The Republican Party’s much discussed but little understood “Project 2025: The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, A Mandate for Leadership” must be engaged and rebutted.
It is a danger to democracy.
Prepared by the Heritage Foundation as a conservative roadmap for a new Trump administration, the 920-page, 180-day playbook offers a mandate for multiple changes in federal government policy. Forty-four pages, about 5%, are devoted to education.
Those pages allege a radical left-wing bias in university teaching, without evidence, and continue from there.
Project 2025, an openly right-wing agenda for America’s future, would require a selective
teaching of American history by omitting mention of race and slavery. It also would substitute religious belief for scientific evidence in studying weather forecasting and environmental change.
It would reclassify federal scientists as political appointees, subject to partisan tests. It
would substitute political tests based on a notion of Christian Nationalism for professional
expertise, stifling critical thinking and free speech.
The science of evolution would be in question. It would diminish adherence to the Freedom of Information Act that supports the public’s right to know what its government is doing.
These proposals are radical, not conservative.
While Project 2025 is positioned as guidance for a Trump presidency and he may not win the election, it is a ready-made agenda for those in the House and Senate who wish to impose their radical, authoritarian views on the country.
The project calls for the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education. It would turn over
consumer protections from predatory proprietary schools to the states and retract the
“borrower-defense” repayment provisions of the federal loan system put in place to protect
students from for-profit schools and lenders.
It would turn college student loans over to private banks, from which they were removed in the 2008 financial crisis, and move funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), in place since 1890, to the Department of Labor, which focuses on statistics not education.
Project 2025 also calls for eliminating Head Start; overhauling the educational accreditation
system, reducing its political neutrality; and rolling back Title IX protections for sexual assault survivors and LGBTQ+ students. It calls for ending all investigations into Title IX violations and for prosecuting all government agencies, colleges, corporations, and other private employers that maintain Affirmative Action or DEI policies. It provides tutorials for how rightwing activists can impose their agenda on local school boards.
Public education was established to ensure an informed citizenry, essential to a functioning
democracy. Project 2025 would deny freedom in favor of authoritarian dictates.
Instead of supporting public education, it would allow for the banning of books, restricting independent inquiry, allocating public funding to restrictive religious schools, cutting funds for the support of children with special needs, and placing a greater emphasis on free market economics than on democratic institutions.
Our history of higher education is not perfect, to be sure. However, it is a history of steadily
improving quality and equality because leaders at the campus, state and federal levels
pursued positive agendas for advancing access, excellence and affordability. Project 2025
would erode this progress without substituting positive alternatives.
Project 2025 deserves rebuttal not only for its education proposals, but for others as well. We should not remain silent or neutral. We, as educators and private citizens, should affirm the purpose and benefits of education to society and the individual; the need to protect food, water, land and air from unregulated commerce; and voting as a foundation of democracy.
We should honor community obligations as well as individual aspirations. Even entrepreneurs like judges depend on the rule of law equally applied.
Project 2025 is not conservative. It does not conserve rights and freedoms. It limits them.
It opposes inconvenient history and science deemed uncomfortable and would impose views that its authors find more comforting even if false. Only by challenging this agenda and advocating for freedom of inquiry and free speech will we preserve them and our democracy as we approach our nation’s 250th birthday on July 4, 2026.
Dr. Robert A. Scott, President Emeritus, Adelphi University and Ramapo College of New
Jersey; Author, How University Boards Work, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018; Co-
Author, Letters to Students: What it Means to be a College Graduate, Rowman & Littlefield, 2024