Education

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      What is the US Department of Education and what does it do?

      by

      Donald Trump has taken the overwhelming step of undoing the Department of Education on Thursday by signing an executive order to dismantle the agency in charge of the country’s national education policy.With the stroke of a pen, Trump fulfills a campaign promise he made all the way back in 2016.What is the Department of Education?The Department of Education is a cabinet-level agency created by Jimmy Carter in 1979 to oversee national education policy and administer federal assistance programs for schools across the country.The department manages a budget of approximately $268bn and employs about 4,400 staff members. Its core responsibilities have included distributing federal financial aid for education, collecting data on the US’s schools, identifying major educational issues and enforcing federal education laws prohibiting discrimination and implementing congressional education legislation.Among its most significant functions is administering federal student aid programs, providing billions in grants, work-study funds and loans to more than 13 million students. The agency also oversees programs addressing special education, English-language acquisition and education for disadvantaged students.Critics have long questioned the need for the department, arguing education should remain entirely under state and local control, while its supporters maintain it plays a crucial role in protecting educational equity and providing much-needed federal backing to schools serving vulnerable populations.Can Trump legally eliminate a government agency?Scrapping an entire department would require congressional approval – something that conservatives seeking to get rid of the education department have failed to do for decades.No president has ever successfully closed a cabinet-level agency enshrined in law before. And the constitutional separation of powers means the president’s executive authority alone isn’t sufficient to close the agency by the stroke of his pen.The White House has acknowledged this limitation, with administration officials confirming they don’t have the necessary votes in Congress to eliminate the department completely.So instead, Trump’s executive order would essentially direct the education secretary, Linda McMahon, to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure”, according to administration officials, while working within existing executive branch powers. This could include reorganizing certain functions, appointing leadership aligned with the aggressive drawing-down goal and potentially returning specific authorities to states where federal law permits.What does the executive order mean for American students?The mass weakening of the agency will undoubtedly create significant uncertainty for America’s 50 million public school students and their families, with impacts varying widely depending on how the directive is implemented.In the immediate term, most students will probably see little change to their daily educational experience, as schools primarily operate under state and local control and budgets for the year are already set. However, the long-term implications could be substantial if federal education programs are modified or reduced.Shuttering the department puts marginalized students most at risk, experts say. Since federal programs support special education, English-language learners and disadvantaged students, they face the brunt of the impact. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (Idea), which provides protections for students with disabilities, is federally enforced through the department.What happens to student loans?There is significant uncertainty for the federal student loan system, which currently manages approximately $1.69tn in outstanding debt for more than 43 million Americans.While the White House has indicated functions such as student loans will continue, any disruption to the department’s distribution of grants, work-study funds and loans could affect the more than 19 million college students in the United States.There are questions about which department might oversee these operations, but earlier this month, Trump suggested transferring loan management to either the treasury department, commerce department or the small business administration next. The treasury department may be the most likely choice.Borrowers currently in repayment are unlikely to see immediate changes to their payment requirements or loan terms, but may face uncertainty about where to direct questions and how to navigate repayment options if administrative responsibilities shift. But the executive order’s impact on new student loans and financial aid processing for incoming college students remains unclear. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump signs executive order to dismantle US Department of Education

      by

      Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that instructs the US education secretary, Linda McMahon, to start dismantling the Department of Education, seemingly attempting to circumvent the need to obtain congressional approval to formally close a federal department.The administration may eventually pursue an effort to get Congress to shut down the agency, Trump said at a signing ceremony at the White House on Thursday, because its budget had more than doubled in size in recent years but national test scores had not improved.The federal government does not mandate curriculum in schools; that has been the responsibility of state and local governments, which provide 90% of the funding to schools. Nevertheless, at the White House, Trump repeated his campaign promise to “send education back to the states”.The executive order targeting the education department, which has been expected for weeks, directed McMahon to take all necessary steps to shut down key functionalities. Trump added at the signing ceremony that he hoped McMahon would be the last education secretary.“My administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department. We’re going to shut it down and shut it down as quickly as possible. It’s doing us no good,” Trump said.McMahon appeared to smile in acknowledgment as she sat in the front row at the signing event in the East Room. Trump spoke from a stage in front of a row of state flags, and flanked on each side by a group of schoolchildren sitting at small desks.The bulk of the education department’s budget is made up of federal grant and loan programs, including the $18.4bn Title I program that provides funding to high-poverty K-12 schools and the $15.5bn Idea program that helps cover the education costs for students with disabilities.The White House said those programs, as well as the $1.6tn federal student loan program, would not be affected by the order. It was not immediately clear what spending cuts the administration would be able to achieve without cutting those initiatives.The move comes after the administration has already taken steps to undercut the department’s authority by instituting a round of layoffs that has reduced its workforce by nearly half and cancelled dozens of grants and contracts.The idea of shutting down the education department dates back to efforts by Republicans in the 1980s. But the push has become increasingly mainstream in recent years as pro-Trump grassroots activists took aim at agendas that promoted education standards and more inclusive policies.Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, has separately introduced a one-sentence bill on Friday that would terminate the education department at the end of 2026. Similar efforts have failed to get enough votes to pass in previous years.The Trump administration’s efforts to shutter the education department have largely followed the playbook in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s rightwing manifesto to remake the federal government, which envisions the department as a “statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states”.Democrats on Capitol Hill denounced the executive order and warned it could leave in jeopardy millions of low-income families, who rely on federal funding in schools.“Shutting down the Department of Education will harm millions of children in our nation’s public schools, their families and hardworking teachers. Class sizes will soar, educators will be fired, special education programs will be cut and college will get even more expensive,” Hakeem Jeffries, the US House minority leader, said in a statement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe progressive wing of the House Democratic caucus also denounced Trump’s order as an unconstitutional attempt to evade seeking congressional approval to implement his political agenda.“The reality is that the Trump administration does not have the constitutional power to eliminate the Department of Education without the approval of Congress – however, what they will do is defund and destabilize the agency to manufacture chaos and push their extremist agenda,” said the Democratic congressman Maxwell Frost.But without cutting out the department itself, the incoming Trump administration, buoyed by a rightwing backlash to public schools that intensified after the Covid-19 pandemic, could alter key parts of the department’s budget and policies in ways that would be felt in schools nationwide.Some Republicans support the idea of sending block grants to states that aren’t earmarked for specific programs, letting states decide whether to fund low-income students or students with disabilities instead of requiring them to fund the programs for those students. Programs that don’t affect students directly, such as those that go toward teacher training, could also be on the chopping block. Expanding the use and promotion of school vouchers and installing “parents’ rights” policies are also likely.In late January, Trump signed executive orders to promote school choice, or the use of public dollars for private education, and to remove funding from schools accused of “radical indoctrination”. Trump also revived a “1776 commission” to “promote patriotic education”.The education department boasted that in the first week of the Trump administration it had “dismantled” diversity, equity and inclusion programs.Soon after Trump took over, the department was loaded with key staffers tied to a rightwing thinktank, the America First Policy Institute, often referred to as a “White House in waiting”. The thinktank has supported driving out diversity programs and banning books, which the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism documented in a report on the institute’s ties to the education department. The policy institute has promoted installing Christianity in government, including in schools.The department ended investigations into book banning and got rid of a book-ban coordinator position last month in a move announced by Craig Trainor, the acting assistant secretary for civil rights, who previously held a role at the thinktank. More

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      I’m a recent Stem grad. Here’s why the right is winning us over

      by

      When my friends and I graduated with our math degrees this past May, we felt like we could do anything.After long nights spent on problem sets, the most aimless and ambitious of us will forgo grad school and become interns and employees at the shiniest, slimiest corporations in America – big banks, the military industrial complex, big tech, big pharma – where we will solve interesting, difficult problems on cushy salaries.Working at the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) seems to require the same skillset. Fueled by unbridled techno-optimism and edgy cultural capital, Doge seems less like a government agency and more like another one of Elon Musk’s shaky startups. While bewildered pundits including Fareed Zakaria struggle to diagnose and process the new technocracy in DC, our new Doge overlords are infinitely familiar to my classmates and me: they might as well be guys we knew from school.This is the new generation of young technocrats who helped lift Trump into office: they are the crypto-obsessed love-children of Musk and Donald Trump, of Silicon Valley and the Heritage Foundation, of “effective altruism” and “effective accelerationism”. Meanwhile, graduates who lean left are simply out of luck: outside of academia, it can feel nearly impossible to find a progressive job in tech. Progressive Data Jobs, a major hub for jobs in this space, currently lists 96 open positions across all experience levels. By contrast, the careers portal at Goldman Sachs alone boasts 1,943 open jobs.That’s because, for decades, the progressive movement worldwide has failed to organize technical talent for its own interests.Upon graduation, an average science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) student often faces a binary choice between industry and academia: BlackRock or grad school. Sure, there’s a handful of research non-profits out there, like Radical Data or the inactive Algorithmic Justice League; but they mostly focus on advocacy instead of governance. While there is excellent progressive work in data science being done by organizations such as OpenSecrets, Split Ticket, ProPublica’s Data Store, and even Twitter accounts such as Stats for Lefties, there is no systematic effort by progressives to recruit technical talent at scale.Meanwhile, financial and tech industries begin targeting Stem students with aggressive recruitment tactics as early as freshman year: over time, these industries become the only careers students can imagine outside of grad school. It’s no wonder that Stem students are more conservative than humanities and social science students, even though scientists tend to be more liberal. There are really only two things you can do with a Stem degree: stay in the ivory tower, or – to paraphrase Audre Lorde – go build the master’s house.In an interview with Ross Douthat, the tech investor Marc Andreessen claims that the left alienated Silicon Valley because “companies are being hijacked as engines of social change”: gone are the days of the agitprop 1984 Apple ads, or the naive “coding for good” movements of the 2010s. After the term “Stem” was coined in 2001, the next two decades saw the further division of science and the humanities into two opposing, irreconcilable systems of knowledge at the institutional level. While educational policy-makers obsess over Stem enrollments, funding and research as metrics to assess an education’s worth, students were incentivized to concentrate on one discipline, all while a liberal arts education diminished in appeal and practical utility.This made a generation of Stem students into technical ideologues. Starting from high school olympiads, they learn to worship technical capability above all else – and value the acquisition of technical skills above everything else. In college, they are never taught problem-solving frameworks outside those offered by programming or economics courses: game theory, homo economicus, Pareto efficiency. Crucially, these approaches always attempt to simplify the world instead of tackling society’s complexities head on: simplifying, as an impulse, has given rise to neoliberal, Silicon Valley-funded social movements such as “effective altruism” that do nothing to tackle crucial inequalities. Without alternative paradigms, these theories become real and universal ways to see the world and solve its problems.And so, empowered by Trump and Musk, it is the rightist technocrats who get to change the world today. With flashy tech stacks and a blind confidence to code up a solution to any and every problem, they set out to fix our government once and for all, armed with only three principles – simplify, automate, optimize. And so Doge runs the government as if solving an optimization problem: cut employees, retain key workers, minimize losses, simplify the structure. But already, Doge is reinstating fired federal workers who were working on crucial issues. Classic tech bro blunder: what else did they expect from trying to solve the problems of society without even bothering to understand their nuances?As the technocrat right rises into power, a luddite left also emerges in America – a narrowing base of grassroots organizers, local politicians, activists, academics and non-profits, that increasingly disaffiliate from technology with fear and distrust. As technical industries become more explicitly aligned with the agendas of the new American right in the post-Covid years, there has been little effort from progressive political organizations to recruit self-starting hackers and radical technologists, who exist in abundance on the decentralized internet. Did anyone even try to scoop up the workers who walked out of Google in 2018? Now, in 2025, we realize that a generation of politically naive engineers have already built a singular matrix of algorithmic oppression and universal surveillance that we cannot opt out of. Today’s progressives not only do not understand technology; worse, we have completely ceded technological power to the right.The dearth of efforts to recruit technical talent on the left essentially create a failure of imagination. Talented young engineers fail to imagine how their skills can be used to challenge existing power structures, and movements fail to imagine how technology can be used as a tactic to seize power. As Justin Joque argued in Revolutionary Mathematics, progressive movements need technical people who “understand the current metaphysics of capitalism – not in order to de-reify them, but rather to understand how they can be replaced”. One wonders whether more sophisticated data scientists could have made past Democratic campaigns more effective, or whether a collaboration between engineers and progressive thinkers could have led to more online platforms such as Bluesky.In order to hack and dismantle the technocrat right, American progressives must teach the engineers to dream again. Today’s engineers may be hard at work building the master’s house, but with the right organization and renewed senses of purpose, they, too, can learn to turn the master’s tools against him.

      Jaye Chen is a writer based in New York City More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s student loan changes leave borrowers facing soaring repayments

      by

      Many of the nearly 43 million Americans who have federal student loan debt are seeing their carefully budgeted monthly payments soar amid Donald Trump’s overhaul of education in the United States.In the last few weeks, the Trump administration closed applications for all income-driven repayment plans (even ones not blocked by courts) and limited those eligible for public service loan forgiveness (PSLF). That program forgives the loans of government and select nonprofit workers after completing 10 years of service and making 10 years of minimum payments.“The student loan system was broken when President Biden was responsible for it. All we’ve seen since President Trump has come in as an effort to provide fewer rights and fewer resources for working people that have student debt, making the cost of living go up,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center.“Things are worse now than they’ve ever been, and nothing is on the table that will make life better for people with student loans.”Jordan, a public high-school English teacher in Redding, California, and his wife, who also works in public education, have student loans totaling $200,000. The couple, who recently welcomed a second child, just bought a house to accommodate their growing family. An even higher student loan payment each month wasn’t a consideration when they took out a mortgage, he said.“We’re going from making $600 in payments – that’s what Save (saving on a valuable education) is supposed to do, which we can absorb to an extent. But if we go off of income-based payments, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Jordan, 37, said.“Today I tried to calculate what’s going to happen, and the calculators don’t work on the webpage. I couldn’t even tell you real numbers if I wanted.”With a new mortgage and childcare exceeding $15,000 on a teacher’s salary, Jordan and his family are stretched thin.He said: “It’s been alarming, but I’ve tried to enter into zen mode. I’ll just move my money and I guess wait until they figure out how to garnish my wages, if I even have money. I don’t know. What am I supposed to do?”Aaron, a pharmacist in Ohio, started looking for a second job when Trump got elected in preparation for higher monthly payments.“I’m nervous about it. I basically knew on election night what was going to happen to the Save Plan. It was going to go away. I did a second pharmacist job filling in some [pro re nata] hours,” Aaron, 47, said. “I’m still looking for additional hours to try to pick up.”Aaron took out around $180,000 in loans to cover pharmacy school tuition and living expenses for him and his family. With the Save plan and PSLF, he expected to pay $700 a month and have his loan forgiven after 10 years since he works for the state. Without an income driven repayment plan as an option, he fears a possible monthly payment of $1,800 for the next 30 years on a standard extended repayment plan with no chance of forgiveness.“The more that you go to school, have an advanced degree, you earn more over your lifetime. You pay more in taxes. Not just income taxes, but property taxes, sales taxes, everything else. So it’s actually a pretty good deal to invest in somebody to go to school,” he said. “I don’t see [loan forgiveness] as a handout, which is what people try to say ‘well, you know, I didn’t go to school, so I shouldn’t pay for anything.’ Yeah, but if I told you about all the stuff that I shouldn’t be paying for, you could play that game all day.”Reina Chilton-Mayer is a homemaker and caregiver for her disabled teenage son. Despite her husband having a master’s degree and stable income for many years, the unstable rental market alongside the cost of caretaking has left them with few choices, she said. She and her husband’s combined $140,000 worth of student loans has left them so burdened that they are considering defaulting on their debt for the first time.“I hate defaulting on something. It could have career impacts for my husband,” Chilton-Mayer, 44, said. “If you wanted to change jobs, of course there are going to be financial background checks. So we’re not 100% on whether or not we’re going to do that, but at the end of the day, it just comes down to making ends meet every month.”Ebrahim Ghazali, the chief of pediatrics at a clinic in Springfield, Massachusetts, has just one year left of payments until the rest of his loans would be forgiven under PSLF. The recent changes to federal student loans have paused his payments and left him unsure about the future of his debt.“With these giant student loans, my payments were initially close to $2,000 a month. When I got on the Save plan, it brought it down to between $600 and $700 a month, which I can budget a lot better,” Ghazali, 41, said.But now, with the application websites down, he said he is “unable to progress towards forgiveness and with the application site down. I can’t restart them on a different repayment plan. I’m not even sure if my current employment is going to count towards repayment at this point.”As the potential shuttering of the department of education looms, Pierce noted that “the worst things that could happen are already happening right now, and we don’t need to wait for the education department to shuffle the deck chairs around on the Titanic”.“Borrowers have a right to make payments based on their income,” he said. “They have a right to have their debt canceled that they work in public service, and those rights have been shut down by President Trump.” More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Education department slashed in half after Trump administration mass firings

      by

      The Trump administration has decimated the US Department of Education, firing more than 1,300 employees in a single day in what looks to be the first step toward abolishing the agency entirely.The mass dismissal – delivered by email after most staff had left for the day on Tuesday – has slashed the department’s workforce by half. Along with voluntary departures and probationary firings, the agency that started 2025 with 4,133 staff now operates with an estimated 2,100 employees two months into Donald Trump’s presidency.“Today’s reduction in force reflects our commitment to efficiency,” Linda McMahon, the US education secretary, said in a statement on Tuesday, insisting that student loans, Pell grants and special education funding would continue uninterrupted. Department officials characterized the eliminated positions as unnecessary administrative roles.Civil rights enforcement has been particularly devastated, with regional offices in New York, San Francisco and Boston either closed entirely or stripped to minimal staffing. These units were already buried under backlogged discrimination investigations following campus protests last year.The cuts came just one day after the department warned 60 universities they face “potential enforcement actions” for alleged violations of federal civil rights laws protecting students from antisemitic discrimination – part of a broader push that recently saw the administration cancel $400m in funding to Columbia University over what it called “continued inaction” on harassment of Jewish students. A prominent Columbia student activist with a green card, Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) without charge over the weekend and now faces deportation for his role in last year’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations.“We will not stand by while this regime pulls the wool over the eyes of the American people,” Sheria Smith, the president of the government employees’ union representing department workers, said in a statement.Some school leaders across the country are also alarmed by the implications of the department’s downsizing. Alberto Carvalho, the Los Angeles unified school district superintendent, warned of “catastrophic harm” if the cuts affect federal funding streams.“We receive in excess of $750m earmarked for poor students, English-language learners, students with disabilities and connectivity investments,” Carvalho said in a video statement. The LA unified school district is estimated to be the second-largest in the country.Greg Casar, the Congressional Progressive caucus chair from Texas, meanwhile accused the administration of blatant class warfare.He told reporters: “Trump and Musk are stealing from our children to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.” He called for Senate Democrats to reject the government funding bill that they’ll be voting on this week.Responding to reporter questions on Wednesday, Trump attacked Department of Education employees. “Many of them don’t work at all. Many of them never showed up to work,” the president said in the Oval Office. “We want to cut, but we want to cut the people that aren’t working or not doing a good job. We’re keeping the best people.”The purge aligns with Trump’s campaign pledge to abolish the department entirely – a promise that resonated with the parents’ rights movement that emerged during pandemic school closures. Constitutional experts note that while Trump cannot unilaterally dissolve the agency without congressional approval, his administration appears to be rendering it functionally obsolete.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust last week, McMahon confirmed on Fox News that Trump plans to sign an executive order targeting the department’s closure, despite polls showing roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose such a move.The administration is already preparing to scatter the department’s functions across the federal government. The New York Times reports that officials visited the treasury department on Monday to discuss transferring student loan operations, while McMahon has floated moving civil rights enforcement to the Department of Justice and disability services to the Department of Health and Human Services – mirroring recommendations from the conservative Project 2025 blueprint.The cuts bear the unmistakable influence of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who leads Trump’s so-called government efficiency initiative. McMahon acknowledged “regular meetings” with Musk’s team, praising them for identifying “waste” in the department.Department headquarters remained closed on Wednesday following the mass terminations, with officials citing security concerns. More

    • 188 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      The making of Elon Musk: how did his childhood in apartheid South Africa shape him?

      by

      With an imposing double-winged redbrick main building, and school songs lifted directly from Harrow’s songbook, Pretoria boys high school is every inch the South African mirror of the English private schools it was founded in 1901 to imitate.Elon Musk, who has rapidly become one of the most powerful people in US politics, spent his final school years in the 1980s as a day pupil on the lush, tree-filled campus in South Africa’s capital, close to his father’s large detached home in Waterkloof, a wealthy Pretoria suburb shaded by purple jacaranda blossoms in spring.View image in fullscreenSouth Africa was rocked by uprisings as apartheid entered its dying years. In 1984, black townships across the country revolted. By 1986, the white minority government had imposed a state of emergency. But in the segregated white enclaves, life was affluent and peaceful.“While the country as a whole was very much in flames and in turmoil, we were blissfully very safe in our little leafy suburbs, going about our very normal life,” said Jonathan Stewart, who was a year above Musk at Pretoria boys, which also counts the Labour politician Peter Hain, the Booker prize-winning novelist Damon Galgut and the murderer and Paralympian Oscar Pistorius among its former pupils.“You had this wealthy set, in relative terms, and everybody else was excluded.”View image in fullscreenMusk, who was born in Pretoria in 1971, railed on his social media platform X last month against the “openly racist laws” of the country of his birth and responded “yes” to the statement: “White South Africans are being persecuted for their race in their home country.”After the posts by the man now at the helm of Donald Trump’s “department of government efficiency” (Doge), a special group Trump has created, the US president signed an executive order accusing South Africa’s government of “unjust racial discrimination” against white Afrikaners, citing a law allowing land to be expropriated in certain circumstances. The order cut aid to South Africa, which receives 17% of its HIV/Aids budget from the US, and offered asylum to Afrikaners.It was not clear the extent to which Musk, who left South Africa in 1989 for his mother’s country, Canada, and then went to the US, had a direct hand in encouraging Trump to issue the order.Trump has taken an interest in the alleged persecution of white South Africans since his first presidency, when an Afrikaner rights group travelled to the US to claim, falsely, that white farmers were being murdered for their land with the complicity of the government. Trump saw one of the group’s leaders interviewed on Fox News and tweeted his support.Trump has also been influenced by other interests, including US groups critical of South Africa’s case against Israel at the international court of justice (ICJ) over the war in Gaza, which he referred to in his executive order.View image in fullscreenBut with Musk now among Trump’s closest advisers, it is unlikely he has not made his views known to the president, given they are also tied up with his business interests in South Africa.Musk has claimed that land reform laws, in a country where the white minority, who make up just 7% of South Africa’s population, still own more than 70% of agricultural land, are racist and amount to theft. He has endorsed claims that the killings of white farmers amount to genocide; research suggests the crimes are financially motivated.Musk’s attacks have ratcheted up at a time when he is in a dispute with the South African government about affirmative action laws, as he tries to sell his Starlink satellite network in the country. The world’s richest man objects to a law requiring that foreign investors in the telecoms sector provide 30% of the equity in the South African part of the enterprise to Black-owned businesses.Trump’s executive order will add to the pressure on South Africa’s government to exempt Musk from the Black empowerment laws.X’s press team and Musk’s lawyer did not respond to interview requests or emailed questions.To what extent Musk’s years growing up under the collapsing apartheid regime influenced his positions today, from making what looked like a Nazi salute – a characterisation he rejects – at Trump’s inauguration celebrations last month to his embrace of far-right political parties such as Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, remains an open debate.View image in fullscreenWhite, English-speaking South Africans such as Musk’s family benefited from apartheid’s racial hierarchy but lived mostly separate lives from the ruling Afrikaners.Musk spent the first two years of South Africa’s five high school years at the all-white Bryanston high school in Johannesburg’s leafy northern suburbs. Founded in 1968, it is a mixed-sex, English-language, fee-paying state school, made up of rectangular mid-century buildings.Like South Africa then and now, Bryanston high was sports mad. “It was a little bit like when you think of American society,” said Lesley Burns, who finished at the school in 1984, Musk’s first year. “There were all the jocks and the popular guys in the football team.”Musk, who was on the school’s chess team in 1985, was viciously bullied. The hounding culminated with him being thrown down a set of stairs, beaten so badly that he was hospitalised. The school declined an interview.View image in fullscreenMusk’s father moved him and his brother, Kimbal, to Pretoria boys, where he was well liked, according to Gideon Fourie, who had computer science classes with Musk.“He was a very average personality,” Fourie said. “He wasn’t in any way like a super jock, or a super nerd, or a super punk … He had a group of friends.”South African media were subjected to strict government censorship. Newspapers would appear with censored sections blacked out, particularly reports of the growing unrest in the townships and mass arrests, until those were also banned.In contrast, the fee-paying Pretoria boys was liberal, for its time. In 1981 it became the first government school to admit a Black pupil. The then headteacher, Malcolm Armstrong, used a loophole that allowed it to let in the sons of diplomats from the “homelands” within South Africa that the apartheid system claimed were independent states.“Armstrong even defied the authorities by meeting with the ANC [African National Congress] in Dakar while it was still banned,” said Patrick Conroy, who was in Kimbal’s year, two years below Musk. “He frequently addressed our school assemblies, emphasising the importance of democracy, human rights and social justice.”The school’s current headteacher, Gregary Hassenkamp, was also in Kimbal’s year and has similar memories of his predecessor, although he noted that not all teachers shared Armstrong’s liberal views.View image in fullscreen“I remember him forcing boys to think about the country in which we lived and the attitudes we had,” Hassenkamp said in an interview in his wood-panelled office, wearing a flowing black gown and a tie and socks in the school’s red, white and green colours.Musk has previously described himself as “not a conservative” and backed the Democratic candidate in every presidential election going back to Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, until he moved to the right. But Musk is clearly suspicious of democracy and the leaders it produces.In the 1930s, his grandfather headed an anti-democratic fringe political movement in Canada with fascist overtones, which campaigned for government by elite technocrats. He then moved to apartheid South Africa because the racist system appealed to him.Musk now appears happy to embrace the US version of the “strongman” ruler by backing Trump’s claim that the will of the president is paramount.Some of Musk’s school peers speculated that his current views of South Africa may be influenced by his missing out on the ups and downs of the negotiations to end apartheid and the “miracle” of Nelson Mandela becoming the country’s first Black president in 1994.Since then, the governments led by Mandela’s ANC party have failed to address the world’s worst economic inequality. While its Black economic empowerment policies offer tax breaks and state contracts to Black-owned companies, Black people are five times likelier than white people to be unemployed. South Africa also has one of the world’s highest murder rates.It is not uncommon to hear white South Africans say they are being discriminated against, often citing affirmative action laws. In mid-February, hundreds gathered outside the US embassy in Pretoria carrying signs with slogans such as “Thank God for President Trump” and “Make South Africa Great Again”.View image in fullscreenWhile it is rare to hear white South Africans say they want a return to apartheid, it is also not uncommon to hear older people express nostalgia for that time.“It was a good time, because we had no crime. There were no problems. People, Blacks and whites, got on very well with each other,” Errol Musk said in a video interview from his spacious Cape Town home, when asked about his son Elon’s childhood. “Everything worked. That’s the reality. Of course people don’t want to hear that, but that’s the truth.”Musk and his two younger full siblings, Kimbal and Tosca, have had a tumultuous relationship with their father. Kimbal told Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson that their father would scream at them for two to three hours, calling them worthless and pathetic. Their mother, Maye, has accused him of physical abuse.“It’s rubbish,” Errol said when asked about the allegations, which he has repeatedly denied.The brothers became estranged from their father in 2017, not for the first time, when he had a child with his 30-year-old stepdaughter, Jana Bezuidenhout, according to Isaacson. In Errol’s telling, they got angry with him when he expressed his support for Trump in 2016, at a party in Cape Town they threw for his 70th and Musk’s 45th birthdays.“Things changed when Biden came in and Elon realised they’re trying to destroy America,” Errol said. “Now we exchange messages about every day. Of course, he’s not always able to answer, so his PA will answer me.”Additional reporting by Chris McGreal More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump administration cancels $400m in funds to Columbia University

      by

      The Donald Trump administration announced on Friday that it had canceled $400m in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University in New York because of what it alleges is the college’s repeated failure to protect students from antisemitic harassment.The announcement comes after Columbia set up a new disciplinary committee and initiated its own investigations into students critical of Israel and its war on Gaza after Hamas’s own attack on Israel. That move by the university has alarmed advocates of free speech.It also comes at a time of widespread backlash to American universities by the Trump administration and conservatives more broadly who see the higher education sector in the US as dominated by liberals and ripe for a rightwing attack on its influence.Linda McMahon, the Trump-appointed secretary of education, had warned on Monday that Columbia would lose federal funding if it did not take additional action to combat antisemitism on its campus.A statement issued on Friday by the Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, and the US General Services Administration, states: “These cancellations represent the first round of action and additional cancellations are expected to follow.”“For too long, Columbia has abandoned that obligation to Jewish students studying on its campus,” McMahon said in the statement.The statement also refers to ongoing “illegal protests” on college and university campuses, a phrase Trump has used to refer to some student protests, though what makes these illegal remains unclear.Columbia was central to campus protests that broke out across the US over Gaza last spring. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators set up an encampment there in April and inspired a wave of similar protests in many other colleges.The first amendment to the US constitution protects the rights of people to “peacefully assemble” and to petition the government for a “redress of grievances”.The extent that pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campuses can be considered antisemitic is still debated across political and academic spheres. Republican lawmakers viewed the protests as antisemitic, despite the fact many protesters denied the accusations or were Jewish themselves.Trump has threatened college students with imprisonment and deportation on Tuesday on his Truth Social platform, writing: “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested.”A Columbia University spokesperson wrote in a statement to the Columbia Spectator, that it was “reviewing the announcement from the federal agencies and [pledged] to work with the federal government to restore Columbia’s federal funding”.“We take Columbia’s legal obligations seriously and understand how serious this announcement is and are committed to combatting antisemitism and ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our students, faculty, and staff,” the spokesperson wrote.It is not immediately clear what contracts or grants would be cut under the directive. Columbia University currently holds more than $5bn in federal grant commitments, the GSA statement said.Katherine Franke, a retired legal scholar and former professor at Columbia Law School told the Guardian how she was “pushed out” of her role in January because of her pro-Palestinian activism. She had been with Columbia for 25 years.Franke says that the university was told “unless we as faculty and students take a pro-Israeli position, it [the university] will be sanctioned. And at the same time, the university is now committing itself to something it’s calling institutional neutrality.”She says that though not all the grants were cut, the Trump administration did “cut a significant part of them, and the important research that’s being done with those grants will stop”.Franke is highly critical of the way Columbia is responding to the threats from Trump, believing the institution could have done more to protect students, faculty and the pivotal role the university plays in a democracy.“If you grovel before a bully, it just emboldens the bully, and the bully has now become an authoritarian government with the capacity to act on a level that was unthinkable for us a couple of years ago,” she said.Columbia is one of five colleges currently under the new federal investigation, and it is one of 10 being visited by a taskforce in response to allegations of antisemitism. Others under investigation include the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Minnesota; Northwestern University; and Portland State University. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘We’re going backwards’: the Black student unions being defunded on US campuses

      by

      For Nevaeh Parker, the president of the Black student union (BSU) at the University of Utah, Black History Month is usually a buzzing time on campus.The school’s BSU hosts several events – kickback parties and movie screenings – throughout the month. The Black cultural center, where students would usually congregate and attend activities, would be full. And the month’s crown jewel would typically be a conference at the college for Black high schoolers in the area.But in July 2024, the center was shut down and turned into offices. The BSU budget, previously a guaranteed $11,000 a year to fund various gatherings to support the school’s marginal Black population, has been slashed. And the group has been forced to officially disassociate from the university in order to keep Black students at the center of their programming, all thanks to a new anti-DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) law passed in Utah last year.“It really hurts my soul to feel like we’re going backwards,” Parker, 19, told the Guardian. “We aren’t able to be as strong of a resource as we could be to Black students here.”View image in fullscreenBlack student unions at US colleges are fighting to stay in operation as state laws targeting DEI initiatives threaten their existence. Founded largely in the 1960s and 1970s, the campus groups support Black students at predominantly white universities by securing additional educational and financial resources, demanding more Black faculty, and building spaces for Black students to socialize. Activism by Black student unions helped spur the creation of African American studies programs across the US.BSUs are often the first line of response to racial discrimination on campus, organizing protests and holding universities accountable. Dozens of the groups held demonstrations after George Floyd’s murder in 2020.But anti-DEI bills are restricting what BSUs can do on campus, and how universities are legally allowed to support them. Since 2023, at least 11 states have passed laws targeting DEI initiatives in higher education. And conservative lawmakers in more than 30 states have also introduced such bills. At the federal level, Donald Trump ordered US universities and schools to eliminate DEI measures, threatening to withhold federal funding from those that do not comply.DEI programming at the collegiate level was initially conceived to support marginalized students, who are disproportionately affected by discrimination, financial hardship and feelings of alienation. But Republican legislators have argued that such initiatives are unfair and discriminate against white students. The flurry of anti-DEI bills, which have sharply increased since 2022, comes after the US supreme court struck down affirmative action, or the practice of race-conscious student admissions, in June 2023.Anti-DEI legislation and culture as a whole has had a chilling effect on colleges. Several universities have cancelled scholarships specifically aimed at students of color. Multicultural and LGBTQ+ student centers have been shuttered. And staff overseeing DEI initiatives have been terminated or reassigned.In January 2024, the Utah legislature passed House bill 261, known as the Equal Opportunity Initiatives. The law prohibits state schools and public offices from engaging in “differential treatment”, essentially banning DEI efforts centered around a particular identity.In response to the new legislation, the University of Utah closed its Black cultural center, a major loss for Black students on campus looking for a physical location to socialize, especially as only 3% of Utah students are Black. “It was a home away from home for a lot of students, especially those who lived out of state,” said Parker. “[The state of] Utah is less than 2% Black, [so] obviously, you are going to need spaces that are safe.”View image in fullscreenUtah’s BSU lost its adviser, as administrators either were reassigned to different parts of the university or resigned altogether. Notably, the words “diversity, equity and inclusion” cannot be used on any events sponsored by the university. “It basically took away our voice and took away what things that we wanted to talk about,” said Parker of the new limitations.In a comment to the Guardian, university officials said that identity-centered student groups are still able to gather as “affiliated” or “registered” organizations. “The University of Utah preserves and defends the rights of all registered student organizations – including the Black Student Union – to organize, gather and sponsor events on campus. Universities are marketplaces of diverse viewpoints and ideas, and that includes within our student clubs. Changing their status from ‘sponsored’ to ‘registered’ preserves their independence to continue working with a community of students, faculty and staff without limitation on their communication and activities.”The school said it has since opened the Center for Community and Cultural Engagement (CCE) and the Center for Student Access and Resources, which are “open to all students, whose dedicated staff still provide the same level of support – in advising, scholarship preparation, resource referrals and mentorship”. It has “redistributed the funds that were originally dedicated to BSU to efforts that work toward supporting all students”.Parker noted that the missions of these centers are broad and “not centered on student organization and affinity groups. It’s felt like their ability to support us in the ways that we need have not been met.”In October, the BSU publicly announced that it would forgo official sponsorship in order to fight censorship attempts. Some events at Utah have had to be cancelled, Parker said, as students try and preserve funds they crowdsource across school years. The group has had to meet less as well, especially without a designated space. Club meetings are now held in various campus classrooms.Black students at the University of Alabama have also found themselves in a similar position. Their BSU had its funding revoked and was forced to relocate after a state bill restricting DEI went into effect in October 2024. “It’s been hard for freshmen especially to find their community and find like-minded people that look like them,” said Jordan Stokes, the BSU president.If the BSU wants university support, particularly funding for student events, the groups would be forced to “partner with another organization”, Stokes, 20, said, so the event is not solely focused on Black students and is in compliance with state law. The BSU has since successfully reached out to outside sponsors and alumni to finance Black History Month events, including its annual BSU week which features a number of celebratory gatherings. But that fundraising is finite compared to the university’s resources.The BSU office, which is now sitting empty, also held a significant amount of civil rights artifacts from past events at the university, said Stokes, and students are working to preserve its archives amid the closing. Posters highlighting important Black figures used to hang around the office. Yearbooks past were available for perusal.Now, much of that history is sitting in storage, Stokes said. “We had writing on our wall and on the window where you could read about our history and everything,” she said. “It’s pretty sad for folks who [aren’t Black] to not see this history and learn and explore different cultures.” The University of Alabama did not reply to the Guardian’s request for comment.Both Parker and Stokes said that they are extremely frustrated with lawmakers who are going after their communities and other students of color. Watching the university comply with state demands has been hard, Parker added, especially amid concerns that directly protesting from the anti-DEI policies could have their organizations punished or removed from campus altogether.But both BSUs have continued hosting events to make sure that Black students feel supported. Attendance at BSU events has remained steady, said Stokes, with students becoming more interested in voting and learning more about these policies.Parker said that she and other BSU leaders are focusing on individuals, students who need the organization in whatever way it can exist. That means continuing to celebrate and gather, even under the threat of erasure. “It’s really sad,” she said, “that we as students, who are not politicians, have to take the responsibility to continuously fight every single day for our existence on campus.” More