Our colleges and universities seem to have crossed some invisible line beyond which lies de facto transformation into indoctrination camps. The illiberal impulses that have undone our universities, moreover, are now spilling into the culture at large and tearing the nation apart. After six decades of disastrous decline, culminating in today’s woke revolution, is it too late now to save the academy? Or has the very scale and visibility of the calamity spawned by decades of campus multiculturalism and political correctness (now invoked with terms ranging from “intersectionality” to “cancel culture”) created an opening for restoration? The answer begins from the essential point that systematically reforming a massive, wealthy, powerful, and deeply entrenched economic and cultural sector like the academy requires an ambitious and well-thought-out strategy, whereas the academy’s critics have devised nothing of the sort. I’m not sure we even realize that a plan is both necessary and absent. For some, the seeming invulnerability of the academy to reform—insulated as it is from public pressure by tenure, massive government subsidies, and cultural heft—discourages systematic strategizing. Others write op-eds that analyze, expose, and exhort (this was me—and a great many others—until I realized that the academy’s decline was only accelerating, and that op-eds alone are useless). Still others await a deus ex machina: higher education’s economic bubble will burst (it’s been decades since this hope was floated, and it hasn’t happened); alumni will withhold donations (they don’t); the silent majority of classically liberal faculty will finally reassert authority (they never did, and their majority is gone now); or maybe a sympathetic American president will tweet out some solution (this will never be more than a partial success in the absence of a broader strategy). Lately, some have suggested defunding the academy, as if an army of angry conservatives could actually pull that off. That gravely underestimates the forces protecting the academy from such assaults.