Follow the Left’s Example to Reform Higher Ed

Identify areas, like civics, that are inadequately studied and create new programs around them.

By Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Store

The Wall Street Journal

January 26, 2024


Conservatives have an extraordinary opportunity to reform higher education. Universities face a perfect storm of falling enrollments, souring public opinion and political scrutiny. They need friends. Prudent administrators should be eager to work with those whose opinions they might have previously ignored.


Yet conservatives should be sober-minded about their prospects. Efforts to reform higher education have been underway since William F. Buckley sounded the alarm in his 1951 book “God and Man at Yale,” yet conservatives have continued to lose ground on campuses. While considering their next moves, they should ask: Why has the left been so successful at moving the academy in their direction?


The left’s most enduring victories on campus have been led by academics who think academically. The right should learn from their playbook.


When the academic left seeks to innovate, they do what scholars have always done: They create new disciplines. Academics who thought women’s lives and perspectives were neglected created women’s studies. Those who saw that scholars overlooked the literature, history, and art of black Americans created African-American studies.


This is a legitimate tactic. It’s how universities work. Academics perceive that some phenomenon is overlooked by existing modes of inquiry. They write studies about it; they describe ways of examining it. They attract scholars in related subjects, who become the initial faculty of the new programs. They develop ways of thinking that cohere as a discipline, in which students can be trained. They create associations; journals spring up; grants get funded; students get degrees. One generation of faculty acts as mentors to the next.


To make enduring change in the academy, conservatives must identify important areas that aren’t getting attention and create programs to study them.


The most promising academic innovations today are Republican-led efforts at public universities to remedy the deficit in university-level civic education. Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, or SCETL, is the model. The Arizona Legislature launched it in 2016, and political scientist Paul Carrese developed the program. SCETL now employs 20 faculty, teaches more than 1,000 students annually, and has bipartisan support. Its success has encouraged similar efforts in Florida, Texas, Tennessee,

Mississippi, Utah, North Carolina and Ohio.


Such schools have significant latitude to hire their own faculty and set curricula. The first-rate faculty who lead them therefore can develop a research and teaching program with its own purpose, practices and standards.


Each such school is distinctive. What links them is the mission of creating a new model of university-level civic education. We call this model Civic Thought. The elements of Civic Thought are derived from the intellectual demands of American citizenship, which requires the ability to deliberate about everything from war to education. Equipping the mind for such responsibility is an ambitious intellectual project, fully worthy of the university. Many courses already exist on topics important to Civic Thought. That is quite common in university life.


The periodic table isn’t the exclusive property of the chemistry department. You can study religious questions in anthropology or English or history. Academic fields of study aren’t mutually exclusive domains; they are distinct but interrelated. Developing new centers of gravity can shift the dynamics of the academic universe.


Civic Thought is but one example of how reformers might alter the academy’s landscape. There are plenty of other opportunities to create new fields of study. The contemporary university is notoriously fragmented, and many things worth studying slip through the cracks. This is particularly so in academic areas where conservative scholars tend to cluster, such as in political and military history, classics, theology, political theory and certain subfields of philosophy. With a little ingenuity, scholars could devise new programs.


To do this work well, trustees, donors and policymakers need to form partnerships with scholars who have the knowledge and imagination to foresee what intellectual projects might breathe new life into the university. They also need to understand that building new disciplines is long-term work. Such projects aren’t instantly “scalable,” because they depend on professors. It takes at least five years to mold a promising college graduate into a Ph.D. Most scholars in the academic areas most in need of reform—the humanities and social sciences—do their best work in their 50s and 60s.


Reformers should take this opportunity to make the crucial first moves in what will be a long game. They need to seek out scholars with impressive academic competence and energetic vision, put hiring and curricular power into their hands, and support them in launching intergenerational projects of study.


Some projects will prove unviable; others will be subsumed by the academic status quo. But the ones that succeed make a profound mark on campus.


At the top of the classic list of conservative strategies for reforming higher education are policies to ensure free speech and institutional neutrality on campus. Such policies are useful but indicate only the guardrails of academic life. The disciplines and the professors who staff them drive the conversation. To play the academic game, you need to get on that field.


Mr. Storey and Mrs. Storey are senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute and research fellows at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.


Follow the Left’s Example to Reform Higher Ed - WSJ

Where Liberty and Learning Endure

June 29, 2026
As America commemorates 250 years of independence, we reflect on the enduring principles of liberty and learning that have defined Davidson College for nearly two centuries.

Bankruptcy and Higher Education

June 21, 2026
By Todd Zywicki The Wall Street Journal June 21, 2026 Auburn University is known for its agricultural and STEM programs, its flight school and athletic programs. But the land-grant university recently became notable for another reason: The board of trustees is taking control of the school back from its faculty. The board began seizing the university’s academic programs—including curriculum, course offerings, degree requirements and academic credentials—at its June 5 meeting. The board also dissolved the faculty senate and replaced it with an advisory council to the president, which includes two faculty members from each of the university’s colleges and additional members appointed by the president. The board’s assertion of authority mirrors incoming mandates by the Alabama Legislature restricting the role of faculty senates in the state’s public university system. Predictably, Auburn’s faculty has responded with howls of outrage, decrying these intrusions on the faculty’s authority over academic operations. How could outsiders appointed through a political process have the expertise to make such delicate decisions? I’ve been a professor at a state university for almost 30 years, and I am sympathetic up to a point. But before becoming a professor I was a bankruptcy lawyer. And bankruptcy law teaches an important lesson for how academia can respond to this moment. Bankruptcy gives businesses an opportunity to admit mistakes, reform and emerge stronger. Successful enterprises don’t need bankruptcy lawyers. But when an enterprise loses its way, it goes into receivership. Most universities aren’t financially bankrupt but have lost their mission and direction. Society has long recognized certain institutions’ authority to manage their own affairs. Two notable examples are licensed professionals—such as doctors and lawyers—and universities. Universities, even state universities, have run their enterprises with minimal external oversight. Faculties enjoyed substantial rights of self-governance because they committed to higher standards than those required by ordinary jobs. Professors would establish and maintain standards of scholarly integrity, freedom of speech and inquiry, and rigorous dedication to merit-based assessment of research in specialized areas. They policed their own house, enforcing norms of truth-seeking, maintaining scholarly integrity and rigor, and ensuring that students emerged with basic knowledge, employable skills and civic competency. But over the past several decades, commitment to those values collapsed. Surveys by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression consistently reveal fear among students and faculty around expressing unfashionable ideas. Universities have seen shout-downs, cancellations and even violence against speakers. Merit and quality yielded to “diversity” and “equity.” Truth-seeking has been displaced by faddish theories and ideologically charged teaching and research. Professors design esoteric departments and teach niche classes to cliques of activist students while the needs of other students and taxpayers for real education go unaddressed. Like companies I represented, universities have lost their way. And many have proved either unable or unwilling to self-correct. When that happens, it is appropriate to put institutions into receivership until they reform and rededicate themselves to their mission. At Auburn incoming students must now take certain required civics and history courses to master basic competency in U.S. history and government. To ensure the classes actually meet that objective, professors will have to make their syllabi publicly available. In the classroom, instructors will be expected to stick to the matter at hand and avoid free-ranging political punditry. Just as other companies can learn from the ones that go bankrupt, other institutions of higher education can learn something from Auburn: Fix what’s broken, or someone else might fix it for you. Mr. Zywicki is a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. He was a Dartmouth College trustee, 2005-09. https://www.wsj.com/opinion/bankruptcy-and-higher-education-4c2b178e

Race Preferences Are Falling Nationwide

June 19, 2026
By the Editorial Board The Wall Street Journal June 19, 2026 The Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against racial preferences is turning out to be a landmark with profound consequences as its influence spreads. On Thursday the famously progressive Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a state program that issued scholarships based on race violates the U.S. Constitution. Justice Annette Ziegler wrote for the court that the Constitution requires “that every person ‘must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race,’” and that the state cannot “use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.” That must have been painful for the activist liberal majority on the court. In a concurrence, Wisconsin Chief Justice Jill Karofsky took some shots at Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College (2023) before acknowledging that “I am bound by the precedent set forth in SFFA” and other Supreme Court rulings “when interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment.” The case was brought by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty against a 1985 Badger State law that reserved need-based scholarships through a grant program for “Black American,” “American Indian,” “Hispanic” and some Southeast Asian undergraduate students enrolled in Wisconsin’s private and technical colleges. Last week the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that a scholarship program earmarked for black University of Iowa students studying physical sciences was “impracticable” under SFFA. State governments would be wise to repeal these discriminatory grant programs, or the courts will do it for them.
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