Trump officials went after dozens of colleges. Now they’re rewriting the rules for all of academia

WASHINGTON (AP) — A year ago, the White House was unleashing a blitz on higher education. At one campus after another, Trump officials opened investigations and cut federal funding unless schools fell in line with the Republican president’s political agenda.

Now, after a campaign that put dozens of universities under investigation, President Donald Trump's administration is taking a wider approach, moving to rewrite the federal rules that govern all of higher education. Demands that were being pressed on individual schools are being written into the fine print for thousands of U.S. universities.

“We’re coming over the higher education system and course correcting,” Nicholas Kent, undersecretary for the Education Department, said in an Associated Press interview. Unlike investigations that target individual campuses, he said the new tactic has power “to affect 6,000 institutions.”

The shift comes after federal judges blocked Trump's administration from making crippling cuts at Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles. It also follows a mass exodus in civil rights lawyers who traditionally guide investigations against universities. Still, Trump hasn’t backed down from his campaign to end what he calls “wokeness” run amok in academia.