Konstantin Kisin:

President-elect Donald J. Trump has a clear mandate to reform higher education in his second term, for two reasons.

First, Vice-President Kamala Harris’ association with unpopular ‘woke’ ideas emanating from higher education was one of the biggest reasonsTrump won the election. Some of these ideas merely offended the average American’s moral sensibilities—like the idea that America is fundamentally bad; that people should be judged, admitted to college, and hired on the basis of their race or gender; or that there is moral equivalence between Israel (the Middle East’s only democracy) and Hamas (an openly genocidal terror group that uses its own citizens as human shields). Other ideas—like ‘defund the police’, open borders, and no cash bail—inspired policy mistakes that caused major quality-of-life issues in Democrat-run cities. Voters in those cities shifted towards Trump (or moved away from the cities) faster than any other group.

Harris didn’t help herself by responding tepidly and equivocally to a full year, post-October 7th, of near-constant antisemitic—sometimes explicitly pro-genocide and pro-terror—agitation on many college campuses. Only four years ago, Joe Biden claimed he was inspired to run for President by a single far-right antisemitic rally in Charlottesville, which showed him that we needed to battle “for the soul of this nation”. But a full year of nightly far-left Charlottesvilles on campus somehow doesn’t threaten the nation’s soul?

Second, these bad ideas have created public-trust problems for universities which are no longer deniable. U.S. universities have lost trust over the past decade in lockstep with the rise in symptoms of their woke takeover. Polls suggest this is not a coincidence (see the chart below). Enrollment has declined over the same time period, driven largely by a sharp decline among men, who increasingly reject wokeness. The enrollment decline may have accelerated this past year. Even left-leaning outlets like the New York Times have started publishing embarrassing stories about university leaders subordinating their research and teaching missions to woke fads, wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in the process. Employers are increasingly shunning graduates from elite schools, whose brands have been tainted by extremism and antisemitism, and shifts away from merit in admissions. The public has had enough, and rightly so. “We asked for it,” Case Western English professor Michael Clune observed in The Chronicle of Higher Education.