Presented by BP.

Good morning, everyone. I'm Playbook Deputy Editor Zach Stanton. It's Thursday, March 20th,

and this morning at 501 a.m., it officially became spring. Here's what's driving the day.

Education is at the top of the agenda today as President Donald Trump is expected to sign a long-awaited directive to officially wind down the U.S. Department of Education.

According to a summary obtained by Politico, Trump's pending executive order directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take all necessary steps to facilitate her department's closure, end quote, return education authority to the states, unquote.

Meanwhile, Trump's war on some of America's most elite universities continues a pace today as action targeting Columbia and Penn,

while fellow Ivy League College Dartmouth charts a slightly different path.

Here to chat with me about that is Politica White House reporter and West

Wayne Playbook co-author, Irie Centner. Good morning, Irie. Good morning, Zach.

So right now, university leaders are balancing a few different needs. There's the need to

maintain strong relationships with the federal government for funding, while at the same time

defending free speech rights and protecting non-citizen students.

Dartmouth has found one way of navigating that.

How are they striking that balance and how does it differ from what we're seeing elsewhere?

So I think it's important first to note that Dartmouth is the only school within the Ivy League conference that appears to have escaped the wrath of

the Trump administration. And so all of the other seven schools within the Ivy League are either

under investigation or have had certain amounts of funding frozen or both over all of these

sorts of culture war issues or allegations of anti-Semitism that has happened on those campuses.

And Dartmouth clearly wants to keep it this way. And so one pretty notable move that they made earlier this week was to choose Matt Raymer, who is the former chief counsel at the Republican National Committee, to serve as its general counsel.

And he's not only going to be the top lawyer at the college, but he's also going to serve on the Dartmouth president's leadership team.

And he's also going to oversee the school's office of visa and immigration services, which is notable

because in January, he publicly backed President Donald Trump's push to end

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