The American university is broken. The people running the universities know it, which is why they have redoubled their efforts to make sure you can’t do anything about it.
The story has been told so many times in conservative circles that retelling it risks being a bore: William F. Buckley warned us in 1951 about the free fall that had already begun in higher education. Allan Bloom sounded the alarm in 1987. Ross Douthat offered his critique in 2005. A generation of conservatives has poured time, treasure, and talent into reforming higher ed. We’ve funded centers, endowed chairs, launched institutes, filed lawsuits, and written enough op-eds to fill the Library of Alexandria. Yet still—still—the average graduate of an American university is more likely to be able to explain the nuances of “systemic oppression” than to tell you who wrote The Federalist Papers.
That should be a sign that the old approach, whatever its merits, was fundamentally wrong—not because the diagnosis was wrong, but because the strategy was. As Aristotle says, we should deliberate about means, not ends. Conservatives have been trying to reform the university from within a system that is designed, at every level, to resist exactly the kind of reformation we seek. It is time to stop playing a rigged game and build our own system.
The Unassailable Fortress
To understand why reforming higher education is so difficult, you must first understand what the American university used to be. It was once a place where the Puritan Cotton Mather could write lovingly about Harvard’s mission to train ministers for the Reformed churches of New England. Now Harvard is dead, as the departure of James Hankins clarifies. What we have now is something else entirely.