【中美创新时报2024 年 11 月 19 日编译讯】（记者温友平编译）随着唐纳德·特朗普准备在一月份上任，一个新的保守派高等教育专家正在崛起，他们拥护长期以来被自由派学术界视为边缘的观点。特朗普发誓要从“激进左派”手中“夺回”大学。《波士顿环球报》记者希拉里·伯恩斯和迈克·达米亚诺对此作了下述详细报道。
他们是右翼活动家和保守派国会工作人员。他们包括为大胆的 2025 项目管理计划做出贡献的传统基金会的高等教育专家，以及专门攻击多元化和包容性官僚机构的律师。他们是极少数符合特朗普对大学应该提供什么的看法的高等教育机构的领导者。
随着唐纳德·特朗普准备在一月份上任，一个新的保守派高等教育专家正在崛起，他们拥护长期以来被自由派学术界视为边缘的观点。他们认为这是一个绝佳的机会：高等教育在总统政治中很少只是昙花一现，但特朗普和他的竞选搭档 JD Vance 却把精英学校——它们的成本、文化、政治——作为竞选中的重头戏。特朗普发誓要从“激进左派”手中“夺回”大学，而 Vance 甚至对匈牙利独裁领导人接管公立大学表示赞赏。
特朗普的学术批评者决心将大学从马克思主义者和社会正义战士手中拯救出来，他们认为这些人对他们产生了不当影响。他们打算利用联邦资金、认证委员会、税收、国会调查，以及可能对《高等教育法》的修改来实现他们的目标。
密歇根州立大学教育学教授 Brendan Cantwell 表示，这些保守派思想家都认为“高等教育与他们认为应该拥有的社会类型背道而驰”。
他说，对于该行业来说，它“带来了很大的不确定性”。
2020 年夏天，右翼活动家兼作家鲁福在福克斯新闻的塔克·卡尔森节目中亮相后声名鹊起。他通过推广对批判种族理论的批判引发了全国性的风暴，他从法律研究的根源中夺取了这个术语，以涵盖有关种族和种族主义的广泛教义，称其为“对美国的生存威胁”。
不久之后，特朗普政府请他帮助起草一项行政命令，以限制政府机构和承包商在员工培训中谈论种族和种族主义的方式。
加州大学河滨分校社会学和公共政策教授史蒂文·布林特说：“他涉足这个领域，并逐渐在这些 MAGA 圈子中变得越来越有影响力。”
此后的几年里，40 岁的鲁福越来越多地将注意力集中在高等教育上。作为曼哈顿研究所的高级研究员，鲁福毕业于乔治城大学和哈佛大学推广学院，后来成为一名激进记者。他无法接受采访。
去年，他告诉 Politico，他策划了一场罢免哈佛大学首位黑人校长克劳迪娜·盖伊的运动，并扮演了重要角色。当时，盖伊已经因在国会听证会上就校园反犹太主义问题作证而受到抨击，鲁福帮助散布指控，指控她在学术作品中抄袭。
近几个月来，他还在宣传工作中针对新移民，助长了有关海地移民的虚假言论。
自由主义卡托研究所教育自由中心主任尼尔·麦克拉斯基称鲁福是“给特朗普提供高等教育政策想法的主要影响者”之一。
一些高等教育观察家认为，特朗普政府可能会任命鲁福担任官方职务，而其他人则预计他将继续从目前的平台影响政策。
在鲁福看来，大学在美国煽动了一场“文化革命”。左翼教授和管理人员以及他们的学生追随者正在利用身份政治来推进反美、反资本主义的议程，鲁福认为这一现象始于 20 世纪 60 年代的民权运动。
“新左派夺取机构权力的训练场就是大学，”鲁福在 2023 年出版的《美国的文化革命》一书中写道。
他呼吁进行一场“反革命”，保守派应该利用联邦资金和“民权监管机构”重塑机构，并“制定围攻机构的战略”，使其“朝着国家永恒原则的方向”重新定位。简而言之，鲁福说，保守派必须根除 DEI 计划背后的意识形态，支持者认为该计划让校园更加公平和包容，但鲁福认为，该计划本身也是一种歧视。
“从一个角度来看，当前的战场似乎势不可挡，”鲁福在他的书中写道。“左派已经在整个知名机构中占据了文化主导地位。但从另一个角度来看，情况有可能逆转。”
如果说有许多特朗普的支持者在高等教育领域反复指出，有一所机构是学术道德的典范，他们希望大学效仿，那就是密歇根州的希尔斯代尔学院。
作为一所非宗派的基督教文理学院，希尔斯代尔学院提供基于西方思想的“古典教育”，鲁福和盟友——以及特朗普本人——都认为这应该成为美国大学教育的基础。 （鲁福是希尔斯代尔学院的一名研究员，在那里教课。）
在当今美国高等教育的背景下，这所学校拒绝重视种族或民族多样性，这是非常激进的：它没有多样性和包容性政策。它没有民族或女性研究课程，也不关注招生、教师或领导层的多样性。（该学院的一位发言人不愿透露是否有有色人种的教师或主任。发言人在一封电子邮件中表示，学校“不关注种族”。）该学院不跟踪学生群体的人口统计数据。
该学院长期担任校长的拉里·阿恩拒绝了采访请求，但在通过电子邮件回复《波士顿环球报》的问题时表示，高等教育中的进步人士“强调学习如何重塑社会”，而不是了解“持久的事物”。
“这将教育的重点转向了权力的运用，”他说。 “这种重点的转变导致了知识的下降、毕业率低、校园示威和暴力事件频发以及不严肃课程的泛滥。如果你教年轻人追求权力而不是知识，就会抑制他们的好奇心。这是一个巨大的损失。”
这位 72 岁的管理者还认为现代的多样性观念是对美国平等和反歧视原则的侮辱。他经常指出，希尔斯代尔的创始文件是由内战前的废奴主义者撰写的，他认为学校拒绝追踪学生的种族人口统计数据是一种光荣理想的延续。
“我们是一个愿意并能够为了追求真理而教和学的社区，当然不会关注种族问题，”阿恩说。
据新闻报道，2013 年，安恩在密歇根州议员面前作证时，曾提到州教育官员指控希尔斯代尔违反了多元化标准，因为“我们学校里没有足够的黑人学生”，安恩因此遭到强烈反对。
该学院在一份新闻稿中表示：“使用这个词并无冒犯之意，只是针对那些违规的官僚，如果这种冒犯是真的，安恩博士深表歉意。”
安恩已经在特朗普的圈子里声名鹊起。他是传统基金会的董事会成员，在特朗普第一届政府期间，他担任了总统 1776 年委员会的联合主席，该委员会发布了一份关于美国历史的报告，谴责了《纽约时报》杂志的系列文章“1619 项目”，该项目试图将美国历史重新定义为从被奴役的非洲人首次被带到美国的英国殖民地开始。
安恩在 1776 年委员会的工作以及对 2020 年大选结果的质疑言论使他成为高等教育界的局外人。他曾担任克莱蒙特麦肯纳学院研究机构萨尔瓦托中心的顾问委员会成员。但当他的任期届满时，该中心主任乔治·托马斯拒绝续约。
“两者都表明了对真理的漠视，而真理是学术使命的核心，并且有宣传的倾向，”托马斯在一封电子邮件中说。
然而，希尔斯代尔学院在保守派圈子中一直是一股有影响力的力量，而这些圈子受到候任总统的青睐。
近年来，这所学院吸引了众多特朗普世界的名人——最高法院大法官克拉伦斯·托马斯在 2016 年发表了毕业典礼演讲。希尔斯代尔学院还担任佛罗里达州州长罗恩·德桑蒂斯的指路明灯，后者于 2023 年春天访问了该学院，当时他试图重建一所公立文理学院——佛罗里达新学院。德桑蒂斯政府刚刚解雇了学院的董事会成员，并用包括鲁福在内的意识形态盟友取而代之。他在公开讲话中表示，目标是将学校变成“南方的希尔斯代尔学院”，并提供“类似于我们的开国元勋上大学时所接受的古典教育”。
特朗普的高等教育盟友们也对高等教育界的精英阶层感到厌恶，他们声称这些精英阶层宣扬的反美价值观已经渗透到了社会的其他方面，包括商界。
北卡罗来纳州众议员弗吉尼亚·福克斯 (Virginia Foxx) 于 10 月在北卡罗来纳州格林斯博罗的格林斯博罗体育馆举行的特朗普竞选集会上发表了讲话。
北卡罗来纳州众议员弗吉尼亚·福克斯 (Virginia Foxx) 于 10 月在北卡罗来纳州格林斯博罗的格林斯博罗体育馆举行的特朗普竞选集会上发表了讲话。Julia Demaree Nikhinson/美联社
现年 81 岁的北卡罗来纳州共和党女众议员、前社区学院校长弗吉尼亚·福克斯 (Virginia Foxx) 已经发挥了巨大的影响力。
作为众议院教育和劳动力委员会的强大主席，福克斯一直致力于揭露她所认为的有毒文化，这种文化允许在全国最具竞争力的大学里歧视白人和犹太学生。 2023 年 10 月 7 日，哈马斯领导的对以色列的袭击发生后，她的委员会召集了一批知名大学校长就校园内的反犹太主义问题作证，这一系列高风险的公开审讯最终直接导致三名常春藤盟校校长下台。在第一次审讯中，她和其他共和党成员利用论坛作为平台表达其他不满。
“多年来，大学一直在煽动一种意识形态，这种意识形态有很多名字——反种族主义、反殖民主义、批判种族理论、DEI、交叉性，不胜枚举，”福克斯在 12 月 5 日听证会的开幕词中说道。“大学里教授的这种价值体系对 99% 的美国人来说绝对是陌生的。”
今年早些时候，福克斯委员会的一位发言人称一位教授美国种族问题的哈佛大学教授是“种族煽动者”，这个词在历史上被用来贬低黑人思想家和民权领袖。
教育和劳动力委员会预计将在未来几周任命一位新主席，但高等教育观察人士表示，福克斯将继续通过“文化口号战”来推动人们对精英大学的不信任，并推动增加对大型捐赠基金征税等政策，密歇根州立大学的坎特韦尔说。
彼得·伍德是一位人类学家，曾在波士顿大学担任过各种行政职务，现在是主张学术自由的右翼国家学者协会的负责人，他缺乏鲁福和福克斯那样的名人地位。但他是一群保守派知识分子中的一员，他们在在线出版物、书籍和智库中表达了对当代校园文化的深刻怀疑。
伍德著有一本批评 1619 项目的书，他对大学校园中思想自由的崩溃感到失望，他在一次采访中表示，大学领导者“非常精通自由教育的词汇，愿意随时运用这种自由教育——但他们并不是真心的”，他说。
他说，大多数美国大学都在鼓励“歇斯底里”，而不是就从他所谓的“跨性别运动”到气候变化等话题进行理性辩论。
伍德说，学生只有愿意接受困难、有时无聊、经常违背自己信念的工作挑战，才应该上大学。他说，美国高校在吸引学生的过程中已经偏离了这一理想，取消了曾经将基本知识从一代传到下一代的课程要求。他说，随着大学迎合学生不愿接受智力和意识形态挑战的心理，学生的心理变得脆弱。
“你现在上大学不是为了接受教育，而是为了变得完整，得到治愈，”伍德说。
他说，特朗普和万斯能为高等教育做的最好的事情就是拒绝继续资助机构失败。他希望随着时间的推移“让美国人摆脱”联邦学生贷款和助学金制度，并改革他认为已经过于政治化的大学认证制度。他的组织几个月来一直在对联邦教育部进行审计，他认为该部门臃肿不堪，需要大幅削减。在卡马拉·哈里斯政府的领导下，他认为他的组织的工作将无关紧要。
“但在这种情况下，”他说，“我想这可能会成为新政府的一份有用的规划文件。”
题图：保守派活动家克里斯托弗·鲁福因批评批判种族理论教学而声名鹊起。托马斯·西蒙内蒂为《华盛顿邮报》拍摄，盖蒂图片社
附原英文报道：
No DEI. No ‘transgender movement.’ No women’s studies. Trump World wants to ‘reclaim’ universities.
By Hilary Burns and Mike Damiano Globe Staff,Updated November 19, 2024
Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, rose to prominence with his criticism of the teaching of critical race theory.Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post via Getty Images
They are right-wing activists and conservative congressional staffers. They include higher education specialists at the Heritage Foundation who contributed to the audacious Project 2025 governing plan, and lawyers who specialize in attacking diversity and inclusion bureaucracies. They are leaders of the very few institutions of higher education that fit the Trumpian view of what a college should offer.
As Donald Trump prepares to take office in January, a new conservative higher education cognoscenti, espousing views long considered fringe by the liberal-leaning academic world, are ascendant. They see this moment as one of extraordinary opportunity: Higher education is rarely more than a blip in presidential politics, but Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, made elite schools — their cost, their culture, their politics — a red meat issue in their campaign. Trump vowed to “reclaim” the university from “radical leftists,” and Vance went so far as to applaud the state takeover of public universities in Hungary by that country’s authoritarian leader.
Trumpian critics of academia are determined to rescue universities from the Marxists and social justice warriors they say unduly influence them. They aim to use federal funding, accreditation boards, taxation, congressional investigations, and, potentially, changes to the Higher Education Act to achieve their goals.
These conservative thinkers share a view of “higher education as hostile to the kind of society they think they ought to have,” said Brendan Cantwell, professor of education at Michigan State University.
For the sector, he said, it “brings a great deal of uncertainty.”
A right-wing activist and writer, Rufo rose to prominence in the summer of 2020 after an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News. He set off a national firestorm by popularizing a critique of critical race theory, a term he wrested from its legal studies roots to include a wide range of teachings about race and racism, calling it an “existential threat to the United States.”
Not long after, the Trump administration tapped him to help draft an executive order to limit how government agencies and contractors talk about race and racism in employee trainings.
“He’s been all over this space and gradually become more and more influential in these MAGA circles,” said Steven Brint, professor of sociology and public policy at the University of California Riverside.
In the years since, Rufo, 40, has increasingly focused his attention on higher education. A senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, Rufo graduated from Georgetown University and Harvard University’s Extension School before becoming an activist journalist. He was unavailable for an interview.
Last year, he played a prominent role in what he told Politico was an orchestrated campaign to oust Harvard’s first Black president, Claudine Gay. At the time Gay was already under fire for her testimony at a congressional hearing about campus antisemitism, Rufo helped circulate accusations that she had plagiarized in her academic works.
He has also targeted new immigrants in his advocacy work in recent months, fueling false narratives about Haitian migrants.
Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, called Rufo one of the “main influencers” who “gives [Trump] ideas about higher ed policy.”
Several higher education watchers believe Rufo could be tapped by the Trump administration in an official role, while others expect him to continue influencing policy from his current platform.
The way Rufo sees it, universities have fomented a “cultural revolution” in America. Leftist professors and administrators, along with their student acolytes, are leveraging identity politics to advance an anti-American, anticapitalist agenda, a phenomenon Rufo contends began during the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
“The training ground for the New Left’s capture of institutional power was the university,” Rufo wrote in his 2023 book, “America’s Cultural Revolution.”
He calls for a “counter-revolution,” in which conservatives should use federal funding and the “civil rights regulatory apparatus” to reshape institutions, and “devise a strategy for laying siege to the institutions” to reorient them “toward the nation’s eternal principles.” In short, Rufo says, conservatives must root out the ideology that undergirds DEI programs, which proponents say make campuses fairer and more inclusive, but that Rufo contends perpetrate their own form of discrimination.
“From one perspective, the current battlefield may appear overwhelming,” Rufo wrote in his book. “The Left has achieved cultural dominance over the entire range of prestige institutions. But from another, there is the possibility of reversal.”
If there’s one institution many Trump supporters in higher ed repeatedly point to as a paragon of academic virtue that they want colleges and universities to emulate, it’s Hillsdale College in Michigan.
As a nonsectarian Christian liberal arts school, Hillsdale offers the kind of “classical education,” based on Western thought, that Rufo and allies — and Trump himself — have said should form the basis of a US college education. (Rufo is a fellow at Hillsdale, where he teaches classes.)
In the context of American higher education today, the school is radical in its refusal to place any value in racial or ethnic diversity: It has no diversity and inclusion policies. It has no classes in ethnic or women’s studies, and no focus on diversity in admissions or among the faculty or leadership. (A spokesperson for the college would not say whether there are any faculty or directors of color. The school pays “no attention to race,” the spokesperson said in an email.) The college does not track the demographics of the student body.
Its longtime president, Larry Arnn, declined requests for an interview, but said in emailed responses to questions from the Globe that progressives in higher education “emphasize learning how to remake society” rather than knowing “things that last.”
“This shifts the focus in education toward the wielding of power,” he said. “This shift in emphasis has led to a decline in knowledge, poor graduation rates, demonstrations and violence on campuses, and a proliferation of unserious courses. If you teach young people to seek power rather than knowledge, it dampens their curiosity. That is a great loss.”
The 72-year-old administrator also views modern conceptions of diversity as an affront to American principles of equality and antidiscrimination. Hillsdale’s founding documents, he often notes, were written by abolitionists in the pre-Civil War era, and he contends the school’s refusal to track the racial demographics of its students is a continuation of an honorable ideal.
“We are a community of people willing and able to teach and learn in pursuit of truth while certainly paying no attention to race,” Arnn said.
Arnn faced backlash in 2013 for his testimony before Michigan lawmakers when he recounted a charge by state education officials that Hillsdale had violated diversity standards because “we didn’t have enough dark ones,” according to news reports.
“No offense was intended by the use of that term except to the offending bureaucrats, and Dr. Arnn is sorry if such offense was honestly taken,” the college said in a news release.
Arnn has already distinguished himself in Trump’s orbit. He is on the board of the Heritage Foundation and, during the first Trump administration, cochaired the president’s 1776 Commission, which produced a report on American history that was a rebuke of the “1619 Project,” The New York Times Magazine series that sought to reframe US history as beginning when enslaved Africans were first brought to the British colonies in America.
Arnn’s work on the 1776 Commission and statements of doubt about the results of the 2020 election have made him an outsider in higher education. He used to serve on the advisory board of the Salvatori Center, a research institute at Claremont McKenna College. But when his term expired, the center’s director, George Thomas, declined to renew it.
“Both reveal a disregard for truth, which is central to the academic mission, and a tendency toward propaganda,” Thomas said in an email.
Hillsdale, however, has been an influential force in the conservative circles that have the president-elect’s ear.
The college has attracted a parade of Trump World luminaries in recent years — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the commencement address in 2016. And Hillsdale served as a guide star to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who visited in the spring of 2023 as he sought to remake the New College of Florida, a public liberal arts institution. The DeSantis administration had just fired the college’s board members and replaced them with ideological allies, including Rufo. The goal, he said in public remarks, was to turn the school into the “Hillsdale of the South” and to provide “a classical education similar to what our Founding Fathers had when they went to universities.”
Trump higher education allies share a distaste for the elite segment of the sector, which they claim promotes anti-American values that have seeped into other facets of society, including the business world.
Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina spoke at a Trump campaign rally in October at Greensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, N.C.
Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina spoke at a Trump campaign rally in October at Greensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, N.C. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Associated Press
Here, Virginia Foxx, an 81-year-old Republican congresswoman from North Carolina and former community college president, has already exerted enormous influence.
As the powerful chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, Foxx has focused her efforts on exposing what she sees as a toxic culture that allows discrimination against white and Jewish students at the most competitive colleges in the country. Her committee called a prestigious cadre of university presidents to testify about antisemitism on their campuses after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, a series of high-stakes public interrogations that ultimately contributed directly to the ouster of three Ivy League presidents. At the first of those, she and other Republican members used the forum as a platform to air other grievances.
”For years, universities have stoked the flames of an ideology which goes by many names — antiracism, anticolonialism, critical race theory, DEI, intersectionality, the list goes on,” Foxx said in her opening remarks at the Dec. 5 hearing. “This value system taught in universities is absolutely foreign to 99 percent of Americans.”
Earlier this year, a spokesperson for Foxx’s committee called a Harvard professor who teaches about race in America “a race agitator,” a term historically used to disparage Black thinkers and civil rights leaders.
The Committee on Education and the Workforce is expected to name a new chair in the coming weeks, but higher education watchers said Foxx will continue to drive distrust of elite universities through a “rhetorical culture war” and push for policies like increased taxes on large endowments, said Cantwell at Michigan State.
Peter Wood, an anthropologist who served in a variety of administrative roles at Boston University and now heads the right-leaning National Association of Scholars, which advocates for academic freedom, lacks the celebrity status of Rufo and Foxx. But he’s among a group of conservative intellectuals who, in online publications, books, and think tanks, articulate profound skepticism of contemporary campus culture.
Wood, the author of a book critiquing the 1619 Project, is disillusioned with what he sees as the collapse of intellectual freedom on college campuses, whose leaders, he said in an interview, “are perfectly fluent in the vocabulary of liberal education and are willing to deploy it at the drop of a pin — but they don’t mean it,” he said.
Most US universities have fostered “hysteria” instead of reasoned debate on topics ranging from what he calls the “transgender movement” to climate change, he said.
Students should only go to college if they’re willing to be challenged by work that is difficult, sometimes boring, and often unsettling to their beliefs, Wood said. American colleges and universities have strayed far from that ideal in their attempt to attract students, he said, dropping course requirements that once transmitted bedrock knowledge from one generation to the next. And as colleges cater to students’ reluctance to be challenged intellectually and ideologically, he said, students have become psychologically frail.
“You don’t go to college now to get an education, you go to become whole, to be healed,” Wood said.
The best thing Trump and Vance could do for higher education, he said, is to refuse to continue subsidizing institutional failures. He wants to “wean Americans away” from the federal student loan and grant system over time, and reform the college accreditation system that he believes has become too politicized. His organization has also been working for months on an audit of the federal Department of Education, which he views as bloated and ripe for aggressive cuts. Under a Kamala Harris administration, he presumed his group’s work would be irrelevant.
“But in this circumstance,” he said, “I imagine it just might prove to be a useful planning document for the new administration.”
