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American universities are under attack, and I don’t mean by President Donald Trump.
The biggest threat facing Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and others — institutions with storied histories going back to before the founding of the United States — is coming from within, from activist thugs high on their own idealism.
But that’s no reason to abandon them entirely, or to burn them to the ground.
Those who took them over and remade them into leftist ideological wastelands don’t own them; they’re just squatting.
These schools are our nation’s oldest institutions, counting our founding fathers among their alumni, serving for centuries as stewards of our culture, letters and the arts.
Once they upheld a mission to cherish and pass on the ideals of Western civilization. That is their legacy and their worth.
They can be those protectors again.
Administrative bloat and activist intellectuals have taken over these campuses, but the bones of intellectual inquiry and academic rigor remain to be recaptured.
We cannot cede them to the barbarians who have sauntered through the gates only to vandalize their campuses, literally and figuratively.
The mission of our oldest schools was once well understood: to preserve American culture, to teach what is good in us, and to constantly question what we believe and why, so that we can rule our ideas and not be ruled by them.
Universities must graduate future leaders who think critically, who are not governed by ideology.
Some new schools dedicated to those principles have emerged in recent years, including the University of Austin. Launched by The Free Press’ Bari Weiss and other rebellious thinkers, it boasts a formidable faculty “dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.”
Ralston College in Savannah, Ga., founded in 2010, focuses on the classics as “a revival and reinvention of the traditional university.”
Still other colleges have been remade, such as the New College of Florida, a once-woke school that now brands itself as “educating free thinkers, risk takers and trailblazers” through Socratic dialogue and a classical curriculum.
And Michigan’s Hillsdale College, founded in 1844, has not strayed from its mission of rising students to self-governance through education.
Today’s college-bound kids are more conservative than their predecessors. Those who seek higher education will likely skew to schools that won’t try to shame or remake them.
Institutions that heed this warning will survive; those that don’t will fall.
Our most renowned universities are thus far not passing the test.
The Ivies, the legendary California state school system, and others are doubling down on a mission to educate American students in activist models of discourse and lifestyle, and to export that ethos globally.
All these schools are being investigated by the Trump administration, their funding slashed or under review.
Faculty members may freak out about alleged free speech violations, but these same professors have gone along with every new activist ideology that has come their way.
Yet fighting oppression, elevating victims and inculcating ideology is not the role of academia.
These institutions have one job: to engage students in a critical understanding of their nation and their civilization, to probe what we believe and why.
Academic inquiry cannot be threatened by difficult questions, only strengthened.
Our historic universities must remake themselves.
To start with, they can take some guidance from Trump’s demands — if only to hang on to their federal funding.
But to remain thought leaders and preserve the value of their once sought-after degrees, they must do more.
They must get rid of excessive administrative staff to cut budgets and lower tuition, clear the activist professors out of humanities departments, and abandon studies in oppression.
They must put American students first for admissions, scholarships and fellowships, and focus on merit — grades and initiative, not identity or ideology.
They must abandon demands for thought conformity and introduce students to the great works of the past, the history of ideas, religions and nations.
Our top universities must encourage students to understand the foundations of Western civilization, what makes it special and why it should live on.
We don’t need to destroy the great institutions we’ve built. We need to take them back from the squatters hollowing out these hallowed halls.
The NYPD evicted the occupiers from Columbia’s Hamilton Hall in 2024. Now it’s up to America’s scholars and thinkers to finish the job.
Libby Emmons is the editor-in-chief at the Post Millennial.
