The American University Deserves This
And will be better off accepting it
Writing at the Liberal Patriot, John Halpin calls on the American university to recognize it has lost, and must regain, the public trust. “There are three primary reasons for declining confidence in higher education — political agendas, colleges not teaching relevant skills, and cost,” Halpin says.
Colleges are not producing graduates that society wants to hire, anymore. The academy has failed the society it serves, becoming a radicalization engine that charges exorbitant tuition instead of turning out the knowledgeable, productive citizens needed for the future of American civilization.
“Gallup asked the roughly one-third of Americans who lack confidence in higher education to describe why they feel this way,” Halpin writes. Emphasis added: “At the top of the list of concerns, more than four in ten respondents cited some aspect of perceived political agendas at work in colleges and universities — ideas including ‘indoctrination,’ ‘brainwashing,’ and ‘propaganda’ or colleges being ‘too liberal’ with ‘too much concentration on diversity, equity, and inclusion.’”
Last year, before Election Day, I asked readers of this website to imagine Christopher Rufo as Secretary of Education in a second Donald Trump administration, and the chaos that would ensue as liberal arts education was forced to clean up its act.
No more plagiarists would be allowed to run Ivy League schools, I wrote. The hallowed universities which allowed Hamasaboo encampments to interfere with the education of their Jewish students, that gave hecklers a veto to shut down debates and physically assault speakers, would learn to fear their government more than the overgrown children who tear up their diplomas because it’s what they imagine a real communist rebel would do.
It was only a thought experiment, of course. I never expected Rufo to actually become Secretary of Education. Instead, I wanted to describe the backlash abroad in the land amid the resentments that higher education has engendered among ‘normie’ Americans in just the last decade.
Campus Marxists do not understand normal Americans at all because they are almost never poor. As privileged children at elite institutions, their politics represent a rarefied view from nowhere that fails to resonate with voters. Steve Kornacki laid out the numbers last week.
We see this — white women with a college degree. The only group of white voters that is on the left. “Do you want to continue DEI programs or do you think they should be ended?” White men, no degree? “End it.” White men with a degree? “End it,” they say. White women no degree — “end it,” they say. White women with a college degree? Completely different. By a nearly 40 point margin they say to continue DEI.
Here is the video clip:
This is what Rufo and conservative critics of the academy call “the longhouse.” Liberal feminism pushes out wrongthink in the name of protecting the marginalized minority and the progressive omnicause. Because American society has come so far in tolerating and accepting difference, however, the academy had to invent new marginalized minorities to protect.
Thus the neologisms of our time: “BIPOC,” “Latinx,” “nobinary,” and the ever-expanding LGBTQ2SIAlphabet+ “community.” A decade ago, college age kids used Tumblr to concretize their leftist identity politics as personality profiles. Professors enthusiastically embraced this trend, empowered it, and provided the intellectual justifications for their nonsensical ‘civil rights’ agitation.
Democrats are now a minority party that speaks for a minority of Americans, and they have started to reveal themselves as minoritarians. Last week, DNC Vice Chair David Hogg opined that school shootings and the “climate crisis” are a result of “democracy” not working.
American voters have never treated the climate as a crisis. It has always been a crisis to idealistic people, though. To close this divide, Hogg says that Democrats must “stand up to special interests,” which will somehow convince a majority of voters to change their minds about what their interests are.
In order to realize the revolution, Hogg wants to spend $20 million of dark money through his own political organization to challenge elected Democrats with younger, more revolutionary ones. He wants Hakeem Jeffries, who lost his seat in the House of Representatives last November, to lead the party. Hogg is buying influence over the party to make way for his choice of leader.
Hogg became famous for attending a high school where a mass shooting took place. He has become exactly what Americans have learned to expect from Harvard University, where he graduated in 2023.
The Trump administration is currently using its federal funding leverage to punish Harvard for defying civil rights law and precedents. While this is a popular move with Americans, Democrats are aghast at this attack on the beating heart of the liberal administrative elite. They have gotten away with doing whatever they want for so long that accountability feels like a crime, to them.
Democrats wonder why their polls keep getting worse even though Donald Trump’s approval rating is underwater. As an official, elected representative of the party in the media, Hogg is a constant reminder to non-college voters that they loathe their ivory tower elites as well as the political party which represents the interests of those elites.
This act is stale. Hogg brings nothing fresh to it. Harvard is making Democrats that Americans love to hate. As neo-reactionary writer Curtis Yarvin would put it, “the Cathedral” that includes corporate media, Harvard, and the Democratic Party produces this kind of collectivist priest.
Hogg knows what is best for democracy. He knows best what democracy needs, for he has been to Harvard, and so CBS asks him what they should think about things. Americans demand authenticity and this exchange is inauthentic to them. The Harvard brand is now associated in the public mind with flimflam and political spin.
As I wrote a year ago this week, rather than a broad defunding of all universities, “targeted sanctions” should zeroize budgets for arts departments which teach radical protest rather than the arts, history departments which teach ideology rather than historiography, social science departments which produce shoddy woo-woo in place of replicable research, and so on.
Accountability must reign, and justice roll down like waters. Academics who produce “gender trouble” must become trouble. All the dead wood of the academy must be forced to justify its existence or else be cut down for fuel without fear or favor, I wrote.
Otherwise, academic superstitions will become so noxious to democracy that Trump, or his successor, receives popular endorsement to imitate Henry VIII shutting down the monasteries. Blowback could reach historic proportions. The present turmoil in academic hiring is nothing compared to what is possible if the academy still resists reform.
Rufo, who has largely focused his advocacy on reforming higher education, says that Trump is winning his war against DEI on campus. Furthermore, “the political Right has come to accept that if there must be a civil-rights regime, it should be one of its own making. Rather than continue to defer to left-wing interpretations of civil-rights law, the Right can now advance a framework grounded in colorblind equality, not racialist ideology.”
“Critics have called this approach ‘weaponizing civil-rights law,’” Rufo writes. “But civil-rights laws have always been a weapon — conservatives have finally decided to wield it.” Harvard was not alone in their defiance of Supreme Court decisions against racist admissions practices, but they are the single most prominent example that Trump can make to encourage the others to stop.
Likewise, Columbia is serving as an example to discourage universities from coddling terrorist groupies on campus, while UPenn earned Title IX enforcement action by putting Lia Thomas in the locker room with Riley Gaines. Such actions are popular with a supermajority of Americans. Democrats are the only ones defending these institutions, now.
Rufo thinks that Princeton Christopher Eisgruber, with whom he has held a very spirited public dispute over academic freedom, “understands neither the argument against him nor, frankly, his own.” Like too many of his colleagues, “Eisgruber claims to be defending a noble cause — America’s civil-rights tradition. In reality, he is defending his university’s policies of racialist discrimination.” He is too out of touch.
Partisanized inversions of reality and common sense abound in the academy. Politics infuse everything, making popular culture insufferable and public discourse repellent. The ‘queering’ of core American values at the university has gone too far for average people.
Faculty cadres who made war on the United States and our way of life can either participate in a newly revived tradition of viewpoint diversity now, and let their ideas win on merit, or else go extinct in the future. It is up to them.
Trump's Tariff Guru Explains It All For You
Stephen Miran held his opinions about tariffs and trade deficits long before he became Donald Trump’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. His 41-page paper on the topic, “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System,” drew a fair bit of attention from econ geeks when he published it last November following Trump’s election victory. However, his face has only become familiar to average Americans in recent days as he has been called upon to explain the administration’s tariff policy.
There’s a real discussion to be had about the loss of public trust in higher education. John Halpin rightly points to politicization, soaring tuition, and a mismatch between college learning and job skills. But this piece hijacks that legitimate critique and drives it into the ditch of reactionary grievance, culture war maximalism, and anti-intellectual fantasy.
From a classical liberal and small-d democratic standpoint, the call to defund universities, purge arts and social science departments, and discipline faculty who challenge conservative orthodoxies isn’t reform — it’s authoritarian overreach masquerading as populism. When you propose “targeted sanctions” against departments based on their politics and flirt with “Henry VIII-style” shutdowns of universities, you’ve abandoned the liberal commitment to open inquiry.
This essay collapses into conspiratorial rhetoric — “Hamasaboo encampments,” “the Cathedral,” “queering core American values.” These are the language of moral panic, not reasoned policy. It’s one thing to criticize excesses in DEI; it’s quite another to frame the entire academic enterprise as a Marxist indoctrination factory that needs state retribution. That’s not restoring balance. That’s staging a revenge fantasy.
Christopher Rufo, the intellectual lodestar of this crusade, openly brags about “weaponizing” civil rights law to serve partisan goals. He’s not advancing classical liberal values; he’s proposing an inverse version of what he claims to oppose — using state power to impose ideological conformity. That’s not viewpoint diversity; it’s state-sanctioned dogma. His vision of reform requires coercion, not persuasion — a betrayal of the very constitutional principles he claims to defend.
The caricatures are telling. David Hogg is smeared not for his arguments but because he’s a Harvard grad and a gun control advocate. “White women with college degrees” are cast as outliers — as though the presence of educated, liberal-leaning women in public discourse is a sign of democratic decay. And entire disciplines — history, gender studies, even the arts — are labeled dangerous because they harbor dissenting ideas.
The irony is rich: this brand of post-liberal rightism now seeks to weaponize civil rights law in the name of “colorblindness” while decrying the left’s use of law for social goals. It’s a power play, pure and simple — and one that abandons core liberal values in favor of culture-war authoritarianism.
If universities have become too ideologically narrow, the answer is not to narrow them further by government edict. We need more rigorous scholarship, more heterodox voices, and more institutional humility. But we won’t get there by replacing one orthodoxy with another — or by launching a crusade against “gender trouble” like some kind of academic inquisition.
A democratic society depends on vibrant, open institutions of learning. If we destroy them in pursuit of ideological purity, we may win a culture war — and lose the republic.
In the same vein, I recently listened to Christopher Rufo being interviewed by Bret Stephens at the New York Times. It was like hearing a high school student trying to defend a plagiarized dissertation. I had never heard Rufo speak before — and frankly, he came off like someone who’s been programmed rather than educated. His delivery had the flat affect of someone reciting slogans, not articulating thought. If the conversation held together at all, it was because Stephens kept supplying the historical context and intellectual nuance that Rufo so clearly lacks.
It’s now obvious to me why Rufo appeals to authoritarian politicians: he’s their fascist idiot savant — a vessel for punitive zeal, not reflective inquiry. He’s not a reformer; he’s a culture-war technician in the service of state power. And that makes him not just unqualified, but dangerous.