Fixing America's Universities
Addressing on-campus antisemitism is not enough
Introduction
Recent events have highlighted the federal government’s leverage over America’s elite universities; the Trump administration has acted rapidly and with great force to punish anti-semitism on campus. By threatening to withdraw funding, the administration has demonstrated the ability to bend the universities to their will on this critical issue. But this is a short-term fix and will be reversed immediately should the threat of punishment be withdrawn: A grudging willingness by faculties dominated by the progressive left to tamp down the most extreme behaviors on campus does not represent a change in institutional culture or values. America’s elite universities need to be reshaped into institutions where the faculty and student bodies include citizens with views that broadly represent the diversity of thought across the society.
The relationship between the federal government and America’s elite universities was a driving force in the recent election cycle and has since become headline news. In a public announcement, President Trump called for the reestablishment of the American university: His intention is that American traditions and Western civilization would henceforth be valorized and Marxist indoctrination eliminated. In this vision, entrance and exit exams will be institutionalized to measure the impact of higher education; bureaucrats who enforced “diversity, equity, and inclusion” will be removed. The accreditation system for colleges and universities will be reformed to enforce these changes; those academic institutions that do not comply will find their endowments taxed. President Trump wants to make academia great again. How much of this can be done directly by the federal government is an open question.
The Problem
It is clear that the American university system is deeply broken. Let’s start with the fact that the faculty in four-year US colleges and universities is overwhelmingly liberal: A 2022 survey of nearly 1,500 faculty members found that 50% self-report as “liberal,” 26% as “conservative,” and 17% as “moderate.” At Harvard, 77% of the faculty identify themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal”, while only 3% identify themselves as “conservative” or “very conservative.’’ And Harvard is no anomaly. In the Northeast, the region boasting many of America’s top universities (Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Columbia, Yale), the disparity jumps dramatically: A 2014 study found that in New England, liberal professors outnumbered conservative professors 28 to 1. As recently as 2023, “Democratic” faculty at Yale outnumbered “Republican” faculty nearly 24 to 1 in key departments including political science, history, and law. Counties and towns in which colleges and universities are located also tend to vote Democratic. Forbes reported on November 4, 2024 that “Harris leads Trump by 78% to 8% among college faculty according to an Inside Higher Ed/Hanover Research survey.” Such circumstances can only emerge, prima facie, from deliberate and overwhelming discrimination by the universities against anyone perceived to be on the right.
Top universities have been slow at best, and negligent at worst, in condemning the atrocities committed by Hamas. Hamas, an organization with explicitly genocidal goals. Many major universities allowed disruptive and threatening pro-Hamas protests to continue for months during the 2023-2024 school term before finally taking action, demonstrating either confusion or willful ignorance over the distinction between free speech and threats of violence. It should come as no surprise that such protests have resumed anew. The Trump administration is using civil rights laws and regulations against the relevant universities.
The political views of the faculty teaching America’s undergraduates do not reflect, in any way, the diversity of beliefs among the parents who are frequently paying the bills. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is engaging in loan forgiveness programs, in effect shifting the cost of degrees – many of which graduates themselves see as worthless – onto those workers who either paid off their student loans or never attended college. It’s hard to see this as anything other than a wildly successful grift by university administrators.
Operating a not-for-profit with a giant endowment fund is not a constitutional right. Nonprofits are exempted from taxes because they are meant to serve some greater societal purpose. But the great American research universities enjoy privileges far beyond that: Most of their annual research budgets come from federal research dollars. In fact, at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and Yale, their largest single external (non-endowment) source of funding - in effect their largest customer - is the federal government. By contrast, tuition and other sources come from a much more diverse customer base. While tuition remains a significant factor, losing federal funding would be a devastating blow. This is not true for all schools in the United States; Hillsdale College, for example, takes no federal funding and has been gaining influence rapidly over the past two decades.
Great universities can serve many purposes: To educate students, to train future faculty, to generate first-rate research, to provide a home for the empiricist enterprise, to act as a repository for knowledge and expertise, to encourage contemplation, to provide a space for the exploration of new ideas and theories, to spin off new companies and new technologies, and to facilitate social networking. The list goes on, into sometimes-absurd territory: Operating competitive, revenue-generating sports teams, paying ‘student athletes’ multi-million-dollar salaries, selling merchandise, operating university-branded ice cream parlors, and promoting radical politics.
To my mind, one of the most important purposes of top universities is to introduce the children of the American elite, who inherit wealth and influence, to the students who are admitted on the basis of brilliance. Educating these two groups side by side promotes social mobility and refreshes the American leadership class with people who’ve struggled and fought and generated genuine excellence despite adversity. But because the great universities have largely eschewed purely merit-based admissions (read: testing) and because universities have become enamored of the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ideology, it has become harder and harder for the merely brilliant to gain admission. Meanwhile, expensive consultants teach the children of great wealth how to convince admissions officers that they are members of a “diverse” minority and have been personally oppressed and victimized. The children who are merely brilliant – and can prove it on the SAT and AP tests – are frequently left behind. Perfect test scores and good grades are not sufficient – invisible hurdles, involving expensive extra-curricular activities and intersectional storytelling, are now at the core of admissions at top schools.
Furthermore, when these students do get into college, they discover that grade inflation has completely eliminated their ability to distinguish themselves from their less-brilliant, less-ambitious, and less-curious classmates. Professor Harvey Mansfield, who teaches political philosophy at Harvard University, has waged a lonely battle against grade inflation. Mansfield claims that undeserved As flatter and then corrupt even the best students. Furthermore, if everyone gets an A, how can anyone demonstrate true brilliance or a willingness to work harder than the rest? Grade inflation runs counter to social mobility.
One promise of American exceptionalism boils down to the possibility of intergenerational upward mobility. Parents who inculcate in their children an ethic that honors work and a love of learning should not have to see their efforts undermined by rampant grade inflation – not to mention an increase in tuition costs.
Federal research and overhead dollars have paid for the enormous expansion of university bureaucracies over the past 40 years, while federal backing for student loans has facilitated a dramatic increase in tuition costs. Between the fees that the federal government pays for administering research grants, running national labs, guaranteeing tuition loans, and subsidizing university-run hospitals – among countless other earmarks – the federal government has enormous leverage over universities and their behavior. It is time for Congress to condition this funding on the universities acting in the national interest, rather than actively marketing themselves to America’s enemies.
The Proposed Fixes
I would propose the following policy changes at the federal level to address these issues:
Loan forgiveness is a dispositive sign that the degree a student has received is in fact worthless, that the university’s student selection process is insufficiently rigorous, or that grade inflation has undermined the quality of the credential. To be eligible for future federal funding, the degree-granting university should be required to pay back any federally forgiven loans out of endowment or overhead funding. Universities should be afraid to grant worthless degrees.
To be eligible for future federal grants, universities should be required to reserve 50% of their admissions slots at the undergraduate level for purely meritocratic admissions. All factors of race, gender, wealth, and geography must be eliminated from such applications. Admission for this group should be based exclusively on objective test scores; names, addresses, and other demographic information should be fully anonymized as part of the admissions process. No essays, letters of recommendation, or other qualitative data should be allowed for consideration for these slots. These slots should be restricted to legal US residents, who are eligible to take jobs here in the United States when they graduate. Were these slots open to students who are not able to stay and work in the United States, this would turn into a subsidy program for foreign states. Furthermore, the universities should be required to offer full tuition, room, and board scholarships to anyone scoring to the top ⅕ of the students they admit under this program – who will constitute, more or less, the top 10% of their class on the basis of test scores. For poor and disadvantaged children, we need to be able to say something simple: Do spectacularly well on the SAT’s and AP tests, and you can go to a top school for free. No other hoops or mysterious processes required.
The most under-represented group on elite US university campuses is military veterans. 6.2% of Americans are veterans. At Harvard, veterans accounted for only .71% of the undergraduate population in 2023. That same year, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Williams, and Amherst, together, had only 189 undergraduate veterans enrolled out of a total undergraduate population of 25,777 (0.73%). One form of merit is mere brilliance: Another is making a choice to serve the national interest through volunteering for the military. Veterans should be overrepresented at the great universities, given that they have voluntarily chosen to serve our country. To remain eligible for federal grant funding, universities should be required to maintain 10% of their undergraduate class, 10% of their graduate class, and 10% of their tenure-track and tenured faculty as honorably discharged veterans, ROTC cadets, or active-duty service members. Given the demographics, some schools will likely become ineligible for federal funding as a result; to achieve these numbers, most schools will need to fight to matriculate veteran students and faculty. This will provide a strong incentive for schools to create a friendly environment for military veterans. If Congress is unwilling or unable to enact the relevant laws, the DOD could likely require these same metrics for defense funding on campus, which funds a large fraction of the work in science and engineering.
Every class must be graded on a curve. Since the 1970’s, universities have allowed grades to be inflated to the point where they are largely meaningless. 80 percent of the grades distributed at Harvard and Yale are “A’s.” A simple solution is as follows: To be eligible for federal funding, all classes for which credit is issued must be graded on a symmetric C curve. For every C+, there must be a C-. For every B, there must be a D. For every A, an F. In addition, no more than 5% of the total scores may be A’s, and no more than 15 percent may be B’s. Restoring the signaling power of grades will enable social mobility and reward merit, brilliance, curiosity, and hard work, which are values that we should be inculcating among the young. Forcing grading to be on a symmetric C curve should be a legal condition for federal funding.
Conclusion
America is in a time of political, social, and economic crisis. Political polarization is at an all-time high. Our allies are under attack around the world. Our national debt is ballooning to the tune of about 1.2x GDP; even if every discretionary federal government program were shut down entirely, it would not be enough to close the federal deficit. Enhanced economic productivity is critical in meeting these challenges. Our universities need to advance the goals of our polity, and need to be in the business of recognizing, rewarding, and educating excellence and service.
With the changes proposed above, students will find themselves too busy with their classes to be out on the quad demanding the death of our allies, the destruction of cherished institutions and traditions, and abusing and frightening vulnerable minority groups on campus. It’s time to restore competition both among higher education institutions and among students.
It’s a sad day when the sole surviving pocket of unquestioned competitive meritocracy on American university campuses is the football squad.
Michael Hochberg is a visiting scholar at the Centre for Geopolitics at Cambridge University, a Caltech-trained physicist, and a serial semiconductor founder with four startup exits to his name. His writings on geopolitics can be found at longwalls.substack.com.
Good thing this monster does not write the rules.
We should stop accepting foreign students from China and it's allies. Why are we training and educating them to take that knowledge home to use against us?