Is the Jig Up for Elite Higher Education?
In their hubris, the universities began a series of
blunders that may now end them as they once were.

By: Victor Davis Hanson
The Patriot Post
March 14, 2025

Over the last three decades, elite American universities have engaged in economic, political, social, and cultural practices that were often unethical, illegal — and suicidal.

They did so with impunity.

Apparently, confident administrators assumed that the brands of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other elite universities were so precious to the nation’s elite movers and shakers that they could always do almost anything they wished.

By the 1970s, non-profit universities had dropped pretenses that they were apolitical and non-partisan. Instead, they customarily violated the corpus of iconic civil rights legislation by weighing race, gender, and sexual orientation in biased admissions, hiring, and promotions.

Graduation ceremonies became overtly racially and ethnically segregated. The same was true for dorms and “theme houses.” So-called “safe spaces,” in the spirit of the Jim Crow South, reserved areas of campus solely for particular races. Affluent foreign students often openly protested on behalf of designated terrorist groups like Hamas.

First-Amendment-protected free speech all but vanished on elite campuses. Any guest speaker who dared to critique abortion on demand, Middle East orthodoxy, biological males dominating women’s sports, or diversity/equity/inclusion (DEI) dogmas was likely to be shouted down, or on occasion roughed up.

University administrators either ignored the violence done to the Bill of Rights or quietly approved when their rowdy students were turned loose on supposed conservatives. But in their hubris, the universities began a series of blunders that may now end them as they once were. They began gouging government agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation by grabbing anywhere from 30 to 60 percent of individual campus grants as “overhead.” Yet they usually charged most private foundation grants a far more modest 15% surcharge — as if a lax government did not object to overcharging.

They pushed for a vast expansion of the student loan program, whose portfolio of federally guaranteed loans reached $1.7 trillion. However, once the federal government guaranteed student loans against default, universities began jacking up their fees and tuition well above the annual rate of inflation.

Elite universities did not grasp that the more they began warping their curricula with DEI gut courses, radical green agendas, and postmodern race and gender theories, the less time they had to offer students their once gold-standard general education curricula of Western Civ, history, literature, philosophy, math, and science.

Soon employers started to notice that the new therapeutic courses were also married to race and sex-based admissions. The SAT and ACT were, for a time, dropped. So were comparative rankings of high school grade point averages. Soon, once iconic degrees were no longer any guarantee of the ability to write and speak well, think analytically, or compute competently.

Employers often began to prefer graduates from those state schools where DEI was muted, admissions were competitive, and teaching remained rigorous and non-ideological.

Finally, after October 7, 2023, growing antisemitism on campuses became unapologetic, overt, and violent. Thousands of Middle Eastern guest students brazenly cheered on Hamas terrorists. The campus Marxist orthodoxy that Jews and Israel were “victimizing white people” and Palestinians were noble “non-white victims” ensured that Jewish students were chased and physically attacked on campuses.

A disgusted public watched invertebrate administrators either greenlight the antisemitic violence or ludicrously deny it. So, there was bound to be a public reckoning. And now it has arrived.

Congress will soon pass legislation taxing the annual multimillion-dollar income from multibillion-dollar endowments at 15% to 20%.

There will be no more “overhead” or “surcharges” on government campus grants allowed larger than 15%. Those two reforms alone could cost some of the wealthiest campuses nearly a half billion dollars a year in lost income.

Racially offensive DEI programs will disqualify schools from federal support.

Foreign student guests who break U.S. laws or violate university rules will have their visas yanked and be shown the door to go home.

Campuses will have to abide by the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments of the Bill of Rights or forgo federal funds.

All these remedies enjoy broad public support.

For the first time in memory, most Americans disapprove of current higher education. Only 10% of Americans believe an Ivy League degree makes them a better American worker.

Universities have very little leverage in a nation of declining fertility, fewer youths choosing college, and a federal government with $36 trillion in debt.

They can return to the original mission of offering rigorous, meritocratic, and disinterested education, guarantee constitutional protections for all on campus, and slash their vast administrative bloat.

Or, if not, they are free to continue as they are, ensuring only further mediocrity, public dislike — and eventual irrelevancy.

Missing Those Good Old Alternatives
to Trump?

By: Victor Davis Hanson
(Emphasis added)

Part One – February 26, 2025
Given the left-wing hysterical responses to all of Trump’s thirty-day-old initiatives, let us remember what just a few months ago were the alternatives.

1) War. The Biden non-strategy for the Ukraine war was to provide enough aid for Ukraine to continue, but not enough to win and incite nuclear Russia.

There was scant talk about the humanitarian questions of 1.2-1.5 million Ukrainian and Russian dead, wounded, missing, and captured. The implicit but unstated Biden intention was to fight the war endlessly to the last Ukrainian, if need be, or until the Putin regime was fatally bled out. No one knew exactly how much money we gave Ukraine, given President Zelensky claimed that what he had received and what was purportedly given to him were off by many millions.

It was until recently taboo to note Zelensky had canceled elections, habeas corpus, opposition parties, and independent media. In Zelensky’s defense, our media said Churchill did not hold elections until the last few months of the Pacific War. But they omit that he did hold elections during a world war—and lost! Moreover, Churchill did not cancel habeas corpus or ban opposition parties as is now true in Ukraine.

Europe’s previous strategy was to talk tough, do little, and hope the U.S. would handle the negotiations—until it did that and thus could be damned for doing so. Biden treated Europe as if it had met its treaty obligations under NATO’s rearming requirements, was an equal partner in supplying Ukraine in its wars on Europe’s borders, and was indifferent to its $230 billion trade surpluses and asymmetrical tariffs.

Under the previous administration negotiating with the monster Putin was deemed far worse than allying once with a 20-million-murdering Stalin or formerly courting the greatest mass murderer in history, Mao Zedong.

As for the war against Israel, the Biden policy was to keep trying to overthrow the Netanyahu government, threaten it with arms cutoffs when back on the offensive, restore aid to Hamas, and court Iran with hopes of a new Iran deal, while letting it get rich on oil sales to subsidize Hezbollah and the Houthis. They got a theater-wide war for their efforts.

2) Border. The Biden policy was to keep it wide open, lie that it was closed, and damn anyone as a xenophobe and racist who opposed 12 million unaudited illegal aliens swarming the country.

Do we remember Biden’s impounding of congressionally approved funds? Yes, Biden did that by refusing to continue building the wall despite a congressional mandate and funding resolution to build it.

Worse, he let the already delivered steel rust or sold it off. The Left complains now about the “billions” of dollars needed to deport criminals and other illegals—never the vast hundreds of billions of dollars over the last four years to house, provide health care, and feed twelve million who entered illegally, for the most part without high-school diplomas, English, skill sets or criminal background checks.

No one knows when or if the Biden administration would have ever stopped the influx—at 15, 20, or 30 million more illegal aliens. Or when there were neither any left in the jails of Venezuela and Colombia nor impoverished in southern Mexico?

Part Two – March 4, 2025
3) Pentagon. The military was declared not to be chronically short by 30-50,000 recruits each year—simply by readjusting the required manpower levels downward.

Do we remember the monthly sound-off of a retired admiral or general (Mark Milley was the latest example) screaming that Trump was a “fascist,” and during the Trump presidency, that he was a near Nazi, liar, coward, Mussolini, and an Auschwitz sort of camp builder—all in violation of Article #88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice? Why are active and retired generals and admirals suddenly quiet? Is it that they suddenly believe Secretary Hegseth might finally enforce the UCMJ?

The greatest humiliation in a half-century in Kabul was entirely forgotten—no big deal, no need to investigate any culpability. No one dared say the disaster in Afghanistan was the green light for Putin to invade Ukraine. The lessons from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East were not to be prods to reboot procurement; the only problem was borrowing more money for new $14 billion carriers and $100M jets.

The Pentagon’s chain of command increasingly saw its new role as cultural and social—to fast-track DEI reverse racism, three genders, radical green mandates, and abortion on demand in the way a clumsy and slow-poke Congress never could. And now? The alpha generals who rode the DEI wave are now the omegas, given they placed race, gender, and sexual orientation above military efficacy.

4. Debt. The way to manage the $37-trillion debt and $2 trillion annual deficits was to keep politicizing the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, risk more hyperinflation, and pay off the annual interest debt with cheap rates and debased currency. We were headed for history’s usual solution for bankrupt nations: inflate the currency in Weimar fashion to worthlessness, renounce the debt and descend into Third-Worldism, or begin confiscating private wealth in Soviet and Cuban style—or all three combined.

Or was it more like musical chairs? Each administration doubled the debt, hoping the music would not stop on their watch, and they would find themselves without a chair.

5. Deep State. To keep feeding the unaudited federal bureaucracy we were to keep raising taxes and borrowing more money to send millions of dollars into the Wuhan lab that nearly wrecked the U.S. economy and killed one million Americans.

We were to keep paying 8 percent of the anti-American BBC budget. As good cultural imperialists, we were to keep promoting LGBTQ+ issues throughout traditional societies abroad and subsidizing most groups in the Middle East who wished to destroy us. We spent millions of dollars of aid trying to force gay marriage on the Greeks and Cypriots who wanted none of it.

Did anyone worry—did anyone even know—that the Biden proxies gave $2 billion in assorted “green” grants to be overseen (with no doubt ample pass-through deductions and overhead charges) by election-denialist Stacey Abrams?

What exactly was the status prior of her foundation/PAC? In truth, it had $100 in its coffers; yet when Biden left office it had increased by a magnitude of $20 million to $2 billion. Was it her sex novels or her ability to lose elections and claim she won them that so impressed Biden to entrust her with our $2 billion?

Was it so great that the Biden people took the taxes paid by 100,000 households (the average American IRS bite per household is $20,000) and turned their collective earnings over to Stacey Abrams?

Was the Biden idea to pour cash into leftwing coffers to use the deep state to do what could not pass Congress? Or was it nihilism—spend so much money, print so much money that taxes would have to go up, and thus “spread the wealth”?