Republicans should also take a closer look at public universities and call on legislators –including state legislators — to enact permanent change.

After colleges across the country tolerated anti-Israel encampments, DEI offices were exposed for their futility (and their perfidy), and multiple plagiarism scandals rocked academia, conservatives had a strong mandate to fix universities. Squandering this mandate would reverse the right’s recent strides in higher education reform.

However, Republicans are making a strategic mistake by focusing their war for higher education on elite institutions such as Harvard and Columbia. Republicans should also take a closer look at public universities and call on legislators –particularly state legislators — to enact permanent change.

One cannot deny that the Ivy League is almost universally recognized as the pinnacle of academia. All eight schools are listed among the top 15 American universities by U.S. News & World Report, and names like Yale and Princeton are synonymous with prestige. However, they are just as associated with progressivism.

The disproportionate focus on the Ivies from the Trump administration is not unexpected, but may be misguided. It all boils down to one question: How much can Republicans really change Harvard?

The university has rarely responded to public pressure, is sitting on an endowment larger than the GDPs of some small countries, and has an overwhelmingly progressive administration, faculty, and student body. An incidental consequence of attacking the Ivies is to make them even more inclined toward activism. It attracts left-wing donors who are excited to take on the Trump administration, and increased fundraising efforts from these schools prove that universities know it. 

While the Trump administration should not back down from the fight, the Ivy League is hardly unique in its moral corruption. The University of Wisconsin-Madison removed its chief DEI officer after a financial scandal, 65 public universities had anti-Israel encampments last year, the University of North Carolina at Asheville recently fired its dean of students after she claimed the campus is violating DEI restrictions, and dozens of public schools have been accused of racial discrimination. 

Conservatives should not be solely focused on elite institutions, especially because reforms at public universities would help more students. Across the Ivy League, there are about 61,000 undergraduates, which is roughly the same undergraduate population as Texas A&M University alone. More important, public universities are under the purview of state governments, so they have easier paths to improvement.

Legislators cannot count on the federal executive branch to do all their work for them. Unpopular and potentially unconstitutional actions are unlikely to bring long-term policy change, but state lawmakers have many better options. Weakening the power of faculty senates, ending tenure in public colleges, cutting funding for activist university entities, reducing administrative bloat, and prioritizing the placement of conservatives on boards of regents are all possible solutions. 

Real change must come from the statehouse, not just the White House. It sounds nice to reform higher education entirely from the top down, but this is not a realistic approach. Rather than relying solely on the Trump administration’s war with the most well-connected schools in the world, Republicans in state legislatures need to get to work fixing public universities.