Related to my earlier post this morning, I strongly encourage you to read this analysis by Drs. Katie Rainwater and John Warner on the impending disaster that we can totally avert if we act expeditiously.
Don't get scared. Educate yourself with these documents and links I've shared and act. And act now! Time is of the essence.
Sí se puede! Yes we can!
-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
With Proposed Federal Rules, Heritage Foundation Upends Higher Education
Who is up for a little Christian Nationalism embedded into our higher education system?
Katie Rainwater and John Warner
Last week we promoted an informational webinar on how to participate in the public comment process for resisting a proposal originating with the Heritage Foundation that will fundamentally alter how higher education operates in the United States. Today, we’re fortunate to have expert analysis from Katie Rainwater, fellow at the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, faculty at Florida International University, and a researcher on how national conservatism seeks to change education so that our systems that are meant to serve everyone are instead operating from an explicit right-wing vision. Prof. Rainwater tells us what these operators plan and how and why we must resist it - John Warner
WITH PROPOSED FEDERAL RULES, HERITAGE FOUNDATION UPENDS HIGHER EDUCATION
by Katie Rainwater
Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts recently declared that higher education requires a “moral reset.” Roberts – who professes that the founders envisioned a Christian nation and an American people who honor eternal truths – holds that higher education should be grounded in recognition of “one coherent, universal truth with a capital ‘T’.” Roberts and his Heritage Foundation colleagues envision a sharp departure from university systems premised on institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and humanistic learning. They aim to drastically restrict the number of students pursuing 4-year degrees, arguing that the degrees are a costly and unproductive hindrance to the formation of male-headed households. Their goal is to vocationalize education while also ensuring the curriculum and research at universities supports Christian Right policy goals.
The Heritage Foundation’s path to transforming higher education runs through red states, especially those like Florida where they maintain close relations with the governor. Yet the capacity of states to change their higher education systems is constrained by federal legislation which requires universities to maintain accreditation with a federally recognized accreditor to access federal financial aid. Locking in state-level reform and achieving nationwide transformation thus requires - in Robert’s words - “totally upend[ing] the accreditation system.” Proposed changes to the rules revising the federal recognition of accreditors do just this, achieving nearly all the policy goals for accreditation set out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
Moralistic Teaching and Partisan Research
Guided by DeSantis, the Florida state legislature has given right-wing ideologues control of the general education curriculum and of newly created centers on public university campuses. The Heritage Foundation has been critical to both developments.
In 2023, the Heritage Foundation helped pass Florida Senate Bill 266, which took curricular decision-making authority for the general education curriculum away from faculty experts, instilling it in the Board of Governors (BOG). To make an initial cull of courses, the BOG turned to Scott Yenor, a Christian nationalist and misogynist who advised DeSantis for two years as a Tallahassee-based Claremont Institute director. When Yenor left Tallahassee to become a director at the Heritage Foundation, oversight of Florida’s general education curriculum was given over to Jason Jewell, a right-wing activist who formerly led a Great Books program at a conservative Christian college.
Last year, as Chief Academic Officer of the State University System, Jewell presided over the creation of a sanitized, Florida version of an open access sociology textbook. After faculty raised awareness that the state was censoring the textbook to exclude content on race and gender, the BOG removed “Introduction to Sociology” from the general education curriculum, relegating it to the same fate as already excluded courses like “Sociology of Gender and Social Problems.” Notably, “Families in the United States” is now the only sociology course that can be taken for general education credit in the state of Florida – a testament to the Heritage Foundation’s goal of bolstering the “traditional” family.
The “moral reset” of Florida universities has also included the creation of new centers through which the Heritage Foundation is leveraging millions of dollars of Florida taxpayer money in service of its own deeply partisan ends. Following advocacy by a council linked to the Heritage Foundation, the Florida state legislature established the Hamilton School on the University of Florida’s campus. The aim of the school and a related center which should be headed by a “serious right-wing politics person,” Yenor explained in an email obtained through a public records request, is to create “a generation of thoughtful, strong, practical leaders to head up the conservative movement” and to produce “a new group of young male leaders who could lead the state.”
Other university centers created by the state legislature are even more directly tied to partisan advocacy. The Adam Smith Center at Florida International University hosts the Heritage Foundation-conceived “Carvalho Dialogues” (named after the late, far-right Brazilian conspiracy theorist) to convene right-wing Latin American politicians in support of imperialist America First and conservative policy goals. The Institute for Governance & Civics at Florida State University employs faculty affiliated with the Heritage Foundation and the conservative Christian legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom to produce research and advocacy in support of Christian Right policy objectives like undermining public schools and upending anti-discrimination laws.
They Want Fewer People to Go to College
The education landscape in Florida is being changed in other, less transparently ideological ways. Yenor has observed that “as late as 1980, only 8% of the country went to college.” Yenor, who orchestrated the shuttering of DEI programs in Florida universities and who thinks women should be trad wives, proposes, “The United States should move toward 8% from its current 46%.” Project 2025 argues that postsecondary education policy should be “rebalanced to focus far more on bolstering the workforce skills of Americans.”
“When I became Governor,” DeSantis said at a February 2026 press conference, “I made the point very strongly that there is more than one way that you can succeed as a young person.” The Yale and Harvard graduate proceeded to explain, “Not everyone needs to go to a four-year brick and ivy university.” DeSantis recently declared Florida number one in the nation for workforce education. Under the DeSantis administration, Career and Technical Education has expanded in K-12 schools and more students participate in pre-apprenticeship programs.
DeSantis is careful to frame educational pathways as purely a personal choice. But if higher education contracts to 1960 levels of attendance, it is undoubtedly the working class and students of color who would lose access. Last month, the Heritage Foundation released model legislation that penalizes state universities for open admission policies. Cheered by the Heritage Foundation, Florida has, of course, already eliminated the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion programs designed to foster the success of once excluded groups.
The Proposed Rules
Much more prescriptive than the enabling legislation, the proposed rules specify ways that accreditors must assess - and must not assess - institutions. Here are the implications of a few of the most significant changes:
Accreditors Must Ensure Institutions Toe the State Line. The Heritage Foundation has long sought to change the law so that states can create their own accreditation systems. In 2014, DeSantis, then a US congressional representative, sponsored a failed Heritage Foundation-supported bill to this effect. As Governor, last year, DeSantis created a new state-run accrediting group to enable Florida and other member states to evaluate their state university systems according to standards that they devise.
The proposed rules lock in state control over higher education institutions by preventing accreditors from enforcing quality standards that contravene state law. Although the proposed rules introduce a new requirement for institutions to maintain academic freedom policies, faculty in states like Florida will not be empowered to exercise academic freedom as state law precludes teaching about systemic oppression in the general education (SB 266) or collaborating in research with colleagues in Venezuela (SB 846).
(It is also worth noting that the proposed rules unmoor academic freedom from two closely related principles: shared governance and tenure. The proposed rules eliminate a requirement for faculty involvement in accreditors’ decision-making bodies and require accreditors to evaluate institutions for “sufficient flexibility in instructional staffing” although job security is a necessary precondition for the exercise of academic freedom.)
Ideological Centers Are In. A provision of the proposed rules that requires accreditors to ensure institutions support intellectual diversity could be used to compel speech or to impose ideological centers like those that the state legislature created in Florida on campuses where they are not already in place.
Studies Degrees Are Out and So Are Some Students. The proposed rules change how accreditors evaluate institutions by requiring them to assess whether unspecified minimum expectations are met at the institutional and programmatic level on metrics of student success, including economic returns on degrees. Siri Terjesen, a Heritage Foundation-recognized Florida Atlantic University professor and a member of the committee that created the proposed rules, has identified "gradflation”– the production of more liberal arts degree holders than the job market can allegedly absorb – as a serious problem. The rules could be wielded to require universities to eliminate degree programs, like Women and Gender Studies, that the Right charges have a low return on investment.
Or, even more troublingly, student success metrics on completion and graduation rates could be used to require universities to cut student enrollment. Under Secretary of Education, Nicholas Kent has declared that the new rules will enable him to hold institutions accountable for enrolling students with a low likelihood of success. The proposed rules also prohibit accreditors from adopting any standards related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Wielding the Secret Weapon
The Department of Education claims that the rule changes will enable them to address real problems with the higher education system such as increasing tuition and inadequate graduation rates. But these are not good-faith actors. Trump has called accreditation his “secret weapon”, and he has stocked the Department of Education with generals from the Heritage Foundation who are ready to take their shots. In a 2023 report, the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke argued that career bureaucrats needed to be disempowered; instead, entrusting “political appointees with both the legal and the policy sides of accreditation.” Last year Burke was appointed the Department of Education’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policies and Programs. Former Heritage Foundation staffer Jay Greene now chairs the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity [NACIQI]. which is charged with assessing accreditors.
Preventing the Heritage Foundation from using the accreditation system to decimate higher education will require faculty to organize our campuses and communities to support our colleges and universities as an indispensable public good. Most immediately, faculty and the public should submit comments on the proposed rule changes. For the proposed rule changes to go into effect next year, the Department of Education must meet a November 1 deadline for addressing all public comments. We can impede the adoption of the proposed rules by submitting public comments that document specific harms that will result if the rules are adopted. Consult this AAUP guidance to learn how to submit your proposed comment by midnight on September 21. You can also watch a recording of the previously mentioned webinar that shares additional guidance and suggestions.
Guidance for Submitting Comments to the AIM Committee
In response to Trump’s April 2025 executive order, the Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) committee at the Department of Education issued proposed rule changes that would completely rewrite how the accreditation process works.
The AIM committee is currently stocked with Heritage Foundation operatives and Ron DeSantis allies, who have been working for years to shatter the non-partisan and independent accreditation process. The proposed changes would have a catastrophic effect on higher education, which will lock in MAGA education priorities for years to come. Check out AAUP resources for an overview of what is at stake with accreditation.
The AIM committee is currently receiving public comments on these proposed rules changes. It is critical that AAUP members, faculty, staff, and students submit comments to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the issues at stake. All comments must be responded to by the Department of Education, which only has until November 1 to respond. Strong comments can: 1) result in positive changes to the proposed rules; 2) slow the process down; and 3) serve as the basis for future legal action.
Strong comments:
Cite the specific proposed regulatory change
Use your personal experience and circumstances to describe a specific harm.
Please see the templates below for ideas about how to shape your comments. You can upload comments any time before Monday, September 21 at 11:59 p.m. EDT. Additional resources can be found at the American Federation of Teachers, Alliance for Higher Education, and EdTrust
The AAUP is also looking to publicize concerns raised by our members. If you are interested in making your comments public, or want support drafting your comments, please contact: cdaf@aaup.org.
With Proposed Federal Rules, Heritage Foundation Upends Higher Education
Who is up for a little Christian Nationalism embedded into our higher education system?
Katie Rainwater and John Warner
Last week we promoted an informational webinar on how to participate in the public comment process for resisting a proposal originating with the Heritage Foundation that will fundamentally alter how higher education operates in the United States. Today, we’re fortunate to have expert analysis from Katie Rainwater, fellow at the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, faculty at Florida International University, and a researcher on how national conservatism seeks to change education so that our systems that are meant to serve everyone are instead operating from an explicit right-wing vision. Prof. Rainwater tells us what these operators plan and how and why we must resist it - John Warner
WITH PROPOSED FEDERAL RULES, HERITAGE FOUNDATION UPENDS HIGHER EDUCATION
by Katie Rainwater
Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts recently declared that higher education requires a “moral reset.” Roberts – who professes that the founders envisioned a Christian nation and an American people who honor eternal truths – holds that higher education should be grounded in recognition of “one coherent, universal truth with a capital ‘T’.” Roberts and his Heritage Foundation colleagues envision a sharp departure from university systems premised on institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and humanistic learning. They aim to drastically restrict the number of students pursuing 4-year degrees, arguing that the degrees are a costly and unproductive hindrance to the formation of male-headed households. Their goal is to vocationalize education while also ensuring the curriculum and research at universities supports Christian Right policy goals.
The Heritage Foundation’s path to transforming higher education runs through red states, especially those like Florida where they maintain close relations with the governor. Yet the capacity of states to change their higher education systems is constrained by federal legislation which requires universities to maintain accreditation with a federally recognized accreditor to access federal financial aid. Locking in state-level reform and achieving nationwide transformation thus requires - in Robert’s words - “totally upend[ing] the accreditation system.” Proposed changes to the rules revising the federal recognition of accreditors do just this, achieving nearly all the policy goals for accreditation set out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
Moralistic Teaching and Partisan Research
Guided by DeSantis, the Florida state legislature has given right-wing ideologues control of the general education curriculum and of newly created centers on public university campuses. The Heritage Foundation has been critical to both developments.
In 2023, the Heritage Foundation helped pass Florida Senate Bill 266, which took curricular decision-making authority for the general education curriculum away from faculty experts, instilling it in the Board of Governors (BOG). To make an initial cull of courses, the BOG turned to Scott Yenor, a Christian nationalist and misogynist who advised DeSantis for two years as a Tallahassee-based Claremont Institute director. When Yenor left Tallahassee to become a director at the Heritage Foundation, oversight of Florida’s general education curriculum was given over to Jason Jewell, a right-wing activist who formerly led a Great Books program at a conservative Christian college.
Last year, as Chief Academic Officer of the State University System, Jewell presided over the creation of a sanitized, Florida version of an open access sociology textbook. After faculty raised awareness that the state was censoring the textbook to exclude content on race and gender, the BOG removed “Introduction to Sociology” from the general education curriculum, relegating it to the same fate as already excluded courses like “Sociology of Gender and Social Problems.” Notably, “Families in the United States” is now the only sociology course that can be taken for general education credit in the state of Florida – a testament to the Heritage Foundation’s goal of bolstering the “traditional” family.
The “moral reset” of Florida universities has also included the creation of new centers through which the Heritage Foundation is leveraging millions of dollars of Florida taxpayer money in service of its own deeply partisan ends. Following advocacy by a council linked to the Heritage Foundation, the Florida state legislature established the Hamilton School on the University of Florida’s campus. The aim of the school and a related center which should be headed by a “serious right-wing politics person,” Yenor explained in an email obtained through a public records request, is to create “a generation of thoughtful, strong, practical leaders to head up the conservative movement” and to produce “a new group of young male leaders who could lead the state.”
Other university centers created by the state legislature are even more directly tied to partisan advocacy. The Adam Smith Center at Florida International University hosts the Heritage Foundation-conceived “Carvalho Dialogues” (named after the late, far-right Brazilian conspiracy theorist) to convene right-wing Latin American politicians in support of imperialist America First and conservative policy goals. The Institute for Governance & Civics at Florida State University employs faculty affiliated with the Heritage Foundation and the conservative Christian legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom to produce research and advocacy in support of Christian Right policy objectives like undermining public schools and upending anti-discrimination laws.
They Want Fewer People to Go to College
The education landscape in Florida is being changed in other, less transparently ideological ways. Yenor has observed that “as late as 1980, only 8% of the country went to college.” Yenor, who orchestrated the shuttering of DEI programs in Florida universities and who thinks women should be trad wives, proposes, “The United States should move toward 8% from its current 46%.” Project 2025 argues that postsecondary education policy should be “rebalanced to focus far more on bolstering the workforce skills of Americans.”
“When I became Governor,” DeSantis said at a February 2026 press conference, “I made the point very strongly that there is more than one way that you can succeed as a young person.” The Yale and Harvard graduate proceeded to explain, “Not everyone needs to go to a four-year brick and ivy university.” DeSantis recently declared Florida number one in the nation for workforce education. Under the DeSantis administration, Career and Technical Education has expanded in K-12 schools and more students participate in pre-apprenticeship programs.
DeSantis is careful to frame educational pathways as purely a personal choice. But if higher education contracts to 1960 levels of attendance, it is undoubtedly the working class and students of color who would lose access. Last month, the Heritage Foundation released model legislation that penalizes state universities for open admission policies. Cheered by the Heritage Foundation, Florida has, of course, already eliminated the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion programs designed to foster the success of once excluded groups.
The Proposed Rules
Much more prescriptive than the enabling legislation, the proposed rules specify ways that accreditors must assess - and must not assess - institutions. Here are the implications of a few of the most significant changes:
Accreditors Must Ensure Institutions Toe the State Line. The Heritage Foundation has long sought to change the law so that states can create their own accreditation systems. In 2014, DeSantis, then a US congressional representative, sponsored a failed Heritage Foundation-supported bill to this effect. As Governor, last year, DeSantis created a new state-run accrediting group to enable Florida and other member states to evaluate their state university systems according to standards that they devise.
The proposed rules lock in state control over higher education institutions by preventing accreditors from enforcing quality standards that contravene state law. Although the proposed rules introduce a new requirement for institutions to maintain academic freedom policies, faculty in states like Florida will not be empowered to exercise academic freedom as state law precludes teaching about systemic oppression in the general education (SB 266) or collaborating in research with colleagues in Venezuela (SB 846).
(It is also worth noting that the proposed rules unmoor academic freedom from two closely related principles: shared governance and tenure. The proposed rules eliminate a requirement for faculty involvement in accreditors’ decision-making bodies and require accreditors to evaluate institutions for “sufficient flexibility in instructional staffing” although job security is a necessary precondition for the exercise of academic freedom.)
Ideological Centers Are In. A provision of the proposed rules that requires accreditors to ensure institutions support intellectual diversity could be used to compel speech or to impose ideological centers like those that the state legislature created in Florida on campuses where they are not already in place.
Studies Degrees Are Out and So Are Some Students. The proposed rules change how accreditors evaluate institutions by requiring them to assess whether unspecified minimum expectations are met at the institutional and programmatic level on metrics of student success, including economic returns on degrees. Siri Terjesen, a Heritage Foundation-recognized Florida Atlantic University professor and a member of the committee that created the proposed rules, has identified "gradflation”– the production of more liberal arts degree holders than the job market can allegedly absorb – as a serious problem. The rules could be wielded to require universities to eliminate degree programs, like Women and Gender Studies, that the Right charges have a low return on investment.
Or, even more troublingly, student success metrics on completion and graduation rates could be used to require universities to cut student enrollment. Under Secretary of Education, Nicholas Kent has declared that the new rules will enable him to hold institutions accountable for enrolling students with a low likelihood of success. The proposed rules also prohibit accreditors from adopting any standards related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Wielding the Secret Weapon
The Department of Education claims that the rule changes will enable them to address real problems with the higher education system such as increasing tuition and inadequate graduation rates. But these are not good-faith actors. Trump has called accreditation his “secret weapon”, and he has stocked the Department of Education with generals from the Heritage Foundation who are ready to take their shots. In a 2023 report, the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke argued that career bureaucrats needed to be disempowered; instead, entrusting “political appointees with both the legal and the policy sides of accreditation.” Last year Burke was appointed the Department of Education’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policies and Programs. Former Heritage Foundation staffer Jay Greene now chairs the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity [NACIQI]. which is charged with assessing accreditors.
Preventing the Heritage Foundation from using the accreditation system to decimate higher education will require faculty to organize our campuses and communities to support our colleges and universities as an indispensable public good. Most immediately, faculty and the public should submit comments on the proposed rule changes. For the proposed rule changes to go into effect next year, the Department of Education must meet a November 1 deadline for addressing all public comments. We can impede the adoption of the proposed rules by submitting public comments that document specific harms that will result if the rules are adopted. Consult this AAUP guidance to learn how to submit your proposed comment by midnight on September 21. You can also watch a recording of the previously mentioned webinar that shares additional guidance and suggestions.
Guidance for Submitting Comments to the AIM Committee
In response to Trump’s April 2025 executive order, the Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) committee at the Department of Education issued proposed rule changes that would completely rewrite how the accreditation process works.
The AIM committee is currently stocked with Heritage Foundation operatives and Ron DeSantis allies, who have been working for years to shatter the non-partisan and independent accreditation process. The proposed changes would have a catastrophic effect on higher education, which will lock in MAGA education priorities for years to come. Check out AAUP resources for an overview of what is at stake with accreditation.
The AIM committee is currently receiving public comments on these proposed rules changes. It is critical that AAUP members, faculty, staff, and students submit comments to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the issues at stake. All comments must be responded to by the Department of Education, which only has until November 1 to respond. Strong comments can: 1) result in positive changes to the proposed rules; 2) slow the process down; and 3) serve as the basis for future legal action.
Strong comments:
Cite the specific proposed regulatory change
Use your personal experience and circumstances to describe a specific harm.
Please see the templates below for ideas about how to shape your comments. You can upload comments any time before Monday, September 21 at 11:59 p.m. EDT. Additional resources can be found at the American Federation of Teachers, Alliance for Higher Education, and EdTrust
The AAUP is also looking to publicize concerns raised by our members. If you are interested in making your comments public, or want support drafting your comments, please contact: cdaf@aaup.org.
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