An old law enforcement buddy, Greg, shared with me over lunch recently a capital idea concocted and bandied about by six retired federal law enforcement friends of his: The creation and enactment of a new piece of legislation to be titled the “Intellectual Diversity Enforcement Act” (IDEA).

The clever backronym aside, I thought this notion was ingenious. It is a direct refutation of DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—and all of the legislation, executive orders, and policies associated with it from the prior administration.

The general idea, as expressed to me, is that federally-funded grants and loans would only be given to students attending public and private universities that hire staff based on the intellectual diversity of professors and other university officials, from the very conservative to the very liberal.

My friend expanded on the concept, saying, “I can envision a national ranking of colleges/universities that includes intellectual diversity as a percentage of the overall ranking. [It might be] tied to Title IX funding. The beauty of this ‘diversity’ encouragement is that it is not tied to any specific ethnic, gender, or any other group-identified beliefs. I would leave it to the Department of Education (or its successor agency) to write the rules and regulations around it. As mentioned, it’s not an Executive Order that can be undone later on, but an act of Congress signed into law by the President.”

While any legislation based upon political philosophy may be considered too subjective to be practicable, we in essence already have government boards set up that are based on ideology. The Federal Communications Commission, for example, has an even number of commissioners that are Democratic and Republican, with the governing political party having one extra member to give the governing party a majority on the commission. Currently, under President Trump, the chairman of the FCC is Republican Brendan Carr. Similarly, the Federal Election Commission is comprised of three members from each political party in order to ensure partisan balance.

So how about a federal Intellectual Diversity Commission to work with, or housed within, the Department of Education, created by the IDEA? Okay, I don’t like the word “diversity” any more than the next conservative, but it takes on a revolutionary meaning in the present day when combined with the word “intellectual.” Honestly, the entire concept of “intellectual diversity” is anathema to most of the university professoriate, whose idea of intellectual diversity runs from mildly liberal to full-blown Communist. In most faculty departments in most universities, conservatives often comprise less than ten percent of the professors.

I generally think it is unwise for the federal (or any other) government to attach ideological litmus tests to the dispensing of taxpayer dollars. However, the higher education system in the United States is so warped by leftist ideology and self-imposed strictures on the hiring of faculty who conform to the prevailing leftist worldview in academia that the only hope for correcting the imbalance is for the government to force these institutions to do so by means of a financial cudgel. Nothing persuades like the potential loss of funding.

It is an unfortunate truism that the virtual lock leftists hold over academia has created a college-educated class in our society whose leftist worldview permeates all the other major institutions in American culture. The media, government, corporate sector, the church, and the military are all suffused with suffocating liberalism.

In a remarkable achievement, Donald Trump, a force of nature if there ever were one, has transformed the once elitist Republican Party into the party of middle America, while the Democratic Party simultaneously managed to transform itself into the party of the elites and the government-dependent. He is perhaps the boldest president since Theodore Roosevelt, or certainly since Ronald Reagan.

Only a president with Trump’s fortitude and vision would even entertain taking on the academic establishment through the use of legislation embodied in an Intellectual Diversity Enforcement Act. He has demonstrated a willingness to challenge entrenched establishment precepts that most thought untouchable—affirmative action and its current iteration in DEI, the “gender-affirming care” insanity, the abortion industry, and bloated government. Those are all wonderful and refreshing efforts to roll back leftist dogma. But the IDEA effort would represent an affirmative move by taking the fight to the enemy, as it were.

Academia is the font for so much of society’s ills. The left has understood for generations that to dominate education is to dominate culture and gradually took greater and greater control of higher education—indeed, all of education. Changing the ideological composition of those in education so that a balance is achieved between liberalism and conservatism will be neither quick nor easy, but it must be done. It seems that an effective way to reach this balance would be to force it through financial mechanisms, just as President Trump hopes to achieve a balance of trade with foreign countries by means of tariffs. Or to force recalcitrant countries to take back their citizens who have entered the United States illegally, as when President Trump threatens to cut off aid to these countries. Why not do the same for university administrations?

Now is the time to act. Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House. Universities would be wise to embrace the intellectual diversity enforcement concept, as they risk becoming increasingly irrelevant under crushing leftism. As the father of three grown children who went through the higher education system, I saw their once-elite institutions indoctrinate them with leftist ideology.

It’s time to give students the opportunity to receive a truly well-rounded education. It’s time to enact the IDEA.

William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and nonprofit sectors for more than 35 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., and has been a contributor to Townhall, American Thinker, Epoch Times, The Federalist, American Greatness, and other publications. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)