Former president Donald Trump unveiled his plan to reform higher education in his latest campaign video that aired on Tuesday.
Trump’s agenda tackles both cultural and economic problems in higher education, and aims to “reclaim” colleges and universities from “the radical left,” he said in the video published to Rumble. His “secret weapon” will involve firing college accreditors who “failed” to “ensure that schools are not ripping off students and taxpayers” and replace them with people who will uphold a new set of standards that includes “defending the American tradition and western civilization.”
“President Trump has laid out a bold agenda for his second term and there is no other candidate in the race who can even come close to what he’s doing,” Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesperson, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “This new Agenda47 policy proposal is another example of President Trump being far ahead of the curve.”
Trump-approved accreditors will enforce other standards that include “protecting free speech, eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs incredibly, removing all Marxist Diversity, Equity and Inclusion bureaucrats, offering accelerated options for low-cost degrees, providing meaningful job placement and career services and implementing college entry and exit exams to prove that students are actually learning and getting their money’s worth,” according to the video.
Trump also intends to order the Department of Justice to open civil rights cases against “schools that engage in racial discrimination and schools that persist in explicit, unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity.” Schools that do so will “have their endowments taxed” and be fined the maximum amount of their endowment, which will then be used as “restitution” for the case victims.
“Colleges have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from hardworking taxpayers, and now we are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all,” Trump said. “We are going to have real education in America.”
Trump announced his candidacy for the 2024 election in November. He faces a pool of other candidates including former Republican South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former Republican Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, while speculation continues about whether or not Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis will launch a bid.
Trump took a hard stand for freedom of speech on college campuses during his tenure office. He signed an executive order in 2019 to strengthen free speech protection on campus by threatening federal funding.
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