From Retribution to Regulatory Regime
The Trump administration has learned from earlier mistakes in its education policies.
This article is part of an ongoing project by American Purpose at Persuasion on “The ‘Deep State’ and Its Discontents.” The series aims to analyze the modern administrative state and critique the political right’s radical attempts to dismantle it.
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Federal judge Allison Burroughs’ recent decision reinstating federal funds to Harvard marks the end of the first phase of the Trump administration’s broad attack on leading universities. Her opinion laid out in impressive detail how the administration has ignored legally mandated procedures, vastly exaggerated its authority to withhold funding, and threatened First Amendment rights. Whether or not her decision is upheld by the First Circuit and the Supreme Court, it pulled down the curtain on Trump 2.0’s initial shock-and-awe campaign against higher education. But the administration had already quietly revised its approach, developing a more legally plausible and sustainable strategy to bend schools’ practices to its will.
Trump’s assault on universities began as a paroxysm of bullying and bravado. First came a series of executive orders with titles such as “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” and “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” Next came massive funding freezes and cancellations at leading universities, followed by sweeping regulatory demands that no responsible university leader could accept. A few of these actions were quickly reversed by the agencies that announced them. Others were enjoined by federal judges. Meanwhile, several universities negotiated agreements subjecting them to fines and continuing federal oversight in exchange for renewal of funding.
As spring turned to summer, the administration’s strategy subtly shifted. It began to announce the findings of investigations before imposing sanctions—a reversal of the previous Alice-in-Wonderland sequence. The administration’s earlier missives to Harvard had been heavy on demands and vitriol, but light on evidence of civil rights violations. In late June, though, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) provided extensive evidence of Harvard’s toleration of antisemitic activity after October 7, 2023 without, however, specifying how it expected the university to make amends. The administration’s initial pronouncements led Harvard to adopt a confrontational stance; its revised tactics opened the door to negotiations.
For better or for worse, the agencies responsible for carrying out the White House’s higher education impulses and policies are becoming more adept at following legal procedures and making arguments that can survive judicial review. They are also becoming somewhat clearer on what schools must do to comply with their interpretation of civil rights laws. Meanwhile, they have broadened their investigations to cover more schools: colleges and universities are now being investigated under Title VI for antisemitism, about 50 for violating Title VI’s prohibition of racial discrimination, and a few more under Title IX for transgender issues. (Most Title IX transgender investigations have targeted K-12 schools.) The Trump administration is thus moving beyond simple invective and attack to creating a new civil rights regime for higher education.
While the Trump administration has promised to tame the “administrative state,” to eliminate the Department of Education, and to return power to local schools, its deepest ambition is to remake education at all levels. So far it has focused on “woke” universities. But its campaign to rid K-12 schools of DEI, racial preferences, transgenderism, and other assaults on “meritocracy” will soon heat up. These efforts will not quickly fade away. Not only is there considerable politically exploitable public anger at educational institutions, but since the 1960s the federal government has accumulated significant influence over all levels of education. As a result, governmental powers and resources long advocated by the left can now be wielded by the right.
At Harvard and elsewhere faculty, students, and alumni are debating whether to negotiate or resist. Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has called on university leaders to mount “total and unrelenting resistance” to the administration’s demands. To be sure, schools’ leaders face hard choices in their negotiations with this administration. But even after the decision in the Harvard case, they do not have the luxury of stonewalling. Not only does the government have too many resources on its side, but most university presidents and lawyers recognize that their institutions have made serious mistakes in recent years. The easiest way to effect reform in academia is to utter those ever-serviceable words, “the government made us do it.”
In short, we are now witnessing the development of a regulatory regime that will influence American education at all levels, from pre-K through graduate school. It will last at least as long as Republicans hold the presidency. Some elements are likely to survive beyond that. This new, Trumpified civil rights state rests on three pillars: (1) pre-2025 expansions of administrative authority under civil rights laws, especially Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972; (2) the rebirth of funding cut-offs authorized by Titles VI and IX; and (3) the Supreme Court’s growing embrace of a “color-blind” interpretation of the Equal Protection clause and Title VI.
Pillar #1: The Civil Rights State Democratic Administrators Built
In a previous American Purpose essay I explained how the Trump administration has used powers and strategies developed by previous administrations—especially Obama and Biden—to promote much different policies. The civil rights statutes that cover education, primarily Titles VI and IX, say nothing about antisemitism, the treatment of transgender students, or schools' responsibility to monitor and control the speech and private activities of students. But in recent decades federal rules on all these topics have proliferated.
When the Obama administration announced rules on how schools must assign students to sex-segregated facilities (on the basis of “gender identity”), it opened the door for the Trump administration to require that such assignments be made on the basis of biological sex. Once antisemitism and “Islamophobia” were included as forms of “national origin” discrimination, the Trump administration could cynically use the charge of antisemitism as a battering ram against Ivy League schools. Once preventing various forms of “harassment” by students and faculty fell within the ambit of federal regulation, the Trump administration had a lever for controlling schools’ disciplinary rules, their training practices, and even their curriculum.
Columbia University Law Professor David Pozen has rightly warned that “Higher-education policy in the United States is now being developed through ad hoc deals, a mode of regulation that is not only inimical to the ideal of the university as a site of critical thinking but also corrosive to the democratic order and to law itself.” But he wrongly asserts that this regulatory strategy is “unprecedented.” Indeed, the combination of vague guidelines, threatened sanctions, extended negotiations, and detailed compliance agreements has been at the heart of the Department of Education’s enforcement strategy for years—especially when Arne Duncan was Secretary.
For nearly half a century, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has devoted almost all of its resources to investigating complaints filed by private citizens. Those found to have merit have been resolved through ad hoc negotiations culminating in detailed “resolution agreements.” In her extensive 2015 examination of OCR’s use of enforcement discretion, law professor Catherine Kim found that “OCR enforcement proceedings do not usually result in settlement, but rather they always do.” In fact, “There has not been a single instance over the past quarter century in which enforcement decisions resulted in the final agency action necessary for judicial review.” This “has precluded the public’s ability to exercise meaningful checks on them.”
Despite the fact that in the aggregate these negotiated agreements constitute federal policy, the “letters of finding” issued by OCR at the conclusion of its investigation have always included this proviso: “This letter sets forth OCR’s determination in an individual case. The letter is not a formal statement of OCR policy and should not be relied upon, cited, or construed as such.” Policymaking through ad hoc negotiations and detailed settlement agreements may be troubling, but it is nothing new.
The same can be said for the current administration’s demand that schools create internal compliance offices, provide multiple reports to regulators, and subject themselves to years of oversight by government agencies. These were all features of the Department’s agreements on sexual harassment under Title IX and on K-12 school discipline under Title VI. The Obama administration insisted that schools develop large, autonomous Title IX compliance offices to address sexual misconduct. The Trump administration is insisting that schools create Title VI offices to address antisemitism. The Obama administration thus created a detailed playbook—which the Biden administration largely followed—that is now being used for much different purposes by Trump 2.0
Pillar #2: Rebirth of the Finding Cut-Off
The Trump administration has departed from the practices of all previous administrations in this crucial way: its predecessors were exceedingly reluctant to terminate federal funding to educational institutions, while this administration, on the other hand, relishes the opportunity. Until 2025 the federal government had not terminated funds to enforce Title VI since the heyday of southern school desegregation in the 1960s. Even then, it had applied the sanction only against the most recalcitrant rural school districts. With one minor exception, the Department has never cut off funding to enforce Title IX. Instead, it has relied upon the threat of private suits and lengthy investigations to drive schools to the bargaining table. The Trump administration, in contrast, has unilaterally withheld billions of dollars in federal funding and threatened to deny future grants and contracts as well.
Previous administrations shied away from funding cut-offs for two reasons. First, civil rights statutes provide extensive procedural protections for recipients of federal funds. The funding agency must first engage in negotiations with the recipient, proceeding further only once it's determined that “compliance cannot be secured by voluntary means.” Termination must be based on an “express finding on the record, after opportunity for hearing, of a failure to comply” with federal law. The recipient can then seek judicial review of the termination. In addition, the agency must report all terminations to the appropriate House and Senate committees. They cannot become effective until thirty days after the filing of these reports.
When it first withheld funds from Harvard, Columbia, and other schools, the Trump administration dealt with these inconvenient procedures by ignoring the law. Challenged in court, government lawyers took the startling position that it had not acted under Title VI to punish Harvard for tolerating antisemitism but under its inherent executive authority to cancel grants and contracts for any reason it saw fit. Judge Burroughs’ opinion provided a thorough and convincing refutation of this novel claim.
By early summer, 2025, the administration seemed to have recognized the tenuousness of this claim, and began to adopt a more legally tenable strategy. The “Notice of Violation” sent to Harvard by HHS offered a vivid contrast to the bombastic rhetoric and blunderbuss demands of the administration's previous declarations. It provided a clear statement of schools’ legal responsibility to protect students from various forms of harassment, and then offered many pages of evidence of Harvard’s failure to address serious forms of antisemitism after October 7, 2023. Almost all that evidence came from Harvard’s voluminous 2025 Task Force Report on Antisemitism, supplemented by a few articles in the Harvard Crimson. In other words, it relied on evidence that the university had already uncovered and problems it had promised to address. HHS remained mute on what it expected the university to do. In effect, the “Notice of Violation” was an invitation to engage in negotiations. But it was also a reminder that once federal agencies go through the process mandated by civil rights laws, they can wield a powerful financial stick.
In the past, a second and even stronger reason for avoiding funding cut-offs was that regulators considered them counter-productive. Former HEW Secretary Joseph Califano likened it to “opting for decapitation instead of plastic surgery to eliminate facial disfiguration.” The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights identified the central dilemma: “Although funding termination may serve as an effective deterrent to recipients, it may leave the victim of discrimination without a remedy. Funding termination may eliminate the benefits sought by the victim.”
But if the goal is in fact to “decapitate” or at least wound disfavored schools, this dilemma disappears. Termination of funding becomes an end in itself, not just a means for inducing compliance with civil rights law. Invoking civil rights laws is just one way of the many ways the Trump administration has sought to defund prominent universities.
In its legal challenge to the administration’s decision to withhold over $2 billion in federal grants, Harvard complained that this “sweeping freeze of funding for medical, scientific, technological, and other research that has nothing at all to do with antisemitism or Title VI compliance.” Most of the egregious antisemitic activity described by Harvard’s Task Force on Antisemitism was perpetrated by students and faculty affiliated with Harvard College, the Divinity School, and some programs at the School of Public Health. But the funding freeze fell most heavily on scholars in other parts of the university. The sciences have paid the steepest price for misconduct by those in the humanities.
As Judge Burroughs emphasized, to the extent the government terminates a grant on the vague ground that the “award no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities,” it must provide evidence of misconduct by those receiving the particular grant in question. This the government could not do: there was no evidence that those conducting health research had engaged in antisemitic behavior. But if the government had made the effort to follow the procedures mandated by Title VI and Title IX, the demand for such program-by-program evidence disappears.
The irony is that this feature of civil rights law is a consequence of the most significant legislative victory of civil rights advocates of the 1980s. The original language of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act specified that a funding cut-off “shall be limited in its effect to the particular program, or part thereof, in which such noncompliance has been so found.” This “pinpoint” provision was the product of extensive negotiations between the Department of Justice and members of Congress during the long debate over that seminal legislation. In Grove City College v. Bell (1983) the Supreme Court reaffirmed an identical “pinpoint” provision in Title IX, holding that a college would not lose all its federal funding because one program within it had failed to comply with federal rules.
That decision was greeted with outrage from civil rights groups, in part because it meant that Title IX would not apply to athletic programs, which seldom receive federal money. Democrats mounted a multi-year effort to enact what became known as the “Grove City bill,” finally succeeding in passing it over President Reagan’s veto. The legislation specifies that “the term ‘program’ means all of the operations of a college, university, or other postsecondary institution, or a public system of higher education.” In their zeal to prevent any part of an institution from evading civil rights mandates, the proponents of the Grove City bill substantially expanded the enforcement tools available to the Trump administration.
Pillar #3: The Supreme Court’s Endorsement of “Color-Blindness”
The Trump administration is on strong legal grounds in its demand that schools eliminate racial and sex preferences in admissions, scholarships, and employment, and that it stop segregating students and employees by race, ethnicity, or religion in academic programs and training. Here it can invoke the authority of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA) as well as its 2007 decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools.
Supreme Court decisions on racial preferences have always left plenty of room for further interpretation. After each Court ruling on affirmative action, the Obama and Biden OCR issued “Dear Colleague” letters seeking to minimize their impact. For example, in 2011 it issued a lengthy document entitled “Guidance on the Voluntary Use of Race to Achieve Diversity in Postsecondary Education.” Shortly after the Supreme Court decided SFFA, the Biden OCR released a 16-page “Dear Colleague Letter” (DCL) explaining how schools can continue to “develop curricula or engage in activities that promote racially inclusive school communities.” The first Trump Administration withdrew the Obama-era letters, but left nothing in their place.
The second Trump administration, in contrast, has taken a page out of the Democratic handbook by issuing executive orders and DCLs that are far beyond what the Court has said. These guidelines focus on two issues: when non-racial factors are being used as a “proxy” for race; and when schools’ training and course material engage in prohibited racial “stereotyping” and “harassment.” The administration’s broad reading of SFFA has important implications for K-12 schools as well as higher education. Long after the antisemitism and transgender issues have faded from view, these racial issues will dominate the regulatory arena.
Racial Preferences and Proxies
In his majority opinion in SFFA, Chief Justice Roberts tried to walk a fine line between prohibiting the use of racial preferences in admissions and allowing schools to take into account the many ways race can influence applicants’ opportunities, character, and trajectory. On the one hand, “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” On the other hand “universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today. … [W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly.”
The Trump administration is determined to prevent schools from circumventing the Supreme Court anti-affirmative action rulings by “relying on non-racial information as a proxy for race, and making decisions based on that information.” In a February 2025, DCL, the Department of Education claimed that “A school may not use students’ personal essays, writing samples, participation in extracurriculars, or other cues as a means of determining or predicting a student’s race, and favoring or disfavoring such a student.” It added that it would “be unlawful for an educational institution to eliminate standardized testing to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity.”
Enforcement of that DCL was enjoined by federal district court judges in Maryland and New Hampshire, in part because it impinged upon K-12 schools’ control over curriculum. But in late July, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a lengthy memo laying out “non-binding best practices” on how to comply with nondiscrimination law. Selection criteria used by a school for admissions, employment, or honors become “legally problematic” if they were “selected because they correlate with, replicate, or are used as a substitute for” race, sex, and other “protected characteristics”; or if they were “implemented with the intent to advantage or disadvantage individuals based on protected characteristics.” In general, “Intent to influence demographic representation risks violating federal law.” For example, scholarship programs cannot “target ‘underserved geographic areas’ or ‘first generation students’ if the criteria are chosen to increase participation by specific racial or sex-based groups.”
The upshot is that the Departments of Justice and Education claim broad discretion to investigate and punish schools for using any selection criteria regulators suspect has been chosen to advantage or disadvantage individuals based on their race or sex. Given the subjectivity of such determinations, schools are advised to base selection decisions on “specific, measurable skills and qualifications directly related to job performance or program participation.”
In its agreements with individual colleges, the administration has made it clear that “restoring merit-based opportunity” means basing admissions almost entirely on grades and test scores. That is why it has required Columbia and Brown to provide data “showing both rejected and admitted students broken down by race, color, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests.” And that is why a recent executive order requires all selective colleges to release data on the race, grade point averages, and test scores of all admitted and rejected applicants. The message is clear: If a school admits Black or Hispanic students with lower grades or test scores than white or Asian students, it invites a lengthy investigation by the federal government, not to mention court suits brought by Edward Blum.
How fully the administration will cleave to these quantitative measures of meritocracy is far from clear. In its April 11 letter to Harvard, it first required the school “adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies” but then demanded that it “reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence.” Moreover, “every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must admit a critical mass of new students who will provide viewpoint diversity.” Apparently, meritocracy has not totally displaced diversity; rather a new form of diversity has displaced the old. We will soon see if this commitment to meritocracy leads regulators to challenge colleges’ common practice of setting lower standards for male applicants than for females.
The complexities of issues related to preferences, proxies, and merit will provide federal regulators with steady work for the duration of the Trump administration. Expect them to avoid issuing legally binding—and judicially reviewable—rules on the topic. Rather, they are likely to initiate multiple investigations culminating in detailed agreements with individual schools—a well-established process with novel objectives.
The Attack on “DEI”
The Trump administration has also relied upon the Court’s SFFA opinion to justify its campaign against all manifestations of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” programs. Trump’s executive orders on “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferences” and “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” not only prohibit “discriminatory equity ideology” (defined as “an ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit, and capability in favor of immoral generalizations”), but also requires public elementary and secondary schools to provide a “patriotic education” (“an accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling character of American’s founding and foundational principles” that explains “how the United States has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history” and offers a “celebration of America’s greatness”).
Just as the Obama and Biden administrations sought to eliminate “rape culture” on college campuses and create what they envisioned as a culture of racial, ethnic, and sexual tolerance in America’s schools, the Trump administration is seeking to recreate a culture of reverence for traditional American values. What they share is a commitment to using vague non-discrimination statutes to evade the explicit federal statutory ban on federal control of the curriculum of the nation’s schools.
Following the “colorblind” logic of SFFA, the Departments of Justice and Education have determined that schools violate Title VI and Title IX when they “organize programs, activities, or resources—such as training sessions—in a way that separates or restricts access based on race, sex, or other protected characteristics.” This not only prohibits the practice of restricting courses, programs, benefits or training to students of a particular race, ethnic group, or sex, but also grouping students within these programs: no race-based “privilege walks” or “safe spaces” limited to minority students or women. Identifying and ending such programs, activities, and benefits will no doubt be a major topic of federal investigations. Here they are on relatively solid legal ground.
More legally dubious is their effort to go well beyond such banning of segregation and exclusion to regulating the content of schools’ courses and trainings. Their rationale is that the Supreme Court has read civil rights statutes to prohibit racial and sex “stereotyping” that creates a “hostile environment.” According to the Attorney General’s July memo, “Unlawful DEI training programs are those that—through their content, structure, or implementation—stereotype, exclude, or disadvantage individuals based on protected characteristics or create a hostile environment.” This includes trainings that promote sentiments “such as ‘all white people are inherently privileged,’ ‘toxic masculinity’ etc.’” In a February DCL, the Department of Education maintained that DEI programs frequently “teach students that certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens that others do not.” These programs “stigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups based on crude racial stereotypes. Consequently, they deny students the ability to participate fully in the life of a school.” That DCL also suggested that schools promoting “the false premise that the United States is built upon ‘systemic and structural racism’” have “toxically indoctrinated students” and thus violated civil rights law.
The Department of Education acknowledges that federal law “prohibits the Department from exercising control over the content of school curricula,” and that rules against stereotyping and harassment can raise First Amendment concerns. But it insists that “the First Amendment rights of students, faculty, and staff, and the curricular prerogatives of state and local school agencies do not relieve schools of their Title VI obligations not to create hostile environments through race-based policies and stereotypes.” Here it relied on three decades of court decisions and administrative guidelines specifying what constitutes racial and sexual harassment sufficiently serious to create a “hostile environment’ that prevents students from benefiting from their education.
Two federal district courts have enjoined the Department of Education from enforcing its February guidelines, finding that the Department had not followed the rulemaking procedures required by the Administrative Procedure Act and suggesting that the broadly stated guidelines would have a “chilling effect” on the free speech rights of teachers and students. That is why the Attorney General insisted that her memo merely laid out “nonbinding best practices.” This was a warning to schools about practices that might trigger federal investigation, but one that could not be subject to another round of judicial review.
Known Unknowns
As hard as it is to believe, Trump 2.0 began only eight months ago. In that short time it has already shifted its approach once. Predicting the behavior of this uniquely mercurial president is always risky business. For the long-term development of Trump-styled civil rights policy, three questions loom large.
The first is organizational. For several months federal civil rights policy was a chaotic free-for-all. Among those issuing guidelines, initiating investigations, and announcing funding cut-offs included the Departments of Justice and Education, a new “Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism,” HHS, the State Department, the Department of Agriculture, Homeland Security, and even the Department of Energy. Much of this activity has been coordinated by staffers in the White House.
Meanwhile, the number of employees in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has been substantially reduced. It is no longer able to investigate the thousands of complaints it receives every year, to say nothing of the new guidelines it is expected to enforce. If a new Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights is ever confirmed, she will face the daunting task of revising her agency’s standard operating procedures and its understanding of its mission. Meanwhile, the very existence of the department is up in the air.
At this point it appears that the Civil Rights Division within the Department of Justice has become the hub of civil rights policy for education. Will that unit expand to conduct the hundreds if not thousands of investigations required to impose its ambitious policies on 6,000 institutions of higher learning and 13,000 public school districts? Will it be willing to devote the resources needed to promulgating Administrative Procedure Act rules that will remain in place after the current administration leaves office? Building new administrative structures is harder than enfeebling existing ones or engaging in ad hoc bullying.
Second, the courts. The Trump administration has lost many challenges in the lower courts, often due to its callous disregard for procedure. As it gets better at jumping through procedural hoops, will it fare better in court? Keep in mind that federal courts have always played a major role in interpreting and enforcing civil rights statutes. Almost all the issues described above—from transgender rights to the definition of “hostile environment” to the implications of SFFA—will produce conflicting lower court decisions and, after considerable delay, Supreme Court rulings.
Some of these legal controversies will focus on questions of statutory interpretation. For example, lower courts have split on whether Title IX requires schools to assign students to sex-segregated facilities on the basis of “gender identity.” While it is unlikely that the Supreme Court will endorse the Obama/Biden approach, it is almost as unlikely that it will accept the Trump alternative. After all, the federal statute is completely silent on the issue. Conservatives who cheered the demise of “Chevron deference” as an attack on the “administrative state” might be disappointed when the Court refuses to defer to the Trump administration’s interpretation of civil rights statutes.
Then there is the difficult constitutional question of when federal regulations violate academic freedom and the free speech of teachers and students. A number of courts have already raised serious questions about whether efforts by state governments and the Trump administration to dismantle DEI are so vague as to have a “chilling effect” on protected speech. Warnings issued years ago by free-speech advocates about the dangers of over-eager civil rights regulators now seem prescient. During the Obama years this issue created divisions on the left. Now it is creating schisms on the right.
Third is the question of how higher education leaders will respond. College presidents, faculty, and alumni are now engaged in a heated debate over whether to resist or negotiate. Given the draconian sanctions threatened by the Trump administration, the latter will almost always prevail. The big question is whether presidents, provosts, and deans will view this as an opportunity to make substantial changes within their institutions or will try to do as little as possible to appease regulators. Recognizing that personnel is often policy, the Justice Department and its allies have tried to depose those university leaders most committed to affirmative action and “anti-racist” policies—UVA’s James Ryan being the most prominent example. For those who see the new federal regulation as an opportunity to impose needed reforms, the challenge will be to make those changes without appearing to be mere toadies of a vengeful White House.
For decades those on the left have called for stronger enforcement of civil rights laws and more extensive regulation of educational institutions. Those on the right have decried the power of the “administrative state” and defended the autonomy of “secondary institutions” such as universities. Now the script has been switched: the right is attempting to reconstitute one part of the “administrative state,” and the left has rediscovered the virtues of institutional autonomy. Perhaps in the long run this scrambling of old assumptions will lead us to wiser regulation of higher education—but given current levels of political polarization, don’t expect it soon.
R. Shep Melnick is the Thomas P. O’Neill Professor of American Politics at Boston College and author of The Transformation of Title IX and The Crucible of Desegregation.
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