Higher Education Must Reform—or Else

A day of reckoning has come for higher education.

In the past four years, acolytes from America’s most prestigious universities not only continued their project of indoctrination on their own campuses, they also attempted to transform the whole country into a grander version of the higher education insane asylum.

From tearing down history to defunding the police to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion over merit and enforcing it with bureaucratic apparatchiks to suppressing speech in the name of tolerance, wherever the Democratic Party took power, there have been attempts to replicate the toxic culture of college campuses.

With the change in the cultural tide has come a forceful de-wokification of government and corporate institutions. But what about the belly of the beast? What about in the woke madrassas themselves?

Jack Fowler at National Review wrote about how alumni at Cornell University are organizing for the February elections (Feb. 1 to Feb. 28) to place two members on the 64-person board of trustees.

“Some concerned graduates are refusing complacency while the university board relentlessly rubber-stamps the administration’s ideological obsessions, tarnishing the once-prestigious brand,” Fowler wrote.

Cornell, like many other campuses and Ivy League schools, was hit by waves of anti-Israel protests that turned highly disruptive over the past year. Some students at the school called the administration’s response “weak.”

I know for a fact the administrators are weak. In 2022, the school removed a bust of Abraham Lincoln from the Cornell University Library after somebody complained about it.

Typical of many leftist institutions, they have been extremely hesitant to punish Democratic Party-linked activist groups, even in cases where protests get violent.

That’s par for the course.

The trustee elections are hardly free and democratic. The school doesn’t allow alumni candidates to actively campaign or tell others what their platforms are. The university polices all materials and information they send to alumni groups. They’ve essentially put a gag order on any candidates running who aren’t outright endorsed by the school administration.

Even allowing two dissenters on a board of 64 people is apparently too much for them to handle.

Fowler wrote that “the process for this election is another example of Cornell’s obtuseness, the administration’s fierce objection to dissent, and its unspoken rule for a board that exists to follow rather than lead.”

The Alumni Free Speech Alliance, an organization that’s been active on more than 30 college campuses and is quickly growing in influence, has made a plea to Cornell to change its ways or face oblivion.

The Alumni Free Speech Alliance published an open letter on Wednesday explaining why Cornell’s election rules are a joke and why the school’s mismanagement is damaging the institution’s reputation.

The letter cited weak leadership, erosion of free speech, rampant antisemitism, and nonexistent viewpoint diversity at the school.

“The student newspaper reports that a 99.5% pure monoculture dominates Cornell’s faculty and staff—creating unhealthy and grossly lopsided political alignments,” the letter read. “An atmosphere of GroupThink breeds a professoriate which is ‘exhilarated’ by the murder of innocent Israelis and indoctrinates students with one-sided dogma.”

The trustee election could be won with 3,000 votes, the Alumni Free Speech Alliance wrote.

The alliance made a final plea for reform:

Like other Ivy League and elite schools across America, Cornell University is now in serious trouble. The current Administration and Trustees seem helpless in the face of the reputational decline Cornell is now experiencing—by being wedded to policies that have pushed the university far down the wrong road. Cornell needs new leadership. Cornell needs its alumni to step up. Cornell needs your help NOW!

Will the administration listen and change course? It’s doubtful. In the past, it didn’t need to listen to criticism.

For a generation, Ivy League schools such as Cornell have essentially blown off demands for free speech and ideological diversity. They are institutions by, for, and of the Left. In the past decade, they’ve essentially dropped any pretense of evenhandedness.

It worked because higher ed is a feeder for all other elite institutions that are keenly interested in maintaining their privileged status. They were free to act as imperiously as they wanted to because they knew their access to wealth and power was unassailable.

However, they may not be able to simply ignore disgruntled alumni anymore. Americans are angry. They’re tired of funding and essentially underwriting institutions that seem to be providing net negative value to American society.

There is a real danger that they will now be bludgeoned from the outside. Taxpayers aren’t too keen on bailing out student loans unless the universities themselves pay up. There have been proposals in Congress to tax university endowments.

One such piece of legislation was sponsored by former Ohio senator Vice President JD Vance.

If the universities were wise, they would open themselves up to miffed alumni. They would provide a little more balance in their faculty. They would abandon their obnoxious, malignant, and in many cases downright illegal DEI programs. They would throw a bone to disgruntled alumni and at least pretend they are listening to demands for change.

That would be the shrewd move as their power wanes and their opponents now hold the sword of Damocles over their heads.

But you won’t find much wisdom in our modern-day institutions of higher learning. They appear to be constitutionally incapable of reforming from within and are arrogant enough to think they can remain impervious to criticism.

Some institutions, such as Harvard, are gearing up for a legal fight against the Trump administration. At least they are paying enough attention to know what way the winds are blowing.

A storm has been brewing outside. The cultural vibe shift is real. If Cornell and other institutions of higher education insist on changing nothing, or acting like the cultural revolution of 2020 is still in effect, they are going to face a lot worse than an alumni revolt.