
The Free Press

Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has been engaged in a high-stakes conflict with America’s elite universities and, by proxy, American universities as a whole. The administration’s supporters have applauded the president’s decision to strip billions of dollars in funding from the Ivy League, while critics have warned that such actions are an overreach and will have a negative impact on the hard sciences.
Beneath the dueling headlines, however, there appears to be an uneasy, if often unstated, agreement: Something is deeply wrong with academia, and no one is quite sure what to do about it.
Conservatives have long made the argument that academia has been corrupted. And since the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 and the Hamas terror campaign of 2023, an increasing number of centrists and liberals have joined the chorus, recognizing that many once-great universities had been captured by destructive ideologies and are no longer truth-seeking institutions.
I have been involved in the campaign for higher education reform for a number of years, working with a coalition that exposed former Harvard president Claudine Gay for plagiarism, abolished DEI in dozens of state universities, and transformed New College of Florida, once a haven for left-wing activist ideologies, into a classical liberal arts institution.
These initiatives have been significant, but piecemeal. Now, it is time to systematize the lessons of these campaigns and to enact a program of national reform.
To that end, we have assembled a group of academics, intellectuals, and civic leaders who, today, are proud to unveil the Manhattan Statement on Higher Education, which recapitulates the crisis of the universities and calls on Trump to advance six principles for reform: truth over ideology, institutional neutrality, color-blind equality, free speech, civil discourse, and administrative transparency.
Although some academics will balk at any kind of intervention, the reality is that American taxpayers subsidize the universities to the tune of more than $150 billion per year. In exchange, those institutions have a responsibility to follow the law and to uphold basic academic standards, beginning with the most important of all: an orientation toward truth.
These principles are good for universities, conducive to the public good, and consistent with existing law. The intention is to set a baseline of minimum standards that will rein in the worst instincts of the universities, empower administrators who want to prioritize academic excellence, and ensure that taxpayer funding is devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, rather than ideological crusades.
These principles are also broadly popular. As part of this initiative, the Manhattan Institute, where I am a senior fellow, conducted a public opinion survey on each of the reform principles and found that they all enjoy the support of an overwhelming majority of Americans.
The American people have been enormously generous to our universities. It is time for the universities to honor their end of the bargain.
Voters have grown distrustful of the universities and see these reforms, which they support by margins ranging from 3:1 to 9:1, as common sense. For example, 66 percent say that universities must provide a real forum for free speech, and 67 percent agree that schools should expel students who try to squash civil discussion by disrupting events, occupying buildings, and calling for violence. Voters overwhelmingly support students’ right to protest, but have little tolerance for activism that seeks to intimidate others.
Even the principle that has sparked the most controversy—abolishing DEI and adopting a policy of color-blind equality—has majority or plurality support from Republicans, Democrats, whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. Only 20 percent of voters say that race, gender, or ethnicity should be taken into account when universities are choosing which students to admit or teachers to hire; 71 percent say that all potential university students should be treated equally, regardless of gender or skin color.
The American people have been enormously generous to our universities. It is time for the universities to honor their end of the bargain. You can read the Manhattan Statement in full below. Its deepest purpose is to remind the public that there is a compact between the citizen and the university, and that we all have a common interest in seeing the universities succeed.
The Manhattan Statement on Higher Education
America’s colleges and universities have long been the bright lights of our civilization. For nearly four centuries, they have pioneered new fields of knowledge, brought the arts and sciences to new heights, and educated the men who built our republic. But over the past half-century, these institutions gradually discarded their founding principles and burned down their accumulated prestige, all in pursuit of ideologies that corrupt knowledge and point the nation toward nihilism.
There have been warnings. From William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale to Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, conservatives pleaded for the universities to maintain their basic commitments, while liberals promised to reform the campus from within. All of these attempts failed. The conservatives were ignored; the liberals were steamrolled; and the process of ideological capture accelerated.
Now, the truth is undeniable. Beginning with the George Floyd riots and culminating in the celebration of the Hamas terror campaign, the institutions of higher education finally ripped off the mask and revealed their animating spirit: racialism, ideology, chaos. The current state of affairs is untenable. The American people send billions to the universities and are repaid with contempt. The leaders of these institutions seem to have forgotten that the university and the state are bound together by compact. During the Founding era, schools of higher education were established by government charter and written into the law, which stipulated that, in exchange for public support, they had a duty to advance the public good and, if they were to stray from that mission, the people retained the right to intervene.
Over the years, the locus of this particular compact has changed—the universities have entered into a relationship with the federal government—but the underlying principle remains the same: Higher education must serve the public good and, in times of trouble, must be reformed. The troubles of the current era are neither light nor transient. The universities have brazenly, deliberately, and repeatedly violated their compact with the American people. They have engaged in a long train of abuses, evasions, and usurpations which, with every turn of the ratchet, have moved our society toward a new kind of tyranny—one in which ideology determines truth, and the university functions as a political agent of the left.
Let us enumerate the facts:
• The universities have capitulated to the radical left’s “long march through the institutions,” which has converted them into laboratories of ideology, rather than institutions oriented toward truth.
• The universities have violated their commitment to serve in a position above day-to-day politics and, instead, have adopted a narrow political agenda and engaged directly in partisan activism, with particularly disastrous results for the humanities and social sciences.
• The universities have built enormous “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracies that discriminate on the basis of race and violate the fundamental principle of equality—that high prize which was inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and codified into law with the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act.
• The universities have contributed to a new kind of tyranny, with publicly funded initiatives designed to advance the cause of digital censorship, public health lockdowns, child sex-trait modification, race-based redistribution, and other infringements on America’s long-standing rights and liberties.
• The universities have corrupted faculty hiring practices with racial quotas, ideological filters, and diversity statements, which function as loyalty oaths to the left and have virtually eliminated conservative scholars from the prestige institutions.
• The universities have degraded the liberal arts with reductive ideologies that no longer aim to preserve and discover what is highest in man, but to unleash resentments against Western civilization, from the Greeks and Romans to the English and the Americans.
• The universities have ceased to represent the nation as a whole; rather, they have divided Americans into “oppressor” and “oppressed,” and have, in effect, declared war on millions of Americans who simply want to live, work, worship, and raise families in peace.
Enough. The American people provide status, privileges, and more than $150 billion per year to the universities. In light of these transgressions, we have every right to renegotiate the terms of the compact with the universities and to demand that they return to their original mission: to pursue knowledge, to educate the citizen, and to uphold the law. In exchange for continued public support, these institutions must abide by the principles of the Constitution and honor their obligation to public good.
To that end, we call on the President of the United States to draft a new contract with the universities, which should be written into every grant, payment, loan, eligibility, and accreditation, and punishable by revocation of all public benefit:
• The universities must advance truth over ideology, with rigorous standards of academic conduct, controls for academic fraud, and merit-based decision-making throughout the enterprise.
• The universities must cease their direct participation in social and political activism; the proper vehicle for criticism is through the individual scholar and student, not the university as a corporate body.
• The universities must adhere to the principle of color-blind equality, by abolishing DEI bureaucracies, disbanding racially segregated programs, and terminating race-based discrimination in admissions, hiring, promotions, and contracting.
• The universities must adhere to the principle of freedom of speech, not only in theory, but in practice; they must provide a forum for a wider range of debate and protect faculty and students who dissent from the ruling consensus.
• The universities must uphold the highest standard of civil discourse, with swift and significant penalties, including suspension and expulsion, for anyone who would disrupt speakers, vandalize property, occupy buildings, call for violence, or interrupt the operations of the university.
• The universities must provide transparency about their operations and, at the end of each year, publish complete data on race, admissions, and class rank; employment and financial returns by major; and campus attitudes on ideology, free speech, and civil discourse.
We acknowledge that the crisis of higher education will not be resolved in an instant. Still, we maintain faith that these proposed reforms will provide a starting point for a broader restoration, which can push back the forces of radicalism and create the space for real knowledge. Despite the challenges, we refuse to abandon the hope that America’s universities can once again be those bright lights, pursuing truth, sustaining our highest traditions, and educating the future guardians of our republic.
Christopher Rufo, Manhattan Institute
Jordan Peterson, University of Toronto
Bishop Robert Barron, Diocese of Winona-Rochester
Virginia Foxx, United States Congress
Victor Davis Hanson, Hoover Institution
Niall Ferguson, Hoover Institution
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Hoover Institution
Sergiu Klainerman, Princeton University
Omar Sultan Haque, Harvard University
Joshua Rauh, Stanford University
John Cochrane, Stanford University
Iván Marinovic, Stanford University
Dorian Abbot, University of Chicago
Joshua Mitchell, Georgetown University
Carol Swain, Vanderbilt University
Bradley Thompson, Clemson University
Gad Saad, Concordia University
Lee Jussim, Rutgers University
Eric Kaufmann, University of Buckingham
J.D. Haltigan, University of Buckingham
Alex Priou, University of Austin
Peter Boghossian, University of Austin
Pavlos Papadopoulos, Wyoming Catholic College
Pedro Domingos, University of Washington
Dan Bonevac, University of Texas
Luciano de Castro, University of Iowa
Brandon Warmke, University of Florida
Bryan Caplan, George Mason University
Adam Kolasinski, Texas A&M University
Joshua Katz, American Enterprise Institute
Christina Hoff-Sommers, American Enterprise Institute
Solveig Gold, American Council of Trustees and Alumni
Jay Greene, Heritage Foundation
Scott Yenor, Claremont Institute
Jim Piereson, Manhattan Institute
Peter Wood, National Association of Scholars
Yoram Hazony, Edmund Burke Foundation
Ben Shapiro, Daily Wire
Rich Lowry, National Review
Roger Kimball, The New Criterion
Daniel McCarthy, Modern Age
Mark Bauerlein, First Things
David Rieff, Author