Ending the Reign of Ivory Tower Dictators
16th December 2025
Northwestern University recently struck a deal with the United States Department of Education (ED). The university will pay a $75 million fine and guarantee there will be no more Jew-hating on the quad and no race discrimination in the admissions office or on faculty hiring committees. Then, federal money will start to flow again. But can Northwestern be trusted to honor its end of the bargain?
The Trump Education Department seems to have settled on a case resolution strategy to reform America’s ivory-tower malefactors. The trial balloons suggesting direct federal oversight of higher education appear to have been a negotiating tactic. ED will settle for using its longstanding (and frequently abused) practice of imposing policy by means of a “voluntary” agreement with an individual university—an agreement that administrators at every other institution of higher education (IHE) in the country will take as a hint as to how to behave if they want to avoid a federal lawsuit. After all, the Trump Department of Education has reached six anti-discrimination case resolutions with universities: the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, the University of Virginia, Cornell University, Columbia University, and now Northwestern.
The case resolution strategy has generally followed the same pattern: the university pays a sizable fine and then commits to cease tolerating anti-Jewish intimidation, sex discrimination by way of “transgenderism,” and race and sex discrimination in admissions, hiring, and staffing. It also commits to reviewing its dependence on foreign students and international branch campuses. Finally, it agrees to join with the Department of Education in selecting an independent monitor who will make sure the university lives up to its commitments. Or the university president can certify compliance under penalty of perjury. The university is free to run its own affairs. Yet if it breaks its promises, the independent monitor will alert ED, which will then impose new sanctions.
The tools that enabled the Marxist Long March Through the Institutions can also be used to deconstruct what they have built. But that didn’t happen in a day, and its disassembly won’t happen in a day, either. Right-thinking people need to buckle down for a long haul.