Conservative intellectuals perpetually complain that the universities have closed off opportunities for the expression of Conservative opinions on college campuses. They aren’t imagining things. There’s a wealth of data to show that bias against conservatives is real. A 2022 survey revealed that only one percent of the Harvard faculty identify as “conservative,” but 37 percent self-identify as “very liberal.” Ironically, the era of diversity has turned out to be one of ideological uniformity.

　　What’s curious is that no one seems to be talking about one of the most obvious solutions to the problem: de-accreditation. To understand what I’m talking about let’s first review the process of accreditation. Contrary to what you might suppose, the government has little role in this. Rather, groups of university professors form into cliques that assess the merits of the programs run by their peers at other colleges. The US Department of Education then affirms what the academics have decided. The system is supposed to ensure two things: basic requirements for learning are being met and graduates are finding jobs.

　　Yet, plainly, in many fields, neither is happening. In 2015, Inside Higher Ed reported that fewer than 40% of PhD graduates from the six highest-ranked English departments in the country were getting tenure-track university positions, and some of those students won’t obtain tenure. For students from the English departments ranked 29–62, the rate of gaining one of those entry-level tenure track positions was below 30 percent. Moreover, the programs are more notable for their trendiness than for academic rigor. A contemporaneous review of the 52 highest-ranked English departments in the country found that only four required a Shakespeare course. The ones that did were Harvard, Berkeley, Wesleyan, and the Naval Academy.

　　English serves as a particularly egregious example of this phenomenon. But it is hardly alone. There’s a mountain of data showing that children raised in religious households have lower rates of suicide, pregnancy, and self-harming. It’s also been demonstrated that African-American children brought up in two-parent households rarely live in poverty. How many sociology programs even make passing mention of these facts?

　　While university sociology and English departments often fail to teach basic knowledge in their fields, they are exemplars when compared with education programs. One of the most notorious examples of this revolves around the instruction that’s been provided in recent decades to trainee teachers about how children learn to read. From the 1970s until just the last few years, most education programs promoted what is known as “whole learning.” This is the idea that the best way to help students learn to read is to read engaging stories to them aloud, particularly “culturally relevant” ones, and then to give them books that they might enjoy. This approach greatly de-emphasized and even dismissed the importance of teaching phonetics, and its consequences were disastrous. Even though the research showing that this method wasn’t working was plentiful, much of it had even been provided by education school researchers.

　　That was typical of the preference within education schools for theory over evidence. I saw this up close. While I am not proud of it, it happens that I have a masters degree in education. As you might guess, a lot of the “teaching” I was provided was really ideological indoctrination. More troubling though was how bad the teaching of the art of teaching was. I attended two different masters programs. It’s hard to say which was worse. Two of my grad school teachers actually recommended to us that we should save time by not reading our students’ papers. Nor did my teachers ever mention simple but necessary steps for improving student performance like taking attendance and calling parents. I’m sure that many, if not most, education students know less about how to teach after completing their masters and doctoral programs than they did before entering them.

　　One could go on. Angela Davis taught for the better part of two decades at the University of California, Santa Cruz in a department called the “History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies,” and she remains an emerita professor there. Davis received her appointment in 1991. This was twenty years after revolutionary Black nationalists whom she was taking from jail used guns that she owned in a shootout with the police. Four people were killed in that melee. Seven years later—and thirteen years before she was given her post at Santa Cruz—she promoted the Jonestown Cult and wrote to President Carter to tell him not to allow a child living there to be brought back to the United States. This is in addition to her status as a Vice-Presidential candidate of the Communist Party USA and her frequent jaunts to the USSR and Cuba.

　　America has been permitting academics to win one another’s favor by giving them the exclusive right to determine what programs are and aren’t meeting standards. This is akin to asking reality show contestants to define modesty.

　　As many readers may know, Middle Eastern Studies and Afro-American Studies programs have become particularly notorious as welcoming enclaves for other tenured radicals.

　　However, there is an answer to this wholesale problem: de-accreditation. America has been permitting academics to win one another’s favor by giving them the exclusive right to determine what programs are and aren’t meeting standards. This is akin to asking reality show contestants to define modesty.

　　It doesn’t have to be like this. There are serious groups, like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute ISI, that offer regular reports on what’s happening in academia. If a rich donor is willing to supply the funding, they should do more than just assess college and university departments for their intellectual diversity, academic standards, and rates of employment for graduates. Those that don’t measure up should be given failing marks. ISI and groups like it could simply say that the departments are not, by their measure, accredited.

　　Initially, some schools or departments that are de-accredited will likely bask pridefully in their censure. But I doubt this will last long. Academics are easily embarrassed. They won’t like those annual press reports saying that they have failed to provide their students with proper instruction or work opportunities. The enormous negative press coverage given to Penn, Harvard, and MIT over their college presidents’ congressional testimony on campus antisemitism has affected donations and admissions, and it’s apparent that much of the faculty at these schools would rather not be associated with the damning commentary. A list of such failing schools would be bound to act in the same way and give undergraduate and graduate applicants pause.

　　This reporting should also look at the further failing of these departments. Graduate PhD programs routinely exploit and mistreat their doctoral students. They do this in two ways. Most famously, tenured professors use graduate students to teach the classes and grade the papers they don’t want to. Perhaps more troubling is that they force them through a needlessly torturous process for approval of their doctoral dissertations. That gauntlet compels the students to stick in acknowledgments for established academics and to tuck in stray words of praise for the department and the field’s current shibboleths. This serves as a mechanism by which to discourage originality, weed out unconventional thinkers, and delay the granting of diplomas, often for many years. It’s a process that’s desperately in need of reform, and it’s one of the principal reasons why so many colleges are now so ideologically monochromatic.

　　A de-accrediting organization need not assess every college or university program. To save money and time, it would be better to focus on the most obvious targets: English, sociology, history, education, and Middle Eastern studies.

　　This does not mean the watchdogs should limit themselves to these subjects. After all, oxymoronic though it may be, there are actually a few Marxist economics programs. The New School offers one, and Notre Dame, of all places, has a number of Marxist economics classes, and, even for a time, had a separate department teaching “heterodox” economic theory. Almost equally curiously, there is a Marxist economics program at the University of Utah.

　　Conservative watchdogs charged with looking at what colleges and universities are doing also might devote some resources to providing useful guides that answer the question of what graduate programs should be. What is it reasonable to expect a doctoral program to teach? How long should it take for a graduate student to receive notice about his dissertation, and is it appropriate for faculty members to make themselves unavailable for months or years for service on the committees that examine these papers?

　　There’s something more to think of, too. The Department of Education has been rubber-stamping the claims of the academic cliques about what trendy programs are and aren’t worthy of accreditation. Yet a future presidential administration could instead turn towards these independent reports. How would my alma mater, Yale, feel if its English department lost federal accreditation because it doesn’t require its doctoral students to read Shakespeare, Tennyson, or Twain? I have a fair degree of confidence that the mix of shame and trepidations regarding lost grant money would get its attention.

　　And, if conservatives really wanted to get frisky, they could make the Department of Education require the implementation of campus Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs on the basis of ideology. Or is that just a bit too ironic?