Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the College Fix on August 1, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
A proposal by a high-profile conservative organization to fix higher education by enacting reforms at the federal level—basically withholding funding from misbehaving schools—is making the rounds through academia, prompting a mix of praise, criticism, and debate.
The Manhattan Institute recently published The Manhattan Statement for Higher Education, signed by 44 well-known scholars representing both the left and the right who have voiced concerns in recent years about the degradation seen at colleges and universities.
The statement calls on universities to abolish “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) bureaucracies, racially segregated programs, and race-based discrimination in admissions and hiring.
It also states universities should provide a forum for a wider range of debate and suspend or expel those who “disrupt speakers, vandalize property, occupy buildings, call for violence, or interrupt the operations of the university.”
To help enact such reforms, it calls on the president of the United States to force universities to annually “publish complete data on race, admissions, and class rank; employment and financial returns by major; and campus attitudes on ideology, free speech, and civil discourse.”
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The requirements should be “written into every grant, payment, loan, eligibility, and accreditation, and punishable by revocation of all public benefit.”
George Mason University economics Professor Bryan Caplan, a signer, said the statement is about “moving from a world where [the] government massively subsidizes discrimination and indoctrination to one where schools that want to discriminate and indoctrinate have to do so with their own money.”
“Far too many people go to college because of taxpayer subsidies, and the main result is not a ‘high-tech workforce’ but credential inflation,” Caplan told the College Fix via email.
Professor Lee Jussim of Rutgers University explained in a post on Unsafe Science that he signed the statement because he hasn’t seen any serious attempts to reform academia.
He stated that he doesn’t agree with some of the reforms listed, but “the Manhattan Statement is not a detailed policy plan with all details worked out.”
“It is a call to action,” Jussim wrote, “and I am definitely on board with most of the actions it calls for, even while recognizing that the Devil is always in the details.”
But critics include John Tomasi, president of Heterodox Academy, who wrote on Free the Inquiry that federal oversight is not the best solution.
He noted that two days after the statement was issued, University of Austin President Carlos Carvalho strongly endorsed it, which led to “controversy that has already prompted the resignation of Lawrence H. Summers from that institution’s board of advisors.”
Heterodox Academy, an open inquiry and discourse academic group, published its own reform-minded document in June. The group is not calling for crackdowns at the federal level, is “not necessarily seeking a ‘politically balanced’ university,” and does not agree that universities have been “captured” or are in “chaos,” Tomasi wrote.
“Reform to us means persistent insider attention and action that result in sustainable, cultural change on campus,” Tomasi wrote. “Our universities face serious internal problems. But blanket statements and exaggerations hinder rather than advance the serious, long-term reforms we need.”
Another critic is Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, who argued: “If imposed, the result would be an utter centralization of peremptory power over academia—private colleges, state universities, religiously affiliated institutions—in the person of a single man.”
Christopher Rufo, the Manhattan Institute senior fellow who helped lead the statement’s creation, wrote on his personal website that he had “assembled a group of scholars, intellectuals, and policy leaders to consider how we might use this political moment to advance generational reforms in higher education.”
Americans “have reached a decision point: to continue subsidizing the corruption of the universities, or to demand sensible, popular, and targeted reforms,” he told Inside Higher Ed.
The statement, published July 15, argues universities “have engaged in a long train of abuses, evasions, and usurpations, which, with every turn of the ratchet, have moved our society toward a new kind of tyranny—one in which ideology determines truth, and the university functions as a political agent of the Left.”
Caplan said the reforms the statement spells out are necessary.
“Without government support – including subsidized student loans – most students wouldn’t be in college in the first place,” Caplan told the College Fix.
According to Caplan, the best way to stop professors from teaching ideologies in the classroom would be “by having faculty who are curious and value free inquiry. But that’s a pipe dream.”
“The best solution is just to end subsidies, especially outside of STEM,” Caplan said. “There really isn’t much private demand for indoctrination.”
The statement has prompted more debate and alarm than the typical conservative policy paper.
An op-ed Thursday in Inside Higher Ed described it as “concerning” that the statement was signed by Republican Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, former chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, and endorsed by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who posted on X to congratulate the Manhattan Institute for “envisioning a compelling roadmap to restore integrity and rigor to the American academy!”
The piece, written by left-leaning higher education consultant Amanda Fuchs Miller, predicted that the Trump administration would embrace Rufo’s proposals.
“[W]e can expect to see new language in program participation agreements that ties Title IV funds to restrictions on academic freedom; new accreditation rules that prohibit standards around diversity, equity and inclusion; and certifications sneaked into grant terms and conditions that threaten strict penalties for activities that do not align with this administration’s ideology,” she wrote.
The College Fix reached out to signers Professor Peter Boghossian of the University of Austin, Scott Yenor of the Claremont Institute, and Professor Ivan Marinovic of Stanford University, but received no response. Heritage Foundation’s Jay Greene declined to comment.
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This is the America that we are supposed to teach young people to feel pride in?