Reforming the university from within

The pursuit of truth at universities is being hampered by discrimination, a limited scope of intellectual perspective, and unpunished disruption. The federal government has recently been trying to address this, but it would be much better for universities to clean themselves up. If I were the president of the University of Chicago, here are the reforms I would immediately institute:

1. Stop discriminating

   1. Do admissions based on merit (probably just SAT and GPA). Make the admissions algorithm and (anonymized) admissions data public so everyone can be sure that there’s no funny business.

   2. Make it very clear to all units that no discrimination in faculty hiring will be tolerated, even if you think it’s for a really, really good reason. Actually punish chairs and deans if you find out they’ve been discriminating through loss of leadership position and reduction in salary.

   3. End all DEI programs and let all administrators associated with them go.

2. Increase the viewpoint and political diversity of the faculty in a way that doesn’t infringe on the academic freedom of faculty.

   1. Issue a statement acknowledging the the Humanities Division, the Social Sciences Division, the Harris School of Public Policy, Crown Family School of Social Work, and the Divinity school are not functioning properly. Specifically, too many (but not all) of the faculty are focused on activism rather than scholarship and hiring has been hijacked to effectively exclude certain viewpoints. This cannot continue. That said, these units are important components of the university and must be preserved after some adjustments.

   2. Appoint new deans and department chairs in these units. Personally choose them and ensure that they are committed to increasing viewpoint and political diversity among the faculty. Some of these may have to be outside hires.

   3. Stop doing normal faculty hiring in these units and instead do cluster hires focused on increasing diversity of thought. These clusters could focus on, for example, virtue ethics, military history, natural law, American founding fathers and founding documents, Christian thought, great texts of the West, and other areas that would expand the scope of intellectual investigation at the University of Chicago. The topics would be specifically tailored to catch scholars who tend to think about the world differently from those we have now. Departments could hire new faculty only through these cluster hires.

   4. Fund centers associated with each of the cluster hires, which the new faculty from that cluster hire would automatically join. Personally pick a senior outside hire as the first hire in each cluster and appoint him or her as the director of the new center. Focus University funding to these units on the new centers.

   5. Appoint a vocal Trump supporter as the director of the Institute of Politics. So far the directors have all been partisan Democrats, and the content has reflected this. We would benefit from hearing more varied perspectives.

   6. Stop this process once the faculty of these units have opinions roughly spanning those of the public at large, rather than concentrated in a very narrow band of the public opinion spectrum. This might take 5-10 years.

3. Set up mechanisms to enforce reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on speech and protest. Most universities, including the University of Chicago, had good rules in place to prevent the chaos and disruption of last spring, they just didn’t enforce them or punish offenders. The critical failure mechanism is that the faculty currently enforce discipline and they are doing it in a highly biased way. The solution is to outsource decisions on punishment to an external body, such as a neutral law firm, who will investigate a complaint and issue a recommended punishment based on a pre-defined set of rules, which the President will then enforce.