Conservative academics endorsed different approaches to solving the crisis in higher education during the 2025 Bradley Foundation Prize.
Christopher Rufo, Barry Strauss and James Piereson all gathered for a roundtable talk on Thursday after each accepting a Bradley Prize, an award given by the Bradley Foundation to those who embody and further the spirit of American exceptionalism. The three discussed whether elite institutions’ responses to the growing chaos on their campuses called for them to be stripped of their funding until they comply with federal law, or if the federal government has a place in controlling education at all.
“What should that change look like?” the winners were asked. “Do we burn everything down? Do we infiltrate and try to reform it from inside?”
Rufo, senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute and author of the book “America’s Cultural Revolution,” argued that universities have consistently failed to comply with federal law, and that they should be held accountable.
“Universities have shown that they’re not able, willing or even capable of conceptualizing reform from within, and we’ve seen them jeopardize the good that these institutions do,” Rufo said. “Jeopardize it because they’re so committed to, for example, DEI and violating the Civil Rights Act, that they’ll do so until their last breath. And so I think it requires external intervention.”
Rufo pointed out that the issues universities were experiencing in the 1950s and 1960s “are still the same problems today that are compounded many times over.”
“If we’re going to send a billion dollars a year to an institution, it comes with reciprocal duties and obligations that are now starting to be enforced,” Rufo continued.
Christopher Rufo gives acceptance speech at 2025 Bradley Foundation Prize (Photo Credit: Daily Caller News Foundation)
Strauss, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor in Humanistic Studies Emeritus at Cornell University, disagreed.
“I’m a believer of reforming from inside,” Strauss said. “We need outside people to add some leaven, to add some inspiration. I don’t think we should burn our institutions down, we certainly should not burn our great universities down, but they need to be changed.”
“I think universities have to return to their roots. They have to return to liberal education,” Strauss continued. “They have to unashamedly advocate Western civilization.”
In an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation, Strauss also said he was troubled by the Trump administration cutting research funding to universities like Harvard.
“Research, especially in the sciences and in medicine, that serves to benefit the American people, and that’s the kind of research we that we want taxpayers to fund,” Strauss told the DCNF. “There’s got to be a way to negotiate. There’s got to be a middle ground to find a way for Harvard to make some changes that would serve the American people better than some of the things they’ve been doing in recent years while at the same time not jeopardizing, not threatening, the very important research that a place like Harvard does.”
Roundtable discussion at 2025 Bradley Foundation Prize (Photo Credit: Daily Caller News Foundation)
Universities have been plagued by violent pro-Palestine protests since the start of the Israel-Hamas War in 2023. In several cases, university administrators have been accused of failing to address instances of targeted harassment towards Jewish students, and even encouraging the events at times. Harvard and other schools have since been stripped of billions in federal funds for their actions, or lack thereof.
When the topic of using federal funding as a tool to force universities to comply came up, Piereson, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, emphasized that “the federal government built this problem to a degree, and somehow the federal government is going to have to unwind it.” He mentioned that the government has been using federal funds to prompt universities to comply with civil rights laws since the 1960s, and it may be the only viable method.
“So it is an irony that the same tool is being used to change the whole operation,” Piereson said. “So I don’t see any other way to do it. I believe it has to be done.”
“The American university has come under the control of the Democratic Party to a great degree,” Piereson continued. “The diversity ideology ties the Democratic Party, the American university and the federal government together. It would be important to break that hold on the American university, get rid of the diversity ideology and return to merit.”
Rufo and Strauss both told the DCNF they were “shocked” to be selected as winners for the Bradley Prize, but greatly appreciative.
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