Bob Maranto has paid the National Association of Scholars (NAS) the great compliment of reading through and responding thoughtfully to White Paper: Systematic Reform of American Education, our twenty-one-point outline of deeper reforms that education reformers might impose on universities, if they refuse to reform themselves.1 His willingness to take this outline of possibilities seriously, and to approve of many of them, is all the victory a policy advocate might want in any debate. So this response is fundamentally “thank you for thinking so well of these suggestions!”—not “you must agree with me on everything or I fire my guns.”
Bob’s reply is interesting because it is not so much moderate as libertarian(-leaning). He accepts without demur what might be the greatest financial body-blow to our universities, the possibility that reformers might “1. Remove tax-exempt status from universities that practice race and sex discrimination.” I think universities, in a heartbeat, would prefer what Bob eschews as a “costly bureaucracy”—“9. Mandate external program review and program discontinuation.” In general, Bob approves of most (although not all) of Systematic Reform’s catalogue of possible reform measures to remove government subsidies from our universities. I fear that education reformers actually will find these to be the hardest measures to impose—wealthy government clients are tenacious at keeping subsidies flowing. Bob’s selection from our measures is on principle, not on feasibility.
And Systematic Reform’s outline of possible reforms is not principled, and therefore (as Bob noted) not consistent. The handy excuse: this is a catalogue of possibilities, not an actual reform program. Combined with: effective politics must be opportunistic, since we cannot predict political constellations in detail, and a variety of selections from these possibilities will suit reformers in a range of plausible political situations. But we do include new measures of government intervention in universities as well as measures to withdraw government from the ivory tower. This combination does have substantive causes and effects.
I, and I believe the NAS as a whole, are not committed to a particular ideology by which we judge reforms. We are in favor of effective reform, and, tipping our hats to Machiavelli, we are willing to judge reforms by their ends as well as by their means. I trust we are not infinitely flexible as we seek to restore the academy to its proper state, but we are certainly willing to contemplate both withdrawing the state from the university and, where appropriate, using the state to reform the universities. Our cause is to reform the universities, not to advance libertarian or statist ideology. Certainly, we do not want to hold university reform hostage to any ideology whose fundamental interest is not the good of the universities.
But even this is a little coy. The live issue among traditionalist education reformers is indeed whether to confine oneself to proposals to withdraw the state from education, or whether actively to use the state to reform education. Significant numbers of education reformers still mutter uneasily, or even in outright condemnation, of initiatives iconically associated with the DeSantis administration in Florida or the Trump administration in Washington, D.C. NAS contains multitudes, and we are not generally in the business of taking sides in intramural quarrels. But I, at any rate, and I think NAS as an institutional whole, is on the side of the Gaullists of education reform. If the state will help us to achieve education reform, then we favor using the state.
A second, related live issue is whether to embrace a more national orientation for our universities. Bob also demurs from proposals that would reorient our universities away from foreign entanglements; e.g. “15. End permission for foreign participation in American universities” and “16. End all benefit from foreign funding.” The Gaullists who favor using the American state also tend to place a greater priority on fostering the American nation. Here too traditionalist education reformers as a whole are very much not on the same page. Here too I, and I think also the NAS, take the Gaullist side.
Bob’s concluding disagreement with “8. Remove sports revenues from universities,” is a comic marvel, where he champions university sports against our decayed academia:
while academic rigor cratered, athletic teams have maintained standards, hard work, meritocracy, accountability, and fair play. Without the jocks, those values might completely vanish from higher education, eradicated by snowflakes and budget maximizing bureaucrats.
My own athletic loyalties, from principle and perversity, are strictly for teams that ceased to exist before I was born; the New York Giants (baseball), the Brooklyn Dodgers. So when Bob says
in states like mine which lack pro teams, rooting for the college team provides a common state identity, uniting people across lines of politics, race, sex, class, and most everything else. It is one of the most valuable and visible things flagship state universities do, and only a covey of cosmopolitan coastal elites would propose taking that away from us.
He might have a point, and I’m not in a great position to judge! So, for this point anyway, I would not fight terribly hard against Bob’s critique.
Systematic Reform catalogues what education reformers might do, rather than endorsing what education reformers should do. Still, its catalogue does point in certain directions. When Bob says, “Everything else is up for negotiation,” I think that is the important point. Universities should realize that everything else is up for negotiation and not proceed on the false assumption that their assets and their self-governance are immune from campaigns by education reformers. And education reformers should not cripple their efforts by rigidly scrupulous adherence to taboos against using the state to forward education reform.
So I believe—and I think the NAS, institutionally, is not too far off from that belief.
David Randall is director of research at the National Association of Scholars, 13 W 36th St., 4th Floor, New York, NY 10018; randall@nas.org. His most recent books are The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero’s Sermo to the Grand Siècle’s Conversation (2018) and The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought (2019). Randall last appeared in AQ in the spring of 2026 with “Introduction: Enlightenment Now,” his contribution to AQ’s Enlightenment symposium.
1 White Paper: Systematic Reform of American Education, National Association of Scholars, 2026, https://www.nas.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Systematic_Reform_White_Paper.pdf.
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