Today, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon delivered remarks at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, highlighting the Trump Administration’s efforts to restore excellence in higher education and calling on colleges and universities to renew their commitments to free speech, academic rigor, and the national interest.
Below is her speech, as prepared for delivery:
Good afternoon, everyone – what an honor it is to return to Vanderbilt!
Thank you, Vice Chancellor Green, for your gracious introduction, and to Chancellor Diermeier and the student body for welcoming me.
I also would like to welcome Representatives Van Epps and Rose – thank you for being here.
Today, we are coming together at a hopeful moment as we chart a course of renewal for one of America’s national treasures: colleges and universities.
When I was sworn in as Secretary of Education early last year, a crisis in higher education was boiling over.
Months earlier, violent riots erupted across campuses; and universities moved classes online because they lost control of their operations. A weeks-long encampment in Harvard Yard escalated into negotiations between students and the College’s administration. Some of the most high-profile university presidents resigned over their shameful silence on the harassment of Jewish students at their schools. Columbia even had to cancel its main graduation ceremony because it allowed student protesters to overrun and vandalize its campus.
The share of universities with “red-light” free speech restrictions increased, reversing a 15‑year decline. At the same time, academic standards collapsed – with a staggering 80% of four-year colleges dropping SAT and ACT requirements for the next admissions cycle.
The nation watched as decades of institutional decay surfaced all at once – demanding an urgent reassessment of what colleges and universities had become.
But now – two years later – a new chapter in higher education has begun.
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.
I have chosen to come to Vanderbilt because it stands as a national example of this renewal.
Thanks to Chancellor Diermeier’s leadership, 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.
Today, in our nation’s 250th year, 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.
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. Think about that: American higher education is older than America itself.
In their halls, the leaders who would build this Nation immersed themselves in the finest achievements of Western civilization.
They grappled with the great texts; debated Aristotle, law, and biblical scripture; and explored the foundations of human flourishing.
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.
It is no surprise that after securing independence, many Founders turned again to universities – Benjamin Franklin founded what would become the University of Pennsylvania; Abraham Baldwin chartered the University of Georgia; Thomas Jefferson designed the University of Virginia himself.
They imagined the American university as one of the republic’s most essential institutions – a place where any citizen could rise as a leader not through bloodline or pedigree, but through the learning, hard work, and talent the university was obligated to nurture.
How distinctly American: an institution built not to preserve status, but to empower character and capability.
For generations, American universities cultivated the intellectual foundations of citizenship, grounding students in the principles of equality and self‑government that shaped their development into informed Americans. They excited students in a love of truth and beauty – opening new horizons of curiosity and meaning in their lives.
Thus, American universities supplied the political leadership and judgment that enabled the Nation to course correct whenever it drifted. As essential repositories of our civilizational inheritance and drivers of fearless inquiry, higher education shaped public leaders who met bad ideas and menacing trends with reason and civic discourse.
They steered the Nation through many storms, responding adeptly to new challenges while keeping the country on course to realize its founding principles – building a more perfect union for posterity over time.
And as land grants multiplied and national research investment surged, these places grew into awe-inspiring drivers of progress across American life.
Iowa State’s development of hybrid corn transformed American farming, helping feed a growing nation and power the rural economy.
American university labs pioneered chemotherapy, giving millions with cancer a chance to live.
Out of the competing efforts of two university researchers in Ohio and Pennsylvania came not one polio vaccine, but two – each indispensable to the disease’s defeat.
During World War II, a University of Chicago experiment achieved the first nuclear chain reaction in human history, helping America wield its military might and bring the deadliest war the world has ever seen to its end.
Through the Cold War, institutions like CalTech and MIT pushed the frontiers of rockets, spacecraft, and satellite technology that gave America the eyes it needed to watch its adversary from orbit.
And in the modern world, universities continued to expand the very possibilities of human life itself.
Right here at Vanderbilt, engineers pioneered the first prosthetic leg with powered knee and ankle joints working together – a marvel of modern engineering that lets amputees walk with a fraction of the effort once required.
And on the West Coast, the first message in the world that was ever sent across the network that would become the Internet happened in a UCLA lab.
None of these achievements were accidental. They emerged from institutions built on a culture of excellence and truth-seeking – one that insisted on rigor, welcomed argument, and served the nation that gave them life.
How starkly the culture that produced those accomplishments contrasts with what students have encountered on campuses in recent decades.
Over time, many remarkable institutions that once embodied the principles behind America’s rise – the very ideas that lifted millions and powered advances that reshaped the world – 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.
Many disciplines abandoned the pursuit of knowledge altogether, redirecting their work toward political and social agendas like “anti‑racism” that reduce scholarship to activism.
Federal grantmakers, too, fueled this campaign against intellectual rigor – diverting funds from the foundations of serious research and instruction, and instead pouring billions into intellectually hollow projects.
One, funded by a program established to advance American security interests, diverted taxpayer dollars – and this is a real example – to fund a PhD dissertation on “queer and transgender Thai Buddhist artists.”
One by one, colleges and universities slashed the Western Civilization and American government requirements that once anchored an undergraduate education, accepting the premise that endorsing the tradition of liberty that made our freedom possible was itself a bias.
The obligation of every educator to offer sturdy, formative instruction gave way to a sprawling, choose‑your‑own‑adventure catalogue, with courses that offer little in the way of meaningful knowledge or skills.
It is now entirely possible for a student to sail through four years of college and never read a word of Shakespeare, encounter the Founding documents, or even take a basic math course.
Rigor – once understood as the engine of excellence, a vote of confidence in a student’s ability – came to be recast as oppressive, as though high standards are inherently unjust because not every student meets them.
And an ideological climate that deems dissent intolerable and brands certain views as impermissible hardened, stifling free speech and the exchange of ideas essential to discovering truth.
This is not to claim that every development in university life over the past half‑century has been disastrous, or that earlier eras were without flaws.
But it is undeniable: the erosion of excellence, inquiry, debate, and truth-seeking at many of our great universities has been nothing short of heartbreaking.
2024 was a turning point for America – and for higher education.
The most vivid examples of institutional decay rising to the surface compelled a reckoning, a return to the basic standards that powered centuries of academic vitality.
Meeting this moment head-on has been the precise goal of the Trump Administration.
This Administration brought much‑needed scrutiny, and a spotlight, to these issues.
Our work is grounded in a simple principle: taxpayers deserve to know that their investment is supporting institutions that follow the law and serve the public interest.
Our landmark agreements with seven universities within just 11 months – including Columbia, ground-zero of the campus upheaval – to restore civil rights on campuses evinced both the urgency of reform and the clear appetite for institutional change.
And by shining a needed spotlight on these issues, we sought to open the path for a candid and necessary conversation between colleges and universities and the American people.
I’ve been struck – in my many conversations with institutional leaders – by how often they’ve expressed a quiet appreciation for the Trump Administration’s approach that, from the outside, has been cast as heavy‑handed.
The accountability this Administration insists upon provides the air cover to allow college and university leaders to pursue the reforms they long knew were needed.
And we can already see the early signs of that work taking root.
Leading universities – including Yale, Washington University, and especially Vanderbilt – have courageously acknowledged that declining academic standards, politicization of subjects, and a campus monoculture have badly eroded public trust.
The natural science faculty across the nation seized this moment to lead, driving the university back toward truth‑seeking with unmistakable force. Leading researchers from USC and UChicago joined dozens of scholars in a courageous stand, warning that censorship and conformity threatened scientific advancement and calling the academy back to its foundational principles.
More than 300 colleges and universities have courageously rolled back discriminatory DEI mandates – eliminating requirements, closing offices, or removing ideological litmus tests from hiring and admissions.
Just this year, institutions like Ohio State, the University of Iowa, the University of North Carolina, and Washington College have expanded or boldly opened new interdisciplinary centers for civic thought, reviving intellectual freedom and civic statesmanship at the heart of their campuses.
Across the country, students have stepped forward with courage, asserting that free speech and open debate are the lifeblood of a true university.
And – right here at Vanderbilt – a model of courage and clarity lighted the way for the nation.
Thanks to the principled leadership of Chancellor Diermeier, Vanderbilt delivered what may be the gold standard of a Declaration of First Principles. Chancellor Diermeier has been restoring the university’s compass – insisting that its purpose is not to settle debates, but to create a home where the hardest ideas can be examined freely and fearlessly.
A century and a half ago, the Vanderbilts charged this university to “set an example to all institutions that may… arise.” Today, Vanderbilt is living up to that mission – leading by example and helping to unlock the tremendous potential of our nation and its people.
At a time when universities everywhere are being pushed, prodded, and publicly pressured to issue statements on every social or geopolitical controversy, Vanderbilt refused to be swept along by the winds of the moment. Instead, it planted a flag: affirming that a university’s highest duty is to pursue truth, not to posture – and to remain fixed on its core mission of producing educated, knowledgeable citizens equipped to think seriously and independently.
In choosing this harder path, Vanderbilt is clearing the ground for the return of the pathbreaking research and intellectual vitality that make our campuses national treasures – the kind of work that has ignited the hearts and minds of countless Americans, inspiring them to go on and do what Americans do best: lead, serve, and change the world.
To all courageous leaders and students – especially here at Vanderbilt – I applaud you.
For the good of the country – and for the students who are its future – colleges and universities everywhere must seize this moment to drive essential reforms.
They must reclaim the principles, the seriousness, and the sense of mission that once made their institutions indispensable to the American project.
I know that there is no single template for academic excellence. And I hope we will witness a variety of institutional types, each with distinct missions and priorities, flourish in the decades ahead.
But there are some basic commitments Americans expect from every college and university.
First, institutions must protect Americans’ right to free speech and foster a thriving marketplace of ideas, where the pursuit of truth is guided by open inquiry and honest debate. Any university which stifles the free exchange of ideas has stopped being an institution of higher learning.
Second, students must be held to rigorous academic standards because rigor and learning go hand-in-hand. Serious academics equip students with the skills and knowledge needed to succeed in life and contribute to their country and community.
And finally, American institutions must put Americans, and American interests, first.
My message to leaders is to seize this moment. Higher education is at an inflection point, and the American people are watching intently. The choices we make today will help shape the course of our great Nation for the next 250 years.
When someone steps onto a college or university campus, there is an awe that stirs within them. These institutions are wellsprings of possibility and cradles of human potential. They can be magical places.
We owe it to our students, to our country, and to the pursuit of truth and beauty to restore these foundations of excellence.
I am honored to work alongside you, and I look forward to what we will build for generations to come.
Thank you. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.