Can Universities Be Reformed?

Given¹ everything we now know about institutional inertia, bureaucratic constraints, faculty governance, accreditation capture, federal funding streams, and political realities, is meaningful reform of existing universities even possible? Some very serious thinkers (Peter Thiel and Jordan Peterson, among others) have concluded that the answer is no. In this view, the only realistic path is to build entirely new institutions from scratch. Others believe that a combination of legislative action, donor leverage, regental authority, and new centers can still move the needle. What is your stance on this?

Before elaborating, here is a short summary of my answer.

The probability that universities can reform themselves from within, in the absence of powerful external pressure, is very close to zero.

External pressure by local governments can be successful, despite enormous internal resistance, in creating islands of excellence within public universities, as is the case with the Center for Intellectual Freedom (CIF) here at the University of Iowa, or the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, and a few other examples, all in red or purple states. Insofar as these new centers are viewed as unacceptable intrusions within the bodies of their universities, they remain highly vulnerable to the vagaries of local political trends.

Relentless pressure from a reform-oriented federal government may, in principle, have a large impact over a long period of time, unfortunately a lot longer than typical election cycles. Thus, everything that is now being pushed by the current administration can be reversed by a new democratic Congress or a new President inimical to reform.

People who have seriously thought about the state of our universities are not only skeptical about the possibility of reform from within, but are also pessimistic even about the possibility of creating successful new universities.² Peter Thiel, for example, believes that the expenses involved are extremely high and the odds for success too small in the current, entrenched cultural environment, hostile as it is to western-centered notions of value and merit and inimical to the ideals of the US founders and more broadly to those we call “Western Civilization.” Though the reasons for this situation are complex, the result is a vicious cycle which is depressingly simple to describe.³

The feedback-elite producing mechanism-by which the elite universities educate those who will later have an immeasurable impact back on them through grants, legal mandates, civil rights legislation, donations, or as woke educators of the next generations of students, may well provide the best explanation for why the woke disease is spreading so fast, and not only in universities but in all important US institutions.

I am sorry if my assessment appears too pessimistic. My intention is not to discourage people from trying, far from it since I consider myself firmly in the camp of reformers, but rather to draw attention to the enormous obstacles we face.

Corruption of the traditional understanding of the mission of the universities

To understand the obstacles for reform you must first understand how the mission of American universities has been corrupted in the first place. This is a long story which has been brilliantly tackled by my colleagues I. Marinovic and Z. Patterson.

They gave us excellent analyses of how Enlightenment ideals, centered around faith in reason and science, inherent individual rights and skepticism towards tradition and religion, have ultimately devolved into the present belief system based on hard-core materialism and its ideological derivatives: Marxism, neo-Marxism, deconstructionism, anti-Westernism, and anti-capitalistism that shape the belief system of our intellectual elites. As in Berlioz’s “Symphony Fantastique” what started as a romantic dream about the ability of humans to improve their condition through reason has transmogrified into a witches’ sabbath of kooky beliefs, sold to the public in the name of “Social Justice.”

Below are a few reflections of my own⁴ of how this belief system manifests itself in the modern universities.

As many have pointed out, the most ubiquitous form of corruption of our universities is manifest in the acronym DEI and the uniquely destructive bureaucratic institution created to pursue and defend the ideology encoded by the deceptively friendly words Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

DEI is, by design, opposed to individual merit as the only admissible criteria of selection, hiring, and promotion and is, by necessity, inimical to free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, and viewpoint diversity. These are all self-evident within the framework of the traditional foundational goals of the University- uncompromising dedication to Truth and pursuit of wisdom-but treated with suspicion by current university administrations. DEI has eroded these goals by demands made in the name of Social Justice (SJ), at variance with the traditional telos.

As direct forms of discrimination against minorities are now virtually non-existent in academia, discrimination has been redefined in terms of implicit bias, that is an invisible, structural form of bigotry that is suddenly everywhere. Like witchcraft, this form of prejudice cannot be directly measured, but it surely manifests through its harmful results. As Inquisition was once needed to combat witchcraft and other ideological deviances, the immense DEI bureaucracy had to be created to combat this terrible disease. Once Justice was reformulated in terms of equality of results rather than color-blind, measurable, notions of individual performance, it became untenable to insist on merit and the pursuit of Truth; they had to be abandoned or redefined whenever they came into conflict with the new orthodoxy.

Little by little entire departments, especially in humanities and social sciences, became populated by people selected less on academic credentials and more on thinly disguised quotas required by DEI. When the process of change was deemed too slow, entire new programs and departments were created whose most obvious mission appears to be that of advancing the ideology of DEI and creating its future elite cadres, particularly those who populate the ever-increasing university administrations. Once you have created enough woke tenured faculty and legions of woke administrators it becomes close to impossible to reverse the trend.

As everybody but Eisgruber (the president of my university) knows, the telos of the modern university is no longer the search for Truth, wherever it leads, through the promotion of excellence and individual merit. It is instead something else altogether, a tenuous compromise between that old telos and pursuit of social justice through the mantra of DEI.

Not all disciplines are equally affected by the woke disease; in fact, our elite institutions continue to be unmatched in Science and Engineering. The degree of infection of a particular academic discipline appears to be inversely proportional to the level of its mathematical sophistication. The STEM disciplines are thus least affected and among social sciences, economic and business departments appear less compromised than sociology, anthropology or history departments. This pattern appears also to correlate with political orientation. Thus, according to Langbert (2018), the D/R ratio varies from around 5.5 and 6.3 in professional schools and the hard sciences to 31.9 in humanities and 108 in what are called interdisciplinary studies (such as Gender, Black and Peace studies). There is also a factor of 3 difference between the corresponding ratios for women and men faculty, consistent with the higher proportion of women represented in social sciences and humanities.

Humanities, the core of a liberal arts education, are now terminally infected by various versions of neo-Marxist, deconstructionist, anti-colonialist critical theories. While it may appear that the relatively healthy state of STEM disciplines is enough to assuage the worst fears about the state of our universities, I hold that in fact the opposite is true. A healthy liberal arts education is ultimately more important to the health of the entire society, and thus indirectly to the STEM disciplines themselves, than the relatively benign, present state of STEM. The reasons for this are clear, for a society may still prosper without being dominant in the sciences and technology but cannot survive if its cultural institutions are compromised by an ideology which attacks its core foundations. It suffices to point out that STEM majors rarely become journalists, cultural figures, politicians, heads of unions, business leaders or leaders of any other important opinion shaping or decision-making institutions.

Main obstacles to reform

I give below a litany of all the obstacles to reform that I can think of. Most of them are ideological, based on the dominant beliefs of the academic and intellectual classes. The others are based on economic or legal factors.

Political ineffectiveness of conservative principles

The problem of reforming our universities is mainly one of restoration of the old conservative principles that used to govern them. It can thus be framed in the broader context of the conflict between the progressive ideology of the Left and the reactionary conservatism of the Right.

Alas, the Left has an important structural advantage in its debate with conservative ideas, that is those anchored in America’s founding principles- individual civil liberties, limited government, and the rule of law. Conservatives, who have a visceral understanding of the inherent conflict between the basic human aspirations for freedom, justice and equality, personal security, self-expression, spirituality, or the rights of the individual versus societal cohesion, are in the difficult position of having to find the right balance between them, which appear, inevitably, as uninspiring compromises.

This leaves them vulnerable to attacks from the Left which, is, or pretends to be, intolerant of any societal imperfections. The Left vehemently insists that this or that form of inequality is unacceptable and never bothers to explain how its vision of more equality is not incompatible with freedom, or how extensive individual freedoms for some do not interfere with the freedom or personal safety of others.

American conservatives are thus perpetually on the defensive, in the difficult position of explaining the complex abstract ideas of separation of powers, restrained governments, personal responsibility, etc., while the Left insists that these contribute to the specific suffering of concrete groups of human beings. The Left appeals very effectively to emotions, professes to act on behalf of an ever-expanding definition of human rights, and is constantly on the offensive. Conservative often cave in to the onslaught, which renders them politically ineffective.

The problem with academic freedom

To restore our universities to their former telos, DEI must be abolished, yet there is no internal mechanism within our universities that can push for this: there are simply too many tenured professors and bureaucrats who owe their positions to DEI. Not just woke professors who defend the status quo would have to be fired to get rid of DEI, but entire academic disciplines would have to be abolished. Not surprisingly, those who oppose such measures invoke academic freedom in their defense, and here is the rub: how can we, reformers, justify measures that go against the common understanding of academic freedom, something crucial to the very telos we want to affirm and defend? The problem is that academic freedom (AF) is essential to a well-functioning university but a huge impediment to reform of a corrupted one. Yet, unfortunately, the juxtaposition of these two beloved words, academic and freedom, are used as a mantra by both reformers and defenders of the status quo and few have made a serious effort to clarify their meaning and explain their obvious conflict. AF is used to defend all possible aberrations of the modern university and is often confused with the far more extensive notion of free speech.

Elite, woke producing, feedback mechanism

As I have mentioned above, modern universities are at the center of a vicious cycle by which they educate generations of woke leaders who, once they achieve positions of power, are able to steer their alma maters and the entire society further away from their traditional goals and values.

There is plenty of evidence that universities have indeed moved way to the Left, but nowhere is this more evident than in the humanities, which are now terminally infected by various radical versions of anti-western, anti-capitalist, anti-science, deconstructionist critical theories. The STEM disciplines are less affected, yet this is of relatively little consequence to the feed-back mechanism since STEM majors rarely become influential in shaping the cultural and political course of the country.

Lack of autonomy and uniformity

Universities, whether state or private, have gradually become less autonomous. This is due primarily to state and federal mandates, misinterpreted civil rights legislation, certification, large infusion of money through grants and donations, etc. This dependence on external factors explains the current paradox that, despite the competitive spirit of the US economy, almost all universities look alike. You would hope that if one gets mired in Social Justice policies another one would get a competitive advantage by doubling down on excellence and merit, but this is not happening.

Unreasonable university expansion and tenure

The original concept of the university system was to provide an elite education for a relatively low number of highly motivated students. That is certainly not the case today. Thus 39% of young adults (ages 18-24) were enrolled in college in 2022, while roughly 62% of recent high school graduates went straight to college that year. This, of course, led to an expansion of both the professoriate and administrative bureaucracy. It has also led to lower standards, lack of adequate job prospects for graduates and loss of institutional prestige.

Peter Thiel compares the present situation of our universities with that of a large metropolis, claiming that they are both examples of diabolic, immortal, creatures, too large and indispensable to fail despite their permanent state of corruption and dysfunction. As such, Thiel argues, they can indefinitely resist demands for change.

Any serious reform would require a serious retrenchment of the size of universities. US businesses are well equipped to do that by job cuts, something inconceivable in the modern university system due to its tenure policies. Tenure is justified on the basis that it ensures freedom to pursue uncharted and political risky avenues of research and scholarship. But, just as large endowments have not prevented universities from becoming less intellectually diverse, tenure has not had much effect on making the professoriate, arguably the most privileged class of individuals in our society, less risk-averse.

Though there are a few cases when courageous individuals have publicly supported unpopular causes, most professors, freed from worrying about their employment by tenure, are still too mindful about their careers or reputation to take controversial positions. Moreover, even though tenure provides protection for professors who betray the mission of the university through shoddy scholarship, faulty data, plagiarism, or inadmissible political activism and indoctrination in the classroom, it has not helped, at least in some notable cases, individuals whose heterodox opinions displeased their employers.

Contrary to common opinion, I believe that tenure incentivizes junior faculty to play it safe and pursue low risk directions which they believe will get them tenure. Once they have tenure, most continue, by inertia or in expectation of promotions, to play it safe.

Dismal state of the elementary educational system

No serious, sustainable, reform of higher learning will be possible without a major overhaul of the K-12 educational system. Indeed, tomorrow’s college students are educated, or rather ill-educated, today by recent, poorly educated, graduates of our universities-another sad aspect of the elite producing feedback mechanism mentioned above. The direct culprits in this sorry situation are schools of education, teacher’s unions, and accreditation mafia, all seriously infected by Wokeism and incompetence, but ultimately this is a systemic failure of our entire educational system.

Conclusion

Back to the main theme of this article - can universities be reformed? Count me a pessimist, if you think that this could be done by internal reforms, as many well intentioned, but rather naive colleagues believe is still possible. To use the crude cancer analogy, an organism affected by a rapidly spreading cancer does not get any better without massive intervention by surgery, chemical and radiation treatment or by less-intrusive immunotherapy treatments.

A better analogy⁵, given the ideological nature of the disease, is the process of denazification pursued by the occupying powers of West Germany after World War II. This was in fact a process of restoration, in that, once the cadres of the Nazi regime were purged and a new constitution was adopted, the country recovered its sovereignty, that is, the freedom to shape its own destiny.

Can such a process take place within our university system? I am a skeptic hoping to be proved wrong. The fundamental difficulty is that the process cannot be localized to the university system itself, but, just as in the case of denazification, it must be extended to the full cultural environment of the country. This is, of course, where the comparison breaks down, for there is no authority such as the Allied Control Council in Germany between 1945 and 1949, to impose something akin to denazification.

In the absence of such an authority there remains the hope that, given appropriate leadership, and sufficient time, conservatives could replicate the extraordinarily successful march through the institutions achieved by the progressive Left in the last 75 years. This can only be done by pursuing every possible means, including legislative and judicial action, donor leverage, regental authority, the creation of centers of excellence, new universities, new academies, new cultural institutions, new media, or the use of technology, such as AI, to decentralize the elementary educational system and make it more responsive to parents. There are signs, such as this very event of the opening of the Center for Intellectual Freedom here in Iowa, that such a process is already taking place. Among other such developments one can mention the experiment going on at the University of Austin, the new American Academy of Sciences and Letters, or the remarkable success of The Free Press, as an example of the new media. ​The dysfunction is global, requiring an ​“all of the above approach.”

As more people of good faith and moral courage are fed up with the current pathologies of our cultural and educational elites and take steps to fight them, not only by demonstrating the intellectual superiority of conservative ideas but also, through effective organization and political action, I see no reason why such a process could not eventually succeed, hopefully in less time that it took the Left to achieve its present dominance of the cultural space.

1. The text was adapted from my address at the university of Iowa on the occasion of the opening of its Center for Intellectual Freedom.

2. The University of Austin is trying to prove these skeptics wrong. Let's hope that it succeeds.

3. See my Tablet article “Universities Are Making Us Dumber.”

4. Based on my articles “Universities Are Making Us Dumber,” Tablet Feb 26, 2024, and “Principles That Should Stand at The Foundation of Universities,” Heterodox STEM, March 30, 2025.

5. This analogy with denazification is also tenuous, but I admit that I don't have a better one.