What should the endgame be in the Trump Administration's battle with America's elite universities? What should they be seeking to achieve?

Yesterday the great Chris Rufo published the Manhattan Institute Statement on Higher Education, signed by a number of luminaries like Jordan Peterson, Bishop Robert Barron, Victor Davis Hanson, Niall Ferguson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Gad Saad, Scott Yenor, Yoram Hazony, Roger Kimball, and more.

We covered it favorably, calling it a step in the right direction, a moderate option that can be a good starting point for dialogue. The demands in the statement are all process-related: guarantees regarding free speech, academic freedom, political activism on campus, and so on.

We argued that those are very good, but that what is really needed are substantive changes (such as deleting or deeply reforming departments) and that these necessarily entail personnel changes.

After we published this, there was an interesting back and forth on X dot com, the world's public square, between Rufo and arch-frenemy Curtis Yarvin.

The background here is interesting. Rufo and Yarvin have both ruffled each other's feathers and expressed repsect for each other. They inevitably clash because they have fundamentally different perspectives on political action. Yarvin presents a radical critique of the current American "regime" and believes that meaningful change can only happen once that "regime" has been replaced (which he clarifies does not necessarily mean literally abolishing the Constitution and instituting some sort of military dictatorship, but instead is analoguous to the kind of "regime changes" effected by Lincoln and FDR). Rufo, meanwhile, believes in working within existing institutions—aggressively so, more aggressively than previous generations of conservative activists, but still fundamentally within the existing regime.

A project like PolicySphere wouldn't even make sense if we didn't believe more in Rufo's approach. But we also believe that radical critiques like Yarvin are useful to teach people to think outside the box.

Anyway, here was Yarvin's simple proposal: "At any university, generally more at more elite schools, 2-5% of people are secretly based. Students, professors, etc. Identify them and put them in charge."

It's correct.

Of course, Yarvin was speaking in the flippant style characteristic of both his writing and X dot com discourse, but the basic insight is right: there's around "2-5%" and "generally more at elite schools" of people who are aligned with conservative philosophy and have the abilities and credentials to be in charge of these institutions. They should be put in charge.

Rufo countered that that was unrealistic.

He should be reading PolicySphere more.

A Realistic, Ambitious Plan For Taking Over The Universities

The basic idea is this: the Trump Administration should step up all forms of pressure on America's Top 20 universities until they agree to be put under conservatorship by the US Federal government.

That's easy to say, but harder to accomplish.

Yes.

What kind of pressure?

All are welcome, but, as we wrote in a previous article, there is one in particular that seems particularly appropriate and which hasn't yet been used: Section 1702 of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act grants the President of the United States to exercise emergency economic powers when there is an "unusual and extraordinary threat" to U.S. national security, foreign policy, or economy that originates substantially outside the United States. And, in particular, the President can freeze assets and block any transfers, payments or other dealings, including by US persons (including private companies, and other entities such as universities).

There is very serious grounds for applying this section to American universities, since they routinely raise money from, especially, China and China-linked individuals, Middle Eastern countries, and various third world oligarchs. There is a very serious grounds for presuming that any number of such donations might form part of a money laundering scheme, or of illicit technology transfer schemes, with obvious implications for national security.

Therefore, there would be very significant grounds for the President to freeze all accounts by America's top universities that have been recipients of foreign money, which, given that money is fungible, presumptively includes all accounts period, pending a thorough review and investigation of the source and true motivation of every transfer, an investigation that may take many years.

This would mean that the universities would be unable to pay salaries, unable to pay their electricity bills, and so on. They would be shut down, overnight, indefinitely.

Now, sanctions imposed under IEEPA can be subject to judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act, and, of course, constitutional challenges. But here the law is very encouraging. Courts have historically been extremely deferential to the Executive in APA reviews of IEEPA sanctions, under an overall framework that justly prioritizes national security and executive efficiency over extensive due process protections.

Again: this is not a made up pretext. It is true that universities routinely raise money from such unsavory sources and that these same universities have been embroiled in spying scandals with obvious implications for national security. This is a legitimate issue that needs looking into.

No doubt some universities would be granted some sort of temporary injunctions or relief, but as we've seen over the past few months, the Supreme Court's patience with politically-motivated injunctions is wearing thinner every day.

There will be a process, and it's safe to say that these accounts will be frozen for much or most of that process. And that process may very well end with a Supreme Court decision in favor of the Administration, in which case the universities would have lost everything. How long can Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Stanford, etc. be expected to last while having literally all their funds frozen?

Of course, a very reasonable compromise settlement would be for these universities to agree to conservatorship by the Federal government so that their legitimate operations can continue to operate without fears of continuing money laundering or undue foreign influence, while the investigations into foreign sources of funding go on, which should take a number of years, at least five.

Key Reforms

What should we do, then?

Well, the sky is the limit.

Most important: put our people in charge.

Yarvin is right. The fundamental thing is to put our people in charge. To be clear, those people should be of a high intellectual and scholarly caliber, able to steward these great American institutions. But they should be fundamentally aligned with the values of American greatness.

And they should actually be in charge. They should not be "appointed President," with the very weak powers of a university president. They should be in charge the way a CEO is in charge, able to hire and fire whomever they please, shut down and create departments, and so on.

By definition, those are the people who should decide what happens next, but here are some suggestions:

Second most important: fix science

To bang this drum yet again: the rot in American universities goes a lot deeper than declining standards or politicization or DEI, as bad as those are. The replication crisis has shown that most "hard science" fields are producing increasing amounts of garbage—we can't know how much, because so little time and energy is spent on actually replicating those findings. Several scandals have shown that while part of the problem may be incompetence or ideological stultifying, outright fraud is probably rampant.

The very small field of "meta-science" (a terrible name) has tried to address these issues. In a famous landmark paper, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False," Stanford professor John Ioannidis argued conclusively (we're not aware of a single person who disputed the findings) that the majority of research claims are likely incorrect due to statistical power issues, study bias, and publication practices.

He and others propose mandatory replication studies, pre-registration of hypotheses and analysis plans, and stronger statistical standards before publication. Meta-scientists advocate for fundamental changes to academic publishing, including open access mandates, pre-print servers, and reforming peer review, and for changes in statistical and methodological standards, such as raising the bar for statistical significance (some suggest p < 0.005 instead of p < 0.05), requiring larger sample sizes, mandating effect size reporting, and better statistical education for researchers.

The point is this: there is a broad agenda of reform out there just begging to be implemented that would radically improve scientific progress, or at least slow scientific regress, in America.

Revamped admissions

Admissions to US elite universities should be done on the basis of a competitive, sit-down, anonymous examination. Essays are to be graded independently by three different scholars with the final grade being the average of the three grades.

The examination should include a straight IQ test, and this should be a gold-standard IQ test, not a deficient one like the SAT which has been progressively made less effective as an IQ test to reward "grinding" and benefit some groups at the expense of others.

There should be a "science" track where the other tests are purely hard sciences like math and physics, at a very advanced level.

For everyone else, the tests should include essays on American history, American values, great American literature, and, ideally, a Latin translation (as Ivy Leagues had for centuries!), as well as basic AP math.

Since this is America, athletes should be able to pick "sports" as an option to get extra points, but these should not count for more than 10% of their final grade.

Foreign students should be capped at 5% of the student body.

Do we want some sort of scheme to help socially-disadvantaged students get a leg up in admissions? This is an open question. As long as it's not mixed up in racial revanchist nonsense and transparent, it's not a totally crazy idea. But if we wanted to do that (and of course we might not), there is a much better scheme than affirmative action.

When the French elite school Sciences Po wanted to create some sort of special admissions scheme for underprivileged students without running afoul of French laws and taboos around race, they came up with a rather clever program: they partnered with high schools located in underprivileged areas. Per this partnership, the schools would identify their most promising students, and these students would receive special coaching, extra lessons, and so on. They would have clear requirements about the work they had to accomplish and the academic level they had to maintain throughout high school otherwise they would be dropped from the program. And then they would be able to apply through a preferential route.

If Ivy Leagues had actually cared about helping very intelligent but underprivileged kids, or about actually enriching their student bodies by bringing people with an actual diversity of experiences, they might have done that; instead, of course, all they cared about was obeying some abstract and cancerous DEI ideology.

Anyway. If universities decide to adopt this scheme, there should be two important caveats. First, the students should be IQ tested and no student who tests one standard deviation lower than the average admitted student at the university should be eligible. Second, the schools that universities partner with should mainly—not exclusively!—be in rural and other "Real America" places in America. This would only be just recompense for the demographic that has been most systematically discriminated against in elite university admissions over the past 50 years.

End the PhD-tenure track system

Some of our scientist friends tell us that in many (though not all) cases in the hard sciences, doing a PhD program really is a necessary prerequisite before one can meaningfully contribute to research. Be that as it may, it is certainly not true in the humanities and even the social sciences.

An undergraduate who (a) is in the top tier of his cohort; (b) already has an interest in research already knows the research methods of the field, and has a broad enough understanding of the field that he can start to do research.

If the Prussian model of higher education, which US universities copied in the late 19th century, was ever superior, which is doubtful, it certainly is no longer relevant in the 21st century. Within living memory, at Oxford and Cambridge, a talented undergraduate who wanted to dedicate his life to research and teaching, did not apply for a doctoral program, instead he applied for a fellowship. This was a fixed-term contract, for a number of years, during which he would teach undergraduates, have a vote in the deliberations of his college or department, and do whatever research he pleased. Then, he would apply for another fellowship, and so on, until eventually he might be nominated for a chair, that is to say the equivalent of a tenured full professorship.

The superiority of this system is obvious, because the PhD has become a meaningless rite of passage that wastes the most productive years of a scholar's career on the most frivolous stuff. Young scholars also have no academic freedom until tenure, since they are entirely dependent on outside forces for their doctorate, and then grants, publications, and so on. The system is backward: it is young scholars who should have the most academic freedom, because it is young scholars who propose new ideas and new theories that shake up the status quo. As a fixed, multi-year contract, a fellowship grants scholars the freedom to engage in research whose value is not immediately obvious to a committee of tenured professors, or to publish ideas that shake up the status quo; at the same time, it doesn't give every aspiring academic a soul-rotting lifetime appointment.

Fellowships should be extremely selective, so that they are a reliable signal of cognitive ability and hard work. With AI, universities need fewer instructors anyway, and currently graduate students are admitted on the basis that the more graduate students a professor has, the higher his status, which leads to inflation. Rigorous selectivity is not only good on its own to raise the intellectual level of the academy, though this is badly needed, but it would mean that someone who's, say, a Fellow at Harvard in English might not be thought crazy for applying to, say, McKinsey or Google in a non-technical role, and therefore a Fellow would be less afraid that if he publishes research that really shakes up the status quo he will have no future employment.

Let a thousand flowers bloom!

These are, of course, just a few suggestions. We could go on, and on (and on…) with how we would reform the universities. But, to circle back to Yarvin and our original point, a striking observation that Yarvin makes is that all the elite American schools are virtually identical in their ideological outlook and their culture. You'd think this would be otherwise, as these institutions are formally independent and theoretically trying to compete with each other (and therefore differentiate). Why isn't there, say "the libertarian Ivy League"? It really is striking. You will recall that, for example, already all the way back in 1746, Princeton was founded as the conservative alternative to those dangerous liberals at Harvard and Yale. Of course, it is now totally indistinguishable from those two. The reasons for that are many, but a few can be readily identified: dependence on government grants (belying the façade that these are actually independent, private entities, rather than already de facto arms of the government), which are absolutely granted on an ideological basis already, and the general monoculture of America's sociological elite.

As we wrote first, we really should identify the 20 most brilliant and most qualified people for the jobs and really put them in charge of those universities. Which means that they will make different changes. Maybe one Ivy League will be the "Catholic" school; maybe another will be the "Evangelical" one; another the libertarian or "business Republican" university; another the Tech Right-accelerationist university. And so on and so on.

We have listed many problems with US universities: regulatory capture, ideological capture, intellectual stultification, bloat, academic fraud… There's another one that doesn't get brought up enough: they are boring. Everybody understands what Harvard does and everybody can predict pretty reliably what Harvard will do next year.

Let's Make American Higher Education Great Again. Let's also make it interesting and exciting again!