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.”
