Frederick Hess ponders recent efforts to counter left-wing bias in American universities.
Conservatives’ trust in higher education has plummeted since 2015, and for good reason. A deluge of canceled speakers, tent encampments, DEI depravity, grade inflation, and out-of-control borrowing has marked the culmination of decades of institutional rot that has turned brand-name campuses into bastions of left-wing ideology.
This has made the right’s recent counteroffensive truly remarkable. This spring, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a profile of Harvey C. Mansfield, Harvard University’s iconic conservative professor of government. It observed: “Mansfield spent six decades championing lost causes. At 94, he’s suddenly winning.”
Big, if true.
Have we turned the corner on higher ed? The signs are certainly auspicious….
… More than 150 universities have adopted a formal policy of institutional neutrality on political matters — a stark reversal from the virtue-signaling wokeism of the early 2020s that produced campus pronouncements decrying everything from police brutality to fossil fuels. Meanwhile, since 2021, nearly two dozen new programs in Western civilization have emerged at universities across the country to champion republican virtue and teach the Great Books with academic rigor. One heartening consequence of all this activity is that, for the first time in decades, a vibrant job market is emerging for conservative historians, humanities scholars, and political scientists. …
… All in all, there’s much to suggest that we’ve turned a corner. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s not clear that the shifts on campus are as profound or durable as we might wish.
A telling illustration came in August, when Secretary of Education Linda McMahon issued a genial “Call to Action” to campus leaders, imploring them to explain themselves to the American people and clarify their commitment to teaching and research. While reasonable enough, the letter marked a head-spinning retreat from the ominous, threatening “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that the administration issued a year ago. That statutorily unmoored exercise in overreach had gone nowhere, while making the administration look less like a bulwark of academic integrity and more like a playground bully.
