Academe’s reputation for free inquiry, untrammeled discourse, and practical knowledge is in tatters. The American university today has, bizarrely, become a place dominated by anger, fear, and self-loathing, all wrapped in an unlovely cloak of self-righteousness. Faced with the demands of an enraged fringe of students and scholars, administrators and faculty have lost their nerve. In a fit of sanctimonious justification, they’re cheerfully torching the principles of free inquiry and rigorous analysis to placate the campus Jacobins.

College mandarins have leaped at the chance to do away with SAT and ACT scores and lined up to defend racial preferences. They’ve decreed that job candidates must submit letters pledging their fealty to “social justice” as defined by the campus Left, even when the job in question is teaching electrical engineering or radiology. They’ve issued “anti-racist” missives that unapologetically signal that inconvenient argument, teaching, and scholarship will no longer be tolerated. Ivy League faculty make blatantly unconstitutional demands for racial favoritism in workloads, hiring, and speech. Campus star-chamber investigations no longer seem unusual or surprising.

These pathologies have become so common that it’s easy to imagine they reflect an innate defect in higher education. While the left-leaning tilt of America’s colleges has been observable since at least the mid 1940s, and has grown more extreme with time, academic support for today’s insanity is much narrower than it might seem. The problem is that academics, a fairly timid lot in the best of times, are terrified of being smeared and driven from their profession.

What to do about all this? For starters, there is now a firm conviction on the right that a serious problem exists. It wasn’t always so. Today, though, while three-quarters of progressives think that colleges have a positive effect on America, barely a third of conservatives agree.

Commendable efforts are already underway; invaluable organizations such as FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and the National Association of Scholars are battling speech suppression and ideological litmus tests. These initiatives are essential, but that’s largely because conservatives have been playing defense in existing institutions for decades — at least since a young William F. Buckley penned God and Man at Yale.

Much more is needed. After all, even important and necessary attempts to curb campus ideological abuses have largely left the larger dynamics unchecked. Indeed, the response has frequently amounted to guerrilla-style resistance, pleas for equitable treatment, the promotion of alternative programming, and the creation of think-tank refuges for conservative scholars.

So long as college degrees carry an outsized job-market premium and massive public subsidies, though, this is a losing strategy. With a college diploma worth about $1 million in lifetime earnings, colleges are fated to serve as employment gatekeepers, and their employees as cultural commissars. Breaking colleges’ stranglehold on remunerative employment opportunities is critical (as I’ve previously argued). But that promises to be a long, hard slog.

In the meantime, what can private actors do, without waiting on electoral outcomes or policy machinations? It starts with something that should be instinctual for conservatives: build.

Rather than fixate so single-mindedly on reforming existing higher-education institutions, conservatives should throw themselves into the work of building new ones.

I know. This sounds outlandish. It can strike modern sensibilities as unrealistic. But it shouldn’t.

For much of American history, the creation of prominent new colleges and universities was routine. Between 1820 and 1899, 672 new institutions were established, 573 of which were private — an average of more than a half dozen private institutions each year. During the second half of the 19th century, private donors founded eleven universities that today rank among the nation’s top 20 — including Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Chicago. More recently, Washington University and New York University have skyrocketed from backwater status to prominence owing to aggressive funding drives and single-minded strategic direction.

In short, the creation of new colleges and universities is neither unprecedented nor radical. Today, however, donors and philanthropic funders have seemingly concluded that it’s foolish to build from scratch when there’s such a large installed base. Thus, pretty much the entirety of the $46 billion a year in higher-education giving flows to established colleges and universities.

If 40 percent of this giving is from right-leaning donors, that’s roughly $15 to $20 billion a year. That’s a lot of money to give to institutions that have shown themselves contemptuous of conservative values and the cause of free inquiry.

Why haven’t conservative donors looked to create new institutions? There are a few reasons: a hollow hope that big gifts would prompt change; the stroking of professionalized campus fundraisers; the finely honed alumni networks, social ties, and practical incentives (from legacy admissions to premium football tickets) that colleges can offer; and an oddly progressive enthusiasm — in the phrasing of historians John Thelin and Richard Trollinger — for the ideal of “a single magnificent campus.”

Conservatives need a new vision of giving, one that starts with the primacy of standing up new institutions and embracing good old-fashioned Schumpeterian creative destruction.

This is a spectacularly good time to launch such an effort. The coronavirus pandemic has upended comfortable routines, prompted students to seek out new options, and put lots of colleges on bankruptcy’s doorstep. It’s been predicted that more than a hundred colleges will be pushed to the brink of financial ruin — thus creating a surplus of move-in-ready campuses. If there was ever a moment to launch a wave of institution-building, this is it.

Rather than establishing tiny conservative beachheads in hostile institutions, always playing defense against campus monoculture, or tinkering with Pell Grant formulas, it’s time to focus on launching new institutions rooted in a fierce commitment to useful knowledge, analytic rigor, free inquiry, an appreciation for intellectual heterodoxy, and the sanctity of the civic square.

Conservatives should welcome any and all comers. We need more of everything. More universities wedded to ideas of classic virtue, unfettered debate, and fearless exploration. More unabashedly conservative gems like Hillsdale College. More tech-infused models that provide cheap, rigorous, nimble alternatives to the status quo. More certification and apprenticeship programs that make it feasible to sidestep college altogether. Each such endeavor will reduce the captive audience for traditional colleges, force incumbents to fight for market share, and reduce the number of students and scholars held hostage by the college cartel.

Is there enough frustration to fuel an interest in new institutions? Well, the American Association of Colleges and Universities has reported that less than 20 percent of faculty and staff strongly agree that it is “safe to hold unpopular positions on campus.” The Knight Foundation has found that 63 percent of students believe that their campus climate deters them from expressing themselves openly. When students were asked who can freely express themselves on campus, “political conservatives” ranked last of the ten groups in question.

Do students want alternatives? Yep. Nearly one in three college graduates say they regret their choice of school. While some of that is undoubtedly a matter of choosing school A rather than school B, it seems reasonable to suggest that a substantial amount of it might reflect a desire for something quite different. Meanwhile, with applicants indicating that the most important reason they’re attending college is to get a job, it’s likely that faster, cheaper avenues that permit students to bypass the campus reeducation camps might have a natural appeal.

Is it feasible to launch new institutions? It sure is. For instance, one of the decade’s most fascinating advances in higher education is Minerva. Started in 2012, it blends online learning (in a small-group seminar format) with residence-hall communities that, semester by semester, migrate to cities around the world. In 2019, just seven years after launching, Minerva received over 25,000 applications and admitted fewer than 140 students, yielding an acceptance rate of less than 1 percent — a figure lower than that of Harvard, MIT, or Stanford. The whole endeavor, which is organized as a for-profit venture, was started with a relatively modest venture-capital infusion of $25 million. For $15 to $20 billion a year in private funding, plus venture investment, an enormous amount of creation is possible.

But it’s also worth launching ventures that bypass traditional higher education altogether. Coding bootcamps are one such terrific model. Providers such as Ironhack, App Academy, and Hack Reactor have created a backdoor to high-paying careers for those who want to work in technology but don’t want to drop $100,000 on the rigmarole of a typical college-based degree program. These operations charge an average tuition of just under $14,000, take about 15 weeks to complete, and boost the median new graduate’s salary from $43,000 to $65,000.

Sure, new institutions may get captured over time. After all, academe in affluent societies has tended to become a playpen for socialists and social engineers. But so be it. That’s an argument for steadily supporting new institutions and making it easy for old ones to go bankrupt or get plowed under. If reformers in the 2060s have to launch a new wave of institution-building, as today’s successes fall victim to O’Sullivan’s Law, so be it.

This shift requires conservatives to rethink our relationship with higher education and how we negotiate the tension between Burkean traditionalism and Hayekian dynamism. In higher education, the former impulse has usually won out. Conservatives give to their alma maters. They give to sensible-sounding programs and initiatives at elite colleges while averting their eyes from the insanity playing out across campus.

Needed is a new norm, one rooted in the creed of institutional creation. Conservative donors and foundations should cease giving to extant colleges unless they explicitly renounce the pathologies that infect contemporary higher education. The new standard should be to invest in new, disciplined, uncompromised institutions that will provide a home for the huddled masses of students and scholars yearning to breathe free.