The Trump administration has gone to war with elite universities, even as it claims its latest missive was sent by mistake. Its approach, as in many other policy areas, has been to shoot first and ask questions later. Power seems to grow out of the barrel of a tweet, with punitive action favoured over due process and principle. This might achieve results in the short term, but cannot win a battle of ideas that by definition requires a consistent philosophical stance.

That said, it is difficult to shed a tear for institutions like Harvard which openly champion partisan political causes, run intellectual dissenters like Roland Fryer or Carole Hooven out of their posts, ride roughshod over academic freedom and contain a faculty which is 1% conservative. The university’s appeal to academic freedom comes across as contrived rather than principled.

Trump’s letter to Harvard wants DEI for conservatives while scrapping DEI for race, gender, and sexuality. It seeks free speech for Zionists, but not for proponents of the Palestinian cause. While it demands that Harvard cease racially discriminatory affirmative action policies, it calls for de facto affirmative action for conservatives.

The universities do the opposite. In the absence of US-style political pressure, as in Canada, Britain or other anglosphere societies, universities push DEI for their sacred identity groups while leaning into their stunning lack of political diversity. They believe in “emotional safety” for race, gender and sexual minorities as a rationale for speech policing, but seek to undermine the identities of whites, men and pro-Israel Jews.

What is needed is “equivalent action”: any affirmative measures on race, gender or sexuality must be matched by equivalent measures for conservatives. If you monitor by race, you monitor by vote. If you report the sex of your faculty, you report their ideology. Want to improve representation of black or indigenous people? Then show equivalent progress in recruiting conservatives and Republicans. Failure to do so will bring a public rebuke and a hefty fine proportional to your lack of equivalence. Want to fund radical academic activism on race or radical feminism? Then you fund an equivalent number of Curtis Yarvins, Jared Taylors and Bronze Age Perverts. Partisans cannot promote their cherished groups without simultaneously pushing those they despise. As a result, they scale back diversity efforts, protecting merit.

While I believe in merit and non-discrimination, it is also true — as the Supreme Court has ruled — that diversity can form part of a college’s admissions rationale. Even Nathan Glazer, an early conservative critic of affirmative action, believed that some representation of under-performing groups above their test scores is desirable while Jews like him who experienced Jewish quotas should not have been permitted to form 40% of the Ivy League. If Smith College wants to increase its share of conservative students above the current 1% or Caltech does not want to fall to 0% black, the use of diversity measures is not unreasonable. The question is how to keep them in check. Universities have repeatedly shown themselves unable to restrain their DEI efforts. An equivalent action system would provide the built-in discipline needed to balance conflicting priorities, ideologies and groups.

My philosophical approach is “liberal realism”, a stance whose goal is political neutrality and academic freedom. However, unlike the “liberal idealism” of many classical liberals, I recognise that persuasive arguments cannot produce change within a university system in which the hegemonic side is unwilling to relinquish power. Motivated reasoning and euphemisms for censorship like “inclusion” permit them to rationalise the status quo.

Universities have repeatedly shown themselves unable to reform and have resisted or misinterpreted the law – on speech codes, due process, the heckler’s veto or affirmative action, for instance – for four decades. This is because many faculty support DEI. For example, two-thirds majority of Left-wing academics in elite anglosphere universities supported the political litmus tests known as mandatory diversity statements in 2022, though there is evidence, at least in the US, that this share may have declined to half. External political pressure may have induced the self-reflection needed for progressive illiberals to broaden their horizons. Political intervention may be a prerequisite for persuasion.

While classical liberals must win the battle of ideas among academics, the public in a democracy cannot have its priorities shut out of taxpayer-subsidised institutions like universities. Academic persuasion may occur over generations, but that is not a democratically acceptable timeframe. Institutional autonomy, contra Harvard, is a privilege that must be earned, not a right. When a university wants to censor conservative or gender-critical speech, or bar black students, the government has, rightly, intervened. The next step is to introduce a sustainable self-regulating principle.

Equivalent action holds the promise of ending the campus wars once and for all.

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Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and author of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution (Forum Press, 4 July).

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