Secretary McMahon: Many Administrators, Few Leaders

U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon's remarks at Hillsdale College on September 8, 2025.

"St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthians that "they had ten thousand teachers, but not many fathers." Plenty of would-be authorities with their own opinions, but few mentors and leaders who would take responsibility for their personal growth.
America's colleges and universities, I think, are facing a similar shortage today.

There are so many administrators staffing the offices of our Institutions of Higher Education. Ten thousand is a drop in the bucket.

We have administrators for diversity and sensitivity. For liaising with professional associations. For micromanaging professors' classrooms. For compliance paperwork on all the regulations handed down by the state and federal government.

Americans don't know their names, their full job descriptions, their biases, or their qualifications. Parents don't ask to see the administrative staff page when they're checking out colleges. But we've handed them governance of our entire postsecondary system.

At the same time, how many true leaders do we have? How many college presidents, provosts, and other officers with the courage and accountability to deliver on the promises in the college brochure?

Hillsdale College-and a few other proud institutions swimming against the current-prove that leaders can be more than figureheads.

They can be guides on the path to higher learning. Examples of how a college education can forge your character and transform your life. Generals in the war to defend what once made American universities the envy of the world.

Yet so few recognize the potential, the fragile but fertile future, placed in their charge. The crisis of Higher Education is first and foremost a crisis of leadership.

As university leadership has fallen, so has the university.

Colleges were once world-renowned repositories of knowledge about our nation's history, the great philosophical and literary traditions of western civilization, and the latest advances in science, technology, and medicine.

Going to college felt like uncovering an ancient treasure long buried.

As a first-year student, you were proud to become a part of this pillar of the local community; this center of beautiful architecture and the partner of local employers, who would eagerly hire you when you finished your degree.

Colleges were places to date, meet your future spouse, and maybe even have your first child.

They were on the cutting edge of research and intellectual movements, producing the movers and shakers of every domain and discipline.

The difference between attending Hillsdale College and almost any other university today? At Hillsdale, this is still what the college experience is like.

Most other campuses, it's the opposite. Attending these schools, for many students, feels like a burden. Or a waste. An obsolete and expensive credential.

According to Gallup approval ratings, Higher Education once enjoyed the confidence of more than two thirds of Americans. Today, that number has fallen to one third.

We should ask our Higher Education leaders why that might be.

Decline is a choice, and too many college leaders today have made that choice and failed to own up to it.

I'm standing here today as the Secretary of Education in part because American families are fed up with the broken college system that delivers disillusionment for millions of students.

They elected Donald Trump as President because he promised to fix it.

If you read the news, you know the Department of Education and the federal government are taking steps toward solving all these problems. The bureaucracy has been derelict for decades. Leadership matters in government too.

But government alone can never make Higher Education great again if the leaders-the personalities of these institutions-don't commit alongside us to saving them.

Don't they realize? The alternatives to college are warming up in the dugout ready to replace the four-year diploma. This is not a time for dithering.

Government and private sector jobs all over the country have begun shedding degree requirements, and students are turning to shorter-term or online programs.

Millions are entering the trades, gaining vocational skills through Career and Technical Education or Apprenticeships.

The cultural and regulatory barriers that made college a default option-and the red tape blocking innovative postsecondary institutions out of the market-are starting to come down.

These trends are all good for students, but I imagine they are troubling for four-year colleges with absentee leadership and declining enrollment.

If the four-year degree model wants to compete, it must restore public trust and make college a place that young Americans once more aspire to attend.

I hope my talk today will be watched or read critically by Higher Education leaders who want to know more about the Trump Administration's approach. I say to them: our approach is actually quite simple.

I have four straightforward recommendations for how these leaders can make their institutions attractive to students again. Make them worthy of the trust the American people have placed in them. Make them-well-more like Hillsdale.

We all love Hillsdale, but one school shouldn't have a monopoly on excellence!

First, university leaders must prioritize their student's growth, even when it makes them uncomfortable. These institutions must challenge our young people and equip them for productive and fulfilling lives as citizens of the United States.

Students should want to attend, not just for fun or because of social or parental pressure, but because they know deep down that it will be difficult. Difficult, yes, but advantageous for their future and a worthwhile step on the path to adulthood.

College should be a trial by fire that inspires students to struggle and strive. And this should begin in the admissions office, where the requirements should be rigorous, selective, and completely merit-based.

Classes should be challenging and make no apologies or accommodations. They should be connected to the real world, mixing practical career skills with big-picture insights.

Lecture courses should have the same expectations and etiquette as the students' future jobs. Seminars should build character through open debate. Student life and campus community should not be a laboratory for social experiments in neo-segregationism or political correctness.

Degree programs must deliver a clear return on investment and be transparent about how they will translate coursework into a career. College is not a place to "find yourself"-but to equip yourself for a concrete vocation.

My second recommendation: university leaders should value free enquiry once again, and restore truth as the highest good. The college classroom must be rededicated to truth-seeking.

Truth is the path to every scientific discovery, every Eureka! moment, and every conversion of the heart and mind.
Censorship and its chilling effect on free speech have no place on campus. A university that stifles enquiry or punishes dissent betrays its purpose and undermines the very innovation that drives our nation forward.

Every discipline-whether it's the humanities or the hard sciences-should apply the same rigor as medicine or engineering.
Programs that have developed a reputation obfuscation or ideological conformity must raise the bar or disappear.

Higher Education's greatest successes have come when its luminaries strove to transcend their biases, uncovering objective truths that advanced humanity's understanding of the world. That's the standard we must return to.

Third, college leaders must once more treat their institutions as repositories of our civilizational inheritance. We have entrusted them with producing citizens who sustain America's economic and cultural vitality. And they have violated that trust.

In the past few years, we've seen colleges take foreign funding for groups that have stirred up violent activism and created hostile environments, for Jewish students especially. We've seen real American history stripped out of the curriculum, and the heritage of our country denigrated by both rogue professors and official university statements.

This is a profound betrayal of America's founding tradition of liberty.

A 2024 survey found that more than half of college students were unable to answer basic civics questions about the Bill of Rights, election law, or the three branches of government. It's little surprise that a poll this year found only 41% of 18-29 year olds today are proud to be American.

Why would they be? They don't know the first thing about America.

The libraries, department faculties, and research facilities of our universities are national treasures. It's absurd for hard-working Americans to pay taxes and fund these institutions if they detract from, instead of add to, our nation's strength.

It takes leadership to protect these resources from enemies both foreign and domestic. It doesn't matter if the attacks on America's cultural patrimony come from the Chinese Communist Party or from our own misguided undergrads. True leadership means you don't back down.

When university leaders not only play along, but act like ideologues in their own right, they twist our repositories of civilization into factories for producing activists instead of thinkers.

When students graduate, their diploma shouldn't signal how they'll vote, but it should guarantee they've learned to think clearly, engage civically, and live fully in the freedoms America affords.

Fourth and finally, university leaders must embrace their role as public intellectuals directing institutions that can transform society.

This is the difference between a university and a diploma mill. Both offer degrees, but only the former offers new ideas-and prepares young thinkers to bring those ideas to the world.

A world-class university is a think tank of American civic life, producing the concepts and the individuals who will advance our constitutional republic toward a more perfect union.

Americans are not predisposed to look up to the ivory tower. But that's because for many years, the view has not been much to look at.

A college president should engage in the national discourse and chart a unique course for the ship he or she steers through complicated intellectual waters.

America's place on the world stage also depends on cultivating civic leaders-some would call them "elites"-from among our best and brightest.

Our nation's history, laws, and culture are complex, and we need graduates who dive deeply into the principles of the American founding and the whole history of the West, ready to navigate its challenges with wisdom.

The best way for university leaders to influence the national discourse is by producing experts, critics, innovators, and entrepreneurs who carry forward that mission.

So, to recap these four recommendations to college leaders:

1) Prioritize personal growth.
2) Seek and serve the truth.
3) Preserve and defend civilization.
4) Model intellectual leadership and produce future thinkers and leaders.

America is a symbol of hope and liberty to the world. Our institutions must prepare students to carry that mantle, to lead with clarity and conviction, and to show the world what a free society can achieve.

Our university leaders can be the change agents who make this vision a reality.

I'm grateful to Hillsdale College-to Dr. Arnn, and to all the dedicated professionals and brilliant intellectuals who have led this institution to greatness-thank you for carrying the torch of leadership for so long. Both in the sunny times, and the dark ones.
I'm so glad to have your example in showing college leaders a skill which is very much like statecraft. That is, schoolcraft. You are the archetype of university leadership, crafting a school where young people are inspired and formed, not disillusioned and misled; where they are equipped for career success, not burdened by debt and doubt.

The Higher Education system in this country has fallen far, and it will not be fixed overnight. The federal government can only do so much. But if enough leaders take the initiative to make their institutions a little more like Hillsdale, we will be heading in the right direction.

Thank you."