Biden calls time on Trump’s four-year moratorium on truth

Donald Trump will go down in history as the worst United States president ever. In terms of higher education, he will be remembered not only as a president hostile to its fundamental purpose – the pursuit of knowledge – but also as one who failed to leverage the strengths of US universities to make for a better world.

The extent to which the Trump administration leaves a higher education legacy will perhaps best be determined by the shelf life of its meagre policy accomplishments. But the damage done from his four-year moratorium on truth and his unending embrace of nationalism presents a deeper challenge.

Because Trump relied on executive orders, most of them ideologically driven, the newly inaugurated President Joe Biden can reverse them with the stroke of a pen.

On his first day in office, Biden revoked Trump’s travel bans blocking people from seven mostly Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States, a critical first step toward rebuilding the reputation of US higher education in a global context.

He also reinstated an Obama-administration policy that opens a door to citizenship for young adults who entered the United States with undocumented adults. For many of these young minds, the pathway will be a college degree.

Biden has already announced his intent to rejoin the Paris Agreement and re-enter the World Health Organization, making good on his vow not only to boost research on climate change and public health, but also to rebuild trust in scientific research, which took a beating under the Trump administration.

These and other swift actions were welcomed by US higher education leaders, who were rarely consulted by the Trump administration on key issues.

“We applaud the Biden administration for immediately moving forward to make America a stronger, more inclusive, and more competitive country,” Barbara R Snyder, president of the Association of American Universities, said of Biden’s first actions in office in a statement.

From a policy perspective, “the Trump administration’s legacy will not cast a long shadow”, says Terry Hartle, senior vice president of government relations for the American Council on Education, an umbrella group that represents higher education’s interests in Washington.

And yet the long-term implications of Trump’s years in office remain to be determined. Biden is expected to jettison Trump’s mostly toothless orders related to campus free speech, but that alone cannot erase the image of Trump supporters scaling walls and shattering windows of the US Capitol building, the nation’s grandest symbol of democratic government.

The depth of the impact may reveal itself in the context of international student enrolments. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, US enrolments dipped, but then recovered to record-setting numbers within just a few years. As Hartle notes, even as the US tightened immigration regulations, then-president George Bush championed academic exchanges and international education as tools for healing differences.

International enrolments in US universities have been losing ground more recently as the US competes with more countries seeking to recruit beyond their borders. Enrolment drops were exacerbated last year by the impact of the coronavirus on education – another Trump legacy with long-term consequences – that has only hastened the pace at which students are looking elsewhere to study.

A snapshot survey assessing the impact of the pandemic on autumn enrolments at more than 700 US colleges and universities found an unprecedented 43% drop among first-time international students.

It will take time for the Biden administration to untangle the complicated web of immigration policies put into place under Trump, but Biden has already proposed a plan to make it easier for foreign graduate students and researchers to study and work in the United States, and international educators are cautiously optimistic that undergraduate enrolment levels will increase after the pandemic.

Still, it may be harder for US universities to convince international students that they’re welcome on their campuses.

First controversial decision

Not every Trump administration policy stoked controversy. Trump was especially interested in supporting vocational training, and community colleges benefited from some of his tweaks to federal loan policies during his tenure.

Legions of educators and education policy analysts say Trump’s first controversial decision was his choice for education secretary, Betsy DeVos, a billionaire who is perhaps remembered best for giving the potential for grizzly bear attacks as an argument for why guns should be allowed in schools.

DeVos has almost no experience in the education sector; the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, suggested her deep pockets were her primary credential.

Its analysis found that her family had donated a quarter of a million dollars to members of the education committee responsible for vetting nominations, and more than US$950,000 to 21 senators who would weigh in on her confirmation. Vice President Mike Pence cast the vote that broke the 50-50 deadlock, the first time a vice president’s tie-breaking power was needed to install a member of the president’s Cabinet.

DeVos cared mostly about the K-12 sector, so in some ways her neglect of higher education spared it from what might have been. She was successful in reversing two key Obama-era regulations.

One gave more rights to students accused of campus sexual assault and harassment. Those include a live hearing and a cross-examination of the accuser, which victims’ rights groups argue unnecessarily forces survivors to relive their trauma.

The other, known as the ‘borrower defence to repayment’, made it harder for student borrowers to claim they were defrauded by their schools and have their loans forgiven. The Obama administration’s policy was intended to hold for-profit colleges accountable for providing a quality education.

The Biden administration is likely to overturn both of these, though each must go through a negotiated regulatory process, which will take time.

DeVos, one of the few Cabinet members to stay on with Trump nearly to the end of his four years in office, tendered her resignation the day after the US Capital building was ransacked at Trump’s urging.

In her resignation letter, her list of higher education accomplishments can hardly be called revolutionary. Just about every incoming administration tinkers with, and takes credit for simplifying, the federal student aid process. The Trump administration restored year-round access to federal grants for low-income students, an action Congress had taken weeks earlier.

While Trump signed legislation to strengthen funding for historically black colleges, his dubious boast that these institutions “never ever had better champions in the White House” has already been overshadowed by Vice President Kamala Harris. She is a proud alumnus of Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, DC.

DeVos’s greatest failure may have been her inability to drum up bipartisan support for Trump administration initiatives. In her farewell letter to Congress, DeVos urged lawmakers to reject attempts by the Biden administration to reverse course. Given that Democrats are in control of both the House of the Representatives and the Senate, that is unlikely.

When DeVos tendered her resignation earlier this month, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, tweeted: “Good riddance Betsy.”