As Campus Antisemitism Reared Its Ugly Head, Conservatives Woke Up. What Comes Next?

While conservatives have long recognized the problems facing American universities, campus responses to the October 7 attack in Israel made clear the scale of the rot in higher education and jolted congressional Republicans into action.

The first stage of the response, hauling the presidents of major universities before the House Education and Workforce Committee for hearings, made significant waves and led to the departure of University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and, ultimately, Harvard president Claudine Gay — but the work to reform America’s ailing universities has not stopped there.

Instead, policy-makers and think-tankers are seeking to capitalize on the groundswell of concern about the state of higher education to reform a once great American system that has become bloated and ideologically corrupt.

“One reason for America’s dysfunctional higher-education system is because, until very recently, conservatives haven’t been paying sufficient attention to this area, at least outside of a few culturally important issues, such as campus free speech, due process, and the use of race in college admissions,” Defense of Freedom Institute president Robert Eitel told National Review.

Eitel, who served as deputy general counsel of the Department of Education in the Bush administration and senior counselor to former secretary of education Betsy DeVos under Donald Trump, told NR that the Left’s ideological capture of American higher education has reached a tipping point; no longer can conservatives bat away questions of how best to educate the country’s future elite.

“The left could never have completed its ideological takeover of higher education if conservatives had dedicated sufficient time, money, and attention to higher-ed policy and institutions. Now, we’ve reached the point where the failure of progressive policies has driven higher education into such a state of emergency that the problems can no longer be ignored,” Eitel said. “The good news is that the conservative movement understands the importance of this policy area now. There will be no turning back.”

It is difficult, multiple education-policy experts told NR, to separate the intertwined causes behind the ideological capture of American universities: Title IX policies, the financial influence of hostile foreign governments, and a federal bureaucracy hellbent on perpetuating DEI all contribute to the problem in different ways.

The woman on the right with the most immediate influence in the area of higher-education policy is, naturally, House Education and Workforce Committee chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.). In a series of conversations with National Review, she explained the work she and the rest of the committee — often in bipartisan fashion — have done to address some of the more blatant excesses of academic institutions. One such problem is the ballooning cost of tuition. Foxx told NR that President Joe Biden’s repeated attempts to “cancel” student-loan debt in a manner in which he does not have constitutional authority have helped build support among conservatives for an alternative path.

“What the Biden administration is doing is a temporary fix — all temporary. All it’s doing is transferring to taxpayers the debt the students have incurred in going to college; it does nothing to bring down the cost of a college degree or even just attending college,” Foxx said.

She pointed to the committee’s College Cost Reduction Act, arguing that the formula she and her colleagues have drawn up is preferable to Biden’s extralegal debt forgiveness.

“What we’re doing is offering a solution there, while they’re just using a Band-Aid. This bill looks at the problems from a comprehensive point of view: Costs keep going up, debt goes up along with it, completion rates aren’t going up, and students are worse off,” Foxx told NR.

“We’re going to make sure that colleges have skin in the game,” she said. “That’s the only way we’re going to achieve the goals we want to achieve, which are to keep costs low, lower the debt incurred by the students, help boost completion rates, and force the schools to take some responsibility for all of this.”

Eitel told NR that this subject — the federal student-loan program — is one of three “major areas of attack for conservatives” on higher-education policy.

“For years, student loans have been a policy playground for progressives with very little adult supervision from conservatives,” he said. “When the Supreme Court halted Biden’s attempt at an illegal student-loan bailout last year at the urging of red-state attorneys general, the administration quickly pivoted to a ‘death by a thousand cuts’ approach of forgiving as much debt as possible through low-profile regulatory action and administrative decisions so as not to trigger a public outcry.”

If not amended, Eitel said, the student-loan issue “will be nothing but a massive political headache for the next GOP administration.”

Beth Akers, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on the economics of higher education, said it was Biden’s move on student-loan debt that galvanized conservatives to think about education policy.

“Earlier in my career, I would be frustrated that Republicans weren’t at the table putting forward big legislation and reinventing higher education, and that was because it was a liability for them to do so,” Akers told NR. “Their constituents weren’t excited about it, and even if they had positions on things that they would’ve liked to change, it just didn’t warrant putting in the political effort necessary for attempting reform.”

That changed, she said, in 2022, when Biden announced his plan to push student-loan debt onto the American taxpayers.

“Student-loan cancellation was an open question; Democrats were posturing about cancellation during the 2020 primaries and promising a huge amount of cancellation, but it felt like rhetoric,” Akers told NR. “Biden was the most modest in what he said he would do, and when he took office, there were still questions about whether he would really do anything.”

Eventually, though, it became clear that the president was committed to the idea of “forgiving” student debt, and Republican staffers began calling Akers to learn about the policy side of the issue.

“Their bosses were suddenly motivated to intervene because the political objection was sufficient among their constituents,” she said. “They felt sufficiently disgusted with the notion of student-loan cancellation that they felt ready to go.”

In late 2023, according to a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll, only 46 percent of swing-state voters said they either “strongly support” or “somewhat support” the Biden administration’s move to “cancel” $127 billion in student loan debt. A USA Today/Ipsos survey taken earlier that year showed that 47 percent of Americans supported forgiving up to $20,000 in debt for Pell Grant recipients, and that percentage shrank the higher the debt total grew.

The College Cost Reduction Act would also reform the accreditation process for colleges and universities, which Eitel called “the center of gravity in higher-ed policy.” He told NR that higher-education accreditors often use their power to push a level of ideological conformity on campuses across the country.

“Accreditors are supposed to serve as academic quality watchdogs, and this watchdog status gives them gatekeeper status for Title IV federal student-loan dollars — no accreditation, no federal student loans,” he said. “Unfortunately, many accreditors use that gatekeeping status to push an (always leftist) ideological conformity on schools that have nothing to do with academic quality. . . . More needs to be done by Congress to allow innovative accreditors that aren’t captive to the Left to enter the market for academic quality assurance.”

Another topic on which Republicans have moved of late is transparency in the funding of colleges and universities. As National Review reported in the fall, the Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions (DETERRENT) Act — which the House passed immediately after the university presidents’ hearing — would lower the threshold at which colleges and universities would be required to report foreign donations. The consequences of unadulterated foreign funding of American universities include, for instance, the establishment of virulently anti-Israel campus groups under the auspices of the Middle East Studies Association, which receives billion-dollar contributions from states like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar.

“It’s not necessarily a brand new thing, because the law has been in effect for a long time,” Foxx said, referring to the already-existing Higher Education Act, “but the problem was that the schools — the colleges and the universities — weren’t paying attention to the law, and they weren’t reporting [foreign donations].”

Foreign influence is another of Eitel’s three priorities for conservatives on higher-education policy.

“Our enemies and frenemies have taken advantage of elite higher ed’s unquenchable thirst for cash, and that is why billions of dollars are flowing in from places like China, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia,” he said.

Donations from Qatar in particular have come under increased scrutiny in the aftermath of October 7, and the total sum of the money its government has sent American institutions of higher education reached $4.7 billion between 2001 and 2021, the Free Press reported shortly after Hamas’s attack and the ensuing support for terrorism that emerged on elite university campuses.

“Universities have historically fallen short of their legal obligations to report this money to the Department of Education as required by federal law,” Eitel said. “At a minimum, the public must know whether schools receive foreign gifts and contracts, in what amounts, and from where. Measures also need to be taken to ensure that intellectual property and sensitive research at research universities are sufficiently protected and that students who are Chinese citizens or with family in China are not subject to CCP intimidation.”

No list of conservative policy priorities where higher education is concerned would be complete without addressing Title IX and, as many on the right see it, its weaponization since the Obama administration.

He said conservatives must use “all the tools at hand” to “force colleges and universities to return to a ‘pre-woke’ understanding of civil rights,” including “public education and agitation, rulemaking, executive action and investigations, litigation challenges, and legislation.”

Foxx said that Title IX at its conception was “not as coherent as it should have been,” and that former secretary of education Betsy DeVos made strides toward reworking its text to ensure, for instance, the application of due process in university investigations and disciplinary proceedings.

“Under the Obama rules, there was no due process for the person who was accused of doing something wrong — sexual harassment or anything else of that nature,” Foxx told NR. “It totally violated our norm of being innocent until proven guilty. Students were expelled from schools; they were brought up before student courts with no representation. What [DeVos] did was come up with what I thought — and still think — was a very well-thought-out Title IX. What you’ve got to realize is that the Biden administration consists of all these warmed-over Obama people who are going back to what Obama was doing.”

Akers told NR that, while Foxx has always taken the lead on education policy, there is now a much larger constituency for the issue area than there has been in the past.

“Virginia Foxx has always put something out every year,” Akers said of education legislation, “and now we have a push toward more comprehensive reform than we’ve seen from Republicans. While policy-wonk types have always been in the discourse about what should happen with higher education, we’ve got lawmakers at the table in a bigger way now.”