It’s Time for the GOP to Play Hardball With Public Universities

It’s old news that universities are not particularly friendly grounds for conservatives. Every so often, a new study looks at the partisan affiliation of professors in various academic disciplines, and it’s never pretty.

Business, economics, and the hard sciences are always home court for Republicans, but at the average college, no academic department comes close to parity. On the other hand, conservatism in some academic departments is utterly extinct or even unimaginable: In sociology and communications, the odds of finding a conservative prof are literally 100:1, or, in some places, worse.

Conservatives have been complaining about universities since before conservatism was even a coherent movement, but nothing much has been accomplished. Bill Buckley rose to prominence after publishing God and Man at Yale in 1951, but despite his needling of the professorial class, the dregs of ’60s radicalism ended up filling the ranks of the academy (bombing American military bases is apparently an excellent qualification for teaching college students).

The results have been disastrous. The left has consolidated its position into complete dominance of higher education, which serves as the principal apparatus of elite production in postindustrial society. This provides it with enormous cultural and political influence, while slowly choking conservative political possibilities by depriving the Republican Party of the expertise and trained personnel necessary to effectively exert political power in the modern state. The result is Republican administrations that are barely able to staff their own bureaucracies: They appoint twice as many Democrats to executive branch positions as Democratic presidents appoint Republicans.

Republicans at all levels had decades to deal with what has been an obvious issue since the genesis of modern conservatism; why the inertia? Some of it, it seems, was because Republicans naively didn’t take universities seriously. Campus problems, surely, would remain confined to campuses—students would come out, wise up to the world, and leave radicalism on the quad. But much seems to have been a reverence for the founding mythology of academia: the sacred rights of faculty self-governance and academic freedom.

It’s time to put old illusions aside and recognize what universities have become: a patronage system for the left and a political machine for Democrats.

Colleges and universities systematically discriminate against conservative professors and students. Hundreds of billions of dollars of state and federal funds go to establish professors of critical gender studies and fund research projects whose sole purpose is to decry America as an evil and oppressive state.

Republicans are hardly helpless in the face of this onslaught. Red states control vast swathes of the American public university system, and billions of dollars of state funds flow into their coffers. Republicans at the national level can levy strikes against the excesses of federal grant and loan funding. With some imagination, and more importantly, political will, universities can be brought to heel and made to represent the priorities of the citizens that fund them, rather than the left-wing professors who have stacked their own ranks. 

The first step is for state governors to take seriously their power to appoint university governing boards. Currently, it is common to appoint donors and local business leaders to governing boards, but these appointees are usually unengaged and ineffective; many are happy to get their free football tickets and leave the university administrators to their own devices. Their lack of experience with academic governance and university administration means they usually do not have a solid grasp of the problems facing universities or the actions that need to be taken to effectively exercise power in higher education. Replacing apathetic boards with experienced activists will allow them to properly exercise their oversight functions, appoint effective conservative university presidents, rein in university spending on frivolous projects, shutter useless and hostile degree programs, veto tenure applications for unqualified ideologues, and mandate changes in university policy.

The DeSantis administration in Florida is an excellent example of conservative leadership taking higher education seriously. New boards have begun a complete transformation of both the flagship University of Florida and smaller colleges like New College of Florida and Florida International University, while the legislature has put significant money into the state scholarship program to ensure that education is affordable and the state university system retains as much talent as possible.

State legislatures can also play a major role by being aggressive with their oversight of university budgets. Universities must be hit where it hurts, in their pocketbooks. Any university that does not shut down hostile patronage programs like various grievance studies departments and adjust its hiring practices to bring its professoriate in line with state public opinion should have its funding pared dramatically. University administrators who fear for their budgets will quickly move to curtail left-wing excesses on campus; if they don’t, their mandates can be reduced to provide only the most basic degree programs, without amenities. Legislatures can also reward universities for playing nice, and appropriate funds for colleges to build out independent conservative centers that will provide jobs and training for future conservative academics, like the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida and the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University.

At the federal level, reform is more difficult, due to the constraints on congressional legislation and the partisan lean of the administrative state. But Republican presidents can certainly staff up organs like the Department of Education, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation with appointees that will dispense with absurdities like awarding the University of Texas at Arlington $5 million to better integrate equity into mathematics education. Congress, on the other hand, can take direct aim at the overstuffed budgets of grant-giving agencies and, ideally, cut them down to a much more reasonable, even to a rather minuscule, size: “Give grants appropriately or don’t give them at all” should be the message.

Of course, there will be outcry from leftists, academics, Democratic party hacks in general, and squeamish Republicans about “politicizing education.” But no one should be fooled: education has already been politicized—anyone can watch the Claudine Gay depositions if they dare to dispute the fact. Conservatives must respond in kind.