President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a series of executive orders on education, escalating his efforts to wield influence over America’s campuses.
One order is aimed at reshaping the current system of college accreditation. Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary, claimed “third-party accreditors” have relied on “woke ideology,” and said the administration would set up “new accreditation pathways.” Details were not immediately apparent, but Scharf said the Department of Education would seek “to hopefully make it much better.”
Changes to the accreditation system could have major repercussions for colleges and universities, which rely on accreditation for Pell grants, student loans and most other state and federal funds.
Trump framed it as a matter of improving educational outcomes, asking Scharf and Education Secretary Linda McMahon about the potential of students entering college without knowing basic math. (The accreditation system applies to colleges, universities, law schools and graduate programs.)
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Trump said he hears about schools “where they’re going to teach people basic math, math that we can all do very easily, but they can’t do.”
“They’re, you know, going to the top school, and they’re going to, they come out with a program of teaching basic math to somebody that got into a Harvard or Princeton or Yale,” he continued.
Trump didn’t reference his efforts to target elite universities directly, but Scharf singled out Harvard in an order promising to enforce the laws over universities that receive undisclosed foreign gifts. Scharf claimed that universities like Harvard “have routinely violated this law.”
The White House in recent weeks has publicly clashed with major universities, including Columbia and Harvard, freezing hundreds of millions worth of grants along the way. The administration has stripped at least some grants from hundreds of other universities, a NOTUS analysis of federal data found.
State education departments are also facing an ultimatum from the administration: promise to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs or run the risk of federal funding cuts.
Trump is also seeking to entirely dismantle the Education Department, firing over half its staff last month.
Along with the university-focused directive, Trump signed an executive order to undo the Biden-era civil rights guidance in classrooms that Scharf assailed as “diversity ideology.”
The president also signed an executive order seeking to “ensure that we properly train the workforce of the future by ensuring that school children, young Americans, are adequately trained in AI tools,” Scharf said.
“Somebody today, very smart person, said that AI is the way to the future,” Trump said. “I don’t know if that’s right or not, but certainly, very smart people are investing in it heavily.”
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Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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