Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has been engaged in a high-stakes conflict with America’s elite universities and, by proxy, American universities as a whole. The administration’s supporters have applauded the president’s decision to strip billions of dollars in funding from the Ivy League, while critics have warned that such actions are an overreach and will have a negative impact on the hard sciences.
Beneath the dueling headlines, however, there appears to be an uneasy, if often unstated, agreement: Something is deeply wrong with academia, and no one is quite sure what to do about it.
Conservatives have long made the argument that academia has been corrupted. And since the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 and the Hamas terror campaign of 2023, an increasing number of centrists and liberals have joined the chorus, recognizing that many once-great universities had been captured by destructive ideologies and are no longer truth-seeking institutions.
I have been involved in the campaign for higher education reform for a number of years, working with a coalition that exposed former Harvard president Claudine Gay for plagiarism, abolished DEI in dozens of state universities, and transformed New College of Florida, once a haven for left-wing activist ideologies, into a classical liberal arts institution.
These initiatives have been significant, but piecemeal. Now, it is time to systematize the lessons of these campaigns and to enact a program of national reform.
