Higher education is in crisis. Students and faculty are uncomfortable speaking their minds, lest they find themselves canceled; tuition costs are skyrocketing, far in excess of inflation; taxpayers are asking why they’re paying for radical indoctrination.
This crisis is the result of an exploding university bureaucracy that subverts faculty governance in favor of an illiberal identitarianism. What began as administrative bloat has become a full-blown commissariat that stifles intellectual diversity, undermines equal opportunity, and excludes dissenting voices. The average four-year university now has more DEI officials than history professors. DEI offices have broadened the meaning of terms like “harassment” and “discrimination” not to promote a welcoming campus environment but to enforce progressive ideology.
How do we fix this mess? Appeals for internal reform aren’t enough. The problem necessitates external controls from federal agencies, civil rights regulators, and congressional oversight, tied to federal funding.
Fortunately, Congress has already given the Department of Education (DOE) some tools to address these issues. The next administration should instruct the department to compel institutions to certify their compliance with federal requirements on the protection of student speech and association rights and with Supreme Court rulings that outlaw loyalty oaths. Just as all recipients of federal higher-education funds must certify compliance on everything from accounting standards to antidiscrimination practices, conservatives can mandate that they discontinue programs that undermine free speech and due process, as well as those that constitute compelled speech in the form of diversity statements.
Next, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) should investigate any institution that admits to engaging in “systemic” or “structural” racism, as was claimed in so many self-flagellating statements three summers ago. In addition, to ensure that colleges and universities don’t resist the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that bans racial preferences in admissions, the OCR should require them to show that their admissions processes are indeed color-blind—whether by disclosing GPA and standardized test data, or by another method that prevents racial discrimination by proxy.
Finally, the DOE must overhaul accreditation metrics to focus on fraud prevention and academic rigor and must remove accreditation monopolies, such as the one that the American Bar Association enjoys over law schools, when institutions abandon (as the ABA has) their mission of neutral, merit-based judgment.
There’s still a long way to go before higher education returns to its mission of seeking truth, but the next Department of Education has a vital role to play in advancing that process.
Photo: Victor J. Blue for The Washington Post via Getty Images
