But in their hubris, the universities began a series of blunders that may now end them as they once were.
They began gouging government agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation by grabbing anywhere from 30% to 60% of individual campus grants as “overhead.”
Yet they usually charged most private foundation grants a far more modest 15% surcharge—as if a lax government did not object to overcharging.
They pushed for a vast expansion of the student loan program, whose portfolio of federally guaranteed loans reached $1.7 trillion. But once the federal government guaranteed student loans against default, universities began jacking up their fees and tuition well above the annual rate of inflation.
Elite universities did not grasp that the more they began warping their curricula with DEI gut courses, radical green agendas, and postmodern race and gender theories, the less time they had to offer students their once gold-standard general education curricula of Western Civ, history, literature, philosophy, math, and science.
Soon employers started to notice that the new therapeutic courses were also married to race and sex-based admissions.
The SAT and ACT were, for a time, dropped. So were comparative rankings of high school grade point averages.
Soon, once iconic degrees were no longer any guarantee of the ability to write and speak well, think analytically, or compute competently.
Employers often began to prefer graduates from those state schools where DEI was muted, admissions were competitive, and teaching remained rigorous and non-ideological.
Finally, after Oct. 7, 2023, growing antisemitism on campuses became unapologetic, overt, and violent.
Thousands of Middle Eastern guest students brazenly cheered on Hamas terrorists.
The campus Marxist orthodoxy that Jews and Israel were “victimizing white people” and Palestinians were noble “non-white victims” ensured that Jewish students were chased and physically attacked on campuses.
A disgusted public watched invertebrate administrators either greenlight the antisemitic violence or ludicrously deny it.
So, there was bound to be a public reckoning. And now it has arrived.
Congress will soon pass legislation that will tax the annual multimillion-dollar income from multibillion-dollar endowments at somewhere between 15% and 20%.
There will be no more “overhead” or “surcharges” on government campus grants allowed larger than 15%.
Those two reforms alone could cost some of the richest campuses nearly a half billion dollars a year in lost income.
Racially offensive DEI programs will disqualify schools from federal support.
Foreign student guests who break U.S. laws or violate university rules will have their visas yanked and be shown the door to go home.
Campuses will have to abide by the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments of the Bill of Rights or forgo federal funds.
All these remedies enjoy broad public support.