What Does Project 2025 Say About Higher Education?: Part II

As I began discussing in my previous post, Project 2025 will have a damaging impact on individuals’ access to higher education. This has been a long standing goal of conservatives, as Fabiola Cineas points out at Vox. The goal is to limit access to universities and to return them, in many ways, to places that will, as Lauren Lassabe Shepherd mentions when speaking with Cineas and describing the history of Harvard, institutions “to train white men, usually second, third, fourth sons, and sometimes first sons, for the ministry, sometimes for medicine, sometimes for law, and also for public service.” This move dismantles advances made over the past century in access to higher education.

Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance, himself a Yale Law School graduate, delivered a speech entitled “The Universities are the Enemy” to the 2021 National Conservatism Conference. In that speech, he called universities “hostile institutions” where professors “teach that America is an evil, racist nation” to students who will “bring that indoctrination into our elementary and high schools.” He railed that universities limited free speech and expression while attacking free speech and expression. He concluded his speech by quoting Richard Nixon who said, “Professors are the enemy “ as Vance vowed to “aggressively attack the universities in this country.”