Higher education leaders across the nation are anxiously pondering the rise of businessman Donald Trump as president of the United States and the arrival of scores of people that he will be hiring to help put his ideas into action.
For sure, few people — those who supported Trump’s bid to win the election and those who supported others or did not vote at all in the 2016 election — have definitive insights about Trump’s plans. He has had little engagement with higher education during his decades as a businessman. He was less than specific about a number of hot-button issues during his presidential campaign. To date, the views of many he has selected for his team run the gamut.
Questions may abound on a variety of fronts about how Trump and his team will deal with the myriad day-to-day realities of running a nation of some 320 million people.
There is an unofficial consensus, however, that higher education leaders need to exert extra energy to help Trump understand the roles of institutions of higher learning, and Trump and his team are likely to demand a different approach from educators to getting his ear.
“They are going to be very much about return on investment (ROI),” says Johnny Taylor, president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall Education Fund, the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that raises funds for scholarships to help students attend historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
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The Obama administration and several leadership teams both Democrat and Republican before Obama looked at higher education from a “civil rights or moral perspective,” Taylor says. “They [Trump and his team] will be very much about ROI,” Taylor says, based on Trump’s campaign themes and the business people around Trump.
