Chris Rufo, who needs no introduction, just unveiled the "Manhattan Institute Statement on Higher Education." It has been signed by numerous personalities, including Jordan Peterson, Bishop Robert Barron, Victor Davis Hanson, Niall Ferguson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Gad Saad, Scott Yenor, Yoram Hazony, Roger Kimball, and more.

The meat of a statement is a list of reforms that the signers believe universities should undertake.

These include: advancing "truth over ideology" through "rigorous standards of academic conduct," "controls for academic fraud," and "merit-based decision-making"; ending university participation in social and political activism; a commitment to color-blind equality and ending DEI; guarantees on freedom of speech; "swift and significant penalties" for disruptive activities seeking to censor speech (ie, students trying to disrupt speakers).

And finally, the speakers say, "The universities must provide transparency about their operations and, at the end of each year, publish complete data on race, admissions, and class rank; employment and financial returns by major; and campus attitudes on ideology, free speech, and civil discourse."

These are all excellent measures and we are happy to applaud and endorse them.

We would add a few points.

These are all process-based guarantees. These are all well and good, but the deeper problem with American universities is not process, it's content and personnel. Take the "Studies" departments: they have absolutely zero academic or scientific value (negative, in fact), and they de facto serve as arms for funding political activism. Publishing data on "employment and financial returns by major" would, at the margin, make the existence of these departments less justifiable, but it still wouldn't guarantee their elimination. Ending corporate university participation in activism would still mean that intellectually unimpressive far-left ideologues would be receiving six figures salaries to indoctrinate the youth, publish pseudo-research to push far-left narratives under a veneer of intellectual seriousness, and so on. It should be perfectly fine to say that all these departments should be shut down, period, all the employees laid off, and the money reappropriated to, say, race-blind scholarships for low socioeconomic status students, or a Donald J. Trump Institute for American Greatness.

And, while "Studies" departments are the most egregious and obvious example of low intellect and political activism passing off as scholarship, this phenomenon is obviously true across the humanities. To a first approximation, every English Department in the US that's not in an explicitly Christian conservative institution is dedicated to methodological deconstructionism, and to narratives based on identitarian revanchism.

Pick a discipline. It's true in the academies but also in social sciences. History and Sociology departments are obviously terminally diseased. Even Economics, which was thought of as the most Republican-friendly social science, has moved sharply to the left since Donald Trump's appearance and his deviations from neoliberal orthodoxy: witness the economics profession's hostile reaction to Javier Milei and his basically-neoliberal reform agenda.

Great scholars such as Nobel Prize winner Maurice Allais and Harvard professor George Borjas have made powerful arguments against the status quo on trade and immigration, respectively. The point isn't that they're "right," even less that their views should be enforced; rather that it should be obvious that these views' lack of representation in economics scholarship is at least partly due to political and ideological barriers, and not just the scholarly merits of these views.

We could go on. Economic History has been thoroughly gutted as a subdiscipline within economics. The culprit here is Scientism, a left-liberal ideology: the economics profession has been more interested in a cargo cult of adopting the forms of the material sciences, such as mathematical modeling, rather than a search for truth. Economics is a social science, which means a historical approach is at least as valid as a theoretical approach, but the historical approach has been almost completely abandoned. As an example of the real-world consequences of this, former IMF economist Ashoka Mody tells an anecdote in his brilliant history of the Euro crisis, "EuroTragedy," that when the Euro was introduced the IMF convened a seminar of economists to ask them what the likely results would be. The modelers said that the Euro could work; the economic historians pointed out that every time a currency union was tried between polities with significant differences in productivity, the currency failed. It's obvious that the historians should have been listened to, but because their prestige in the profession is, again, for ideological reasons, lower than the prestige of the modelers, they weren't.

Similarly, Political Economy has essentially vanished as a discipline. The few remaining PhD programs in Political Economy are, de facto, programs in development economics. You see, advanced Western nations have solved all their political problems—isn't it obvious?—and it's only those benighted third worlders who need our lectures about how their political systems are broken and should become like ours… But studying economics through a political lens might lead one to realize that not only individuals and firms, but also nations, compete for economic advantage, and therefore there might be at least some merit, some of the time, to policies such as tariffs or manufacturing subsidies…

The point is this: true reform of the American academy cannot be caused merely by changing processes. There must also be choices about substance.

And, inevitably, choices about substance are also choices about personnel. A university could meet all of the Statement's rules and still have English professors who teach their students that the only thing worth knowing about Shakespeare is that he was a racist white man and that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie represents the height of literary genius, because that is what the people employed by that department believe (or believe they ought to believe). Ultimately the goal of Republicans should be to replace the personnel of those universities, at both the administrative and academic level.

The hard sciences are just as much in need of reform as the rest. This is a very important point that must be constantly emphasized. As important as those are, the problems of the universities are not limited to politicization and the decline of standards in the humanities.

In many of these debates, moderates will say, very sincerely, things to the effect: "I agree with you that the politicization is bad and is a problem and there should be some solution, but we can't damage these institutions because they also do research that cures cancer."

What if they don't, though?

What if most of their research is either fraudulent or the equivalent of adding epicycles upon epicycles in order to game the NSF/NIH grant-making process or the peer review process or the tenure process?

There is no space here to go over the problems in the so-called hard sciences with the reproductibility crisis, or with generational effects leading to new theories being systematically discounted, or with rampant fraud through hard-to-detect statistical manipulation of results such as "p-hacking". (A good first read is this article by William A. Wilson, "Scientific Regress"; the dismal picture it painted in 2016, almost ten years ago, has, of course, only become much worse since.)

And to be clear, the statement does nod towards this issue by mentioning the issue of "fraud."

But conservatives should be very clear that they are not just trying to fix the humanities or politicization, and that the rot in the universities goes much deeper, and that we are not making some tradeoff where we will get somewhat less cancer research but that's ok because we will get somewhat more free speech or political neutrality. Indeed, we are rescuing cancer research as well.

This is a good opening salvo in the war against the universities. The obvious subtext of the Statement is the Administration's ongoing war against universities, particularly Harvard and Columbia.

We view the Manhattan Institute Statement as welcome as an opening salvo. This is the "moderate option." Ultimately the Administration should not settle for it, but should go much further.