Peter McDonough:

Well, I hope it doesn’t. But we should all be concerned that it may.

I wouldn’t have seen this coming. but, frankly, I should have and maybe more of us should have. Back in 2021, the vice president, appearing at a National Conservatism Conference, said we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country. He said it in a speech titled, “The Universities Are the Enemy.”

That should worry us all. That should worry us on all ends of the political spectrum. It should worry us whether we are in statehouses or state legislatures, whether we are on the boards of public universities or whether we are on the boards or in leadership positions of private colleges and universities, because we don’t have a federal system of higher education.

We have a mosaic that’s made up of publics and privates, small and large, religious-based and not. And I think we can all agree that, over the decades, this mosaic of higher education has really, truly been the envy of the world. It’s why people come here to go to college. And it’s produced the economic vitality that we have experienced here. It’s enabled us to have a level of national security and health benefits.

It allowed us to address some of the largest problems in medicine with a power that, frankly, starts in most instances in the research labs on our college campuses. And all of this is at risk.

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