Do Universities Need Radical Reform?

By Brandon Warmke

This piece is adapted from a talk the author gave at MIT on 10/14/2025 for the MIT Civil Discourse Project speaker series.

Universities do many great things. I have made my career writing and teaching philosophy, and I admire what universities, at their best, stand for: a culture of learning, fearless truth-seeking, rigorous argumentation, and passing a tradition of knowledge to young people.

A century ago, universities made a social contract with the American people. The basic terms were something like this: we academics make a good-faith effort to seek truth and educate students. In turn, the public gives us money and entrusts us with incredible freedom to think, teach, and write. We faculty are trustees, both of that agreement and the institutions that have grown out of it.

I’m sorry to say, however, that we have defaulted on our contract with the American public. For starters, universities regularly engage in illegal race- and sex-based hiring. You know it, and I know it. Hiring committees often decide from the outset to hire a woman or racial minority. Deans often refuse to make hires if the candidate does not contribute to “diversity.” Some people deny this ever happens; they say that although affirmative action is crucially important, no one has ever been hired because of his or her race or sex. I’ll let you be the judge of whether that is plausible.

And it isn’t just hiring. Recently, it came to light that the Harvard Law Review rejected 85% of submissions using a racial rubric. Remarkably, the student editors often cited demographic reasons to accept or reject papers. “We have too many Yale JDs and not enough Black and Latino/Latina authors,” one editor claimed. Another complained that an article cited only “nine women and one non-binary scholar,” while another criticized a paper for only using the word Black seven times.

I ask you: Is this how the Harvard Law Review should be run? How did it come to be run this way in the first place?

Furthermore, universities regularly discriminate, not just on the basis of race and sex, but also ideology.

We know, for example, that academics discriminate against conservatives. How do we know this? You can just ask faculty, and they’ll tell you. According to a survey conducted by Yoel Inbar, 37% of psychology faculty say they would discriminate against a conservative in a hiring decision, a finding replicated in other studies and confirmed by any conservative in academia.

To nobody’s surprise, this ideological discrimination extends to graduate admissions. For example, in 2020–21, the English department at the University of Chicago announced that it was “accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies.” If you just wanted to get a PhD to study Chaucer or Shakespeare, sorry, you were out of luck.

Academics also engage in a kind of implicit discrimination in the way they construct job ads, which are often written to exclude conservatives, libertarians and centrists. Examples are legion, but consider a recent ad from UC Berkeley seeking a tenure track professor who works on “abolition studies, anti-racism and anti-blackness, social inequality, racial socialization, racial capitalism, trans/queer/feminist theory, structural intersectionality, social justice and structural change, and critical disability studies.”

Let’s be honest: these are jobs for progressive activists. And there is no right-wing equivalent. Berkeley is not advertising a job in Rush Limbaugh studies or pro-life activism.

Ideological discrimination also happens through the use of diversity statements, wherein job candidates are required to pledge allegiance to progressive political projects and are punished for not being up to date on all the progressive lingo.

You might be thinking, Aren’t DEI statements already passé? No, I’m afraid they’re not. The AAUP just last year recommended that DEI criteria be used in tenure, promotion, and assessment of faculty. Many universities will happily follow that guidance. A 2025 report from the National Association of Scholars investigated the hiring at 98 American universities and found that 86 still require diversity statements. While it is true that many universities have recently stopped requiring such statements, this has been largely due to political pressure, legislative action, and the threat of lawsuits.

Even those conservative faculty who manage to get hired face another form of ideological discrimination due to politically motivated selective demands for rigor. Academics employ selective demands for rigor when they lower their standards for research they like politically and then ratchet up the standards for work that they disagree with. Simply put, it’s easier to publish, get tenure, and be promoted if you defend the popular left-wing view, whatever that is, on any topic.

To illustrate just how low the standards are for research that promotes left-wing politics, consider just two recent papers from the premier peer-reviewed feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia. One paper, titled “Bones of the Womb: Healing Algorithms of BIPOC Reproductive Trauma with Rituals, Ceremonies, Prayers, Spells, and the Ancestors,” is a “mystical, womanist narration” by an “intersubjective, queer, divine, lavender feminine/masculine Bangladeshi-Muslim-American Person/People of Color (PoC), Woman of Color (WoC), Mother of Color (MoC) to four fierce energy beings, and Scholar of Color (SoC)” who also happens to be a tenured full professor. Another paper recently published by Hypatia on chicken ovulation positions the infertile hen as “central to a fuller feminist resistance.” I stress that this is the premier journal in the field of feminist philosophy. No conservative philosopher could get such nonsense through peer review, nor should they. But if you’re doing left-wing activism, demands for rigor go out the window.

One reason selective demands for rigor are so common is that virtually all academic fields are ideologically captured. Some academic fields have virtually no Republicans, including gender and critical studies, anthropology, and communications. In English, there are 48 Democrats for every one Republican. In history, 17:1. In Math and Econ, it’s 5:1. The most balanced is engineering, at 1.6:1, a field where issues of morality and politics rarely come up in teaching and research anyway. If you’re left-leaning, you’re much less likely to get pushback on your research when things get political.

Furthermore, faculty have become more left-leaning over the last 30 years. In 1990, 42% of faculty identified as being on the left, and 18% on the right. In 2017, 60% of faculty identified as either far-left or liberal compared to just 12% being conservative or far-right.

Even worse, there are entire fields that are defined by their political ideology and activism. Ask yourself: Would the gender and women’s studies department at Harvard hire a conservative? Of course not. You simply cannot get a job in many departments unless you accept a whole suite of left-wing moral and political projects.

In response to criticisms that academia has been ideologically captured and turned itself over to political activism, some seek argumentative refuge in the sciences. Unlike the humanities, science has been spared activist intrusion, we are told. But no, the scientific institutions have been captured as well. Just recently, USC Associates Chair in Natural Sciences and Professor of Chemistry Anna Krylov announced that she would no longer engage in any professional capacity with Nature, the publisher of many prestigious science journals. Her reason? “The group has institutionalized censorship, implemented policies that have sacrificed merit in favor of identity-based criteria, and injected social engineering into its author guidelines and publishing process.” Krylov concludes: “The result is that papers published in Nature journals can no longer be regarded as rigorous science.”

Thus ends our brief tour of problems. I haven’t touched on many others. For example, according to a 2025 FIRE survey, 1 in 3 college students believe that it’s acceptable to use violence to stop a speaker. I haven’t mentioned the ideological skew in the readings that faculty assign. Nor have I discussed the scholar activist pipeline, the reams of fake autoethnographic papers in fake fields of study, the grade inflation, the dramatic increase in the cost of college, the replication crisis in many areas of science, the plagiarism scandals from university presidents and administrators, the cancellation and deplatforming campaigns, the costly and increasingly sprawling administrative bureaucratic apparatus, and the refusal of campus administrators to prevent students from occupying buildings, destroying property, and disrupting the normal operations of campus. And that’s before we discuss the challenges posed by AI, and whether students are actually learning anything. The conclusion is this: universities have violated their social contract. We have not been good stewards of the public trust.

The Need for Reform

Now, some of you might hear all this and think, This is great! If this is your view, you should have the courage to stand up and publicly defend it to the American people. Defend all the race- and sex-based discrimination and ideological capture, and let the public decide if this is what they want to subsidize.

For the rest of you, though, let me outline three reasons why universities need reform.

First, universities should stop breaking the law.

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act makes it illegal to hire or not to hire someone on the basis of race or sex. Virtually all universities claim to be equal opportunity employers, and in their ads themselves assert that they will not discriminate on the basis of race or sex. But they do it anyway.

One reason to support reform, then, is simply that the academe wakes up every day and decides to break the law. Academics should be ashamed of themselves. It is no part of the public’s contract with universities that faculty and administrators are given a free pass to break the law so long as their politics tells them to.

Second, universities must rediscover their mission.

We might disagree about what exactly our mission is, but we should agree that it is not political action. It’s not even social justice. It is truth-seeking and inquiry. How can academics say to the public with a straight face that we are fearless truth-seekers, testing our views against the best criticisms, when we act like political herd animals?

None of this is good for our students, either. According to recent surveys of 1,400 students, 88% admitted to pretending to harbor more progressive views than they genuinely endorse with the aim of succeeding academically or socially. We preach diversity and inclusion, but we have bred in students a spirit of resentment, posturing, divisiveness, fear, and intolerance.

Universities should care more about the search for truth and understanding than they do about playing politics. For that we need reform.

Third, universities are under attack.

Universities will not persist if they remain partisan political institutions. The 1915 AAUP Statement on Academic Freedom warned us what will happen if we can’t police ourselves and purge our ranks of the incompetent. If we continue to “shelter intemperate partisanship,” the AAUP warned, “it is certain that the task will be performed by others.” If centrists, libertarians, conservatives, and Republicans cannot by and large support what we do, the reform will be done for us. In many states this is already happening as voters through their elected officials are attempting to enact the reform we have for decades refused to do ourselves. You don’t have to like this. I’m just telling you what will happen.

So why does the reform need to be radical?

When I say that reform must be radical, I mean that the problems are so endemic and deep that the requisite kind of reform cannot happen from within. Students, faculty, and administrators will not change their behavior, all on their own accord, for their own motivations, and under their own steam in the next ten years. Why?

First, they haven’t yet. None of the problems I listed are new. We have witnessed a decades-long decline. Can you name one big, sweeping change universities have made that is—and this is the key point—not in response to state or federal action, political pressure, or the threat of lawsuits? If anything, over the last decade, the politicization of the academy, illegal hiring, and ideological capture have gotten worse. Why haven’t we already reformed?

Second, they do not have the incentives to self-reform. Why would they? HR bureaucrats, administrators, and faculty have a great thing going. They get to work with like-minded peers. Their politics are rarely challenged. They’ve created jobs programs for like-minded activists. Why give all that up without a fight?

Third, they don’t want to. Personnel is policy. As long as we are staffed by the same faculty, deans, and human resource bureaucrats, we will continue to do all the things I’ve been criticizing. What is the evidence for a great groundswell of desire to correct course? Think about what it would take to correct even half of the problems I listed. What exactly is your faculty senate trying to do about them? Do they even care?

Conclusion

I would much prefer that universities reform themselves. I am skeptical of both state power and democracy. My preference is not that lawmakers or voters stick their noses in our business. But I’m realistic. The kind of reform necessary to repair higher education is not coming from within.

We are not entitled to the public’s trust or to their wallets simply because we have PhDs. We must be worthy of it. To be worthy, we must undertake radical reform.

Brandon Warmke is Associate Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education and Affiliate Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Florida. He can be reached at bwarmke@ufl.edu.