Yet, this campaign presents American conservatives with a dilemma. While many rightly criticise universities for abandoning open inquiry and suppressing dissent, Trump’s approach may cross a dangerous line. As Greg Lukianoff from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has recently argued, there is a critical distinction between enforcing conditions of institutional political neutrality for organisations receiving public funding and dictating campus governance, admissions, and speech.
How Universities Became Politicised
The politicisation of American universities did not happen overnight. It resulted from a decades-long abandonment of core academic principles, particularly the ideal of institutional neutrality on political matters.
In 1967, the University of Chicago’s Kalven Committee established what became known as the Kalven Report on university neutrality. This influential document articulated that a university’s “mission of discovery and dissemination of knowledge” requires it to maintain institutional neutrality on political and social controversies. As the report declared: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”
The political capture of university administrations took hold in the 2010s, with the explosive growth of administrative offices devoted to “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” or “DEI.”
DEI ideology is not merely about promoting inclusion. It rests on critical theory, a radical political philosophy that defines individuals primarily by group identity – race, gender, or sexuality – rather than by character or merit. It replaces the liberal ideal of equality of opportunity with a demand for the pursuit of equality of cherry-picked outcomes, enforced through imposed intellectual conformity. Under DEI’s logic, disagreement becomes “harm,” and academic freedom gives way to emotional “safety.”
After 2020, many colleges dramatically expanded these bureaucracies. What began as efforts to make campuses more welcoming evolved into what professors Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Snyder describe as “DEI Inc.”
American universities typically require “diversity statements” for faculty hiring. These function as ideological hurdles for new staff. Professors have faced career-ending sanctions for such trivial DEI infractions as showing historical paintings in art classes.
The results have been predictable. At Harvard, a 2022 survey found more than 80 per cent of faculty identified as liberal versus just 1 percent as conservative. Students increasingly self-censor for fear of social ostracism. A 2021 Knight Foundation survey found over 65 percent of students reported that campus climate deterred them from expressing their views.
Organisations like FIRE and Heterodox Academy have long recognised the growing threats to academic freedom posed by DEI orthodoxy and ideological capture. Both groups work to defend free speech, due process, and institutional neutrality within universities themselves. They challenge campus censorship and ideological loyalty tests, defending open inquiry and merit-based scholarship – the foundations of American universities’ former excellence.
Trump’s Unprecedented Power Play
The capture of universities by DEI ideology made them an inevitable target for political pressure – and a central theme of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Trump pledged to dismantle DEI bureaucracies, end ideological hiring, and restore “patriotic education” across America’s campuses.
But before conservatives applaud, they should ask whether something went wrong in the first 100 days of the Trump presidency – and whether the principles they seek to defend are really being protected.
The federal government certainly has a legitimate interest in ensuring that public funds support genuine scholarship, not political activism. But how should that interest be pursued? And why have defenders of free speech, like FIRE and Greg Lukianoff, raised serious alarms about Trump’s approach?
To answer that, we must first be clear about what academic freedom protects – and where the government’s constitutional limits lie.
Under long-established Supreme Court precedent in Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957), academic freedom includes a university’s right to determine “who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.”
Yet, less than two months after Trump’s inauguration, his administration launched a sweeping attempt to control these very freedoms.
In February 2025, the Department of Education issued a sweeping “Dear Colleague” letter ordering all K-12 and public colleges to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programmes within 14 days.
Last month, Harvard received a more specific letter from the Federal Government demanding sweeping changes to its governance structure, leadership, hiring practices, and admissions processes. The Trump administration required elimination of all DEI programmes, barring of specific student groups, and detailed mandates on disciplinary procedures, protest regulations, and hiring preferences. The message was clear: comply or lose billions in federal funding.
Harvard President Alan Garber’s response was firm: these demands “[threaten] our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” The irony in this is real – but constitutional protections do not depend on the virtue of those who claim them.
The Trump administration retaliated by freezing $2.2 billion in funds to Harvard. The administration’s pressure campaign then escalated when President Trump explicitly directed the IRS to begin revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status. Trump publicly branded Harvard “a disgrace,” framing the university’s ideological stance as justification for ending its century-old tax privileges.
The move raises serious constitutional concerns. Targeting tax status based on ideology would break with past practice. Previously, tax exemptions were revoked only for clear unlawful conduct, such as Bob Jones University’s racially discriminatory admissions policies.
Harvard responded late last month by filing a federal lawsuit, accusing the administration of violating constitutional protections and endangering critical research programmes.
Trump’s war against academia extends far beyond Harvard. Northwestern University saw $790 million in funding frozen. Cornell faced a $1 billion hold. The University of Pennsylvania lost $175 million over its transgender athlete policies. Even public universities not known as progressive bastions – like Iowa, Virginia, and Ohio State – face federal probes for diversity practices.
By March 2025, investigations into more than 60 campuses were underway under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
The Constitutional Dangers of Government Control
The Trump administration’s aggressive actions raise not only political concerns but profound constitutional ones. They force us to ask: even when confronting deeply politicised institutions, what limits must government observe?
To answer this question, we need to consider the unconstitutional conditions doctrine – a principle rooted in long-standing First Amendment jurisprudence. It holds that, while the government may choose not to subsidise every activity, it cannot make public funding conditional on an institution abandoning its constitutional rights. Free speech, academic freedom, and institutional autonomy are rights, not privileges.
Reviewing an institution’s tax-exempt status is not itself unconstitutional. The Internal Revenue Code requires educational organisations to operate for the public benefit and refrain from substantial political advocacy. If a university genuinely abandons its educational mission to become a political organisation, it may properly forfeit the privileges that tax exemption confers.
But the standard must be neutral. It cannot turn on whether a university’s views are conservative, progressive, or otherwise. The First Amendment forbids using regulatory powers to punish viewpoints. Tax exemptions support education – not ideological conformity.
The Trump administration’s approach embodies this danger. Rather than applying a neutral standard to all universities, it singled out ideological opponents for retaliation. Harvard’s failings – real though they are – cannot justify government demands that private institutions adopt specific governance structures, hiring criteria, or ideological positions as conditions of funding or tax status.
While the government can set general standards for academic quality and enforce compliance with civil rights laws like Title VI, it cannot leverage funding to dictate who teaches, what is taught, or how universities govern themselves.
The government may legitimately insist that public funds support institutions that comply with neutral civil rights laws and academic standards. It can withhold funding from programmes that discriminate unlawfully or abandon scholarly purposes. But, it cannot dictate internal governance, hiring, or curricula to enforce ideological conformity. Coercing universities to restructure themselves or to punish lawful student expression crosses from enforcing neutrality into imposing orthodoxy – precisely what the constitutional protections of academic freedom exist to prevent.
When the government dictates hiring or bans student groups, it abandons neutrality for control. Ordering private institutions to deregister lawful student groups violates free association while mandating specific hiring criteria represents precisely the central planning conservatives have long opposed.
A principled approach would have applied neutral, generally applicable standards across all institutions, whether politicised by progressive activism or by any other ideological capture. The government could have enforced compliance with existing civil rights laws, audited whether universities had genuinely maintained their educational mission, and challenged unlawful discrimination where it arose. However, it could not condition funding or tax status on specific ideological alignment. Reforming politicised universities demands patience, litigation, market competition, and cultural change – not federal coercion. rue conservatism restores academic freedom, not dictates ideology.
Defending Harvard’s autonomy is not defending Harvard’s activism. It is defending the constitutional principles – free speech, limited government, and institutional pluralism – that protect all institutions, conservative and progressive alike. These are not slogans but essential safeguards against state orthodoxy. If conservatives discard them for short-term victories, they risk finding themselves with power but nothing left to conserve.
There is no question that many universities, including Harvard, have betrayed the principles of academic neutrality and merit-based scholarship. But constitutional protections are not rewards for good behaviour. They exist to prevent the abuse of government power, even against institutions that have lost their way. Trump’s methods risk replacing one form of ideological orthodoxy with another – and conservatives should be the first to resist that temptation.
America’s founders understood what conservatives have always defended: free institutions require protection from government overreach, regardless of who holds power.
Trump’s methods resemble those of authoritarian regimes internationally. Recent examples include Viktor Orbán’s effective expulsion of Central European University from Hungary and Turkish President Erdoğan’s installation of government-appointed administrators at Boğaziçi University – actions widely condemned as assaults on academic freedom. When the state dictates academic life, it crosses a dangerous constitutional line.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression – hardly a bastion of left-wing thought – has understandably condemned the Trump administration’s approach as “unprecedented in scope” and fundamentally unconstitutional. As FIRE warns, if conservatives applaud overreach now, they surrender the ability to oppose it later.
Alternatives to Federal Control
Conservatives face a stark question: Will they defend academic freedom as a principled good, or wield it selectively as a weapon against their opponents? If they criticise campus orthodoxy, yet applaud government overreach when it serves their goals, they reveal that their concern was never really about freedom but about power.
Trump’s approach presents a false binary: accept progressive campus orthodoxy or embrace government control. The government has a legitimate role in ensuring that public funds and tax privileges support institutions committed to educational neutrality — not political activism. And it can exercise this power legitimately through neutral, generally applicable standards that protect, rather than undermine, academic freedom.
Indeed, a constitution-compliant model for this already exists. The Kalven Report’s principles of institutional neutrality offer a framework for ensuring universities remain forums for inquiry rather than instruments of partisan activism. Conditioning funding and tax status on adherence to neutrality – not on ideological content – respects constitutional limits while promoting the public purposes universities are meant to serve.
Courts also offer powerful tools when properly wielded. The Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against race-based admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard provides a template: carefully targeted litigation based on existing law, including enforcement of neutral civil rights statutes like Title VI, can drive meaningful change while respecting constitutional principles.
Market pressures remain potent. The University of Austin, founded in 2021 as an alternative to politicised education, has attracted significant funding and renowned scholars, such as Harvard’s former president Lawrence Summers and philosopher Peter Singer. This competition-based approach aligns with principled reform, using choice rather than coercion to drive improvement.
Alumni and donors wield tremendous influence. When major donors threatened to withhold gifts after Harvard’s inadequate response to antisemitism in 2023, the university quickly shifted course. At the University of Pennsylvania, similar donor pressure led directly to the resignation of President Liz Magill after her congressional testimony on antisemitism was deemed inadequate. If donors collectively demanded institutional neutrality and viewpoint diversity as conditions for future support, universities would respond.
A Dangerous Precedent
The greatest risk of Trump’s university crusade is not that it will fail, but that it might entrench a troubling precedent of federal micromanagement that began under the Obama administration. Obama’s Title IX regulations were justifiably criticised for imposing federal overreach in campus discipline. Trump’s approach is more dangerous still: it represents a significant escalation in scope and partisanship that future administrations could eagerly exploit. If we grant the federal government power to condition funding and tax status on ideological compliance, what happens when that power changes hands?
Imagine a future progressive president using these same tactics against religious universities. Suppose a Harris administration demanded that a religious university abandon its theological commitments to retain access to federal research funding or tax-exempt status.. Such an assault would strike at the heart of religious communities’ ability to transmit their values through education – a freedom Americans have cherished and defended across generations.
If conservatives accept government overreach when it targets ideological opponents, how will they credibly resist it when their own institutions are next?
The American Constitution’s careful balance of powers was not merely a political arrangement. It was designed to preserve the moral fabric of a free society. Even if institutions like Harvard have acted unlawfully, those claims must be proven through appropriate legal processes – not presumed by executive fiat. Crossing those boundaries for political gain corrupts the very foundation of freedom.
University reform requires patience, strategy, and commitment to principle over expedience. Academia’s capture by progressive orthodoxy took decades; correction will not occur overnight.
Reforms should begin by insisting that universities return to institutional neutrality as a condition of public support. But it cannot end with government dictating ideology from Washington. Any effective solution must respect constitutional limits and values of limited government, not sacrifice them in pursuit of short-term victories.
Universities have betrayed their mission by becoming partisan actors rather than institutionally neutral forums for debate. But the Trump administration’s scorched-earth approach threatens to destroy the very principles of academic freedom and limited government that any meaningful reform should aim to restore. If we stand against mandatory DEI statements because they compel speech, we should just as vigorously oppose government demands that universities adopt particular ideological viewpoints, even those we agree with.
The battle for America’s intellectual future will not be won by presidential diktat. It will be won through the patient work of building alternative institutions, reforming existing ones through legitimate channels, and recommitting to principles that transcend partisan advantage. This approach aligns with true conservative tradition and values that have long served as bulwarks against both mob rule and autocratic control.
It may be hard to feel sympathy for Harvard. Its leaders tolerated ideological conformity, allowed DEI mandates to metastasise, and often failed to uphold the very academic freedom they now invoke. But in resisting Trump’s attempt to remake it by decree, Harvard, however ironically, stands for something larger: the constitutional limits that protect all institutions from political domination.
Conservatives face a defining choice. They can confront the politicisation of universities through principled, constitutional means – insisting on neutrality, enforcing civil rights laws fairly, and using market and cultural pressure to restore true academic freedom. Or they can embrace the temptation of government coercion, abandoning the very limits that protect freedom itself. If they choose the latter, they will not only forfeit the moral high ground but lay the groundwork for their own future defeat.
Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014. This article was first published HERE
How Universities Became Politicised
The politicisation of American universities did not happen overnight. It resulted from a decades-long abandonment of core academic principles, particularly the ideal of institutional neutrality on political matters.
In 1967, the University of Chicago’s Kalven Committee established what became known as the Kalven Report on university neutrality. This influential document articulated that a university’s “mission of discovery and dissemination of knowledge” requires it to maintain institutional neutrality on political and social controversies. As the report declared: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”
The political capture of university administrations took hold in the 2010s, with the explosive growth of administrative offices devoted to “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” or “DEI.”
DEI ideology is not merely about promoting inclusion. It rests on critical theory, a radical political philosophy that defines individuals primarily by group identity – race, gender, or sexuality – rather than by character or merit. It replaces the liberal ideal of equality of opportunity with a demand for the pursuit of equality of cherry-picked outcomes, enforced through imposed intellectual conformity. Under DEI’s logic, disagreement becomes “harm,” and academic freedom gives way to emotional “safety.”
After 2020, many colleges dramatically expanded these bureaucracies. What began as efforts to make campuses more welcoming evolved into what professors Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Snyder describe as “DEI Inc.”
American universities typically require “diversity statements” for faculty hiring. These function as ideological hurdles for new staff. Professors have faced career-ending sanctions for such trivial DEI infractions as showing historical paintings in art classes.
The results have been predictable. At Harvard, a 2022 survey found more than 80 per cent of faculty identified as liberal versus just 1 percent as conservative. Students increasingly self-censor for fear of social ostracism. A 2021 Knight Foundation survey found over 65 percent of students reported that campus climate deterred them from expressing their views.
Organisations like FIRE and Heterodox Academy have long recognised the growing threats to academic freedom posed by DEI orthodoxy and ideological capture. Both groups work to defend free speech, due process, and institutional neutrality within universities themselves. They challenge campus censorship and ideological loyalty tests, defending open inquiry and merit-based scholarship – the foundations of American universities’ former excellence.
Trump’s Unprecedented Power Play
The capture of universities by DEI ideology made them an inevitable target for political pressure – and a central theme of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. Trump pledged to dismantle DEI bureaucracies, end ideological hiring, and restore “patriotic education” across America’s campuses.
But before conservatives applaud, they should ask whether something went wrong in the first 100 days of the Trump presidency – and whether the principles they seek to defend are really being protected.
The federal government certainly has a legitimate interest in ensuring that public funds support genuine scholarship, not political activism. But how should that interest be pursued? And why have defenders of free speech, like FIRE and Greg Lukianoff, raised serious alarms about Trump’s approach?
To answer that, we must first be clear about what academic freedom protects – and where the government’s constitutional limits lie.
Under long-established Supreme Court precedent in Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957), academic freedom includes a university’s right to determine “who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.”
Yet, less than two months after Trump’s inauguration, his administration launched a sweeping attempt to control these very freedoms.
In February 2025, the Department of Education issued a sweeping “Dear Colleague” letter ordering all K-12 and public colleges to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programmes within 14 days.
Last month, Harvard received a more specific letter from the Federal Government demanding sweeping changes to its governance structure, leadership, hiring practices, and admissions processes. The Trump administration required elimination of all DEI programmes, barring of specific student groups, and detailed mandates on disciplinary procedures, protest regulations, and hiring preferences. The message was clear: comply or lose billions in federal funding.
Harvard President Alan Garber’s response was firm: these demands “[threaten] our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” The irony in this is real – but constitutional protections do not depend on the virtue of those who claim them.
The Trump administration retaliated by freezing $2.2 billion in funds to Harvard. The administration’s pressure campaign then escalated when President Trump explicitly directed the IRS to begin revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status. Trump publicly branded Harvard “a disgrace,” framing the university’s ideological stance as justification for ending its century-old tax privileges.
The move raises serious constitutional concerns. Targeting tax status based on ideology would break with past practice. Previously, tax exemptions were revoked only for clear unlawful conduct, such as Bob Jones University’s racially discriminatory admissions policies.
Harvard responded late last month by filing a federal lawsuit, accusing the administration of violating constitutional protections and endangering critical research programmes.
Trump’s war against academia extends far beyond Harvard. Northwestern University saw $790 million in funding frozen. Cornell faced a $1 billion hold. The University of Pennsylvania lost $175 million over its transgender athlete policies. Even public universities not known as progressive bastions – like Iowa, Virginia, and Ohio State – face federal probes for diversity practices.
By March 2025, investigations into more than 60 campuses were underway under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
The Constitutional Dangers of Government Control
The Trump administration’s aggressive actions raise not only political concerns but profound constitutional ones. They force us to ask: even when confronting deeply politicised institutions, what limits must government observe?
To answer this question, we need to consider the unconstitutional conditions doctrine – a principle rooted in long-standing First Amendment jurisprudence. It holds that, while the government may choose not to subsidise every activity, it cannot make public funding conditional on an institution abandoning its constitutional rights. Free speech, academic freedom, and institutional autonomy are rights, not privileges.
Reviewing an institution’s tax-exempt status is not itself unconstitutional. The Internal Revenue Code requires educational organisations to operate for the public benefit and refrain from substantial political advocacy. If a university genuinely abandons its educational mission to become a political organisation, it may properly forfeit the privileges that tax exemption confers.
But the standard must be neutral. It cannot turn on whether a university’s views are conservative, progressive, or otherwise. The First Amendment forbids using regulatory powers to punish viewpoints. Tax exemptions support education – not ideological conformity.
The Trump administration’s approach embodies this danger. Rather than applying a neutral standard to all universities, it singled out ideological opponents for retaliation. Harvard’s failings – real though they are – cannot justify government demands that private institutions adopt specific governance structures, hiring criteria, or ideological positions as conditions of funding or tax status.
While the government can set general standards for academic quality and enforce compliance with civil rights laws like Title VI, it cannot leverage funding to dictate who teaches, what is taught, or how universities govern themselves.
The government may legitimately insist that public funds support institutions that comply with neutral civil rights laws and academic standards. It can withhold funding from programmes that discriminate unlawfully or abandon scholarly purposes. But, it cannot dictate internal governance, hiring, or curricula to enforce ideological conformity. Coercing universities to restructure themselves or to punish lawful student expression crosses from enforcing neutrality into imposing orthodoxy – precisely what the constitutional protections of academic freedom exist to prevent.
When the government dictates hiring or bans student groups, it abandons neutrality for control. Ordering private institutions to deregister lawful student groups violates free association while mandating specific hiring criteria represents precisely the central planning conservatives have long opposed.
A principled approach would have applied neutral, generally applicable standards across all institutions, whether politicised by progressive activism or by any other ideological capture. The government could have enforced compliance with existing civil rights laws, audited whether universities had genuinely maintained their educational mission, and challenged unlawful discrimination where it arose. However, it could not condition funding or tax status on specific ideological alignment. Reforming politicised universities demands patience, litigation, market competition, and cultural change – not federal coercion. rue conservatism restores academic freedom, not dictates ideology.
Defending Harvard’s autonomy is not defending Harvard’s activism. It is defending the constitutional principles – free speech, limited government, and institutional pluralism – that protect all institutions, conservative and progressive alike. These are not slogans but essential safeguards against state orthodoxy. If conservatives discard them for short-term victories, they risk finding themselves with power but nothing left to conserve.
There is no question that many universities, including Harvard, have betrayed the principles of academic neutrality and merit-based scholarship. But constitutional protections are not rewards for good behaviour. They exist to prevent the abuse of government power, even against institutions that have lost their way. Trump’s methods risk replacing one form of ideological orthodoxy with another – and conservatives should be the first to resist that temptation.
America’s founders understood what conservatives have always defended: free institutions require protection from government overreach, regardless of who holds power.
Trump’s methods resemble those of authoritarian regimes internationally. Recent examples include Viktor Orbán’s effective expulsion of Central European University from Hungary and Turkish President Erdoğan’s installation of government-appointed administrators at Boğaziçi University – actions widely condemned as assaults on academic freedom. When the state dictates academic life, it crosses a dangerous constitutional line.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression – hardly a bastion of left-wing thought – has understandably condemned the Trump administration’s approach as “unprecedented in scope” and fundamentally unconstitutional. As FIRE warns, if conservatives applaud overreach now, they surrender the ability to oppose it later.
Alternatives to Federal Control
Conservatives face a stark question: Will they defend academic freedom as a principled good, or wield it selectively as a weapon against their opponents? If they criticise campus orthodoxy, yet applaud government overreach when it serves their goals, they reveal that their concern was never really about freedom but about power.
Trump’s approach presents a false binary: accept progressive campus orthodoxy or embrace government control. The government has a legitimate role in ensuring that public funds and tax privileges support institutions committed to educational neutrality — not political activism. And it can exercise this power legitimately through neutral, generally applicable standards that protect, rather than undermine, academic freedom.
Indeed, a constitution-compliant model for this already exists. The Kalven Report’s principles of institutional neutrality offer a framework for ensuring universities remain forums for inquiry rather than instruments of partisan activism. Conditioning funding and tax status on adherence to neutrality – not on ideological content – respects constitutional limits while promoting the public purposes universities are meant to serve.
Courts also offer powerful tools when properly wielded. The Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against race-based admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard provides a template: carefully targeted litigation based on existing law, including enforcement of neutral civil rights statutes like Title VI, can drive meaningful change while respecting constitutional principles.
Market pressures remain potent. The University of Austin, founded in 2021 as an alternative to politicised education, has attracted significant funding and renowned scholars, such as Harvard’s former president Lawrence Summers and philosopher Peter Singer. This competition-based approach aligns with principled reform, using choice rather than coercion to drive improvement.
Alumni and donors wield tremendous influence. When major donors threatened to withhold gifts after Harvard’s inadequate response to antisemitism in 2023, the university quickly shifted course. At the University of Pennsylvania, similar donor pressure led directly to the resignation of President Liz Magill after her congressional testimony on antisemitism was deemed inadequate. If donors collectively demanded institutional neutrality and viewpoint diversity as conditions for future support, universities would respond.
A Dangerous Precedent
The greatest risk of Trump’s university crusade is not that it will fail, but that it might entrench a troubling precedent of federal micromanagement that began under the Obama administration. Obama’s Title IX regulations were justifiably criticised for imposing federal overreach in campus discipline. Trump’s approach is more dangerous still: it represents a significant escalation in scope and partisanship that future administrations could eagerly exploit. If we grant the federal government power to condition funding and tax status on ideological compliance, what happens when that power changes hands?
Imagine a future progressive president using these same tactics against religious universities. Suppose a Harris administration demanded that a religious university abandon its theological commitments to retain access to federal research funding or tax-exempt status.. Such an assault would strike at the heart of religious communities’ ability to transmit their values through education – a freedom Americans have cherished and defended across generations.
If conservatives accept government overreach when it targets ideological opponents, how will they credibly resist it when their own institutions are next?
The American Constitution’s careful balance of powers was not merely a political arrangement. It was designed to preserve the moral fabric of a free society. Even if institutions like Harvard have acted unlawfully, those claims must be proven through appropriate legal processes – not presumed by executive fiat. Crossing those boundaries for political gain corrupts the very foundation of freedom.
University reform requires patience, strategy, and commitment to principle over expedience. Academia’s capture by progressive orthodoxy took decades; correction will not occur overnight.
Reforms should begin by insisting that universities return to institutional neutrality as a condition of public support. But it cannot end with government dictating ideology from Washington. Any effective solution must respect constitutional limits and values of limited government, not sacrifice them in pursuit of short-term victories.
Universities have betrayed their mission by becoming partisan actors rather than institutionally neutral forums for debate. But the Trump administration’s scorched-earth approach threatens to destroy the very principles of academic freedom and limited government that any meaningful reform should aim to restore. If we stand against mandatory DEI statements because they compel speech, we should just as vigorously oppose government demands that universities adopt particular ideological viewpoints, even those we agree with.
The battle for America’s intellectual future will not be won by presidential diktat. It will be won through the patient work of building alternative institutions, reforming existing ones through legitimate channels, and recommitting to principles that transcend partisan advantage. This approach aligns with true conservative tradition and values that have long served as bulwarks against both mob rule and autocratic control.
It may be hard to feel sympathy for Harvard. Its leaders tolerated ideological conformity, allowed DEI mandates to metastasise, and often failed to uphold the very academic freedom they now invoke. But in resisting Trump’s attempt to remake it by decree, Harvard, however ironically, stands for something larger: the constitutional limits that protect all institutions from political domination.
Conservatives face a defining choice. They can confront the politicisation of universities through principled, constitutional means – insisting on neutrality, enforcing civil rights laws fairly, and using market and cultural pressure to restore true academic freedom. Or they can embrace the temptation of government coercion, abandoning the very limits that protect freedom itself. If they choose the latter, they will not only forfeit the moral high ground but lay the groundwork for their own future defeat.
Roger Partridge is chairman and a co-founder of The New Zealand Initiative and is a senior member of its research team. He led law firm Bell Gully as executive chairman from 2007 to 2014. This article was first published HERE
3 comments:
Brief comment: Fire must be fought with fire.
The woke/CRT/DEI takeover of universities (USA and elsewhere) is an essentially political exercise ( not an academic one). So, to change this, a political counter attack is necessary - an academic approach would take decades and may fail. e.g. leading historian Niall Ferguson gave up on Stanford and founded the University of Austin as a new model.
Trump ( a politician) has exerted major financial pressure on top Ivy League unis to force change. *Irrelevant if one likes/dislikes him - it is the method used.
cf Auckland University's mandatory Maori studies unit: the coalition could have easily demanded that this must be optional - otherwise big govt funding would be cut. Instead, a waffly letter from govt. encouraging student choice - as a result, AU kept the mandatory course because its aim is political (the overt indoctrination of students ) not academic ( offering students an opportunity to study indigenous culture).
This is the harsh reality of the woke culture
I understand the argument but I see Trump as a temporary feature and normal Marxist wokedom will be restored once he goes. Hence, who cares if the University hierarchy suffer a bit of discomfort for a little while.
While not pretending to be anything like a match for Roger’s superior knowledge of statutory law, it would seem obvious that even constitutional rights are conditionally available only to those who exercise them within the law.
It would appear that Governments have every right, indeed a responsibility, to withhold public funding from those who believe they are above the law.
Isn’t that what Trump is doing? All power to him!
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