After Secretary of Education Linda McMahon sent the “Compact 2.0” letter on Aug. 3 to all colleges, asking them to respond to a wide range of complaints, some naïve people imagined this was a kinder, gentler, stick-free reform movement from the Trump regime. One day later, the hammer dropped from the Heritage Foundation (source of Project 2025) with its “Model State Legislation to Codify the Federal Higher Education Compact.”
The timing reflects a coordinated attack on higher education, with state laws under this “Project Censorship” intended to establish whatever controls the Trump regime fails to impose. While public colleges are directly controlled by the law, it also provides that the state can “condition” any funding for private colleges on obedience to a seemingly endless series of rules.
Much of this model law consists of warmed-over right-wing wish lists for repression; some provisions are embarrassingly outdated, such as listing “the Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro” as a “foreign country of concern” even though he was overthrown more than seven months earlier.
The law is so poorly written that it would actually outlaw institutions beloved by conservatives, such as a ban on any college that wants to “partner or contract with an outside organization that gives any preference on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin for any purpose.” This would require colleges to prohibit all single-sex national fraternities or sororities, because it bans “any” sex preference “for any purpose.” It would also ban partnerships with any organization that favors Americans over foreigners—which would have to include a prohibition on colleges working with the Heritage Foundation.
The model law is packed to the gills with awful ideas, such as requiring campus police “to perform specified federal immigration enforcement functions under ICE’s direction and supervision.” Ordering all campus police to serve as ICE agents is a breathtaking abuse of government power and violation of institutional academic freedom.
The model law aims to make state regulators the only authority over colleges by destroying accreditation and academic standards. Any accreditor faces bankruptcy if it takes “adverse action” against a college even when it’s justified: “An institution of higher education negatively impacted by retaliatory or adverse action taken against the institution by an accrediting agency or association may bring an action against the accrediting agency or association in a court of competent jurisdiction and may obtain liquidated damages in the amount of federal financial aid received by the institution, court costs, and reasonable attorney fees.”
The model law bans not just DEI offices, but anything related to diversity. It’s illegal to “engage in any of the programming or practices of a diversity, equity, and inclusion office, whether or not under the auspices of such an office.”
So what are the “programming or practices” of a DEI office? It’s never defined in the law, but presumably almost any event or activity that closely resembles any event conducted by a DEI office would qualify. In other words, any programming related to diversity, equity and inclusion would be completely banned in state colleges. (The law includes a specific prohibition on DEI programming using “funds from any source.”)
This is censorship on a massive scale, one that requires a ban on all conceivable diversity-related programs, whether organized by the university, faculty or students. And the incredible vagueness of these terms makes censorship even more likely, since the law directly allows for dire penalties—including “suspension or termination of authorization to operate in the state”—for any violations.
The model law selectively uses language from the University of Chicago’s Kalven report to impose institutional neutrality, including a ban on the university to “take official action or express opinions on the political and social issues of the day” or to “modify the institution’s corporate activities to foster social or political values.” In the Kalven report, this language is “a heavy presumption” with no enforcement, unlike the model law. The Kalven Report also recognizes many exceptions omitted from this model law: “university ownership of property, its receipt of funds, its awarding of honors, its membership in other organizations.” The Kalven report also declared that colleges must speak out against those who “threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.” Of course, that provision is eliminated from a model law that threatens universities and the values of free inquiry.
When it comes to viewpoint diversity, the model law requires a massive bureaucracy to monitor what professors think on a scale never before attempted: “Rigorous, good faith assessment of a broad spectrum of viewpoints, including empirical assessment where applicable, across the teaching and research of the institution and each of its academic units.” Essentially, this requires an ideology report card; the college must rigorously investigate and evaluate the political beliefs of every professor (“across the teaching and research”) based on their classes and publications, and then issue a “viewpoint” report on what all professors think. Beyond the enormous amount of work required for a rigorous assessment of every professor’s ideology, it is difficult to imagine any legitimate use of this information.
The desire of the Heritage Foundation to engage in viewpoint discrimination against leftists runs headlong into the problem of crafting a statute that can meet the legal standard of viewpoint neutrality, such as this provision: “Prioritizing the hiring of faculty members in academic subfields that are not well represented in an academic unit, in the judgment of relevant academic departments and the chief academic officer of the institution, except where an academic department has intentionally specialized.”
What does this even mean? When is an academic subfield “not well represented”? The only objective way to measure such representation is by reference to the current national distribution of faculty in particular subfields. This would mean, for example, that an English department with relatively few scholars about gender compared to other colleges would be required to prioritize hiring gender scholars.
Since this law would probably be passed only in conservative states, which tend to have fewer faculty in left-leaning subfields compared to colleges in the rest of the country, it might actually require preferential hiring of faculty in leftist subfields. Of course, that would never happen.
Obviously, the real purpose of this law is to pressure colleges to hire conservative scholars by giving preference to subfields—such as military history—that are perceived by some as more conservative and “not well represented.” But this undefined term simply gives administrators unchecked power to control departmental hiring decisions.
The law also explicitly overturns academic freedom by giving trustees and state regulators total power over the curriculum: “Acknowledgment that the [trustees/regents] and the [state higher education regulator] may disqualify courses from inclusion in the state’s general education curricula for any reason.” This gives incredible new power to effectively ban many classes at the whim of the state regulator. The phrase “for any reason” certainly has nothing to do with academic standards. This is an open door for government control. In fact, it actually reduces the power of trustees substantially by allowing state regulators to overturn what trustees want.
The law requires the state regulator to make “a comparison of the number of statewide program graduates to the number of annual new jobs in the state for which the relevant degree is a core credential.” The state regulator must shut down programs if the number of graduates in a major is fewer than the “new jobs” each year that require a particular major to apply. The model law even provides a specific example: If all of a state’s public and private colleges produce 90 anthropology graduates per year, then “if new jobs requiring an anthropology degree are significantly below 90 annually, the report should identify one or more of the public institutions’ anthropology programs for consolidation, discontinuation, or enrollment limitation.”
It’s difficult for me to convey the sheer idiocy of anyone who would ever recommend a policy this moronic. Have they never applied for a job, except at some right-wing think tank? Only 18 percent of job postings in America require a bachelor’s degree, and of those jobs only a tiny fraction of specialized jobs require applicants to major in one particular field. Even if an employer preferred liberal arts graduates, they would almost never require this, and a requirement for a particular major is almost unimaginable. Has anyone ever seen a job posting that only permits anthropology B.A.s to apply?
Because almost no jobs require a specific liberal arts major, under this law almost every single liberal arts major at every public college could be eliminated at the whim of a state regulator. (The law says the regulator “may” make exceptions and “may” choose to create a process for appeals.)
Perhaps I’m too kind in suggesting that the model law’s authors suffer from a mental deficiency. We cannot discount the strong possibility that this model legislation is intentionally evil: The fact that every single liberal arts department at every college could be arbitrarily shut down based on this insane jobs number-crunching is a feature rather than a flaw. If you wanted to destroy higher education, it’s hard to find a better vehicle than this model law.
The Heritage Foundation’s model law is the worst combination of mindless bureaucracy and authoritarian control. Universities are compelled to produce vast quantities of reports for the state regulator, and any failure to comply fully is a violation of the law that demands retaliation. Then these reports are used by the government to command control over the curriculum and operations of the universities. While small provisions in this onslaught of legal demands might seem acceptable or even desirable to some, what unifies the whole model law is a dangerous creation of government control, dictating all aspects of campus life—usually in repressive ways—but with the specter of state control by a higher education regulator always looming over it all, dictating arbitrary enforcement of every vague provision. If passed, administrators will read this law and march to the far right before they even get marching orders. States must reject the Heritage Foundation’s Project Censorship model.
