It’s too early to start celebrating the rollback of federal meddling in higher education now that Betsy DeVos has been confirmed as secretary of education, but there are hopeful signs. Under President Obama, the department’s zealous “progressives” pushed directives that instituted their favored policies on gender and diversity — changes that drove up the cost of running colleges.

In this Martin Center article, Clark Conner looks at those hideous policies and the swarm of new administrators hired to enforce them. In the University of North Carolina system, e.g., some 80 apparatchiks work to make sure the universities comply with Washington’s edicts. Naturally, they’re well paid. (Creating unnecessary administrative positions for fellow leftists is an old tactic.)

Conner spots some glimmers of hope that under Secretary DeVos, at least some of the federal meddling will be reversed. For one thing, she is not going to enforce a 2016 rule regarding transgender bathrooms put out by the old regime when that issue was hot. For another, DeVos has appointed (at least temporarily) attorney Candice Jackson as deputy secretary for civil rights. Jackson is a “libertarian feminist” who has worked for Judicial Watch and written a book on the way the Clinton machine went after the women who accused Bill of mistreating them. The Left knows that personnel is policy and therefore is throwing a tantrum over Jackson.

Conner concludes rightly that “DeVos and her Department will be judged in part on their ability to roll back the expanded Title IX powers granted by the Obama administration to Washington bureaucrats and university administrators. If successful, universities, students, and taxpayers stand to benefit.”