In his second policy agenda item on education, former President Donald Trump laid out a plan to leverage accreditation to take back colleges and universities "from the radical left and Marxist maniacs."
"For many years, tuition costs at colleges and universities have been exploding, and I mean absolutely exploding, while academics have been obsessed with indoctrinating America's youth," Trump said Monday night in an Agenda47 policy video posted to Rumble, just two days after he spoke for hours to college-age voters at the Turning Point Action Conference.
"The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left, and we will do that."
The key leverage in Trump's plan is the rooting out of leftist accreditors and forcing the accreditors to hold the indoctrinating higher-education institutions accountable with the threat of yanking federal funding and accreditation.
"Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system," Trump said. "It's called accreditation for a reason.
"The accreditors are supposed to ensure that schools are not ripping off students and taxpayers, but they have failed totally. When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.
"We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again, and once and for all."
Among the standards higher education institutions will be held accountable for under Trump's plan:
- Defending the American tradition and Western civilization.
- Protecting free speech.
- Eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs.
- Removing all Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats.
- Offering options for accelerated and low-cost degrees.
- Providing meaningful job placement and career services.
- Implementing college entrance and exit exams to prove that students are actually learning and getting their money's worth.
Then, Trump vowed to direct the Justice Department to win funds in civil lawsuits of violating institutions to pay back Americans unconstitutionally defrauded.
"Schools that persist in explicit unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity will not only have their endowments taxed, but through budget reconciliation, I will advance a measure to have them fined up to the entire amount of their endowment," Trump said.
"A portion of the seized funds will then be used as restitution for victims of these illegal and unjust policies, policies that hurt our country so badly.
"Colleges have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from hard-working taxpayers and now we are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all.
"We are going to have real education in America."
Trump's first Agenda47 education policy plan focused on rooting out indoctrination in American public primary, elementary, middle, junior high, and high schools.
The former president has already released 35 detailed campaign agenda plans. Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis has released two thus far: border security and military reform.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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