The Senate voted to confirm Linda McMahon as secretary of education on Thursday following a smooth confirmation hearing. She pledged to tackle campus anti-Semitism and end DEI initiatives.
McMahon, the former World Wrestling Entertainment chief executive and Small Business Administration head during President Donald Trump’s first term, won confirmation with a 51 to 45 vote.
“Under the Biden-Harris administration, the Department of Education focused on everything but student success,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.), chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. “We need a strong leader at the Department who will get our education system back on track. Secretary McMahon is the right person for the job.”
McMahon’s ascension follows Trump’s swift rollout of executive orders targeting anti-Semitism and DEI in higher education. Just two weeks into Trump’s term, the Department of Education opened investigations into “widespread antisemitic harassment” at Columbia University and four other schools in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks. The department also scrapped $15 million in federal grants for diversity programs at three universities. The Department of Justice, meanwhile, launched a task force “to root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses.”
During her confirmation hearing, McMahon said universities that fail to protect Jewish Americans’ safety would face defunding. She also pledged to revoke foreign students’ visas if they praised Hamas and indicated she’d be open to forming an anti-Semitism commission “to evaluate the progress of universities on this issue.”
“I think that, by far, what we saw happening on our campuses was absolutely deplorable. Kids locked in libraries, afraid to come out. Now, I believe in freedom of speech on campus—open debate—and we should encourage that, but we cannot allow violence happening on our campuses. That puts all students in an unsafe place,” McMahon said.
“And if I were confirmed as the secretary of education, I would want to make sure that the presidents of those universities and those colleges are taking very strong measures not to allow those to happen. They can call in the police; they can do whatever they need to do, set standards, and to make sure those standards are upheld. We cannot allow that kind of violence to take place on our college campuses,” she added.
McMahon also criticized DEI initiatives, arguing that they promote segregation within universities.
“It was put in place ostensibly for more diversity, for equity and inclusion, and I think what we’re seeing is that it’s having an opposite effect. We are getting back to more segregating of our schools instead of having more inclusion in our schools,” she said. “When there are DEI programs that say black students need separate graduation ceremonies, or Hispanics need separate ceremonies, we are not achieving what we wanted to achieve with inclusion.”
Democrats, meanwhile, pressed McMahon on Trump’s pledge to dismantle the Department of Education. McMahon maintained that any move to eliminate the department would require congressional approval and reassured senators that federal funding for schools and universities would remain unaffected.
“Fund education freedom, not government-run systems. Listen to parents, not politicians. Build up careers, not college debt. Empower states, not special interests. Invest in teachers, not Washington bureaucrats,” McMahon said.
McMahon previously spent a year on the Connecticut board of education and is a longtime trustee at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn. She also served as chair of the America First Policy Institute.