Last week, US President-elect Donald Trump announced that his close ally Linda McMahon — a businesswoman and former professional wrestling executive with little direct experience in education administration — was his candidate for education secretary. She was the latest in a series of unconventional nominees for cabinet positions.
In a statement announcing McMahon’s nomination, Trump said, “We will send Education back to the states, and Linda will spearhead that effort,” reinforcing a campaign promise to dismantle the US Department of Education.
McMahon’s nomination reportedly has received mixed responses from professional educators in the States, as she is not a well-known figure in the education world.
“I don’t know her,” admitted veteran education policy expert, Prof. Michael J. Feuer, speaking to The Times of Israel during a visit to Tel Aviv. Feuer, dean of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at George Washington University in Washington, DC, has spent his career in the highest echelons of educational academia in the US. Among other roles, during the Obama administration, he served as a member of the National Board of Education Sciences and as president of the National Academy of Education.
But, Feuer noted that “it’s not the first time” an incoming president had vowed to close the Department of Education.
“When Ronald Reagan became president [in 1981], the Department of Education had just been established about a year before, and his pledge was to close it,” Feuer explained. But the government then commissioned a study which showed that American education “was in trouble,” so the idea was scrapped, he added.
The department was created by the Carter administration only in 1979, partly in response to the “pressures of international scientific and economic competition” in the 1970s, he said, and partly out of the recognition that a central authority was needed to deal with national education issues.
“There needs to be a federal presence because of the issues that affect us as a whole nation,” Feuer stressed.
Previously, “for 80, 100 years” there was only an Office of Education whose function was to provide data about schools to the federal government. Even today, “most public education in the US is run at the state and local level, both in terms of finances and government and curricula,” he said.
Feuer is no stranger to Israel. He grew up in the New York City borough of Queens, received his PhD in public policy analysis from the University of Pennsylvania, and studied public administration at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and political theory at The Sorbonne. Throughout his life, he said, he has maintained close ties to the Jewish and Israeli worlds, both professionally and personally, and has a daughter who lives here.
Visiting in part to attend the 2024 International Education Conference, a one-day event held on Monday in Tel Aviv, Feuer spoke with The Times of Israel in a wide-ranging conversation covering the state of education in both Israel and the US, the anti-Israel campus protest movement in the US, and the potential effects of the incoming Trump administration on the field of education.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Times of Israel: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us. It’s not the easiest time to come to visit Israel, obviously.
Prof. Michael J. Feuer: No, but I have come several times, even in the past year, and had an opportunity to be with colleagues and friends in Israel who are thinking about the future of education. I did not need a lot of persuasion to come back for that.
This conference is about imagining new education for Israel. I think this is a very important moment in Jewish and Israeli history to be taking stock and thinking of what might be some options for the continuation of Israel’s remarkable education system and to look ahead to the future.
Let’s talk about the educational environment in the United States and at George Washington University specifically. There are a lot of issues around higher education in the US vis a vis Israel and the Israel-Hamas war and October 7. And there have been of course anti-Israel protests at your university. Recently, a kosher restaurant in DC had the windows smashed on the anniversary of Kristallnacht.
I am glad to talk about this. It’s important to note that what I’m going to say does not represent the institutional position of George Washington University in any way.
The environment on American college campuses is not very new. It’s gotten worse, but it’s something that we have felt for some time. The question of attitudes on campus about Israel, Zionism, and the Jews has become very complicated and in some ways very painful.
As a lifetime Jewish-American Zionist, I sometimes tell my friends that I have been dealing with what we call intersectionality long before it became fashionable.
One needs to keep some perspective on the whole situation… We have close to 20 million undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in American colleges and universities. We had approximately 3,000 arrested during the most difficult campus protests. You can do the math, but that’s a tiny percentage.
We had, at my university, a protest that began with probably 50 or so people, of whom the number of students we really couldn’t quite ascertain, but we knew many, if not most, were actually not GW students or affiliated with GW.
Were you affected personally? There have been reports of Jewish faculty or people with ties to Israel at various universities being threatened, picketed, accosted or worse.
I didn’t experience anything myself, but I have colleagues at the university who have told me that their students came to them very fearful, many of them in tears. They had been shouted at, they had been threatened.
I can tell you that a colleague asked me how I felt about what I was seeing on campus, and when I said it was very hurtful, the answer was, “Oh, come on, they’re just kids.”
This was very painful because it suggests an abdication of moral and professional responsibility. I consider that to be a very serious threat to the whole education enterprise.
The protests developed into more like 120 or 150 protesters. Then you had some very ugly slogans like “Jews go back to Poland.” There was one fellow carrying a sign that said, “Final Solution.”
I thought that person was clearly not a student and looked to be probably in his 40s. I had no idea where he came from. But more important than his horrible sign was the suggestion that I not take it seriously.
It’s a new academic year. It’s been a year of the conflict here. It seems like there’s not the same urgency amongst these protesters now.
By and large, it has been much quieter.
I had the pleasure of spending an hour and a half in a public interview with the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, who recently wrote a book about Israel after October 7th. We had a room of 100 plus people, students, faculty, and guests from the community. There were no protests, no agitation.
You have been extensively involved with national education, especially during the Obama administration. Now there is a strong Trump presidency coming in. It does seem that the voters in America feel that the state of higher education is a major issue. And there were very effective advertisements and talking points for the Republicans about DEI and “wokeism” in schools.
It’s a great point and it’s very complicated. I’ll tell you some of my personal reactions to this.
First of all, I’ve dedicated much of my work and much of my personal life to trying to repair some of the awful damage from America’s racial history and to finding ways to create opportunities that would at least put us more in the direction of fulfilling some of our egalitarian aspirations.
I am favorably disposed to the idea of improving the racial balance among students and faculty in institutions of higher education. I have even written about why I think affirmative action should be sustained and not ended. There is an argument for making principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion very prominent in the minds and hearts of academic leaders and academic community members.
Therefore, it is sad for me to acknowledge that some of the ways in which those programs were implemented were counterproductive and have led to this backlash, which we started seeing even before the first Trump administration.
There is now a backlash that may actually go too far in the other direction. There are things within the DEI movement that could be done better and reevaluated, absolutely. Should we abandon the effort to have more participation from people who are in communities that have suffered from real discrimination? That would be unfortunate.
One of the criticisms of DEI, especially amongst the Jewish right, is that it doesn’t have a place for the Jewish experience and corrals everyone into binary oppressor/oppressed categories.
I understand where that response is coming from. You hear prominent minority faculty joining in the slogan that Zionism is just another form of white supremacy. You have people who are not willing or able to correct that horrible misunderstanding of Zionism, of the Jewish people and of Jewish demography.
I think part of the collateral damage of the protest movement in the past year has been the further erosion of whatever coalition we were hoping to still save between the Black and Jewish communities in the United States.
When the Black Lives Matter movement decided to tell the Jewish participants they were not welcome because they might be Zionists or whatever it is, this was taken as a stinging betrayal, and an abandonment of a shared set of values that have been essential in the history of race and religious relations in the US.
So there’s work to be done here. My recommendation is that we look for strategies to mend it, not end it. There would be ways of doing that.
I have friends on what you call the Jewish right. They’re some of my best friends, and I have many good friends on the Jewish left. To tell you the truth, I think neither of them actually has it right.
But that’s easy for me to say because I like to think I’m in the middle on a lot of issues. I understand the reaction, and I can tell you that things are going on that don’t make as much news as they might.
For example, we have a program that we started at my university, which was an attempt to educate faculty in schools of education around the country on ways in which their DEI programs could be more inclusive of Jews and of problems of antisemitism and even of anti-Zionism, as if there’s a very big distinction, which I think is mostly not the case.
What we have found is a great deal of interest on the part of education school faculty in places all around the US to actually learn more about good ways to mend their DEI programs by being more inclusive of issues relating to the Jewish population and to the current conflict.
So that gives me some hope that there might be some way to maintain a collective aspiration for equity in a way that does not lead to the counterproductive and negative effects that we have seen.
What is the feeling among your educational community in the US right now? America is going to have another Trump administration, this time with a majority in the Senate and House.
We’re all dealing with a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, I think, when we see the rhetoric and the pronouncements that have been made by Trump and his team.
I don’t know. We’re all in a bit of a state of shock, to tell you the truth. Even the people who wanted Trump are in a state of shock that he won.
