The real higher education problem is the leftist brand that most colleges espouse. College presidents who hate Jews can be fired all the way back to the community college level, and you really don’t address the overall bias problem that the lack of free speech and free thought promotes. The hate-Jews agenda meshes with the hate-everything American agenda that holds sway at the so-called elite schools and throughout higher education to a substantial degree.

Are there colleges that reject the leftist brand and allow unbridled free speech? Some are better than others, but if full-blown free speech is the goal, the answer is a resounding No!

A recent study by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) ranks 248 colleges regarding free speech. The rankings are very revealing in that colleges generally considered to be the best schools—the so-called elite schools—rank very low in free speech. Harvard’s score was zero out of a possible 100 points, putting them at the very bottom of the 248 schools. The other Ivy schools are also far down the rankings.

Those schools considered to be rivals of the Ivy schools also do very poorly. The University of Chicago, at 13th, is the only elite school in the country that has a good score. Indeed, its four-year average would place it at number one. The highest-ranked school is Michigan Tech, with a score of 78. So, even the best free-speech college does not fully embrace the search for knowledge that wide-open debate promotes.

Image by AI.

What is the answer? It’s all about money. Stop giving these schools money to spread hatred and leftist indoctrination.

Elite schools trumpet their superiority, not unlike the Academy Awards of the movies that promote their business with glitter and illusions. The elites promote themselves above all while delivering a fraudulent product.

It used to be that the science areas were free of this fraud. That’s no longer true, as we know from the absence of debate about climate change, COVID, and a host of other enormously important issues that fall under the STEM umbrella.

The only thing to which these institutions can claim to be “elite” is promoting hatred and ignorance. They have no way of reforming themselves since they are incapable of learning from outside their closed circle. They make sure of this by only hiring those who agree with them. They refuse to allow free speech on campus because it would undermine their views.

At Harvard, to implement real reform, you would have to fire not just the president but most of the administrators and faculty. Then, they’d need to hire those who seek to approach the level of Roland Fryer, the great economist at Harvard, who has been treated so badly because he dared to disprove important parts of the leftist narrative with real, high-powered research.

Furthermore, reform of K-12 public education via education vouchers is necessary to free future college students from leftish indoctrination supported by the biased colleges that prepare the materials used in the K-12 curriculum. New college students should be ready to promote a free speech environment at elite and other colleges.

Properly prepared students are necessary to match with the culling and replacement of biased college administrations and faculty. Reform of K-12 public education requires unfettered education vouchers in the mode that the great Milton Friedman originally imagined (or perhaps Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill, and William Edward Forster all preceded Friedman on this idea). These would be under the total control of parents (no regulatory oversight) with matching dollars equal to public education funding. Such vouchers do not presently exist and, as a result, voucher programs have not fulfilled their promise.

Indeed, to complete the reform of higher education, why not carry forth the voucher concept to public universities? Free speech colleges could flower around the country with voucher support.