Former President Donald Trump wants the endowments of large colleges and universities taxed to pay for a new academic institution called “The American Academy.”
Ivy League schools such as Yale have a $41 billion endowment and Harvard has a $50.7 billion endowment. Trump’s own alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, has a $21 billion endowment.
“In recent weeks, Americans have been horrified to see students and faculty at Harvard and other once-respected universities expressing support for the savages and jihadists who attacked Israel. We spend more money on higher education than any other country—and yet, they’re turning our students into Communists and terrorist sympathizers. It’s time to offer something dramatically different… “THE AMERICAN ACADEMY” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Donald Trump Says New School Would Not Impact Debt
Trump suggests his institution would be funded by the federal government and would be provided free of charge without adding a dime to the national debt.
Trump claimed in a video announcing The American Academy that the school would be free from Left-wing political ideas.
“We spend more money on higher education than any other country, and yet they’re turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions,” Trump said in the Truth Social clip. “We can’t let this happen.”
Trump continued, “There will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed.”
Republicans have increasingly described higher educational institutions as seminaries of Left-wing ideology, citing colleges and universities they see as hostile to conservative views.
Trump’s Prior Higher Ed Record
Under Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the Trump administration worked to deregulate private for-profit institutions. The Biden administration has reimposed many of these restrictions to more aggressively regulate these schools and institutions.
HuffPost noted that this Trump initiative likely is in response to President Joe Biden’s student debt initiative.
Critics point out that Trump is good at putting out test balloons and bumper-sticker ideas; however, how he would create such an institution or what would go into it remains to be seen. The proposal is reminiscent of his 1776 initiative that debuted in the waning days of his presidency and sought to revive the kind of Americanism that existed in the post-World War II era. Trump’s 1776 initiative stressed the “facts of our founding are not partisan. They are a matter of history. Controversies about the meaning of the founding can begin to be resolved by looking at the facts of our nation’s founding.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis generated significant controversy over his black history curriculum and its handling of slavery, something that critics of Trump’s 1776 initiative likewise panned.
“The creation of such a school would need congressional approval, and at least in theory, it stands to reason that GOP lawmakers would be highly skeptical. Republicans generally believe the federal government should play a very limited role in education — the destruction of the Department of Education is a perennial goal for the party — and the idea that Congress would create new taxes on private entities in order to create an ‘academy’ that hands out free degrees seems like the sort of thing that might give conservatives pause,” MSNBC columnist Steve Benen writes. “There are also all kinds of administrative questions — who would run the ‘academy,’ who would hire the faculty, etc. — that Team Trump will probably struggle to answer.”
Benen continued, “But stepping back, what’s surprising is the former president’s willingness to even broach the subject in the first place. Has Trump University already faded from memory?”
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
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