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Chris Rufo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, laid out a series of reforms in a letter on Monday that he believes will help “save” higher education in the country as well as taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars.
Rufo published his reforms in the Free Press, in which he calls for President Donald Trump to create a new contract with universities. In the new contract, universities should be part of each payment, loan, grant, eligibility, and accreditation. Failure to comply could mean the termination of all public assistance programs, Rufo suggested.
The letter states universities must “advance truth over ideology, with rigorous standards of academic conduct, controls for academic fraud, and merit-based decision-making throughout the enterprise.”
WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL ADMITS COLLEGES MUST TAKE ‘STRENUOUS ACTION’ TO RESTORE FREE EXCHANGE OF IDEAS
Signed by over 40 people, including educators, religious leaders, academics and authors, the letter asks universities to stop taking part in social and political activism and “adhere to the principle of color-blind equality, by abolishing DEI bureaucracies, disbanding racially segregated programs, and terminating race-based discrimination in admissions, hiring, promotions, and contracting.”
It calls for a return to the concept of freedom of speech, the protection of civil discourse and “swift and significant penalties” for anyone who disrupts speakers, vandalizes property, occupies buildings, calls for violence, or prevents the university from carrying outits operations.
TRUMP’S CRACKDOWN ON HARVARD, ‘WOKE’ COLLEGES WILL TAKE MORE THAN 100 DAYS TO LEAVE LASTING REFORM: PROFESSOR
The list of reforms also includes a request that universities are transparent about their operations and, at the end of each year, disclose the full data on race, admissions, and class rank, as well as employment and financial returns by major, campus attitudes on civil discourse, ideology, and free speech.
The call to action directed at the Trump administration comes just over a month after the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust held a hearing on June 4 entitled, “The Elite Universities Cartel: A History of Anticompetitive Collusion Inflating the Cost of Higher Education.”
It also comes as the Manhattan Institute released a poll on Sunday that found that only 15% of registered voters say they have a lot of trust in private Ivy League colleges and universities.
Among America’s public colleges and universities, just one in five or 20% of registered voters say they have a “great deal” of trust in these institutions, according to the Manhattan Institute poll.
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