Those Newly Brave Universities
As American universities succumb to left-wing ideological monoculture, even tenured professors whisper their dissent in fear. This hard-hitting op-ed exposes the failure of university leadership to defend intellectual diversity, and argues why federal intervention, however regrettable, has become necessary.
Michael Fertik
May 12, 2025 - 10:55 AM
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Tenure Was Meant to Protect Speech — Not Hide From It
Recent op-eds in the Wall Street Journal by Harvard’s Professor James Hankins and Wesleyan President Michael Roth argue, more or less, that, while American higher education has become nearly universally politically left-leaning, it is not the federal government’s role to seek corrective action to this lamentable monocultural drift. Instead, universities should be allowed to govern themselves back toward the intellectual diversity that is required to fulfill their educational missions.
I cannot be the only reader who has reacted with the simple question: why haven’t the universities been able to govern themselves till now?
It is indeed regrettable that government has had to intervene to prompt the fully tenured leaders who run America’s best universities to start acting responsibly toward their own core educational purpose. Faculty and administrator advocates for hard-left uni-ideology have terrorized other faculty who have reportedly been quietly skeptical of so-called DEI excesses. These supposed skeptics, who are practically unfirable tenured professors — probably the most job-safe humans on the planet — have acquiesced in the long march toward intellectual conformity. Over decades, they have hidden. Worse, they have too often declined to support students or junior faculty who have bravely spoken up against the monoculture.
Professor Hankins – I am a former student – tells in his piece (“A Conservative Harvard Professor on How the University Can Save Itself,” WSJ, April 24, 2025) of fellow professors who have spoken to him in hushed tones of their reservations. They dislike the excesses of on-campus academic activism. They dislike the lowering of intellectual standards to accommodate and sacralize hard progressive notions du jour. Why have the tenured professors been cowardly? Why must they skulk and whisper? Why have they not made their skepticism loudly public over the past decades?
I have taught at Harvard Law School for most of the past ten years. When I ask faculty friends the same questions, they sometimes flatly admit cowardice. They fear DEI administrators who can perhaps not exactly fire them but who can easily subject them to investigation. Faculty must often defend these investigations at great personal expense, “draining,” as one friend told me, “our retirement accounts.”
Wesleyan’s Token Efforts Fall Flat
In his own op-ed, Michael Roth (“Our Universities Need Diverse Ideas, Not Ideological Auditors, WSJ, May 1, 2025) picks out some examples of green shoots intellectual diversity coming organically from the Wesleyan community. His immediate point is that Wesleyan isn’t Portlandia. His overarching argument is that Wesleyan should be left alone to right itself.
One of his chief pieces of evidence is the launch of a student journal that explores finance. It is astonishing that anyone would think that this is proof of material intellectual diversity. If anything, clucking about the birth of this periodical illustrates exactly how deep the ideological uniformity goes: if this is news worth sharing, the Wesleyan community must be overrun by a baseline belief that capitalist economics is no more than blight.
How much more persuasive it would be if Roth could specify the impressive number of conservative or libertarian professors Wesleyan has hired during his tenure as University President. But he does not. Because he cannot.
Taxpayer-Funded Conformity, Now With Legal Risks
While the voting, tenured faculty have steamrolled their universities toward hard left monoculture, they have been all too glad to continue receiving the enormous largesse of the American taxpayer. Harvard in the billions, Wesleyan in the millions. The money is now at grave risk.
Many legal eagles now glibly assert that Supreme Court precedent prohibits the Trump administration from taking its announced punitive actions. Specifically, they will say that precedent forbids the federal government from withholding grant monies in the absence of exceptional prior clarity as to the preconditions under which those funds are enjoyed.
In fact, precedent in this field is, at best, varying and unsettled. Indeed, an important portion of that precedent has to do with how grant-receiving institutions speak about subjects like abortion. We have all seen how much deference the current Court has shown that line of cases. A legal showdown is imminent, and the federal government will win a lot of points, though certainly not all.
The Real Shame: Government Must Act Because Universities Won’t
The Trump administration has finally gotten these university leaders out of bed. Perhaps the president’s heavy-handed action is exactly as necessary as it is regrettable. If the adults who have supposedly been running these institutions are either enthralled with or too terrified of internal campaigners who threaten social ostracism in the absence of full capitulation to their screedy, data-undriven demands, then they eventually forfeit the right to say they are in charge.
Maybe it is the fact that Trump’s administration is attacking the universities that bothers them so much. Remember that President Biden’s administration undertook similar action. In November 2023, following some nasty on-campus behavior in the wake of Hamas’s October 7th terror invasion of Israel, then Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said that “[i]f an institution refuses to follow the law to protect students, we would withhold dollars.” The Department of Education investigated six universities at that time. But that was Biden. This is Trump. It must be worse, right?
Or perhaps the Harvards and Wesleyans of America are happy for lesser universities to be investigated but not the most famous ones? Or perhaps it is the sheer volume of dollars now at risk that is finally, finally forcing the university leadership to pay attention. That seems most probable.
Like many recent commentators, Professor Hankins and President Roth agree on their central argument: it is most unfortunate that the federal government is now taking steps to punish, severely, universities that have capitulated to hard left campus ideological monoculture. They fail to reach the more essential point: it is most unfortunate that the federal government must now do so, because university leaders have not been brave enough to do it themselves. What a stupid place to be.
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Michael Fertik
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