The Manhattan Statement on Higher Education

Hope for much needed educational reform:

That there are massive problems with higher education in America – and much of the West – might be an understatement. Many issues come to mind, including how so many colleges and universities today have become hot houses for radicalism, progressivism, indoctrination, and propaganda. Instead of teaching students how to think, they are mainly taught what to think.

The growing problem of ugly antisemitism on so many campuses is just one clear example of the stranglehold the radical left has on higher education. When Jews feel unsafe to simply be on campus at Columbia University, Harvard and so many other schools tells us a lot about the current state of play.

And then we have so many students graduating with useless degrees – in things like gender studies and the like – which does them zero good to face life in the real world, or even to land them a job. Real world skills that an employer is looking for are often absent, but these recent grads can give you all the latest about transgenderism or critical race theory or the ‘virtues’ of communism.

Many people have been concerned about this situation, and one new document is worth being aware of in this regard. It is “The Manhattan Statement on Higher Education”. Writing in a recent Substack piece, Christopher F. Rufo of the Manhattan Institute (an American conservative think tank) said this about the document:

Earlier this year, I assembled a group of scholars, intellectuals, and policy leaders to consider how we might use this political moment to advance generational reforms in higher education. The following statement of principles, dubbed the Manhattan Statement, recapitulates the crisis of the universities and lays out a targeted, popular, and practical vision for reform. We hope that President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon can bring it to life.

A number of luminaries have added their name to this important document. They include:

Christopher Rufo, Manhattan Institute
Jordan Peterson, University of Toronto
Bishop Robert Barron, Diocese of Winona-Rochester
Victor Davis Hanson, Hoover Institution
Niall Ferguson, Hoover Institution
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Hoover Institution
Joshua Mitchell, Georgetown University
Carol Swain, Vanderbilt University
Bradley Thompson, Clemson University
Gad Saad, Concordia University
Christina Hoff Sommers, American Enterprise Institute
Peter Wood, National Association of Scholars
Yoram Hazony, Edmund Burke Foundation
Ben Shapiro, Daily Wire
Rich Lowry, National Review
Roger Kimball, The New Criterion

The 1050-word statement can be found here: https://manhattan.institute/article/the-manhattan-statement-on-higher-education

It is worth reading the entire document, but let me share parts of it here. It opens with these words:

America’s colleges and universities have long been the bright lights of our civilization. For nearly four centuries, they have pioneered new fields of knowledge, brought the arts and sciences to new heights, and educated the men who built our republic. But over the past half-century, these institutions gradually discarded their founding principles and burned down their accumulated prestige, all in pursuit of ideologies that corrupt knowledge and point the nation toward nihilism.

 

There have been warnings. From William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale to Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, conservatives pleaded for the universities to maintain their basic commitments, while liberals promised to reform the campus from within. All of these attempts failed. The conservatives were ignored; the liberals were steamrolled; and the process of ideological capture accelerated.

 

Now, the truth is undeniable. Beginning with the George Floyd riots and culminating in the celebration of the Hamas terror campaign, the institutions of higher education finally ripped off the mask and revealed their animating spirit: racialism, ideology, chaos.

 

The current state of affairs is untenable. The American people send billions to the universities and are repaid with contempt. The leaders of these institutions seem to have forgotten that the university and the state are bound together by compact. During the Founding era, schools of higher education were established by government charter and written into the law, which stipulated that, in exchange for public support, they had a duty to advance the public good, and, if they were to stray from that mission, the people retained the right to intervene.

Some of the problems addressed by the authors include these:

The universities have capitulated to the radical Left’s “long march through the institutions,” which has converted them into laboratories of ideology, rather than institutions oriented toward truth.

 

The universities have violated their commitment to serve in a position above day-to-day politics and, instead, have adopted a narrow political agenda and engaged directly in partisan activism, with particularly disastrous results for the humanities and social sciences.

 

The universities have built enormous “diversity, equity, and inclusion” bureaucracies that discriminate on the basis of race and violate the fundamental principle of equality—that high prize which was inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and codified into law with the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act.

 

The universities have contributed to a new kind of tyranny, with publicly funded initiatives designed to advance the cause of digital censorship, public health lockdowns, child sex-trait modification, race-based redistribution, and other infringements on America’s long-standing rights and liberties.

 

The universities have corrupted faculty hiring practices with racial quotas, ideological filters, and diversity statements, which function as loyalty oaths to the Left and have virtually eliminated conservative scholars from the prestige institutions.

Given the American taxpayer is subsidising all this, the authors finish with these words:

The American people provide status, privileges, and more than $150 billion per year to the universities. In light of these transgressions, we have every right to renegotiate the terms of the compact with the universities and to demand that they return to their original mission: to pursue knowledge, to educate the citizen, and to uphold the law. In exchange for continued public support, these institutions must abide by the principles of the Constitution and honor their obligation to public good.

 

To that end, we call on the President of the United States to draft a new contract with the universities, which should be written into every grant, payment, loan, eligibility, and accreditation, and punishable by revocation of all public benefit:

 

The universities must advance truth over ideology, with rigorous standards of academic conduct, controls for academic fraud, and merit-based decision-making throughout the enterprise.

 

The universities must cease their direct participation in social and political activism; the proper vehicle for criticism is through the individual scholar and student, not the university as a corporate body.

 

The universities must adhere to the principle of colorblind equality, by abolishing DEI bureaucracies, disbanding racially segregated programs, and terminating race-based discrimination in admissions, hiring, promotions, and contracting.

 

The universities must adhere to the principle of freedom of speech, not only in theory, but in practice; they must provide a forum for a wider range of debate and protect faculty and students who dissent from the ruling consensus.

 

The universities must uphold the highest standard of civil discourse, with swift and significant penalties, including suspension and expulsion, for anyone who would disrupt speakers, vandalize property, occupy buildings, call for violence, or interrupt the operations of the university.

 

The universities must provide transparency about their operations and, at the end of each year, publish complete data on race, admissions, and class rank; employment and financial returns by major; and campus attitudes on ideology, free speech, and civil discourse.

 

We acknowledge that the crisis of higher education will not be resolved in an instant. Still, we maintain faith that these proposed reforms will provide a starting point for a broader restoration, which can push back the forces of radicalism and create the space for real knowledge. Despite the challenges, we refuse to abandon the hope that America’s universities can once again be those bright lights, pursuing truth, sustaining our highest traditions, and educating the future guardians of our republic.

Let us hope these much-needed reforms take place. And countries like Australia could certainly use something quite similar here.

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