Conservative: Don’t Let Universities Off So Easy
Team Trump is “giving Columbia University the $400 million back in exchange for just a handful of basic concessions,” fumes National Review’s Jim Geraghty. No: “It’s time to require colleges and universities that get so much federal aid to cut the administrative bloat;” best “set a maximum administrator-to-student ratio and enforce it.” And make them “cut tuition rates, never mind merely minimizing the rate of increase.” Purdue “has kept tuition flat for twelve years now — $9,992 per year. If they can do it, everyone else can do it.” And “stop giving 290,000 slots in U.S. universities to Chinese students, so we can stop devoting American resources to educating young people who are, in many cases, the offspring of powerful figures in a regime that hates us.”
From the left: The Resistance Got Old
“It isn’t just Bernie who is getting long in the tooth,” quips Ryan Zickgraf at UnHerd. “So are his supporters and those currently raging against the Trump machine.” The “white-haired dissidents at Tesla protests in 2025 outnumber those too young to rent a car.” “Where did the kids go? The best answer is that most of them didn’t vote at all.” “Election turnout in November trended downward for young adults”; “when the youth did vote, they leaned Republican. “According to data whiz kid David Shor, Trump won a majority of those under the age of 26 except women of colour — a massive change from both 2016 and 2020.” Now, “it’s unclear whether Democrats can attract anyone under 30 to the resistance cause.”
From the right: Restoring Balance to Big Law
After years of shunning Donald Trump, “Big Law is finally putting politics aside,” cheers Richard Porter at RealClearPolitics. “The top law firms in New York City” had all “contributed money to Democrats” and coordinated “their pro bono and corporate advisory work with the left’s economic activism,” including “support of “Environmental, Social and Governance” and “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” initiatives. Trump’s volley of executive orders aimed to increase “the cost of participating in progressive activism,” thereby “purging the politicization of American business.” Now both Sullivan & Cromwell and Paul Weiss have bent the knee, agreeing that “the justice system should be fair and nonpartisan.” The lesson: “Focus on business and keep the politics in balance.”
Media watch: Burying ‘the Lede’ on Deportees
“Few things are so unhelpful as the journalist who buries the lede,” notes Becket Adams at The Hill. Yet it’s common in reporting on the Trump immigration crackdown. Example: The feds want to deport Georgetown researcher Badar Khan Suri, the son-in-law of a (possibly former) Hamas official, for allegedly promoting Hamas. Yet, Politico didn’t mention why he was arrested until the ninth paragraph of its story, and only after noting he has no criminal record and “merely ‘[opposes] U.S. foreign policy toward Israel.’ ” The Associated Press, NBC and other outlets weren’t much better. Coverage of Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil was similarly “befuddling.” There’s a “robust and worthwhile debate to be had about these arrests.” But not “if we have only partial information.”
Libertarian: DOE Isn’t Very Constitutional
“Fully eliminating the useless” federal Department of Education “will require an act of Congress, but there’s good reason to believe the president has room to maneuver until then,” argues Reason’s J.D. Tuccille. The DOE “produces mostly red tape” and “encourages further bureaucracy at the state and local level to ensure compliance. The results are almost uniformly unsatisfactory,” as dismal national test scores keep showing. Trump “may even have an obligation to” act, since he swore an oath to defend the Constitution, and while not “everything the Department of Education does is” necessarily unconstitutional, “most of its activities have no constitutional foundation.” “So, the Trump administration should be able, at least, to discontinue activities unauthorized by the Constitution,” and DoE “may be a hollow husk by the time legislators act.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
This story originally appeared on NYPost
