Hopes and Fears: Higher Ed Leaders Sound Off on Trump’s Return to Power

As Donald Trump returns to the White House on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day—with a GOP Congress behind him, a vice president who’s called universities “the enemy” and a WWE powerhouse tapped as his education secretary—it’s fair to say that the only certainty for U.S. higher education is uncertainty. Trump’s attention to the sector during his first term was fleeting. He didn’t make higher ed a central issue in his protracted campaign for re-election, either, although he did call for axing the Education Department, firing accreditors, deporting campus protesters, eliminating DEI programs and launching a national online university.