A new revolution has co-opted the training grounds of America’s students, teachers, and future leaders. Our formative institutions have moved from operating with an informal left-wing bias in their admissions and hiring policies to effectively snuffing out conservative ideas and would-be dissenters. Ideological filtering mechanisms such as diversity statements at colleges and universities now require applicants to endorse progressive creeds of race and gender. These have been accompanied by similar exclusionary moves by professional associations, above all the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association. These mechanisms embody a larger attitudinal shift within higher education, which now regards traditional American beliefs as morally and intellectually illegitimate and mandates their exclusion from every sphere of society.

The American education crisis is a political crisis. The higher education revolution will virtually eliminate all political opposition to the woke establishment from every leading position in American civil society—and, above all, from all programs that train their graduates to draft policy, fight in the courts, and operate the administrative and regulatory machinery of government. The looming higher education embargo threatens to reduce catastrophically the supply of personnel who can put anti-woke policies into practice. Woke functionaries throughout the republic are working to revolutionize America, discarding its norms of liberty with the same bland indifference as their academic counterparts have discarded the tolerant norms of higher education.

This isn’t a conspiracy by a small group of woke dissenters. This rapidly accelerating revolution proceeds from a change in sensibility among thousands of administrators, professors, and professionals. Some are clear-eyed about the exclusionary consequences of the changes they impose, but most simply have embraced the substance of woke ideology as a fundamental belief, deciding to bring their formal admissions standards into conformity with it and silently abandoning the norms of procedural liberalism and tolerance without entirely realizing what they have done. Each committee that imposes a new ideological filter does so not necessarily from malice but with a bland, profound indifference that functionally bars any dissenter to woke ideology.

Americans must understand the formidable nature of the woke challenge and work together to defeat it. The woke movement has already suffered political setbacks, and it will suffer more. Nevertheless, Americans should take the revolution’s consequences seriously, especially in our institutions of higher education, where the mass of woke functionaries are at their strongest.

The Present Landscape

Currently, traditionally minded Americans possess a limited educational network. Stellar graduates continue to emerge from mainstream institutions: within the last generation, Senators Tom Cotton graduated from Harvard Law School and J. D. Vance graduated from Yale Law School. Political dissenters also have created their own network of dedicated institutions. Hillsdale College is almost entirely independent of the woke framework. Other institutions that are either traditional or open to traditionally minded Americans operate more within the mainstream education system; these include the University of Dallas, Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, the University of Arkansas’ Department of Education Reform, the Claremont Institute’s Fellowship programs, the American Enterprise Institute’s Education Policy Academy, and all the programs funded by the Jack Miller Center. These institutions have had appreciable effect, not least in supplying a skeleton of potential recruits for government service, and they will not disappear swiftly or entirely.

Yet traditionally minded Americans would be foolish to continue to rely on mainstream institutions of higher education. Bright spots like Cotton and Vance remain the exception, and at prestigious public policy programs such as Princeton’s recently renamed School of Public and International Affairs, entire cohorts have graduated with hardly a single conservative student.

Traditionally minded Americans certainly should use the educational institutions and programs they still control or to which they have access. They must recognize, however, that in every mainstream educational institution they will face a tough campaign to maintain even a toehold. Faced with the woke functionaries’ bureaucratic revolution, dissenters can no longer rely on being tolerated.

Nor would traditionally minded Americans face extinction from higher education if their current education network were sufficient. Their current travails are in good measure the consequence of an extraordinary shortage of potential governmental personnel. In higher education policy, for example, there are perhaps two dozen traditionally minded specialists in the entire country who can formulate policy and serve in government. Similar shortages cripple traditional governance in every policy arena.

America should have intellectually diverse historians and English professors and politically varied doctors and physicists—but these are luxuries. What Americans must recognize as a necessity is having a depoliticized education system. We must have colleges and universities that neither silence nor compel political opinions, that neither abrogate institutional neutrality nor redefine political activism as a professional goal, and that adopt an ethos and an institutional practice that counter the myriad petty mechanisms that have ousted traditionally minded Americans from higher education.

The priority for education reform must be to supply personnel for the classroom, the courtroom, and, above all, the halls of government. Traditionally minded Americans have striven valiantly to work within the existing education system, and with significant effect. But what they have achieved is not enough. The prospect that a new woke revolution will finish cleansing the academy of dissenters underscores the fact that education reformers need new tactics—like creating an entire new system of Harvards, flagship state universities, and community colleges.

What Is to Be Done

American education reform should focus on five strategic goals:

To achieve these goals, education reformers should focus on the required outputs—what personnel they need to achieve their aims. They should work backward to find out what inputs are needed. This will allow institution building to proceed on a granular, realistic basis. Reformers therefore should assemble a comprehensive list of positions they wish to staff, along with the formal and informal education credentials needed to fill them. Within the world of higher education policy, for example, this would include:

Reformers should assemble similar lists for all areas of government policy, not least to guide their priorities for funding new educational institutions.

Rules for Philanthropists

Yet America cannot wait for such lists to be assembled. Philanthropists should begin immediately to fund small independent programs dedicated to graduating cohorts of professionals capable of engaging in policy formulation at policy institutes, as well as staffing the executive and judicial branches at the federal level. These programs should be scaled to produce 100 graduates per annum, including 5 PhDs and 95 MAs. Each program should employ 15 full-time faculty, including one dean and a range of senior and junior faculty, teaching classes with 20 students apiece.

The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) at Arizona State University provides a useful budget for comparison purposes. SCETL’s $6 million annual budget supports 23.3 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) positions. SCETL’s remit includes considerable K-12 civics programming, so a focused Masters program probably would reduce its expenses considerably. Total annual expenses for each of these new programs, including administrative support, therefore should be a minimum of $4 million. Philanthropists should do the following:

Building a Parallel Polis

A series of linked programs might be housed in a sort of Hillsdale Government School, an equivalent of the Harvard Kennedy School that is entirely independent of all government aid and accreditation requirements. Regardless of the administrative structure, reformers should focus on the following tracks:

Reformers need to provide the entire range of education and professional development for career tracks such as medicine, engineering, public health, scientific research, the foreign service, and the military. Every existing professional discipline needs at least one independent educational institution to educate a bare minimum of personnel capable of government service. But the Hillsdale Government Schools should make these four tracks a priority.

Such programs by themselves will not serve to create a career body of personnel. Reformers should create organizations to promote professional development within each category of government personnel. Each area of government administration needs its own Federalist Society to provide professional contacts and career guidance as well as professional development classes and programs. In general, reformers need to provide career tracks for the graduates of these new education institutions. They should supply a sufficient number of positions in policy institutes and other non-governmental careers to employ these personnel in formulating new policy during the times they are in opposition and to keep them available for government service when their party returns to power.

Rounding Out a Reformer’s Agenda

Supportive policymakers also should enact a series of legal and regulatory changes to increase the production of these policy personnel, not least by removing the tools woke functionaries use to remove traditionally minded Americans from higher education and the professions.

Reform educators, finally, will need to instill a vocation for government work among graduates of these programs—neither to facilitate ambition nor to revolutionize the country but to save the nation. Reformist government personnel must use government to protect and expand the sphere of liberty and reduce the authority delegated to woke private sector monopolists, whether in business, the professions, or any other aspect of civil society. They must dedicate themselves to using the levers of government to depoliticize those gatekeepers—and to remove their powers to control entry and promotion within civil society.

The creation of these linked programs and regulatory changes also, and not incidentally, will create the core of personnel needed to reclaim or replace the mainstream institutions of higher education. The graduates of a Hillsdale Government School will be able to take command of the Harvard Kennedy School. An established Hillsdale Government School, moreover, will make a Harvard Kennedy School dispensable once it has lost its monopoly on producing government personnel. Traditionally minded Americans can eliminate the influence of the woke institutions upon our republic—but first they must establish this network of independent institutions, both to mount a proper assault on the radical bastions and to serve as a sufficient substitute for them. Harvard delenda est, and every radical university; but traditionally minded Americans must have institutions ready to take their place.

Traditionally minded Americans must take up this challenge. Even absent the new revolution that will eliminate political dissenters from higher education, they would be imprudent to continue to rely on their existing education networks. The woke challenge makes it imperative to create new institutions to educate a core of policymaking personnel.

We must have undersecretaries and superintendents as well as presidents and governors. No victory at the ballot box will be enough unless we also have the personnel to govern our republic. We must train a body of traditionally minded public servants if we wish to restore the American nation and its liberties.