In a recent interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo pivoted from his usual focus on the ideological biases of higher education—the prevalence of “critical race theory and gender ideology and liberatory pedagogy”—to remark on the broader restructuring of universities that has taken place in recent years. “Our universities are no longer liberal arts universities,” Rufo noted. “They are these mega complexes that have scientific arms, research arms and financial arms.” In contrast to this, he highlighted the “community of scholars and learners that have a shared commitment to a culture of civil debate” at New College of Florida, where he is a trustee.
“Its structural design makes students into customers.”
Indeed, the conversion of universities into corporate juggernauts is closely connected to their drift into ideological extremism. Over the past two decades, metrics-driven leadership has transformed how universities operate. In the process, power has migrated from decentralized departments to an administrative apparatus that prioritizes enrollment growth, branding, and public impact over intellectual rigor.
These changes might sound politically neutral. Some of them might well appeal to conservatives. Shouldn’t colleges be run more like businesses? If “tenured radicals” are the source of left-wing ideological dominance on campus, why not subject them to higher standards of accountability? But in effect, these developments have played a key role in consolidating the progressive monoculture on campuses and contributed to the politicization of scholarship and teaching.
In eras past, when power was more decentralized, distinguished faculty voices of varied political persuasions might compete with the president from power bases inside the institution. Today, in contrast, politically active junior faculty see that attracting controversy can be a way to get ahead, while traditionally minded senior faculty who once acted as moderating forces in academic life have been sidelined as their departments and disciplines have been merged and dissolved in favor of new interdisciplinary programs. Today, the loudest faculty voices heard on campus are speaking from left-leaning interdisciplinary power bases (or affinity groups and multicultural centers) inside and outside the university. The moderate and traditional voices that once found a home in traditional departments have gone silent.
Addressing the hyper-politicization of academia must therefore start with a recognition that metrics-based centralized planning nurtured this tendency in the first place. While other factors played a role, the centralized university became an incubator for ideological extremism above all because its structural design makes students into customers and incentivizes faculty to seek visibility through controversy rather than through traditional scholarly achievement.
The most visible leader of the centralization movement was Arizona State University President Michael Crow, who first articulated his model for a “New American University” when he took the helm in 2002. His “reinvention” and “transformation” involved breaking down disciplinary “silos” to put students before faculty and “impact” before everything else. Convinced that he had found the winning recipe, Crow and co-author William Dabars published Designing the New American University in 2015 as both a testimony and blueprint. The “New American University,” the book proposed, should be “broadly inclusive, representative of the region’s socioeconomic diversity, and “through its breadth of functionality, maximiz[e] societal impact.” The university, Crow wrote, would
become a force for societal transformation; pursue a culture of academic enterprise and knowledge entrepreneurship; conduct use-inspired research; focus on the individual in a milieu of intellectual and cultural diversity; transcend disciplinary limitations in pursuit of intellectual fusion (transdisciplinarity); embed the university socially, thereby advancing social enterprise development through direct engagement; and advance global engagement.
What this meant in practice was weakening departmental autonomy, dissolving disciplinary governance, and giving centralized administration the power to determine hiring, research priorities, and academic structures. As Crow explained in a retrospective survey of his achievements at ASU: “We have been transformed from a faculty-centric institution to a student-centric institution—that is, the purpose of the institution is to serve the student and to enhance outcomes in the community, not just to provide a place for the faculty to be great academics, or scientists, or creators.” Under the banner of “access for all” and “societal impact,” power was stripped from academic departments, disciplines were collapsed into massive interdisciplinary schools, and faculty were sidelined.
“Leaders argued that the only way to ensure quality was with central oversight.”
Crow’s model gained nationwide influence alongside a broader push for metrics in higher education. At the turn of the 21st century, the US News & World Report college rankings methodology began including ever more granular data: student-to-faculty ratios, enrollment yield rates, graduation rates, job placement rates, and detailed financial metrics. Accreditation bodies also began imposing new requirements for documenting student learning outcomes, institutional effectiveness, and program assessment. Along similar lines, state legislatures began tying funding to retention rates, time-to-degree statistics, and job placement rates.
Rapid enrollment growth accelerated centralization, especially at large public universities. As institutions enrolled tens of thousands of students in hundreds of programs across multiple campuses and online, leaders argued that the only way to ensure quality was with central oversight, with automated assessment systems and standardized practices. New administrative structures were born: “Institutional Effectiveness” offices launched to gather and report data, along with “Student Success” initiatives to track and improve retention metrics. New jobs like “Assessment Coordinator” were filled by staff without PhDs, to ensure every course had measurable “learning outcomes.” Data became the driving force behind academic decisions. Faculty were required to redesign courses around standardized rubrics. Departments faced pressure to adjust grading practices to maintain desired retention rates. Programs were evaluated primarily on their ability to meet numerical targets, and the administration prioritized research that had measurable real-world “impact.”
Just as Designing the New American University was going into print, the country saw violent events on the streets that would rock campuses for the next five years. The killings by police of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice sparked waves of protests and the launch of the Black Lives Matter movement. University presidents from Harvard’s Drew Faust and Princeton’s Christopher Eisgruber to SUNY New Paltz’s Donald Christian issued statements. Over the next few years, the killings of Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and others prompted statements by the presidents of University of Washington, Johns Hopkins, and many more. By 2020, with the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and others, presidential statements were both expected and debated.
“The voice of the president was seen as binding the university together in moral outrage.”
What seems not to have been noticed at the time was that centralization broadly and the “New American University” students-first approach particularly invited protest and radical activism to take center stage—in part because of the agenda of inclusion and open access and also because the institutional design flattened the landscape, demolishing traditional disciplinary spaces and platforms for alternative voice on campus, including voices of moderation, context, and caution. As college and university structures re-embraced the pre-1960s in loco parentis role, promising parents and students safety as well as affirmation and education, the voice of the president was seen as binding the university together in moral outrage against the violence.
This unified institutional outrage was the backdrop to the now infamous confrontation over Halloween costumes at Yale, in November 2015, between faculty member and college master Nicholas Christakis and students who accused him of failing to provide a “safe space” for students. A year and a half later, Evergreen College biology professor Bret Weinstein’s voiced objection to a “Day of Absence,” which called for white people to stay off campus for a day, provoked a massive student protest and the occupation of a campus building. While both Christakis, who remains at Yale, and Weinstein, who resigned from his position, had pockets of support, the leadership of both campuses overwhelmingly sided with students and the broader goal of diversity.
Those with reservations about student protest and campus student-first monoculture stayed quiet, particularly after the national protest movements of 2020. With traditional departmental structures demolished and senior faculty stripped of authority, ideologically-driven faculty gained influence everywhere. Professors who stoked controversy, engaged in media battles, or led student movements thrived. Traditionally, senior faculty wielded significant influence over a department’s intellectual direction, with regular face-to-face interaction and direct oversight of teaching. Senior faculty mentored junior colleagues, shaped curriculum development, and maintained academic standards through collective governance. This system wasn’t perfect, but it organically created constraints on ideological extremes through peer review, professional standards, and the accumulated wisdom of experienced scholars.
These personal, organic forms of oversight were deemed under the new model to be ossified and inefficient. Small departments were eliminated or merged into new units that employed dozens of adjunct instructors teaching hundreds of sections across multiple locations. Demands for efficiency and scale have led to the replacement of senior faculty mentorship with online training modules. Regular departmental discussions, collaborative curriculum development, shared teaching experiences—all of which had a politically moderating function—disappeared.
When the decision to mount a suite of courses is driven by metrics, the rigor of each class matters less than its ability to attract students. Radical voices that spark controversy suddenly have an advantage. Assessment coordinators can point to high enrollment numbers and enthusiastic student feedback as evidence of success. Quality and rigor do not matter. And when departments are dissolved or merged, the traditional role of senior faculty in mentoring junior colleagues has been replaced by centralized “course development” training programs, and their influence over hiring and promotion is diminished by administrative mandates. Many have simply withdrawn from governance altogether, tired of fighting a bureaucratic system that values check-box compliance over academic judgment.
The intellectual vacuum on campus is filled by junior faculty who gain visibility by taking extreme positions that respond to the incentives of the attention economy. The rise of metrics-driven administration coincided with the rise of social media, making it easier for politically driven faculty to build followings outside of department structures. The most radical voices bypassed traditional academic hierarchies entirely, deploying online attention to demonstrate their “impact” directly. A star system was born. Adjunct instructors, lacking job security, also came to see that provocation and siding with students could serve as a kind of employment insurance, ensuring popular classes. The traditional forces that once encouraged moderation and scholarly rigor have been replaced by incentives that reward polemics and ideological fervor.
The push for scale further nudges the climate toward politicization. Administrative metrics favor large or online courses that can process hundreds of students simultaneously. Everyone knows that a 300-person lecture is more “efficient” than twenty 15-person seminars, regardless of pedagogical quality. In smaller seminars, extreme positions face questioning and discussion from peers and professors. There’s little opportunity for dialogue or intellectual give-and-take in a lecture or online format. A charismatic lecturer can present edgy viewpoints to hundreds of students at once, with no meaningful opportunity for debate. The metrics will show high enrollment and efficient resource utilization. Nobody asks about content until there are headlines.
Even at universities that have not embraced the Crow approach, the broader push toward metrics means that traditional academic departments played a smaller and smaller role in campus life and the job of department chair has evolved to face inward and upward, toward central administration, not outward and downward, toward their academic community and younger faculty. Tenured faculty spend more time responding to top-down reporting requirements, adjusting practices to comply with new syllabus standards and course delivery expectations. Centralized planning encourages the reliance on instructors on short-term contracts. The path of least resistance—and greatest job security—lies in siding with students and embracing ideological currents.
It was not obvious at the outset that centralization and bureaucratization would drive politicization, but perhaps it should have been. With departmental homes broken and disciplinary ties severed, why wouldn’t faculty seek emotional connection in politics and causes? Why wouldn’t they spend their extra time on social media rather than in the lab or the library? To counter this trend, senior faculty need to be given a greater say in curriculum development, hiring decisions, and academic standards. The structures that once encouraged scholarly rigor and intellectual diversity must be restored, and simplistic metrics to evaluate “effectiveness” must be abandoned.
Universities must recognize that their experiment with centralized planning has had unintended consequences that have damaged the institution’s status and pose serious political risks. They must support their own faculty voices and devolve power to departments, not in deference to quaint traditions but as an essential mechanism for maintaining academic standards and intellectual diversity. Only by addressing the vacuum that enabled polarization can we universities claim their proper role as centers of reasoned debate and scholarly inquiry.