The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between the true and the false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Universities in the West today would be tragically unrecognizable to their medieval and early modern founders. Pursuits of truth, knowledge, scientific facts, inquiry and critical scrutiny, shared purposes of higher education rooted in both classical and modern practices, are overshadowed by the cancerous spread of subjective postmodernism.

Cancel culture and self-censorship have neutralized institutional neutrality. Professor Owen Anderson, who teaches world religions and ethics at Arizona State University, received a failing annual performance review following anonymous student complaints alleging a “Christian bias.” All the professor did, against the university’s recommendation to incorporate “decolonizing and anti-racism ideologies” into classroom instruction, was to pose scholarly questions about the theory of the “highest good” and Thomas Aquinas. The fact that Professor Anderson is a vocal critic of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), so much so as a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the school’s DEI training, contextualizes the penalty.

Last year, the University of California (UC) decided to scale back a social-justice-themed postdoctoral program that used DEI-based hiring criteria. The decision was met with a firestorm of faculty protests. Leftist professors, many of whom were hired through the program’s incentive structure to retain participating scholars, coordinated a highly effective campaign to pressure the administration. The campaign began with an open letter from anonymous “Concerned UC Faculty, administrators, staff, professorial colleagues, and constituents,” opposing the program’s elimination and supporting UC’s core values of DEI. It also included an elaborate toolkit with action alerts, talking points, a mass email campaign, and a sample press release. Subsequently, a petition with more than 1,000 signatures and endorsements from unions and nonprofits was submitted to the UC president, who was also invited to a press conference organized by the graduate student union. Unsurprisingly, UC is now reversing course and reviving the program.

Not only are university faculty generally left-leaning, but they also lean far to the left, according to a 2026 study of faculty’s campaign donations from 55 top universities. The study, commissioned by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, found that the median university faculty donor registers a -1.02 “CFscore,” slightly less extreme than Bernie Sanders’s -1.14 score. While disciplines like the humanities and fine arts are the least hospitable to conservative views, as confirmed by previous observations, business and agriculture professors still lean heavily to the left. In other words, viewpoint diversity in higher education remains an empty slogan.

The far left’s decades-long institutional march to capture higher education imposes practical obstacles and legal risks for ambitious reform proposals. A conservative takeover is sadly not feasible in the short run, at least not on a scale sufficient to effect systematic change. The best one can hope for, in the effort to meaningfully return higher learning to its intended goals of truth-seeking and critical thinking, is incremental progress.

Judging by the debilitating blowback against legislative mandates, as in Florida’s “Stop Woke Act,” and against top-down policy changes, as in the UC case, we should take another step to anchor incremental progress in alliance-building between conservative and liberal professors. After all, the anti-learning, anti-fact-seeking, anti-merit, and anti-reality quagmire facing higher education was singlehandedly brought on by a loud minority of radical scholar-activists, who skew the faculty viewpoint diversity index to the sharp left, and with whom both conservative and center-left academics have ample grounds to disagree. Although they possess vast differences in high politics, the two sides have much common ground to explore, from supporting free speech to upholding academic rigor.

Resuming standardized testing can be a great starting point for this proposed alliance. As of June 2026, 2,085 accredited universities and colleges in the U.S. are test-optional or test-free in their undergraduate admissions, while a paltry 21 private and 42 public colleges require SAT or ACT scores for admission. The war on tests is a purely ideological construct, perpetuated by the debunked position that standardized tests are racially biased. Both liberals and conservatives can agree on the mounting evidence in favor of bringing back tests. This common ground was the impetus for a growing initiative by UC professors urging the university system to take swift action to advance student success.

1,958 UC professors in STEM, including seven of the nine Chairs of UC Mathematics Departments and 55 additional STEM department chairs, have signed a letter calling for the reinstatement of the SAT/ACT mathematics requirement for applicants to STEM majors, institutional validation of academic readiness, and faculty oversight. Putting their names down, unlike the aforementioned anonymous open letter for DEI hiring, nearly 2,000 UC professors cosigned on presenting glaring evidence of academic failure as a result of UC’s test-optional decision in 2020:

Over the past five years, we have seen a widening divergence in mathematical preparation
levels within the same classroom. This trend indicates that current admissions practices do not
provide a sufficiently reliable check on mathematical readiness for STEM majors. The UC San
Diego Senate–Administration Workgroup on Admissions report documents this crisis in stark
terms: in the last five years, the number of students whose mathematics skills fall below high
school level increased nearly thirtyfold; moreover, 70% of those students fall below middle
school levels, reaching roughly one in twelve members of the entering cohort. These findings
are corroborated by data across our campuses. For example, for three consecutive years, 20-
30% of UC Berkeley first-semester calculus students who participated in mathematical
diagnostic testing displayed severe preparation deficits.

This impressive initiative has also expanded into social sciences, with 786 UC professors signing on a separate letter asking the system to consider the SAT reading and writing sections or the ACT English and reading sections in undergraduate admissions,

As artificial intelligence becomes more capable, it is arguably more important than ever for students to be able to think through and compose sound arguments on their own, to comprehend the texts they read, and to recognize weaknesses in the arguments of those texts. The growing use of AI also makes essays a less reliable indicator of these abilities. Without foundational literacy, students face difficulties across university disciplines. Eliminating the metrics that diagnose these preparation gaps imposed significant barriers for underprepared students and their instructors alike.

In total, 2,354 tenured UC professors, some of whom signed on both the STEM and social sciences letters, recognize the harms of the test-blind movement on student success. That is not a negligible number. Many of the signees are also left-leaning, helping shape a bipartisan consensus for academic excellence and merit.

Disdain for race-based affirmative action can be the next strategic point of convergence. In 2020, Proposition 16, California’s $31-million ballot measure initiative to endorse government preferences, went down in a disastrous defeat, with 57.2 percent of “No” votes. Among the 9.65 million voters who disagreed, 35 percent were Biden voters, according to a Center for Equal Opportunity analysis of post-election data. Prop. 16’s overwhelming failure confirms four decades of public opinion polling data demonstrating broad-based support for race-neutral public policies, especially in higher education.

As early as 1993, public opinion experts Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza cited several opinion polls to argue that the race-preferential policy agenda “is controversial precisely because most Americans do not disagree about it.” A 2003 Gallup poll showed that 69 percent of Americans wanted college admissions to be based solely on merit, and only 29 percent supported considering race and ethnicity. Subsequent surveys by Gallup, conducted in 2007, 2013, and 2016, affirmed the finding that Americans rejected the consideration of race or ethnicity by a margin of two to one or more. 73 percent of Americans, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center poll commissioned before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, said race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions. The Pew Research Center replicated the survey in 2023 and arrived at the same conclusion.

The left’s quarrel, when it comes to race and education, is not about traditional political disagreements. Rather, it is with reality itself. During debate over a California bill that would have restored racial preferences in public education, California State Assemblymember Corey Jackson dismissed evidence of broad public opposition to affirmative action. Jackson, who holds a Ph.D. in social work, insisted that support for race-based preferences “is not a perspective. This is a fact. So, let’s not get it twisted here.” He doubled down during the Assembly floor debate:

To say that government can oppress communities for hundreds of years based upon skin color but not do anything to remedy the genocide, dehumanization, slavery, rape, and destructions of an entire people is immoral. It is unjust. … We must do everything that we can to correct the legal oppression that this state has done to our Native American brothers and sisters, African-Americans, and other similarly situated populations.

Such rhetoric is emblematic of the totalitarian impulse that has swollen academia and hijacked society at large, an impulse that needs to be fended off by conservatives and liberals alike. In the war against illiberal radicals and modern-day Marxists, a war for reality and the survival of Western civilization, we need each other.

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