As you may know, Project 2025 is an expansive roadmap for the far right to remake our country’s political system so that we have fewer civil liberties, fewer protections for minorities and the poor, and more power than ever concentrated in the hands of an imperial President. It’s imperative that we as a university consider these explicit plans because, if enacted, these policies would, among many other things, eviscerate education across the country, starting by abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. In this letter I want to share with you some specifics about how these policies would affect education across the U.S., and Antioch University in particular.
Some background on Project 2025: It is a 922-page document prepared by over 50 conservative organizations, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, that lays out an epic laundry list of goals for the first months of a potential authoritarian presidency. Based on a document that influenced the Reagan Administration in 1980, it aims to “be ready for the next conservative Administration to govern at 12:00 noon, January 20, 2025.” While the document is full of catchphrases (e.g., “cultural Marxism”) and weird language (e.g., “unaccountable federal spending is the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening”), the authors behind Project 2025 are nonetheless extremely clear about thousands of specific actions they hope to take.
The overall effect of the Project 2025 agenda would be to dismantle the checks and balances of the three branches of government, to dismantle the separation of the President from the prosecutorial authority of the Justice Department, and to give the President expansive power, through executive order, to reshape our nation’s Constitution without amending it. Additionally, there is no indication that the current Supreme Court would do anything to stop this extremist remaking of our political system.
These attacks on the progress we have made in our society demand a forceful rebuttal—and here I specifically want to focus on the attacks on our nation’s educational infrastructure. As Antioch’s founding President, Horace Mann, once wrote, “Education is the cornerstone of our community and our democracy.” An attack on education is an attack on equal opportunity and on democracy itself. This is why we must sound the alarm bells about many of the education policies laid out in the Project 2025 platform. Many of these attacks would directly impact Antioch University.
Project 2025’s Frontal Assault on Education in America
Let me walk you through some of the changes that, if enacted, would directly impact institutions of higher education and our system of public education. I will include page numbers, and again, I encourage you to read this plan with your own eyes. Here are some of the education-related “highlights”:
- – Eliminating the U.S. Department of Education (319)
- – Turning all federal education programs into block grants that are administered by states with no federal oversight or preconditions on funding (320)
- – Eliminating the issuance of visas to “foreign students from enemy nations” (141)
- – Cutting off federal student loans to all students at institutions that serve undocumented immigrants (167)
- – Taking away civil rights oversight from the Department of Education and forcing aggrieved students to seek enforcement only through the courts. This would include all incidents of sexual assault or harassment, and any allegation of racial, sexual, religious and other forms of unlawful discrimination in educational programs (330)
- – Rolling back the addition of “nonbinary” as a sex category in the Mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection around high school sports (331-2)
- – Eliminating the Head Start program (482)
- – Instead of monitoring schools for racial disparities “in school discipline indicators…such as detentions, suspensions, and expulsions,” encouraging schools to prioritize “student safety” (334)
- – Blocking any efforts at federal student loan forgiveness, eliminating income-based repayment of student loans, and abolishing the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program (340-1; 354)
- – Passing laws to target and ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory (343) (they cannot define it, but they know it’s bad).
- – Attacking the higher education accreditation system and specifically accreditors who promote DEI policies or mission statements (352)
This is a summary of the many ways that this agenda would sabotage and destroy our system of K-12 public education while also severely impacting the ability of both public and private colleges and universities to carry out our missions. Here at Antioch, these changes could in the immediate future affect our students’ and teachers’ academic freedom, federal student loan eligibility, student visas, our institution’s accreditation, our alumni’s ability to repay student loans, and our freedom to pursue the Antioch mission.
But the impacts would be even more severe on public schools. In particular, we have to think about what impacts eliminating the Department of Education would have on every public school in this country. Public K-12 education is largely a function of state law and supported almost entirely by state and local taxes. As a result, there are wide disparities in resources from state to state and school district to school district, with inner-city schools typically being the poorest. Today, the Department of Education does much to fill the gaps in achieving equal educational opportunities for marginalized and disadvantaged students in our society.
Most of these programs receive little coverage in the press, but they often are making real impacts in the lives of millions of children. An example of one of these key federal programs that Project 2025 would eliminate is the Head Start program, which provides comprehensive early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and families. Head Start has had tremendous success in better preparing students from poor families at the very beginning of their educational journey. Another program that would be axed is Title I, which is designed to provide children from low-income families significant opportunity to receive a fair, equitable, and high-quality education, and to close educational achievement gaps in reading, mathematics, and other core subjects.
Without these programs and so many others, inequality in educational opportunity will widen dramatically, and the income and wealth disparities in our society will only grow. These developments don’t come out of nowhere. They are natural continuations of a decades-long project of political extremists to undermine public education in our country and replace it with private education supported by our tax dollars.
We don’t have the time or the space to fully explore Project 2025’s manifold assaults on education—let alone the totality of what it proposes. If you want to learn more, I encourage you to watch the recording of the Project 2025 presentation by Colin Seeberger from the Center for American Progress. His presentation last week was part of our Antioch Works for Democracy effort.
One thing is clear from even the most cursory review of Project 2025: taken together, these efforts are all about those who have historically had power, wealth, and privilege in this country reasserting their dominance over everyone else. They would be an assault on both democracy and the values of equal opportunity.
In this, Project 2025 is by no means unprecedented. Take for example Project 2025’s vow to replace our federal government’s professional civil service with tens of thousands of political appointees, all loyalists to the President rather than to the Constitution. This echoes a previous purge of the civil service, in 1913, when Woodrow Wilson assumed the Presidency and promptly segregated the government by race, abruptly demoting all Black folks working in white collar positions. This act of racial oppression unwound decades of hard work by Black civil servants and their families. In many cases this presidential order destroyed both their wealth and their social standing—impacts that reverberate through generations. The moral arc of the universe may bend towards justice, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, but it can also suffer grievous setbacks that put the cause of justice and equality back by decades. We have seen it before. And if the many plans in Project 2025 come to pass, it will happen again.
As we press forward, I want to resist efforts in Project 2025 and elsewhere to hijack the vocabulary of American values including the words “freedom,” “liberty,” “patriot,” and even the word “woke.” They are used by some as camouflage for policies and positions that are antithetical to our values as a nation. For them, “woke” means anything that upsets the caste system of white supremacy; “freedom” means the freedom to discriminate; “liberty” means the right to be free, not only from the government but from the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, equal protection and other civil rights that are core to this multiracial, multicultural democracy—even the right to be free from public health laws that protect us all; and “patriot” is often just code for anyone pushing white, Christian, xenophobic nationalism. We can see through this rhetoric and reject the notion that any group, in the name of liberty, freedom, or patriotism, has the right to oppress others. Specifically, as a higher educational institution, we believe in the freedom to explore ideas, the academic freedom to study history and systems of oppression, the freedom to speak out and not be censored on any issue of public concern, and the freedom to have and live by our own religious beliefs, and not to be ruled by someone else’s. We believe in the freedom to get the education that we choose, uncensored by the government and fully informed by science, actual history, and a diversity of views.
We must fight to ensure that future generations have this same choice.
