The Public Needs Campus Viewpoint Diversity

The radical-left monopoly is a threat to America’s democracy, institutions and national well-being.

The Wall Street Journal

By John Ellis

June 16, 2025


President Trump began acting on his pledge to end wokeness by targeting DEI and critical race theory in universities and the federal government. While this was a good first step, shutting down woke programs goes only so far; it limits what bad actors in academia can do, but it leaves those bad actors in place.


Without broader staffing reforms, radical left-wing professors will still control higher education. Several states are trying to dictate what professors should and shouldn’t teach, but these efforts similarly don’t reach the core of academia’s sickness—the political monopoly that guarantees its continued malignancy.


The Trump administration’s April 11 letter to Harvard takes aim at that issue. To receive federal funding, Harvard must establish faculty viewpoint diversity and end viewpoint discrimination in faculty hiring. It would be better if this policy didn’t have to be imposed from the outside, but a militant political monopoly will never reform itself.


The letter aims for political balance, but that would set in motion more-profound changes. Radicals captured the universities to use them for promoting a political ideology that could never prevail at the ballot box. Only the ideological monopoly that they created made possible the repurposing of academia for their political activism. Accordingly, political balance matters most because it will enable a return to appointing thoughtful scholars, whether on the left or right, instead of political activists.


Ending woke foolishness and returning universities to their former brilliance is possible only if the political monopoly is broken up. In his essay “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mill explained that “a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life. . . . It is in a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity.” Only a political monopoly could have given us the collection of silly, faddish notions that is wokeness: criminals as victims, pronoun madness, defunding the police and so on.


It’s easy to understand how a monolithic political group loses its grip on sanity. A party that faces strong opposition will have its weakest and most fanciful arguments picked off and weeded out. That will clear the field of all but its strongest ideas, and leadership will then flow to people who build their party’s agenda on these strong ideas. Without the discipline of an opposition, leadership will flow instead to people who advocate the most ambitious and exciting ideas, which without opposition will gradually degenerate into absurdity.


What makes university reform so urgent is that woke folly inevitably spreads from campuses throughout our society. Children have abysmal scores in math and English partly because radical professors in college education schools persuade their teachers to give priority to “social justice” over the three Rs. The notorious political bias of the legacy media developed partly because journalists are trained in activist college journalism schools. Other professions have suffered similarly.


Universities collectively are now the national headquarters of the radical left. Radicals use them as a base from which to infiltrate and gain control of professional associations, foundations, nonprofits, advocacy groups, corporate offices, editorial boards, government departments, even churches.


Democrats are waking up to the realization that their party’s leaders are excessively influenced by the pseudointellectuals of higher education. Two-thirds of Democratic voters oppose men in women’s sports, yet House and Senate Democrats were nearly unanimous in voting against legislation this year that would have protected female athletes from male competitors. The healthy two-party political system that we once had may not be possible while radicals dominate the Democratic Party through their control of academia.


The federal government’s Harvard letter rightly confronts a crucial question: Should public money support institutions that have all but abandoned much of their original purpose? States have an even clearer path to reform because their influence over higher education is greater and more direct. The Trump administration has used research funding as leverage against Harvard, but states could go even further, as they provide general funding for public universities. What’s lacking even in most red states is the will to use the tools at their disposal.


Americans have seen a series of major scandals in recent years, but none of them—not even the coverup of a sitting president’s mental decline—compares with the scandal that is higher education. The rot we have allowed to fester in our colleges and universities, including antisemitism and anti-Americanism, is a serious threat to the nation’s well-being.


Conditioning continued funding of the universities on reform shouldn’t be controversial. If the political monopoly were broken up, that would take care of DEI, critical race theory and even antisemitism, because these are all created by the monopoly. Attempting to tackle these ideologies while leaving the monopoly in place would only hide them from public view while leaving them to fester in campus classrooms.


Mr. Ellis is a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of “A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism.”


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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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