(President Donald Trump speaking at The Heritage Foundation. Image source: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

Twenty-one months before he would be sworn in as Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth stood before the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, at their Fiftieth Anniversary Leadership Summit, dressed in patriotic garb. His keynote address wove together themes of warfare, religion, education, and the potential death of the American republic. “There is a Marxist political movement,” he announced, “call it cultural Marxism, call it Progressive, call it what you will, that seeks the destruction of Western civilization and Judeo-Christian values—America being the most obvious representative of that over the last 250 years.”

After expounding upon the supremacy of Jesus Christ in all things, Hegseth went on to describe a century-long liberal conspiracy to transform the United States into an atheistic bulwark of anti-Christian communism, made possible by leftists’ total capture of education. At the center of this cabal lies Columbia University, which for Hegseth and other conspiracy theorists, is ground zero for the Frankfurt School of critical theory, a style of cultural interpretation they believe has desecrated American education. In his retelling of this apocryphal story (with no traceable record of actually happening), an unnamed Columbia professor announced that an hour of church cannot win against “our forty hours of atheistic training.” For Hegseth, this is what ultimately led to heresies like critical race theory and gender pronouns. He closed more optimistically, declaring, “I salute Heritage for everything they’re doing on education.”

Not only was Hegseth’s praise of Heritage predictable, his address repeated many of their own arguments. Heritage has long shared the view that liberal politics threaten to destroy America’s cultural fabric, but the specific story Hegseth produced—that godless Marxism landed in elite universities and then metastasized throughout the rest of them—is thematic to Heritage’s narrative. This ideological cancer is what has corrupted American culture more broadly and it must be destroyed if Judeo-Christian values are to be restored.

Heritage’s solution for eradicating progressive thought in higher education has been to target vulnerabilities in colleges’ financial infrastructure, using this as leverage to compel orthodoxy. Since taking office, Donald Trump has implemented policies and strategies nearly identical to what Heritage proposes.

At the moment, Heritage is best known for Project 2025. Their 920-page document, Mandate for Leadership, summarizes their policy advice for the executive and legislative branches. Although Trump distanced himself from Project 2025 during the 2024 election, in 2025 he hired many of its architects to his administration and has now enacted nearly half of its agenda. Yet most media outlets have missed the extent to which Trump’s most controversial education decisions mirror Heritage’s policy preferences. Because Mandate for Leadership isn’t where Heritage is clearest about their most draconian strategies, their financial attack plan hasn’t been well-noticed. It also mutes the importance of religion to their goals.

Take, for example, what Mandate for Leadership has to say about the Grad Plus loan program—it’s “redundant” and students are eligible for other kinds of loans. That’s bland and vaguely procedural. Yet Heritage education lobbyists Lindsey Burke and Jay Greene made a very different argument for ending Grad Plus in The Federalist, an aggressively far-right online magazine. They argued there that American women are not having babies early enough or often enough. Burke and Greene suggest that funneling more children into religious schools could help increase birthrates, but they also argue that college “extends adolescence” and that college students avoid having babies while enrolled. They recommend curtailing student loan access and eliminating Grad Plus entirely, not because it’s redundant, but because fertility rates will rise if Americans aren’t in school so much. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” ended Grad Plus a few months ago. It’s probably no accident that he has also hired Burke to work on education policy.

Trump’s higher education agenda overlaps with Heritage’s exceptionally well, sometimes right down to specific rationales and word choices. Heritage has a scorched earth plan for higher education: institutions must either capitulate or be destroyed. Trump appears to be working on Heritage’s behalf.

The Heritage Foundation’s Religious Nationalism

It has become popular for Heritage’s detractors to call them “Christofascist,” yet this term doesn’t really explain much about what they actually want. Heritage would probably also tense up at being called a “Christian nationalist” organization, partly because their self-understanding is that of Judeo-Christian nationalism. Many religious studies scholars (probably most) would question “Judeo-Christianity” as a concept; it’s often intended as an inclusive gesture to Jews, yet it frequently buries Judaism under Christian interpretations and expectations. This is true of Heritage, too: what they present as “Judeo-Christian tradition” best aligns with conservative styles of Christianity. Many of what they name core Judeo-Christian values aren’t particularly typical for Judaism. For instance, Heritage takes strong positions that abortion and same-sex marriage violate God’s natural order, yet 82% of religiously observant Jews support same-sex marriage and 83% are pro-choice. Heritage also insists that Jews need to line up with the foundation’s goals to be considered credibly Jewish. Jewish students who oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, or organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace who advocate for Palestinian wellbeing, don’t make the cut. Heritage believes such positions are intrinsically antisemitic and accuses those Jews of belonging to a terrorist cabal called the “Hamas Support Network.” In other words, Heritage claims to speak with Judaism’s moral authority and present itself as its defender, while simultaneously invalidating ethical positions that most Jews hold and denouncing Jews who are too critical of Israel.

Heritage has tried to place conservative Christianity at the heart of American life since the 1970s. While all movements evolve over time, many of Heritage’s early values remain central to their worldview today. In a recent speech, Heritage’s current president, Kevin Roberts, echoed its earliest years, claiming America’s “age of inversion” is coming to an end; people hunger for real truth, real faith, and real families. Roberts explained that we’re entering a renaissance of “moral clarity after decades of cultural erosion and spiritual confusion.” These sentiments reiterate the arguments of the Moral Majority, a late 1970s political confederacy of conservative Catholics, evangelicals, fundamentalists, and other moralists. Their perspective was that sin and special interests had overrun America to the point that Christians had become oppressed. Jerry Falwell often gets the credit for this, but some historians have argued that Heritage’s Paul Weyrich was the person most responsible for galvanizing the Religious Right. Regardless of who said it first, America’s heritage, they insist, is religious. Very few of their policy positions (maybe even none of them) can be separated out from a moral framework based in conservative styles of Christianity, and in fact, preserving religiosity is itself a kind of policy position.

“Hatred is the Right Response to Evil”: Heritage’s Hostility Towards Higher Education

The Heritage Foundation has been deeply interested in education since its founding. Much of that has centered on K-12 schools; they particularly wanted to demolish the Department of Education, which they considered the usurper of a role more properly belonging to the states. Religion, they maintain, belongs in education because it supports good character formation.

As for higher education, Heritage frequently presents universities and professors as a malignant evil. At a Heritage event earlier this year, Kevin Roberts asked political commentator Tucker Carlson what he felt ordinary people could do to secure the America they wanted for 2028, the 2030s, and the 2040s. Carlson thought for a moment, then with a serious tone said, “The number one thing every parent needs to do is make sure his or her children are not destroyed by college.” The audience erupted into applause, prompting Carlson to expand, “I know good, decent people, I’m sure people in this room have literally lost children to college. That’s it, [they are] no longer really your child meaningfully. The stakes just couldn’t be higher: you lose your child. And that’s happened to many people I know.”

On Roberts’ podcast, Pete Hegseth took a nearly identical position: “Let’s stop holding these places up as imprimaturs of credibility,” he said. “They’re poisoning our country, they’re bad for our Republic, we should scorn them at every turn and not hang their degrees up.”

(Promotional photo for the Kevin Roberts Show with Pete Hegseth as a guest)

Why such hostility? Much of it comes back to the same conspiracy narrative that Hegseth shared in his Heritage address: vast numbers of “Marxist scholars” have laid waste to academic honor. Mike Gonzalez, one of Heritage’s senior leaders, writes that this “entrenched” Marxist elite “denies the existence of truth, “seeks to stop the transmission of past traditions to future generations,” “decries Socrates and Western concepts,” and “wages war on beauty.” He argues that the left wants to impose DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) orthodoxy upon everyone, including demanding “loyalty oaths” from faculty.

Heritage considers DEI a problem partly because it considers diversity itself to be a problem. A few months ago, Gonzalez wrote that diversity is “poisonous hooey,” explaining “a culture made up of discordant groups with little in common—neither religion, habits, nor especially, language—is no culture. [. . .] A nation of groups is thus an oxymoron.” Yet Heritage despises DEI for deeper reasons than this. At the heart of it, Heritage wants to enshrine a particular style of religious nationalism and religious morality as the dominant cultural authority. DEI, Heritage believes, is an obstacle to that goal.

Take, for instance, LGBTQ people’s existence and acceptance. In June, Heritage shared a video on Facebook denouncing “the clerics of Pride” and their defiance of God’s natural order. The accompanying text explained “there is no virtue in the Pride agenda. It’s empty, selfish, and destructive. Let’s return to fidelity instead.”

Heritage is also staunchly committed to a binary model of gender and in recent years has been vocal in denouncing “transgenderism.” When Kevin Roberts wrote the introduction for Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, he established that America’s top priority must be to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” That not only means increasing birthrates and banning abortion at state levels, but also rejecting transgender identities. Roberts claims “transgender ideology” is “pornography,” and educators and librarians who disseminate such pornography should be jailed and registered as sex offenders. A few pages later he argues that “an individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained—to flourish. Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought.” This is one of the reasons Heritage opposes DEI: sexual diversity is not a good thing; it is merely an example of people defying God’s will.

If Heritage despises institutions’ DEI commitments, it’s partly because they see universities as the party most responsible for defiling American culture. They also present DEI and critical race theory (CRT) as fundamentally racist in their own right: they say these cause division, punish whites, and are un-American. DEI is sinful, according to Heritage. Citing C.S. Lewis, they claim that “hatred is the right response to evil” so this is how we, too, ought to respond to diversity initiatives.

“Hit Them in the Money”: The Trump/Heritage Strategy to Defeat Academia
Donald Trump has openly championed Christian nationalism, and his education policies mirror that of the Heritage Foundation, sometimes word-for-word. Virtually every position he has taken on higher education matches those of Heritage. His rationale for closing the Department of Education (DOE) would be right at home in their 1984 and 1989 Mandate for Leadership books. There’s also his executive order claiming student loan forgiveness creates “perverse incentives,” such as elevated tuition costs or students choosing “low-need majors.” Until Trump hired her to the DOE, Lindsey Burke was Heritage’s top education lobbyist. Her rejection of student loan forgiveness claimed it creates “perverse incentives” such as an “inflationary effect on tuition” and “colleges enrolling students who are unlikely to graduate or have sufficiently lucrative careers,” and preceded Trump’s executive order by several years.

Another example: last year, Heritage lobbyist Jay Greene authored a xenophobic screed titled “Educate Americans First.” In it, he called the number of foreign students enrolled at U.S. universities “poisonous,” and made special objections that Americans were now learning values from students whose “people are hardly known for their adherence” to Western values like equality of the sexes, free speech, and “other basic rules of the road”; he also accused them of causing antisemitism on campuses. He specifically singled out Pakistan, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia for this (all Muslim-majority countries), along with China, accusing Chinese students of espionage and undermining national security. Greene noted that the Optional Training Program allows international students to stay in the U.S. longer for additional hands-on experience in their professions. He concluded that “if U.S. universities prove unable to distinguish between healthy and poisonous doses of foreign influence, policymakers may have to.”

Trump has done exactly what Greene asked. He started revoking student visas from Muslim-majority countries. In May, he targeted students in the Optional Training Program. He’s accused Chinese students of posing a special threat to national security and worked to ban them. The point here is that Trump’s interventions consistently mirror Heritage’s advice.

Greene’s been the clearest about how going after financial infrastructure could force universities into submission. In an article where he compared Ivy League universities to Sodom and Gomorrah, he explained some schools are “beyond repair,” whereas others might be reformed. Greene doesn’t believe they will do this voluntarily, yet hopes that “with full control of the federal government and most state governments, Republicans may judge leftist-captured universities and, like a wrathful God, wipe those institutions clean of any taxpayer funding. Even wealthy private universities are highly exposed to Republicans raining the fire and brimstone of funding cuts on them.”

In a panel last year, Greene claimed the best way to defeat DEI culture is by “taking heads and taking money.” “If you hit them in the money, they will change.”

Heritage is right to assume that universities won’t voluntarily give in to their Judeo-Christian nationalism, nor their demands to abolish support systems for minority students. The array of things Heritage calls “DEI”—which in their estimation includes scholarships for African-American students and having an LGBTQ center—are commonplace. Few universities share Heritage’s displeasure about foreign student enrollments. Most universities don’t object to students delaying pregnancy. In other words, Heritage has correctly read the room when it comes to whether higher education could be easily won over to their side. They’re convinced of their own righteousness and academics’ illegitimacy, so forcing universities to obey seems valid to them. Anything goes if you’re fighting monsters.

Trump’s attacks on higher education strike at the vulnerabilities Heritage names, and often for the same reasons. He’s going after Harvard’s tax-exempt status on the grounds that they tolerate antisemitism by allowing student protests and therefore violate U.S. civil rights law. He financially targeted Columbia for the same reason, threatening to withdraw $400 million of funding unless they agree to punish student protesters and cede control over some academic programs, among other demands. Columbia accepted Trump’s conditions, which by the end of the conflict also cost Columbia more than $200 million in legal payouts. One takeaway from that: Heritage’s financial attack strategy is effective.

Restructuring Accreditation to Dismantle Resistance

The most significant threat to higher education lies in an executive order from April titled “Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education” (RASHE). It cribs Heritage extensively, noting that accrediting agencies are gatekeepers for federal student loans. It bemoans colleges that let students take out loans for majors “with very modest earnings potential.” It also denounces DEI at length, which it calls “unlawful discrimination.” It states, “Federal recognition will not be provided to accreditors engaging in unlawful discrimination in violation of Federal law.” It also directs the Secretary of Education to work solely with accreditors who guarantee institutions are “free from unlawful discrimination,” “prioritize intellectual diversity among faculty,” and don’t “burden students with unnecessary costs.” (According to Heritage, DEI is one of the primary ways that universities needlessly inflate tuition.) The executive order also encourages new accreditors to start up, which seems innocuous at first, but this is almost certainly a necessary first step for wrestling autonomy away from institutions.

Accreditation is exceptionally important for universities’ financial stability—students may only use federal student loans or the G.I. Bill at accredited institutions, and federal research grants are often tied to it. If one reads Trump’s executive order against the current landscape of accreditation infrastructure, it doesn’t make much sense. It’s unrealistic in scope, since it would delegitimate every major accreditor currently out there. It makes considerably more sense when read against a future landscape populated with many additional accreditors. Fully acting on the order now would crash the system without realizing Heritage’s goals, but waiting for Trump-friendly accreditors to emerge lets him coerce universities into doing what he wants.

An example might help. The Higher Learning Commission, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, and the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities are three major accreditors currently operating. Repeating Heritage’s arguments, the DOJ recently cited scholarships for Black students as an example of an “unlawful practice” that universities must avoid. These three accreditors would never refuse approval to a school that had scholarships for Black students. If the Department of Education ceased working with accreditors who permit “unlawful discrimination,” killing them all off at once doesn’t get them anywhere. They need Generic State University to chase accreditation or else they can’t use it as a pressure point, and the pressure dies if there are zero accreditors.

But what happens if new accreditors start up, ones that are friendly to Trump’s argument? Florida governor Ron DeSantis recently helped develop the Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE), which “prioritizes student achievement without ideological capture.” This changes the scenario dramatically. If the DOE banishes the three offending accreditors, universities still have at least one accreditor left. CPHE’s business model lays out some core principles, one of which is “to become and remain recognized by the U.S. Department of Education for the purposes of Title IV participation by its accredited institutions”—Title IV is the section of law that deals with student loans. In other words, CPHE has explicitly anchored itself to obeying the DOE and staying in its good graces. Presumably that means they won’t approve universities engaged in “illegal discrimination” like DEI or student protests of Israel. If CPHE is the only accreditor in that set of four who the DOE will work with, all institutions seeking accreditation would be forced to choose them, and they will only pass muster if they’ve abandoned DEI.

Paired with RASHE, the DOJ memo makes clear that diversity is out, not just when it comes to certain scholarships, but also along with many of Heritage’s other animosities. It denies transgender identities, threatening litigation against institutions that allow trans students access to cisgender students’ spaces (bathrooms, dorm assignments, etc.). It’s illegal to claim things like “toxic masculinity” or “white privilege” are true. Colleges cannot use “demographic-driven criteria” like “first-generation students” to continue discriminating under different names. It’s a sweeping proclamation with implications for every aspect of university life, from admissions to curriculum. Additionally, the DOJ has created a “Civil Rights Fraud Initiative” that encourages the general public to report discrimination to them, promising money if the discrimination is successfully prosecuted. This surveillance model creates a secret police out of civilian volunteers, whose financial reward comes from the punitive fines extracted from the offending university.

Some commentators have wondered why Trump has meddled in student protests at Columbia and Harvard; it’s not something presidents traditionally fixate on. The answer is that it was building up to this larger battle. Harvard and Columbia were always meant to be examples for all of the other institutions. The DOE wasn’t subtle about that point; back in March, it wrote a letter to 60 major universities, naming Columbia and threatening to punish them the same way unless they squelched student protests. If Harvard and Columbia can’t escape Trump’s wrath, what chance do smaller institutions have? We can now add UCLA to that list, too. Trump wants them to pay $1 billion, ban protests of Israel, prohibit gender-affirming care for minors, and rescind athletic awards or recognitions previously granted to trans students. He’s testing universities not just to send a message, but also to see what he can get them to abandon on their own.

What Happens if We Refuse?

Federal student loans are essential for most colleges and universities to stay afloat. Even the most robust endowments aren’t easy to tap into. Very few institutions would even consider abolishing a Latinx student center or forbidding trans students to use certain bathrooms just because Trump said so. But will that still hold true when they’re faced with extinction?

Put yourself in the place of a university president or a board of trustees sometime in the near future. If you end support for queer students, racial minorities, and international students, you can still qualify for federal student loans and grants. Your university remains solvent, but it erases the culture you’ve spent years building. The other option would be to preserve your institutional values but sacrifice your accreditation. Students hoping to attend will have to overlook your unaccredited status and also hope there’s private loans available to them. That’s a very risky choice—it relies on students choosing a college that’s harder to pay for and which lacks the imprimatur of official credibility. It’s basically the Sophie’s Choice of higher education: both options mean destroying something essential. That’s what Heritage wants; as Kevin Roberts says, “the barbarians are inside the gates,” and universities “need to figuratively be torn down or reformed.”

While Trump’s term might not be long enough to achieve the complete systemic overhaul that Heritage wants, it’s certainly enough to wreak havoc on some specific universities for several years. Even one semester without accreditation could be catastrophic. Should another far-right president win in 2028, or should Congress cement Trump’s orders in legislation, it could further strip universities of autonomy. Some schools would likely challenge Trump in court (as they should), but they would need to make a case that academic freedom outweighs the federal government’s responsibility to decide who qualifies for the funding they offer. The judiciary has supported Trump on other issues; they may support him on this too.

This is a crisis for academics, particularly since many institutions were already financially weak after the pandemic. The soul of higher education is tied up in this moment. My own view is that Heritage’s goals—and by extension, Trump’s incursions—don’t just end if campus protests end. They don’t end if we extinguish trans students’ existence. They don’t end if we accept the absurd notion that scholarships endowed for Black teens are actually racist. Heritage’s goal is the complete restructuring of American culture over the course of decades, re-centered on conservative Christian morality, and they’re convinced universities are the key to achieving this. They don’t seem insincere to me; they are true believers. Ask yourself, then, if what they want is the abolition of gay life, the expulsion of foreigners, and authority over which concepts get taught in schools, what sacrifices would scholars need to make to satisfy this Inquisition? And would whatever we preserved by making those sacrifices even still be something worth saving? I doubt it.

Andrew Monteith is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Elon University in North Carolina, and the author of Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs (New York University Press).