Higher Education Needs An Intervention

Higher Education Needs An Intervention

On October 14, 2025, I appeared on The Federalist Radio Hour with Matt Kittle, to discuss how Crushing The DEI Cult Will Take Time And Enforcement

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, William A. Jacobson, a Cornell Law School professor and founder of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, joins Federalist Senior Elections Correspondent Matt Kittle to discuss President Donald Trump’s war on DEI in higher education and explain what level of enforcement is required to ensure the deeply-rooted ideology doesn’t return.

One of the main topics discussed was the Department of Education’s proposed Compact for Excellence in Higher Education.

Listen below.

Transcript auto-generated, may contain transcription error, lightly edited for transcript clarity

(sorry, no timestamps on this transcript generate by the podcast platform)

Kittle: And we are back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I’m Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at the Federalist and your experienced Shirpa on today’s quest for Knowledge. As always, you can email the show at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST, make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and of course to the premium version of our website as well.

Our guest today is Cornell Law professor William Jacobson, founder of Equal Protect.org, a civil rights initiative devoted to the fair treatment of all persons without regard to race or ethnicity.

It’s a critical project and relevant to what we plan to talk about today. We discuss President Trump’s new higher ed reform plan targeting the DEI cult on college campuses. Professor Jacobson, As always, it’s a pleasure. Thank you for joining us on the Federalist Radio Hour.

WAJ: Thank you for having me on.

Kittle: Absolutely this is basically what we’re talking about. The President recently announced a sweeping new plan to reform American higher education, pledging his administration’s commitment to rooting out what he called woke education. Policies that have been corrupting college campuses across the country.

That woke stuff is very much tied to the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda. It’s not just an agenda, it’s a way of life on these college campuses. Do you think that this latest move by the president will accomplish what he hopes it can do well.

WAJ: It’s a very difficult situation because the DEI culture, which is a culture that focuses not on individuals and not on individual rights, but on group identity issues, is so deeply deeply embedded.

In the universities. I mean, I see it at Cornell myself, that it’s going to be very tough to get rid of. It has a quasi religious feel to it. It is the reason to be for a lot of administrators and a lot of professors, and it’s going to be tough.

I think that his use of federal funding is probably the biggest and best instrument that he has, and he has wielded rhat so far to some extent with success. There was the agreement with Columbia to change certain practices.

But at its core, this is a cultural problem and that’s going to be much tougher to get at.

So, in response to the question is he likely to be successful, what’s the chances? It’s hard to say. I think if this effort he’s making is sustained only for two to three years, it will ultimately fail.

The way I like to describe it is the DEI bureaucrats and advocates on campuses are like survivors of a shipwreck clinging to a lifeboat waiting for help to arrive. They think they can outlast the Trump administration and we’ll find out in three years, you know, whoever this successor administration is going to be. But clearly nobody wants to change. They’re not going to change. They will only change superficially to the extent their funding is dependent on it.

But they are not going to give up the ideology. It’s going to take many years to get there.

Kittle: I think that’s a good way to put it, that they are clinging to the thing and obstinately as as possible.

I think about a recent video coming out of the University of Iowa and good old Iowa City, small town midwest, you know, big ten campus obviously, and so you know, really into the cult of DEI. But we see video of a faculty member or someone within the college talking about how, yeah, we we we’re supposed to be changing this. This was a statewide order similar to what is happening at the national level with what the president is doing here, and they talked about how they just change the terminology, but the result is the same sort of discrimination that we’ve seen throughout. How do you get through that kind of mindset and actual assault on laws in this country?

WAJ: The enforcement has to be local. You have to get the schools to police themselves. And the way that the Trump administration is trying to do that in their compact with Higher Education that was released not long ago,they’re offering a carrot and a stick.

The carrot is for schools which are willing to reform in compliance with that compact, there will be financial incentives. They will essentially get the fast track on federal funding, and there will be other perks that come along with it. So, if you’re willing to reform yourself on all these horrible practices, if you’re willing to move the campus a little bit back towards the center, if you’re willing to open up viewpoint diversity, not just skin diversity, if you’re willing to do all these things, there will be an incentive for you, there will be a carrot.

But there’s also the stick in that same compact, which is if you’re not willing to do that, well, we’re going to just keep doing what we’re doing. We’re going to scrutinize you, and if we find violations of law, we’re going to yank your funding. And you, colleges choose which way you want to go. It’s a fork in the road. You can cooperate with us, or you cannot cooperate with us. Your choice, and there’s a carrot if you cooperate, and there’s a stick if you don’t.

And I think that’s probably the right approach because trying to regulate what happens on campuses from Washington, D.C., one is generally speaking not a good idea and two ineffective anyway, because as you mentioned, they’re behind closed doors, still doing the same things.

They’re rebranding. So we issued a report over a year ago about the branding efforts. At Cornell it used to be called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Then they changed the name to I think it was Diversity and Inclusion, and now they’ve changed the name to something ridiculous. I don’t even remember what it is, something with the word ‘belonging’ in it.

Kittle: So they’re constantly branding, belonging ang inclusion. I belong yes, belonging in inclusion, which continues to have the original concept of, and again, all of these words that they’ve used, these catchphrases, are exactly the opposite of what we think about when we think about, you know, a colorblind society. They don’t want a color blind society.

They don’t want things based on merit, they don’t want … it’s just a thumb on the scale of it all. That’s what the whole concept of equity is really all about. It’s about opening up spots for the people that they think have been discriminated against. It’s like your organization talks about that to fight racism.

You don’t use racism, but that is exactly what they’re doing, is it not?

WAJ: Yes, it is. I mean, that’s a worldview that does not view individuals as individuals. So when somebody applies to your school, you don’t care so much about who this person is. You care about what skin color they have. Which box can be checked, which ethnicity they are, which gender identity, they are all of those things that are group identities as opposed to focusing on the individual. And I think it was Chief Justice Roberts in one of the cases a few years ago, said the way to stop racial discrimination is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. But they don’t see it that way.

They say, well, there was slavery, there was Jim Crow. And my response is, well, okay, tell me about the individual. Don’t tell me about groups. Don’t tell me about one hundred years ago. Tell me about this individual.

And there’s almost no societal harm that can’t be fixed by focusing on the individual. So if an individual was in fact subjected to racism, that can be considered. The Supreme Court said that in the Students for Fair Admissions, the Affirmative Action case, specifically said that it is okay to consider an individual’s experience with racism, but you cannot stereotype and assume that everyone with a certain skin color has suffered harm and everyone with a different skin and color has gotten rewarded in life.

Those gross generalizations and stereotypes are not good enough as a matter of law. But that’s what the attitude is. So if you have somebody who was in fact discriminated against, that can be considered when they’re applying to college or anything else.

And so this is the problem. The Trump administration is fighting a deeply ingrained culture, which is why pushing the obligation to enforce these rules and the civil rights laws onto the colleges I think is probably the right way. They know what’s going on on the campus. They may not want to admit it, but they know and they should be held responsible.

So that compact, among other things, makes the president or chief executive of a university responsible for these violations, responsible for failure to adhere to the compact. It also requires that these policies be adopted throughout the university, and that’s really the way to do it. So I think they’re onto something here, but there is going to be, there already is massive pushback, massive claims that this interferes with academic independence.

I guess my response to that is where has academic independence gotten you? I’m all in favor of academic independence, but you have killed the golden goose, the goose that laid the golden egg. You had a good thing going academia. You had almost unlimited federal funding.

All you had to do is be modestly moderate. All you had to do is not purge conservatives from the campuses, which has happened. There are almost no conservative professors left on campuses. Approaching zero.

All you had to do is not get carried away, and you couldn’t do that.

So you’re telling us that you want absolute independence. On the other hand, your absolute independence has created a terribly unhealthy situation for higher education.

You’ve turned the population against you. You’re biting the hand that feeds you. This is an unsustainable model. It’s in your own interest to do what we’re asking you to do. You can’t keep going with this bubble because it’s going to burst sooner or later.

The higher education system needs an intervention. And that’s how I view what the Trump administration is doing, is they need an intervention. They cannot reform themselves because there is no internal opposition left. There is nobody who is going to reform them who works on a campus. There may be people like me who speak out, but I’m almost or close to alone on a massive university campus.

There you will not find I think even one or two other people at Cornell who will say the things that I’m saying and call for the reforms I’m calling for, so there is no internal opposition left. Higher education cannot reform itself. It’s on an unsustainable bubble that’s going to destroy higher education. It needs an intervention.

It needs an adult in the room. And I think that the person who’s doling out the money is that logical person, and that person is the federal government.

I wish the federal government wasn’t involved at all. I wish that academia had been more responsible, but it wasn’t.

In a better world, the federal government should keep its hands off of academia, but we don’t live in a better world. We live in a world where it has become a bubble where half the population is not just excluded, but demonized on campuses. What kind of model is that? What kind of future is that for higher education? There’s no future. The bubble has burst, and it’s time for the adult in the room to force reforms onto higher education.

[promo]

Kittle: The intervention, Yes, enema. Possibly the higher education system could use an enema. You’re right when you say the purging that’s gone on over the last not just few years when everybody’s attention turned to this DEI cult and all of that sort of thing. This has been going on for a long time.

It’s picked up its pace obviously over the last decade and certainly over the Trump era, because that is the political side of all of this thing. But you said it earlier. I think you put your finger on it when you talk about the individual versus the group. That’s what DEI really is about.

It’s the group. It’s group think, it is group politics, it is identity politics. And how much of this stuff is really driven by power by politics as opposed to good education.

WAJ: Yeah, well, I think that our political system, if you see, and getting back to this issue of conservatives being purged, it’s not so much that people have been fired, although that has happened in certain cases.

It’s more that they’re not hired. And so you have a culture which for over thirty to forty years has excluded half the population from participation in the campuses, and that results in bad policy, bad politics, because these are the people who go to become journalists and politics and all other sorts of things that have impact on society. It’s one of the ways we got to where we are now that New York City looks likely to elect an outright socialist who hates our country as its mayor.

Kittle: Well, so was that the design? Was that the plan all along?

WAJ: I think it was. If you look at the writings back in the sixties and the seventies, and you look at the approach, the left recognized that if you want to change society, you change it by taking over education.

Now, I don’t think forty years ago they said we’re going to get a socialist elected mayor of New York City. But what they did recognize is that that was a weak point in society.

The most conservative family, the most traditional family, the second you put your kids in a public school, whether it’s K through twelve or even private higher education, the second you put them into the education system, you have surrendered them. You’ve surrendered them to people who don’t have our best interests at heart, and who view our country is inherently evil. And that’s what they teach kids. The entire thrust of the leftist agenda is that the United States is uniquely evil in the world, and capitalism is uniquely evil in the world.

And that’s why you have increasing numbers of students, or increasing numbers of younger people who believe that socialism is a better model. Yes, it was their plan to convert a generation. It was not their plan to elect somebody the mayor of New York City who’s a socialist. They probably didn’t even dream that big. They probably wouldn’t have even thought that was possible, that in the home of capitalism, the home of the stock exchanges, the home of corporate America, we’re going to convert that to socialism. I don’t even think they dreamed that big, But it’s the end result.

Kittle: It certainly is. And you know, I’ve talked about higher education. Higher education, as you mentioned, needs an intervention sort of our public school systems, and it’s all tied together. It’s maybe a conversation for a different day. We’re really focusing on what’s happening in our universities and college campuses on the front of carrot and stick.

We have seen some movement on this front from the Harvards of the world, if you will, talking about changing policies. As we mentioned, they can change those policies, they can change the terminology but still do the same sort of thing. That’s why enforcement is so critical in all of this. But we have seen some movements some university saying, okay, we don’t want to lose that funding.

It’s not because they had an epiphany and they said, you know what, we’ve been engaging in racism now, you know, come to think of it. Professor Jacobson and the rest of the folks who are fighting against this racism, they’re absolutely right. Anti discrimination or anti racism is actually is actually racism and all of these sorts of things. They’re doing it because there are dollar signs at stake here and a good significant amount of dollar signs.

Do you see them really fully changing because of these sorts of federal policies. At least over the next three years. I see changes being made.

WAJ: Three years is not long enough.

If this project to reform education ends in three years at the 2028 election, then the gains will be temporary. This is going to come roaring back, like an allergic reaction. It’s going to be much worse.

Because there’s a lot of angry people in the DEI industrial complex right now. You have to eliminate the departments, eliminate the jobs, eliminate the ideologies. And if that keeps up for in my estimation, six to ten years, I think you will have effected tremendous change because people will move on.

But if it’s only two to three years, it won’t be long enough. It won’t be long enough. And that’s why I think there was some irrational exuberance early in the Trump 2.0 term when he issued a bunch of executive orders addressing the DEI problem and the problem in contracting, etc..

And my view was that the reports of the death of DEI are premature, to paraphrase a famous saying. And it’s true. It’s going to take many years. It’s going to need to change what has happened with the bureaucracies and everything else. I think it can change, but six to ten years is my time frame.

Kittle: Yeah, definitely, And all of those executive orders issued can go right away, just as we saw in 2021 when the DEI president Joe Biden took over and whatever he was signing, whatever was put in front of him, or his autopen, whatever the machine was signing. Whatever the machine was signing at that time, he was all in. And that is the problem is that if you really want systemic change, just like the leftist in this country, they have played the long game, there has to be a long game for it, and obviously that involves at a basic level politics.

Our guest today is Cornell Law professor William Jacobson, founder of EqualProtect.org, a civil rights initiative devoted to the fair treatment of all persons without regard to race or ethnicity. We’ll talk more about that organization coming up in just a moment.

[break]

Kittle: But let’s go back to the new reform strategy from the Trump administration. What does it ultimately aim to do? What are some of the details of that that are important, some of the details that may, in your estimation, not be effective in combating all of this.

WAJ: Well, I think that it reinforces what is already the law for non discrimination.

What makes very clear how broadly, it expands non discrimination based on race, ethnicity, other factors, and sex, although there. Are some carve outs for sex.

And it puts the executive, the chief executive, the president of the university on the hook for violations. So instilling that personal responsibility I think is important for the enforcement of the law.

It could also be extremely important because they’re going to have to certify compliance, and there are laws out there that if you falsely certify compliance in order to get funding, the funding can be pulled back by the federal government, and so that increases the stakes. They’re making individuals responsible, which I think is likely to have an impact. This is one that’s going to be fought, and it’s a little harder to measure.

They’re talking about protecting academic freedom, but also ceasing policies that demonize conservatives and others who are not in the majority viewpoint. That’s harder to measure, and that might be subject to legal challenge in terms of viewpoint but that’s what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to change the culture on campuses.

And a perfect example is Harvard University, which has been ground zero for a lot of these problems. The Harvard Crimson did a survey showed that three percent of the faculty self identified as conservative or very conservative, and almost eighty percent identified as liberal or very liberal. Compare those statistics to the general population. Using Gallop and Pew sort of numbers from reputable firms, approximately thirty eight percent of people in the US identify as conservative or very conservative. Approximately twenty eight percent identify as liberal.

So there are more conservatives in this country at least people who identify as conservative then there are liberals. Yet you go to Harvard and it’s completely out of whack, it’s completely skewed. And that’s okay to an extent.

But what does it say about a university system that produces faculty who are in a completely different universe than the population of the country?

And that’s just unsustainable. That is not a sustainable model. You cannot have a university system that hates its host country and expect that system to go on forever.

And that’s what we have and so they’re trying to address that, but it’s going to be tough. There are other things here dealing with promotion, institutional neutrality, so that institutions are not taking positions you’re remembered much like the corporate world. After George Floyd, there were a lot of pronouncements about it, universities essentially making political statements.

And they also want to limit the number of foreign students to a certain percentage of the student body, which I think could have an important impact if you notice a lot of the problems we’ve had on university campuses have and from foreign students, particularly at places like Columbia.

And this is not saying you don’t have foreign students, but I think they want it limited to fifteen percent of the student body. Not more than fifteen percent should be foreign. And that gets to something that we’ve written about, which is how is it that our universities a great American universities, the great American universities are in some cases majority foreign. Columbia I believe was majority foreign. Many schools have thirty forty percent.

These universities no longer really are American universities. They’re foreign universities that happen to be based in America, and that’s not healthy for our society.

So a lot of what this is trying to do. If you isolate an individual element, you can argue with it. You can say that doesn’t make sense, that’s not a good idea. You know, maybe we want more foreign students for whatever the reason.

But when you view it in the context of the totality, it’s simply trying to bring our universities back towards the mainstream of the country. We’re not talking about creating conservative universities, but we’re talking about creating universities that are more in sync with the country as a whole, where diversity of viewpoint, including critical viewpoint of the United States States, is preserved. But it can’t be the only thing you hear on campuses, which is what it is now.

Kittle: It seems to me that the critical race theory crowd would like separate, but equally sees may be divided into the liberal campuses and conservatives.

You can go have your conservative institutions and water fountains over there. I mean, I know it sounds absurd, but that’s what we’re doing. In fact, though, I think what we’re seeing in in higher education across the country, from Harvard to the smallest four year colleges. Is this whole push to make conservatives into liberals, to change people’s perspectives forcibly, you know, And that happens in a lot of different ways.

It happens, as you mentioned before, by not how hiring conservative professors, by dominating your enrollment with foreign students from radically anti American countries. It’s no wonder this kind of stuff is happening. But here I want to ask you, in context of what we have seen over the last month, in particular the assassination of Charlie Kirk on a college campus that didn’t happen in a vacuum. Do these universities have blood on their hands now, not just for Charlie Kirk, but all kinds of different incidents we’ve seen.

WAJ: I wouldn’t go so far as to say they have blood on their hands, but they have created an atmosphere of intolerance, and that atmosphere of intolerance is endemic to the universities. Now. Charlie Kirk being assassinated is an extreme example, but Charlie Kirk was not allowed to appear at Cornell University.

Can’t remember the year. I want to say three or four years ago, but time wise it could have been five years ago. I don’t remember the year, but Charlie Kirk was not allowed to appear on campus. There were left wing objections to him appearing. The university eventually claimed there was some paperwork problem and that’s why he couldn’t appear, but nobody believed that at all, and he ended up having to appear off campus in downtown Ithaca.

So these are problems that started…. This is nothing new at my website, you know, we’ve covered shoutdowns and shutdowns at Cornell and elsewhere. There was a forget the year, I think like twenty seventeen, it might have been.

There was a one of the founders of the Tea Party movement was invited to speak at campus and they had to move him into hiding and move the event into hiding because of threats against the event. Rick Santorum was heckled at Cornell and Culter all sorts of people you know aren’t shot, but it’s a hostile environment. I will say Cornell has taken strides to protect speakers more, but the fact that they even have to take those strides, I cannot recall, and I’m not saying it never happened, and I’ve been covering higher Ed since two thousand and eight, I cannot recall a left wing speaker being runoff campus. It may have happened, but it would be an aberration. It would be the exception to the rule.

It’s only conservatives who get chased off of campuses. It’s only conservatives who get shouted down. It’s only conservatives who have to show up with armed security. It’s only conservatives who have to hold the event in secret, in hiding on campuses.

So and this is including at places like Cornell, which is far from the worst. I mean, people always ask me, well, what’s what’s it like at Cornell? I said, well, the good news is we’re not Columbia. Okay.

You know, they should have t-shirts that say that. We’re not Columbia. Okay. But nonetheless, even though we’re not Columbia, there is that culture, and it’s gotten better.

The administration, after a lot of criticism, some federal intervention, alumni complaints, pressure from alumni groups, has done a better job in the last couple of years with that. But why should they have had to do that? What is it about the culture at Cornell and many other universities that breeds the intolerance for opposing viewpoints, for non leftist, nonliberal viewpoints.

What is wrong with this picture, and that’s something that I think the Trump administration is trying to get at, is what is wrong with this picture is that you have a monoculture which does not welcome outside viewpoints. For the most part, there are exceptions, but that is I think a fair characterization of Higher ED in its totality, and it’s particularly a characterization of Higher ED at the so called elite level.

The top ranked schools, not just the Ivy League, but that top tier of schools are extremely intolerant. And why is that?

And that’s getting back to my point that Higher ED needs an intervention because of that culture of intolerance. It can’t even recognize its own intolerance. If you were to ask the students shouting down people on campuses, the liberal leftist students shouting people down, they would not think of themselves as intolerant. They would think of themselves as doing a very good thing, that they’re protecting others from this hateful speech.

So the culture’s completely broken in Higher Ed as a whole. And that’s what I think Trump administration is trying to address. I’m not confident they will have ultimate success.

Again, I think this needs to be a six to ten year effort. Some people might argue longer, but I don’t think anybody can argue the two to three years is going to be enough.

Kittle: I always enjoy the richness of the hilarity, because if we don’t laugh, we cry. But of the people with the coexist bumper stickers screaming in people’s faces to shut up.

That’s what we have on our college campuses right now. And you know, there’s there’s a there’s a big problem. You know, there’s myriad examples, as you mentioned at Cornell, I remember the UW. Madison, which certainly is no battion of conservatism.

But in twenty sixteen, Ben Shapiro appeared on campus. They didn’t want him there, but they ultimately did allow him to speak, and the same sort of stuff they were shouting him down. They wouldn’t let him go on, and you know, I think he handled it well, but at one point it just boiled over and they had, you know, just just angry, vain popping leftists, you know, surrounding Shapiro and surrounding a colleague of mine, Vicky McKenna, who does a talk radio show, a conservative talk radio show in Madison, of all places. You know, Vicky is you know, maybe one hundred and two pounds soaking wet, and they had her surrounded and they were threatening her.

That’s what I take away from what we’ve seen over the last decade in this country on college campuses. But it’s also the students. When you have students who are paying tuition going to these colleges and feel not just like they don’t belong they’re not part of the belonging that these institutions talk about, but they actually feel threatened on these college campuses. And we’ve really seen that over the last several weeks from leftists who have been celebrating the assassination on college campuses of Charlie Kirk.

How do you protect students ultimately, because that’s a big part of this that isn’t always addressed well.

WAJ: One of the ways is you simply enforce the rules. And I’ve seen that at Cornell and elsewhere as relates to the Israel Gaza war, that a lot of the anti Israel students will claim that they’re being discriminated against because of their viewpoint, that pro Palestinian viewpoints are not allowed on campus. In fact, pro Palestinian viewpoints dominate campus.

But that’s their argument, and my response is, no, you aren’t suspended for your pro Palestinian speech. You were suspended because you pushed through a police lineup to get to a career event and disrupt it and prevent other students from interviewing. That’s why you were suspended.

That’s an actual example at Cornell, a couple of dozen students I believe, were suspended because there was a career event. They didn’t like one of the companies that was going to be there. It was one of the weapons manufacturers, I can’t remember which one, and they decided that nobody should be able to hold this event. And Cornell had police protecting the entrance to the building, and these people, literally it’s on video, pushed through the police pushed them aside, and a couple of them got criminally charged, and of course those charges were pretty much dismissed, as they always are.

But that’s why you’re suspended, Or you’re suspended because you disrupted the library. You’re not allowed to use electronic bullhorns in the library while people are trying to study, and you did that, and so it wasn’t your viewpoint, it’s your conduct, and they don’t seem to accept that. So a lot of the violence, a lot of these things don’t require a change of the rules. They just require enforcing rules that already exist.

And university administrators, who a lot of times agree with the protesters, don’t want to do that, and they think, oh, that’s just free speech. Well it’s not free speech when, like at UCLA, you set up a blockade on campus and declare a Zionist free zone and don’t allow people to passs through unless they pledge to be anti Zionists. You’re not allowed to do that. That’s not your right, that’s not speech, that’s conduct.

And so enforce this as to the rioters, as is to the people who shout down. There was a recent event at Cornell, and I keep bringing up Cornell not because it’s worse than any place, just it’s more of my experience. I know more of what’s going on there.

There was a recent event where in order to bring diversity of viewpoint to the campus on the Israel Palestinian issue, because all the vocal faculty are against Israel, all the vocal student groups are against Israel, the president of the university organized a panel and I forget who was on it, but there were names we would all know. I think Brett Stephens might have been one of them.I could be wrong in that, but you know, kind of name brand people up on stage.

And that event was disrupted. So an event meant to bring diversity of viewpoint to campus was disrupted and they enforced the rules and several students got arrested and suspended. Because that’s Cornell, you know, basically, once you’re given the warning to stop the heckling and you don’t obey it, that’s now a rule infraction. And they did enforce it, and I think that was important. And of course now they’re complaining about that that it was enforced against them because they’re pro Palestinian.

No, it was enforced because you do not have the right to prevent others from speaking, and you do not have the right to prevent others from listening, and that’s what they do. So, enforce the rules. If the schools just enforced existing rules, that would go a long way towards solving the problem of disruptions on campus. And shoutdowns on campus.

Kittle: When you think it has reached the bottom of absurd, they keep digging.

That’s all I can say about that. And you know, it’s remarkable to see this over and over again and hear the highly charged language from these leftists on college campuses American politics in general, pointing the finger at Donald Trump and fellow conservatives the MAGA movement as fascist. I ask the question, who really are the fascist in the United States of America today? It would seem to me the people who are trying to shut down freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of self on college campuses. I’ll close with this question, And like any halfway decent attorney, I know the answer to this question, but I want to get a survey from you.

What happens if we don’t get this stuff under control. What happens if after three years all of the reforms in place go away?

WAJ: It all comes roaring back, and there will be retribution against the people who spoke out against it. It will be very ugly.

I think that you will see victory laps taken, and it will it will be very ugly. And I think that’s what we’re likely to see if this is only a three year endeavor. I think that they will believe they’re right, and they will believe it’s time for retribution, just like they did when Joe Biden was elected. They sought retribution against people who served in the Trump administration.

And that’s what’s going to happen. So you know, there is a lot at stake in the next election. Are we going to continue to reform Higher Ed, bring it some place close to where the country is, bring it more into the mainstream? Are we going to get Higher Ed to stop biting the hand that feeds it and develop a culture of diversity of viewpoint or are?

Or are we going to double down? And that’s really what I think is at stake for Higher Ed in the next election.

Kittle: But it’s not just at stake for Higher Ed. I truly believe that we don’t get a handle on this, and throughout our society the same stuff happening in corporate America. As you mentioned before, all of our institutions embedded in our bureaucracy.

So we don’t get a handle on this. Right now. The Republic truly is in peril. I believe that.

How do you feel about that?

WAJ: Yeah. If you wanted to destroy our country what would you do differently than they have done?

Kittle: Yeah, good point, very good point. I think they have mastered the role of destruction. And again, you can only imagine what would happen if they are left without some kind of accountability over what they’ve done the last couple of generations in this country. Tough to contemplate.

Thanks to my guest today, Cornell Law professor William Jacobson, founder of EqualProtect.org, a project of the Legal Insurrection Foundation. You’ve been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I’m Matt Kittle, senior elections correspondent at the Federalist.

We’ll be back soon with more. Until then, stay lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.

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