Brave reformers must dethrone radical political zealots to save our universities

Of the 10 sections of President Trump’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, the second is the real key to reform.

It asks that schools cultivate a “vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus” — exactly what campus radicals have destroyed, reducing higher education to its present appalling condition.

But this remedy also exposes the main weakness of the White House’s compact — and of most reform efforts.

Asking radical university staff to create ideological diversity is rather like relying on Nancy Pelosi to choose Republican representatives for the Jan. 6 committee.

While radicals remain in control of campuses, reform will proceed glacially — if at all.

The discrepancy between what we fund the campuses for and what they are doing is enormous.

Promotion of knowledge and understanding has given way to inculcation of a poisonous fringe ideology.

Students are encouraged to despise their society and kept ignorant of anything that might make them think otherwise.

Receivership

Observers have long shrugged off the danger with the complacent idea that students will see through their professors’ foolishness — if not right away, then when they enter the “real world.”

The election of a veritable communist as mayor of New York shows how shortsighted that is.

After a radicalized college education has been fed to an entire generation, we face the prospect of the remaining well-educated people in their middle and later years being replaced by a second radicalized generation.

Reform is urgent.

The only viable solution is to place schools in “receivership,” a well-established procedure to reform ailing college departments.

A new chairman is imposed on a department with a free hand to make whatever appointments he thinks necessary to restore the department to health.

By action of lawmakers or trustees, a new president can be imposed on a campus with a mandate to return the school to its proper mission by appointing subordinate administrators, especially deans, committed to reform.

Campus ideologues would scream bloody murder as the fiefdoms they have painstakingly constructed are dismantled, predictably appealing to the values they eradicated from campuses.

They will invoke academic freedom and free speech to maintain a stranglehold that allows neither.

They will claim political interference so that they can maintain strict political control on campus.

Exposing this hypocrisy to the public will be vital for the reform effort.

Only strong support will persuade legislators or trustees that it’s safe to do the right thing.

4 kinds of disciplines

Reforming deans will be dealing with four kinds of departments and need to treat each differently: STEM fields; traditional disciplines like political science, history and English; professional schools; and “studies” departments such as ethnic studies and women’s studies.

That last category is the simplest to deal with.

Those departments were formed as vehicles for radical political activism.

Published programmatic statements make this clear.

One UCLA webpage openly declares: “Ethnic Studies is fundamentally about liberation.”

Spend much time in any of these disciplines’ classrooms and you’ll hear such phrases as “resisting systems of oppression,” “advancing social justice” and “preparing students to become agents of social change.”

These are political goals, not academic ones, and essentially code for Marxist ideas.

A reforming dean’s duty is clear: Public employees may not use their paid time for private purposes, which is what their political goals are.

The departments in this category can be disbanded.

Reforming traditional disciplines such as English or history is more complicated.

Though ideological conformity has corrupted many of these departments, higher education can’t do without them.

The case of political science best illustrates what must be done.

That department can’t function without a faculty capable of teaching the spectrum of major political ideas.

When professors are concentrated at one extreme, a department isn’t only unbalanced — it’s incompetent.

Reform will mean appointing specialists in areas of political thought that are missing while reducing areas that are overrepresented.

This is about competence, not quotas.

The same treatment is necessary for other traditional disciplines.

Studying history takes students into a great variety of social and political situations.

How could a department be competent when its faculty sees that variety only from the standpoint of a narrow political sect?

And how could departments of literature, sociology or anthropology be competent given the same limitation?

All will need to be restored to health with a range of social and political thought.

If you build it . . .

STEM fields may not need any more help than a generally healthier campus political climate, but professional schools are a mixed bag.

Many business schools are still fully functional.

Law schools still include some first-rate scholars, so reform there may require no more than ensuring that a school’s future is in their hands.

But almost all schools of education and social work are heavily radicalized.

The University of Seattle’s social-work program boasts (accurately) that its “focus on social justice is in keeping with the values of the social-work profession.”

In such cases, reform may mean rebuilding from the ground up.

One common objection to ambitious reform plans is that because schools are graduating few serious academics, there aren’t adequate candidates to fill the positions needed.

But realistically only a few schools would soon try receivership.

Early reformers can rebuild their faculties by drawing on the remaining nonpoliticized scholars currently scattered across thousands of college campuses — as the recently founded University of Austin has done.

Good students will be attracted by the success of reformed campuses, and a pipeline of teachers and scholars will develop to meet a growing demand.

Radical political zealots are ruling higher education like petty tyrants.

The proper response isn’t to nudge them toward good behavior.

Reformers have to dethrone them.

John Ellis is a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of “The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done.”