Martin Luther wrote ninety-five theses launching the Protestant Reformation of the Catholic Church. Recently the reformist National Association of Scholars issued Systemic Reform of Higher Education, a twenty-one point salvo meant to reform something even more recalcitrant than medieval Catholicism, U.S. higher education. Just as the United Teachers of Los Angeles demanded a 17 percent raise (and got much of it), the NAS white paper is an opening bid in negotiations for collegiate reform. As a longtime NAS member, albeit on its left flank, I hope we do half as well.
I categorize the twenty-one points as the great, the inconsistent, the unfeasible, and the unacceptable. Let’s start with the great.
Rule of Law Reforms
For too long, like feudal lords, campuses have placed themselves above the rule of law, or at least the law of rules applying to everyone else. Reforms 1, 10, 14, and 18 belong in this bucket:
- Remove tax-exempt status from universities that practice race and sex discrimination.
- Require law and order in universities.
- Apply disparate impact theory to college bureaucracies and faculty.
- Defund sanctuary campuses.
Selective universities aggressively discriminated in admissions and hiring, for decades, in a massive resistance against the courts and a public who demand (more or less) color blind approaches, as shown by the landslide defeat of pro-racial quota referenda in MAGA dominated (just kidding) states like California. Yet like the [white] citizens councils of the old South, higher education administrators just will not get the message, using ever more devious means to block groups they dislike such as Asians (and Christians, and conservatives) and privilege those they like (progressives, legacy whites with deep pockets, blacks, and Hispanics). Most Americans, whatever their race, don’t want their tax dollars used to keep Asians down. It’s time to listen to them.
Likewise, requiring law and order could make campuses treat disruptive Hamas supporters just as they would disruptive Proud Boys. Most people, even on campus, think it’s about time. And Sanctuary campuses, in effect, mean that universities make immigration policy. While I’m no fan of President Trump’s revamped ICE, the question of who makes and implements immigration rules was resolved by the Civil War: the feds get to do it.
Fairness Reforms
Like any powerful faction, universities live by their own rules, which are far more permissive than rules for the rest of us. The NAS would change that:
- Tax university endowments at the same level as corporate income taxes.
- Reassign student loan debt to universities.
- Reduce higher education loans and grants.
- Eliminate indirect cost reimbursement rates for universities.
- Remove qualified immunity from [university] personnel.
- Establish private rights of action against [those] personnel.
- Hold presidents and boards of trustees personally liable for negligence.
To me, numbers 2, 3, 4 and 6 are fundamentally equity reforms, or at least should become so. Universities sometimes act like cigarette companies taking advantage of gullible young people, so why shouldn’t governments treat them that way? Numbers 3 and 4 give universities more stake in the long-term success of the young people they take in. That said, NAS might moderate this to enable institutions to take bets on some promising individuals.
Regarding number 2, money is power. Should a middling Ivy endowment like Princeton’s have many times more power than all the HBCUs combined, especially given Princeton’s frequent apologies for its history of white supremacy? Let’s make cheap virtue signaling expensive by taxing high endowments at corporate rates but on a sliding scale with no tax at all for low endowments per student campuses (as at most HBCUs). What honest social justice warrior could criticize this bold equity move?
On indirect costs, as a professor who has gotten grants, I know my employer used considerable staff time to help make that happen, so universities should charge overhead—but how and how much? Copilot tells me that in a MAGA-dominated (possibly fascist) country, Sweden, universities charge 10 percent for indirect costs. In contrast, Jenna Robinson reports that American flagship state universities like mine charge 17-30 percent, but big boys like the Ivies extract a whopping 55-70 percent! Whether we go with a flat rate as low as Trumpy Sweden or something different—I propose 20 percent—the important things are to make indirect costs consistent and transparent. Otherwise, the powerful will use their clout to charge huge fees, with some of that largess going to hire the government bureaucrats who approved the scams, excuse me, lifesaving research. The Pentagon is hardly government’s only revolving door.
Items 19-21 might make university presidents less apt to destroy the careers of professors who criticize sacred causes like DEI, as happened to San Jose State University Anthropology Professor Elizabeth Weiss. Weiss eventually got a payout, but if some of her cash came out of SJSU president Mary Papazian’s pension, it could deter authoritarian leaders from behaving badly. That said, as Jenna Robinson points out, we must take care to avoid making higher education leadership unduly risky—we need great applicants to apply for these posts.
The Inconsistent
- Mandate external program review and program discontinuation.
- Eliminate accreditation bureaucracies’ programmatic review power.
- Mandate program review at education schools and remove their power over k-12
- Remove accreditation and licensing power from politicized academic and professional associations.
So does NAS want to end costly bureaucracies that make professors jump through silly hoops that have nothing to do with teaching and research effectiveness (numbers 11 and 13), or have conservatives take over those bureaucracies and make them work differently (9 and 12)? Here I stand with Milton Friedman. Experience finds licensing and accreditation bodies great at protecting turf and lousy at protecting the public. We cannot program review our way into quality.
The Ugly or at Least Unfeasible
- Remove federal research funding from universities.
- Remove medical teaching schools and their revenues from universities.
- Remove sports revenues from universities.
- End permission for foreign participation in American universities
- End all benefit from foreign funding.
- Boycott of all foreign universities in countries that boycott Israel.
To me, numbers 5 and 7 orient professors more toward teaching and less toward government money grubbing. As Columbia President and later American President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his farewell address, the “military industrial complex” speech:
[T]he free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.… The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet pragmatically speaking, reducing indirect costs to transparent and reasonable (if not Swedish) levels would have similar effect with far less disruption. The system of universities doing federal research likely works better than alternatives and even plays some role in teaching students. That system should be rebalanced toward teaching, not eviscerated. Anyway, medical schools are often the most empirical parts of campus. Who took over after Claudine Gay wrecked Harvard? Harvard Medical School’s Alan Garber, who in a short time has gone a long way toward Harvard’s restoration.
Numbers 15 and 17 seem too much like using universities as tools of foreign policy in a time of (mostly) peace. Number 16 seems too much like disengaging from the world, when we in fact need transparent relationships, not isolationism. To be clear, transparency is essential. Until the first Trump administration universities refused to report billions of dollars in foreign donations. Some allege that one Ivy opened a foundation office in London to bundle and launder money from the Middle East. We must counter these tendencies with strict reporting requirements enabling outside scrutiny—not blanket prohibitions.
The Unacceptable
Number 8, removing athletic revenues from higher education, is a big enchilada. It’s also oxymoronic since for nearly all campuses academics subsidize sports, not the other way around. Second, 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. Anyway, 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.
Everything else is up for negotiation, but ending athletics? Them’s fighting words.
Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas; rmaranto@uark.edu. Maranto is a former school board member, and co-editor of The Free Inquiry Papers (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 2025). He last appeared in AQ in summer of 2025 with “Shameless Boosters and a Loyal Critic: Two Takes on the Ivory Tower,” a review essay of Commencement: The Beginning of a New Era in Higher Education (Silver Tree, 2022) and “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”: Resistance to Change in Higher Education (Harvard Education, 2023).
Photo by Pradamas Gifarry on Unsplash