Author’s Note: This excerpt is from my weekly “Top of Mind” email, sent to subscribers every Thursday. For more content like this and to receive the full newsletter each week, sign up on Minding the Campus’s homepage. Simply go to the right side of the page, look for “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” and enter your name and email.
In this week’s top article, Dr. Kenneth N. Corvo, an associate professor at Syracuse University’s School of Social Work and author of the upcoming Prometheus on the Quad, argues that the American university is in crisis. I think he’s right—for the most part.
In higher education, administrative bloat has weakened institutions, the sciences have been politicized (as we’ve covered in Minding the Sciences), and campuses have become battlegrounds in a broader culture war.
But I disagree with Corvo’s framing of conservatives’ role in this crisis. Corvo writes:
Conservative politicians, emboldened by the populist distrust of ‘elites,’ have sought to defund academic programs, impose ideological tests on tenure, and surveil faculty for perceived biases. State legislatures in Florida, Indiana, and Idaho, among others, have passed legislation directly forbidding types of speech, degrading tenure, and defunding programs that they find problematic.
I maintain no allegiance to any one political party; I’ve criticized Republicans for their demonstrated spinelessness on immigration and denounced the warmongers still lurking in their ranks. But, in my opinion, by arguing that conservatives bear equal responsibility with the left for academia’s decline, Corvo undermines the very solutions needed to fix the problems he identifies: ideological stranglehold, the corruption of scientific inquiry, administrative bloat, etc.
The decline of the American university isn’t some bipartisan blunder—it’s the lopsided result of leftist control.
Arguing that both sides share equally in the blame smacks of a common centrist tic, namely, feigning neutrality, while simultaneously treating virtually any effort to unwind leftist control as an attack on academic freedom.
The ugly reality that escapes many education reformers—even the ones ostensibly opposed to the left—is that for half a century, universities have morphed into leftist indoctrination factories, where “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) dictates across-the-board operations, including hiring and admissions processes. DEI’s predecessor, affirmative action, proved no less than an archetype whereby merit was sacrificed at the altar of identity. And we can’t forget the decades-long attacks on Western civilization. Nor can we rightly say that the right is at fault for the rise of anti-Semitism across the nation’s colleges. The Department of Education (ED) has only fueled this collapse. As the National Association of Scholars’ newly released Waste Land report explains, the ED—staffed mostly by leftists—has weaponized Title IX to erode due process and impose sweeping ideological mandates on universities.
The decline of the American university isn’t some bipartisan blunder—it’s the lopsided result of leftist control.
And how have vigilant conservatives countered? They’ve passed legislation to dismantle DEI bureaucracies, to remove politicized content from curricula, and to end tenure protections for professors who have effectuated protected pulpits for activism instead of education.
[RELATED: Resistance to Trump’s Orders Sows Doubt About Reform]
Such conservative-led legislation has—invariably—been misconstrued by leftists and centrists as an assault on academic freedom. Some of you will remember Florida’s HB 1069, which sent both sides into convulsions, flooding the media with breathless warnings about “book bans.” The right decried government overreach; the left decried an alleged moral panic, insisting kids should be taught that whiteness is bad. In reality, the legislation merely restricted books depicting sexual content that were inappropriate for young students—i.e., no Penthouse in first grade. That’s hardly an Orwellian dictate.
And like the Florida bill, most conservative-led legislation isn’t deepening the education crisis, silencing speech, or stifling the marketplace of ideas—it’s pulling universities from the ashes of leftist dominance and attempting to rebuild what was lost.
Corvo is right about many things, most stringently his writ large declaration that the American university is in crisis. But thus far, only the political right has made serious efforts to steer higher education back toward “the pursuit of truth.” Indeed, Corvo’s article is the most incisive critique of higher education this week. It is undoubtedly a worthy contribution to the debate we must have about how to restore academic freedom and save our universities. And Minding the Campus is here to foster that unfettered, edifying debate.
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