No Country for Coeds

Before I began my career as an English and media professor, I knew the system I was about to enter was already showing signs of decay. So, when Christopher Rufo announced the release of The Manhattan Statement on Higher Education in mid-July, I should have been overjoyed. 

Signed by a who’s who of conservative public figures, including Drs. Jordan B. Peterson, Victor Davis Hanson, Gad Saad, and Nashville’s own Carol Swain, the intended blueprint for President Trump’s higher education agenda aims to quell activism, uproot DEI initiatives, and lead to institutions of higher learning that “advance truth over ideology, with rigorous standards of academic conduct, controls for academic fraud, and merit-based decision-making throughout the enterprise.” Yet, I’ve found myself uneasy. 

To its credit, The Manhattan Statement serves as a much needed articulation of the issues that initiated higher education’s largely self-inflicted crises. But, with just two references to the all-encompassing bureaucracy primarily responsible for college and university decline, it rests largely on simplistic stereotypes of radical professors whose real life’s work is turning good suburban kids into progressive foot soldiers. 

Such a portrait of American academia is not only inaccurate but a danger to the free inquiry and multitude of perspectives that are the bedrock of the university experience. It also drastically minimizes the life-changing potential and promise of upward mobility that the country’s public universities offer. 

The Trump administration’s Manhattan Statement-aligned DEI rollbacks and laws, such as Tennessee’s Divisive Concepts Act, have led state schools like the one where I teach to undertake fundamental reforms. Such initiatives may forever end the type of reverse discrimination I experienced in grad school fifteen years ago when a Caribbean literature professor refused to assign white male students grades above a “B.” Unfortunately, they may also erode the fundamental mechanisms that make public higher education so beneficial to students from working and middle class backgrounds. 

Four-year degrees that cost more than a starter home lend much credence to the type of arguments about higher education that have turned figures like Charlie Kirk into superstar pundits. So do the endlessly viral examples of wokeness that clog social media. In a recent email exchange, Stanley Ridgley, Clinical Professor of Management at Drexel University and author of DEI EXPOSED: How the Biggest Con of the Century almost Toppled Higher Education, lamented higher ed’s viewpoint disparity, “There is a 6:1 ratio of faculty leftists to conservatives on the campuses and a 12:1 ratio of leftists to conservatives in the bureaucracy.” Ridgley said.

“This latter lopsided representation tells you all you need to know about why reform of academia is so difficult and the results fleeting. Changes ordered from the top to conform to civil rights laws are scoffed at, and the names of programs and personnel titles are simply changed. This is occurring now with the scurrilous DEI programs nationwide.”

At academic conferences far and wide, the talk has lately turned to how to keep DEI going by any other name. I’ve sat in on at least two panels that broadcasted the same bromides since November 6th.  Yet, the presence of a few bad actors with administrative aspirations does not change that universities, especially public ones, remain invaluable economic engines.

As Charles L. Welch wrote in Forbes, such campuses are so integral to expanding upward mobility that their economic impact warrants a ground-up revision of the college ranking system. Those not destined for the entrepreneurial celebrity of the Steve Jobs kind fare much better with a state school degree–even with the potential exposure to bureaucratic groupthink.

Since the publication of his 2023 book, Brutal Minds, Ridgley has rightly placed much of the blame on university administration and its vast staff, the “committed ideologues” as Ridgley deemed them during our exchange. “The institutions in their care are torn apart by folks who, yes, eagerly want the destruction of the West and its culture. They say this clearly and unambiguously, and look no further than the brutish Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, whose political position calls for the ‘total eradication of Western Civilization.’

While Ridgley’s assessment of university bureaucrats and activist grad students is quite on point, he has remained clear that his work is a justification for decisive reforms, not a blanket dismissal of the university and academic inquiry. His nuanced position is, unfortunately, not widely shared by conservatives. Since 2016, I’ve seen the Right devolve from a group that heralded the type of classical education and literary canon preservation typified by Hillsdale College into professional superfans of Dirty Jobs who want nothing more than to topple our institutions of higher learning with a fervor that rivals Khalil’s. 

In the 1990s, conservatives took their cues from towering intellectuals like Thomas Sowell and Robert Bork. The day after Trump’s unprecedented political comeback, much of the credit went to Kirk, who became a conservative thought leader through founding Turning Point USA, an organization that treats headline-grabbing anecdotes as the norm and actively discourages high schoolers from pursuing a college education. 

Though Kirk has never spent a full year as an enrolled university student and possesses not even the most rudimentary understanding of how colleges operate, he has made millions as a self-styled higher ed expert. He may not have a traditional degree, but without the existence of the American university, he’d be stuck somewhere between Twitter anon and Congressional pageboy. Though he lacks the credentials to lend his signature to The Manhattan Statement, the document owes him a great debt.

Such anti-intellectual sentiments seem all the more curious when the Right’s other most prominent leaders from Donald Trump and JD Vance to Steve Bannon and Manhattan Statement co-signer Ben Shapiro are the proud owners of Ivy League diplomas. For a thoroughly rotten system that’s antithetical to The Right’s values, higher education remains the ultimate, if often elided, admission ticket to the upper echelons of conservative power.

In all fairness, those in humanities fields such as mine have brought this chaos upon ourselves with the advent of interdisciplinary identity politics programs that, while well intentioned, have long sacrificed academic rigor for activism.

“The faculty who feel the pinch—and rightly so—are the louts in the softer ‘disciplines,’ particularly the so-called ‘studies’ disciplines,” Ridgley said.” These ‘studies’ have always served as an academic jobs program for mediocre academics striving for equal footing with actual scientists and scholars.”

Although well-intentioned, conservative attempts to break DEI and activist scholarship’s hold on higher education have thus far failed to provide any safeguards for faculty members who, to borrow the parlance of esteemed English professor Gerald Graff, “teach the controversies.” 

As I shaped my own worldview, my most formidable experiences were not soaking up Rush Limbaugh on my lunch break or reading Barry Goldwater, but taking graduate courses in Marxist and postcolonial theory that allowed me to parse out what aspects of such approaches could deepen my own stances. I continue to disagree with my academic mentors on most aspects of social and economic policy, but, with few exceptions, those with the most consistent scholarly output never penalized me or their other students.

In the words of a private college English professor I spoke to who wishes to remain anonymous, “Far from being controlled by ideology, academics are fiercely independent…While some scholars and teachers may very well teach in an ideologically dogmatic way, in my experience, such cases are relatively infrequent and more symptomatic of personality than the ideologies themselves.”

But The Manhattan Statement leaves little room for free thinking—including among its political allies. Nearly a decade ago, I first charged my students with a comparative analysis of Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Target shelf staple/white girl beach read Between The World and Me. Despite the unit’s runaway success in developing students’ critical thinking skills, I would have second thoughts about implementing it again if the opportunity arose. It’s simply not Manhattan Statement compliant. Neither am I. And that’s my students’ loss. 

As The Manhattan Statement indicates, a certain breed of humanities scholars has abandoned the calling to teach critical thinking in favor of lived experience and thin methodology that apes the hard sciences while free from their rigor. The result is that, according to William Chace’s infamous essay in the The American Scholar, within one generation, humanities majors have declined from one third of all college students to less than 16% with English and history taking on the brunt of the losses. 

Professors in such disciplines have begrudgingly touted the universality and critical thinking skills students majoring in their fields encounter. But undergrads want to major in English to read books, not learn from a minority of professors who proudly display their time with Occupy Wall Street on their CVs and complain about how everything is problematic. Public proclamations about BLM support on the webpages of lower-tier English departments don’t help matters much either. Yes, both of these anecdotes happened during my time on faculty at previous state schools. But, despite such disturbing infractions and their endless Tweetability, they are merely memorable blips during my nearly two decades thus far in the academy.  

My conversation with the private college English professor evoked similar experiences. “I can understand why some might feel that classic texts and direct close readings to them have been abandoned, but on a practical level in the classroom, nothing could be further from the truth. Every university still teaches Shakespeare, Homer, etc., and teaches many major Anglophone writers and their texts, but they are not the only ones.” 

Nor should they be. Students benefit the most from learning about an array of perspectives. Discouraging open discussion of certain content will neither help Gen Z get over its fragility problem nor instill in such students an ability to formulate effective responses to point of views lacking in rigor. It will also not prepare them for a workforce made up of clients and coworkers with an array of beliefs. 

While the overwhelming majority of university faculty are left-leaning, the reason for this disparity is largely because conservatives eschew academia for the more lucrative private sector. Academics may have high job security and eventually work their way to the upper-middle class, but the lawyers and engineers have it better. And they don’t have to toil until their late twenties on dissertations for TA wages far below the median income. 

A reduction in bureaucracy would allow universities to increase compensation while placing more emphasis on academic and research standards. Some simple revisions to the tenure process to penalize faculty whose votes are politically motivated and unrelated to a candidate’s accomplishments would do much for intellectual diversity and allow university departments to more closely mirror the political demographics of the nation. So would a bonus or salary commensurate with the experience of professionals who opt to start a third act as a professor after years in the field.

With higher education facing this new Trumpian frontier, I want the literature scholars who publish on Marx and the Third World to keep their jobs. I want the environmental biologists who have found evidence of climate change to contribute to the discourse along with those who doubt its apocalyptic potential. An intellectual milieu in which a Friedman acolyte and a Keynesian can both get tenure and duke it out for their lifetimes in front of their charges does nothing but strengthen our intellectual and moral fiber. 

Those who believe in the principles of The Manhattan Statement and wish for the university’s conservative turn would do far better urging the governors of Red states like Tennessee and Florida to focus on public schools’ crushing bureaucratic red tape that Ridgley has spent much of the last few years decrying. 

As Trump’s administration reimagines the nation, our public universities remain central tools in restoring America’s greatness. But their strength lies in their status as a marketplace of ideas, not the privileging of high-minded vocational training or replacing one orthodoxy with another. 

We are a nation built on ideas and their trial and error. Our public universities are those ideas’ greatest incubator. And, at the moment, those claiming to liberate our institutions of higher learning in the name of free thought may well bring about the end of it.