Why are almost all universities the same? The same general curriculum. The same departmental structure. The same political bent. Universities in Wyoming and Idaho are just as left-wing as universities in Colorado and New York. Private universities look just like public universities. Most Christian universities have dropped their distinctive missions and now look like all the other private universities. University administrators adopt the same Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies everywhere. I could go on.

Universities are almost all the same. But why?

Because the universities are machines. To get hired, Ph.D. disciplines produce Ph.D. holders stamped in the same professional mold. Those Ph.D.s then go out into the country and get hired by universities everywhere.

They build departments and design curriculum based on the same standards. University administrators come out of this assembly line—they move from department chair, to associate dean, to dean, to provost, and then to president. The same kind of general education plan gets put in place at nearly every university. And the same distribution requirements do too: take two English, three science, and three social science classes. Now take an ethics of diversity class.

Higher education is a factory for depositing near-identical universities at different locations around the country. And for putting students through the same mass production process.

And the machine is manifestly political. In 1997, 24% of professors in the country were conservatives. In 2006, 9% were. Today it is less than 5%. The machine always veers left.

We have known about this machine for a long time. It was built in the Progressive Era but was made ruthlessly efficient in the 1970s. Yet conservatives have not tried to dismantle it. They have instead defended free speech on campus. Free speech, however, does not disrupt the machine—it just imposes an external limit, insisting that the machine continue its leftward march while respecting free speech.

Conservatives have fought racial preferences in admissions too, but meritocratic admissions standards will only change the racial composition of those who are in the machine. And they will only affect a few universities nationwide.

Conservatives also say they want “choice” in education. But we already have choice in higher education, after a fashion. By offering a huge range of functionally identical options, leftists can formally satisfy demand for “choice” while maintaining total ideological lockstep. Choice matters when it’s among meaningfully different options. Today, we can mostly choose from different varieties of leftism.

Destroy

The only way forward is to dismantle the machine altogether and restore public purpose to higher education. We at Claremont call this strategy “Destroy and Restore.” Both are important.

What do we mean by destroy? No conservative state governor had really tried to destroy elements of the machine prior to Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida. Florida has led other states in dismantling DEI offices on campus, ending mandatory DEI training, and abolishing the requirement for DEI statements in hiring.

Florida executives like Manny Diaz have removed ideologically corrupt sociology classes from general education requirements in Florida universities and colleges. The state has undertaken a review of all general education courses to ensure that they teach something about texts in Western civilization, and not identity politics. Florida is now regulating the teacher certification process to squeeze identity politics out of education schools.

Other states have followed Florida on the DEI front, but Florida stands out. Still, Florida’s higher education efforts are about a 3 on the Richter scale.

A very good start. But they should be coupled with program reviews so that corrupt ideological departments are defunded at public universities, and their faculty fired. Tenured faculty can be fired when there is a financial exigency, and the looming demographic cliff presents just such an opportunity.

Dozens of universities across the country have been dropping programs due to university-wide enrollment declines. Now that process must be linked to ridding universities of inherently ideological professional standards. Disciplines like African Diaspora Studies and Critical Disability Studies should be ushered out of the university in short order. Even departments like History and English, both of which have taken hard turns toward identity politics in the past 30 years, might just be subject to elimination or radical reform.

At the federal level, conservatives should use the same mechanism found in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Universities that violate the law or constitutional rights should lose eligibility for federal funding for, say, three years. No student loans. No grants. It worked to desegregate the public schools. It might work to bring universities back to some sanity.

Destruction is also ideological—a matter of honor. It means discrediting the machine. Conservatives will not be done with the universities until Americans have the same opinion of higher education in its present state as they have for Camel cigarettes.

Universities produce credentials, and the honor attached to their credentials has to mean less and less until it comes to stand for real learning. Shaming the universities involves demonstrating the uselessness of the higher education machine by finding ways of obtaining a superior education without it. It also involves stigmatizing corrupt elements of the university: documentaries based on interviews with sociology professors or gender studies professors, for instance. Just ask them: What does your discipline teach? And then present the videos. It would be hilarious and damning.

Restore

But we must also restore. This means building institutions that produce scientific advancements, reproduce our civilizational heritage, and prepare people for the workforce. These goals need to be met, but we need to completely rethink what kind of institutions will achieve them. Do we need Ph.D.s in all kinds of higher education? Must all universities accomplish all three goals? Must general education be the same at all schools? We need to disenthrall ourselves of received wisdom on our colleges and universities. We have barely begun.

Restoring our civilizational heritage involves at least two things. First, establishing independent academic centers on campus. The Hamilton Center at University of Florida. The Civitas Center at Texas-Austin. These centers have special missions to promote classical education or liberal arts education. They appear as islands of sanity in seas of academic corruption. Perhaps people hope that establishing these centers is a long game, in which the centers attract the best students and revive genuine academic disciplines. Slowly, students will pick the Hamilton Center over corrupt American history or political science disciplines. Slowly, the corrupt disciplines will fade away, while the centers grow. It’s a nice theory, but a naïve one. It has never worked.

These centers will not survive without a fighting spirit. The other disciplines see them as threats. Already, liberal arts faculty at one university have allegedly spearheaded efforts to deter students from taking classes in the new center. Other colleges slander such centers to students. They are difficult to staff and hard to defend without destroying unprofessional, ideologically-infused colleges and departments. Founding these centers is very hard. Preserving them is even harder. There will be no restoration without destruction.

Another promising trend is the establishment of new colleges. University of Austin. Wyoming Catholic. Luther Classical College, a new college in Casper, Wyoming. Or the takeover of existing colleges like New College in Florida. All of these start-ups are small. Perhaps, like the centers that exist on campuses, they can attract students away from other prestigious schools and change the allocation of prestige among higher education institutions. Perhaps someday a degree from Wyoming Catholic or the University of Austin will mean more than a degree from Yale or Harvard. Or Yale and Harvard will come to see that they have to change if they want to keep up with the University of Austin. We can hope that happens, of course, but it will not happen without a long and severe fight.

Conservatives must learn from our failures and from the fragile nature of our new experiments. We need to build new machines and new prestige while dismantling the old ones. Nothing else will work in the long term.