Education Secretary Linda McMahon will lay out her grand vision for how to “chart a course of renewal” for American universities on Wednesday in Nashville, where she will hail Vanderbilt University as an example for others across the country to emulate.
McMahon will say that the Trump administration inherited a “crisis in higher education,” according to prepared remarks obtained exclusively by The Daily Wire, highlighting free speech abuses, violent riots, and declining academic standards as examples of “decades of institutional decay.” She will say that the nation is on the cusp of “a new chapter in higher education,” and highlight the venue of her speech, Vanderbilt University, as a “national example” of how reform is possible.
“A tide of reform is finally washing over our campuses — powered by some institutional leaders who have boldly acknowledged the need to rebuild public trust, restore sanity, and revive a culture of excellence and accountability,” McMahon will say, according to the remarks. “I have chosen to come to Vanderbilt because it stands as a national example of this renewal.”
Unlike several major universities like Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, which adopted academic changes through settlement agreements with the administration, Vanderbilt proactively adopted a series of measures, including a newly issued Declaration of Principles without any similar legal agreement. The declaration states that all American universities’ purposes are “the cultivation of a free and self-governing republic by the creation, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge through reason, argument, and evidence, rooted in the pursuit of truth and discovery at the frontiers of human knowledge and in a university culture of free inquiry, wide-ranging debate, and academic excellence.”
“Vanderbilt has reemerged as the nation’s leading private university by reclaiming campus life’s timeless pillars of truth, institutional neutrality, and open inquiry — ideals that long safeguarded the pursuit of knowledge and now light the way for a new era of academic integrity.”
McMahon’s remarks will hail the Declaration of Principles as a model for the rest of the country, while placing the importance of the initiative to reform higher education as an administrative priority.
“I urge college and university leaders, courageous students, and all who care about truth to seize this moment and help restore the principles that once made these institutions powerhouses of American pride and advancement,” McMahon will say.
McMahon’s speech places the university’s role within the broader American founding, showing how several founders of the country, including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, created universities to educate the nation’s citizens and leaders and develop them into reasoned, moral, and biblical people. In fact, she will explain, that “American higher education is older than America itself.”
“Long before the United States declared independence, institutions of higher education in the colonies were shaping the minds and forging the ideas that would give birth to the American republic,” she will say. “Think about that: American higher education is older than America itself.”
“They grappled with the great texts, debated Aristotle, law, and biblical scripture, and explored the foundations of human flourishing,” McMahon’s speech reads. “These universities provided not only the knowledge, but cultivated the habits of inquiry, reasoning, and truth-seeking that made it possible for a people to attempt — and ultimately achieve — the most successful political experiment in human freedom in history.”
This speech, taken in the context of Secretary Rubio’s recent remarks at the Parthenon in Greece, largely applauded in conservative circles, appears to cement the new conservative lexicon; one that speaks to a broader cultural vision of Western civilization and reasserts the importance of virtuous behavior and the federal government’s legitimate interest in fostering Western virtues.
Recounting the recent declines in academic standards and university administrations’ inability to maintain campus order during the anti-Israel encampments, McMahon’s speech decries a collapse in campus culture. Using the encampments as a focal point for moral decay, McMahon contrasts the founding era’s emphasis on character building, academic rigor, and excellence with an academy that “began to succumb to the idea that merit and excellence should be sacrificed to equity and ideology.”
“It became academically fashionable to indict Western civilization as uniquely flawed, and to argue that centering a university education on its principles amounted to cultural imposition,” McMahon will say.
Secretary McMahon’s speech enumerates the specific measures undertaken by several universities to combat the previous climate of censorship against dissenting viewpoints, reestablish academic rigor and standards, and recommit to nourishing civic virtues.
McMahon’s speech will be livestreamed Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. CT and will be the final installment of her “The Next 250: American Education” speaking series.
