Across the West, universities have ceased to be neutral institutions. Once dedicated to the pursuit of truth, they have become fortresses of ideological conformity. Anyone who diverges from progressive orthodoxy is excluded from faculty ranks, free inquiry is subordinated to activism, and taxpayer funds flow into administrative bureaucracies that enforce political correctness. What was once debate is now enforcement. What used to be education is now indoctrination.
This is no longer a matter of liberal drift but an illiberal takeover—the Berkeley hippies who moved into faculty lounges decades ago would now be considered retrograde white supremacists—a structural crisis. As our colleague Christopher Rufo laid out last month in the Manhattan Statement on Higher Education, this moment calls for more than gentle nudges. Universities have violated their founding compact to seek truth and develop knowledge for the common good. They take billions from the federal government and repay it with contempt for most of the country. Reform will not come from within, so it must be cajoled from without.
The West already has a model for what such reform can look like: Hungary. Hungary’s approach to higher education has attracted scorn from international media and Western academics, who label it authoritarian. In truth, it has begun what American reformers have only recently proposed, and which the Trump administration is attempting to achieve as it moves to remedy our leading universities’ massive civil rights violations: a serious realignment of higher education with the values of the nation that sustain it.
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Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Charles Yockey is a Manhattan Institute policy analyst and Budapest Fellow at the Hungary Foundation.
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