Trump, GOP turn up the heat to ensure fairness, purge wokism on campuses

Scott Bessent going after tax exemptions is the part nobody saw coming, and it's the part that actually matters. Congress can hold hearings until the cows come home. Politicians can give speeches about campus radicalism forever. But the moment the IRS says "your nonprofit status is on the table," universities start returning phone calls fast. Money talks. Ideology, it turns out, does not pay its own bills.

For years these schools operated like the rules didn't apply to them. Race-based admissions got rebranded as "holistic review" and kept humming along even after the Supreme Court told them to stop. Departments that exist mainly to produce activists instead of scholars got funded on autopilot, no questions asked, all while charging families six figures for the privilege. The tax-exempt status was supposed to reflect a public good. Somewhere along the way it became a subsidy for institutions that stopped pretending to serve the public and started serving an agenda instead.

The predictable howling from faculty lounges about "government overreach" would carry more weight if these same institutions hadn't spent a decade overreaching into every corner of a student's life, from freshman orientation to dorm room posters. You don't get to run a closed ideological shop and then cry foul when someone asks whether that shop deserves a tax break. Nobody is stopping any university from teaching what it wants. They're just being told the public doesn't have to keep footing the bill for it.

This isn't about crushing academia, despite what the op-eds will claim by Friday. It's a chance for these schools to actually save themselves, to go back to admitting students on merit and hiring faculty for scholarship rather than activism. Whether they take that offer or dig in is on them. But pretending the old arrangement was sustainable, or fair, was never going to fly forever.