Philanthropists are overlooking a proven, potent method of systemic reform in higher education.
Is there any institution in the United States that, though built on ideals of political neutrality, is more politically biased, more hard left, than the college campus? Is any institution more resistant to the smallest efforts at conservative reform? I don’t think so and history doesn’t, either. It’s been 70 years since God and Man at Yale, 37 since The Closing of the American Mind, and 20 since the founding of conservative centers such as the James Madison Program at Princeton and the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado. Higher education is more progressivist and fixated on identity than ever before.
It is true that conservative philanthropy has stepped up to support the aforementioned conservative centers. I led one at Emory University, starting in 2007, called the Program in Democracy and Citizenship, which prospered because of grants from the Thomas Smith Foundation. While thousands of students have benefitted from these initiatives, the “system” (to use a favorite word of the left) remains a partisan enterprise.
It’s frustrating, especially in secure red states where a conservative citizenry must finance leftist universities whose professors and administrators look upon said citizens with disdain. Personnel at state universities are government workers, but they don’t think of themselves that way. Faculty members function more as an independent class, ideologically and intellectually separate from the general population. They can afford to separate themselves because they enjoy tenure and because academic freedom and faculty prerogatives have become synonymous in academic and journalistic circles. They have power and they know it. What dean will challenge the “studies” departments to drop their activist orientation and hire some conservatives? If he does, his career will end. What lone conservative professor will object when his department’s graduate admissions committee pledges (behind closed doors) to favor underrepresented minorities? To do so is to become even more isolated from his colleagues.
In short, improvement will never come from the professor and administrator ranks. Incentives are squarely against it, not to mention the reigning dogmas. There is, however, a method of systemic reform that hasn’t been tried—or rather, it has been tried once, successfully so, and is ready to be implemented elsewhere. I laid out the plan in a short essay in City Journal in July. The heart of the plan involves the board of trustees; the sole example of it in action is New College of Florida. In January 2023, six individuals were sworn in as new trustees for that small public college in Sarasota, including me, Christopher Rufo, Charles Kessler, and Matthew Spalding. The campus was long known as a hotbed of progressive values and offbeat kids, a school based on the Oxford tutorial model, which encourages independent student work and does not assign grades. The new trustees appeared to represent the very opposite of that progressive vision. We were not the popular kids on campus, of course, and hundreds turned out to our first meeting to denounce us. The media and national scholarly organizations joined in, issuing regular formal and informal vilifications of us.
We expected that response. Indeed, our adversaries were correct in their concerns, given their interests and values. We proceeded to fire the president and hire a new one, fire the general counsel, shut down all DEI operations, deny early tenure to five candidates (in the face of universal faculty support), terminate the gender studies concentration, and steer a general curricular revision in a classical direction. Faculty resistance, community protest, criticism from the scholarly guilds, and media attacks didn't matter. We just did it.
The official story was that a liberal arts treasure was being destroyed by a bunch of reactionary hacks doing the bidding of a bulldog Republican governor. That story was widely believed. One-third of the school’s faculty departed, prompting news reports of a "brain drain" in the Sunshine State. Ms. Magazine issued a statement asking the victims of our actions to report their experience to the periodical for publication. It seemed that our critics would rather watch New College collapse than see it prosper under conservative leadership. Well, it's been a disappointing year for the naysayers. New College president Richard Corcoran secured millions of dollars to improve campus grounds, facilities, and dorms, which were a mess. Forty new teachers have been hired. Most important of all, in fall 2023 the school welcomed its largest matriculating class ever. For years, enrollment had been stuck below 700 students; this year it will exceed 900, and we expect that number to enter the four figures next year.
You will not hear of these positive developments in the media. Liberal academics and journalists want to keep news of conservative success under wraps. They do not want to publicize the effectiveness of the trustee method of reform. It is up to us, then, to spread the word: our work in Sarasota provides a lesson for conservative philanthropists interested in higher education. It spotlights an economical method of breaking the ideological stranglehold on campus. The reform has worked because Governor DeSantis identified how change can be made to an entire institution by three or four people and without large expenditure (replacing a progressive trustee with an active conservative trustee is free). The trustees are a golden opportunity for change—not prestigious appointments reserved for prosperous, well-connected individuals loyal to the institution. Trustees are the ones who have final say on a host of crucial matters, not the faculty, the deans, big donors, or the president.
Trustees rarely exercise this power, instead rubber-stamping the recommendations that come before them. They're faithful to the status quo; they don't want conflict. Most of them come from the worlds of business, law, and politics, which leaves them ill-equipped to disrupt the ideological passions raging in academia. Governors in red states dislike the leftist condition of the campus, but they, too, are unaccustomed to academic dispute. They have the power to appoint trustees, but it doesn't occur to them to put intelligent, experienced warriors on the board who know how intramural politics work.
Here is where conservative philanthropy may play a role in advancing the trustee method. Governors and current trustees need to be educated on the power of the position. They need to learn of the biased decisions faculty and administrators make behind closed doors. The academic jargon that cloaks many of the ideological shenanigans must be decoded. Two or three trustees familiar with academic culture wars can translate these discourses and practices into easily understandable terms.
Here is a practical first step: a donor could create a small troupe of experts who would run seminars for governors, relevant staff members, and trustees, much like the weekend meetings for federal judges supported by the Olin Foundation in the 1980s and ’90s. These seminars could present an overview of higher education, how it has decayed, and what trustees are able to do to fix it. Or, they could be tailored to specific states, to places where a public university might be ready for improvement.
This group of experts would identify governors, local donors, and potential trustees ready to be enlisted in the plan. Group members would meet with current trustees at Red State U who have been appointed by Republicans to outline the reforms that they must enact. They would survey the universities in a state and identify targets for change, such as a general education requirement that veers into political advocacy and must be dropped. They would counsel the governor and trustees on how to respond to the media attacks that inevitably follow conservative change. The success of this group would be easy to assess: Did its actions produce a less biased campus? Did its consultations embolden decision makers? Did the reform give the governor a political win?
I think these questions can be answered in the affirmative if the right people are assembled. I look forward to hearing of philanthropists who agree.
For more insight into higher ed—and what can and must be done to reform it—join us in Malibu, CA, on October 23 and 24, for the Center for Civil Society's fourth annual Givers, Doers, & Thinkers conference, covering "From K to Campus: How the Education Reform Movement Can Reshape Higher Ed." At this conference we’ll explore what we’ve learned from the K-12 ed reform movement, and how those lessons can be applied in higher education reform. We’ll ask: Can the majority of campuses be saved? And is it time to take a significantly different approach to reforming higher education? Dr. Bauerlein will share further thoughts on higher ed as the keynote speaker.