Florida’s proposed higher education reform has received a polarizing reception — even on the Right.

One could certainly call House Bill 999 an exercise in "right-wing illiberalism." But by an older, higher standard, the best term for it is "principled conservatism."

How could something that threatens academic freedom be a principled conservative approach? Well, historians typically trace the origin of the modern American conservative movement to the publication of William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale. Yet people seem to forget the book’s subtitle: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom."

Buckley didn’t oppose academic freedom because he disdained free inquiry or open argumentation. He opposed academic freedom because he didn’t think it actually existed — or could exist. Every human institution, he argued, must have an ethos. The notion of an ethos-free institution of higher education was effectually a ruse to conceal a shift in commitment from Judeo-Christian capitalism to atheistic collectivism. To stand athwart this transformation of Yale, Buckley called on its trustees to eschew academic freedom in favor of upholding and transmitting tradition. They didn’t.

It would have been nice if Buckley were wrong. But Yale, and higher education writ large, has proven his diagnosis correct. Today, Yale has an unmistakably woke ethos. As evidenced by it providing an award for racial justice to the young woman who shrieked at professor Nicholas Christakis for attempting rationally to defend his wife’s proposition that students were mature enough to choose their own Halloween costumes without guidance from bureaucrats.

The higher education sector writ large is all but formally abandoning the ideal of academic freedom in favor of ideologically charged "diversity, equity, and inclusion." Two years ago, AEI published a report documenting that about a fifth of faculty hiring postings included "DEI Statements," which are unmistakably and unabashedly ideological litmus tests. Rather than prioritizing academic merit uber alles, more and more faculty applicants are evaluated based on a commitment to left-wing activism. About half of American professors recognize this as a violation of academic freedom, but the other half (and 75% of liberal professors) support them.

State legislatures can — and should — ban the use of DEI statements at public universities. But they are only an audacious formalization of a long-standing and potentially ineradicable custom. Buckley was correct. Now that academic freedom has served its purpose, the professoriate is abandoning it in favor of the DEI ethos. If states don’t want their flagship universities to go the way of Yale, then state legislators should heed the advice that Yale’s trustees ignored and become active stewards of their taxpayer-funded institutions.

That’s what HB 999 does.

It is not a perfect bill. But in requiring a curriculum that "promotes citizenship in a constitutional republic," by ensuring the study of the "historical background and philosophical foundation of Western civilization and this nation’s founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments thereto, and the Federalist Papers," the Florida legislature is insisting that its institutions of higher education have a baseline American, though not at all a partisan, ethos.

Vesting hiring power in a university’s trustees and president, HB 999 will break or preempt the DEI ideological monopoly in hiring. At Reason, Keith Whittington predicted that "in the name of prohibiting political litmus tests for faculty, the reform will wind up imposing political litmus tests for faculty." But again, pure values-free neutrality has already proven impossible. Value-based judgments must be made. Trustees may prove considerably more committed to academic merit than faculty. And, if not, it would likely take decades before there’s any practical risk of conservative political hiring imposing a new ideological monoculture rather than enhancing diversity of viewpoint.

The media will surely paint HB 999 as an unprecedented assault on higher education. Some conservatives will agree by decrying it as an assault on academic freedom. But the true choice isn’t between academically free universities and conservative universities. It’s between woke universities and American universities. And the public has every right to prefer to subsidize and send their children to American universities.

Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.