NEW HAVEN, Connecticut — Can America’s most elite institutions restore their reputations by recruiting conservative professors and students? 

That question was a topic of discussion at the Buckley Institute’s 14th annual conference at Yale University this week. The Institute, named for the late columnist and a Yale graduate considered the intellectual founder of the American conservative movement, William F. Buckley Jr., is dedicated to promoting freedom of speech both at the New Haven-based university and beyond. 

The president of the American Enterprise Institute, Robert Doar, whose think-tank often recruits students from universities like Yale, said that university leaders should be making a concerted effort to enroll faculty and students with different perspectives to improve the “viewpoint diversity” on college campuses. 

To do so, he added, university leaders need to have serious conversations with their schools’ admissions departments — “because there’s something going on there,” he told the consortium of students, faculty, and alumni.

“Students who are joining these universities aren’t ideologically diverse. And I can’t believe it’s because all the conservatives aren’t smart enough,” Mr. Doar averred. According to a recent campus free speech survey conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, commonly known as FIRE, only 19 percent of students across 254 schools identified as conservative. 

Mr. Doar further spurned the excuse that non-liberals are hard to come by in academia. He called on a bread-and-butter theory of economics: if university leaders create a demand, he said, “you’ll get more supply.” 

If universities don’t begin to prioritize intellectual diversity, both in their faculty hiring practices and admissions departments, he warned, smart children are just going to start enrolling in other schools. 

One such school? The University of Austin, a private university located at Austin, Texas, that was created in 2021 by venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, historian Niall Ferguson, journalist Bari Weiss and others, as an alternative to the “rising tide of illiberalism and censoriousness prevalent in America’s universities.” The university, which welcomed its first student cohort in the fall of 2024, is “committed to the fearless pursuit of truth.” 

Its president, Pano Kanelos, was also called upon by the Buckley Institute to give his two cents on how America’s elite universities can do better. His first suggestion? Get rid of the tenure system, which he believes further encourages educators to conform to liberal biases. The University of Austin, for its part, removed tenure in favor of “really robust contracts that say: do your job, and we’re going to continue to reward you and employ you,” Mr. Kanelos said. “Can you imagine that?” 

However, Mr. Kanelos fretted that academic conformity takes root even before students enter their university campuses. “Students who want to get into these universities learn very early on that if they want to be admitted by the admissions departments at these elite universities, they have to follow a very narrow path, check a lot of boxes, and do a lot of safe things,” he said, adding that he has two kids in high school who are “in the middle” of this process. “They conform to avoid risk.” 

Thus, by the time students start at their universities, they’ve already “been beaten into being conformists” and believe that their “future and success depends not upon heterodoxy, but upon orthodoxy.” According to FIRE’s free speech survey, roughly one quarter of students reported feeling pressure to avoid discussing controversial topics in the classroom. For conservative students, that figure jumped to 37 percent. 

He finds hope, however, in institutions like Buckley. “You guys are the ones who are going to win,” he said, addressing the students in the room. “Your peers are sheep. You are the eagles. And you’re going to soar. Outside the hothouse of these ridiculous environments called universities, the world is on your side.” 

The third panelist, a senior editor at the National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke, agreed with Mr. Kanelos’ praise, but cautioned that they shouldn’t “downplay” how difficult it is for students to “push” against their institutions. 

“We should acknowledge that it is rational for a lot of people in these institutions to shut up. Because if you think about it, not everyone is going to go on to engage in a career that rewards them for being a maverick.” Thus, Mr. Cooke argued, the bulk of the change can’t come from students alone, but “the institutions themselves.” 

However, Mr. Cooke isn’t particularly optimistic that universities are going to become incubators of academic freedom anytime soon. More likely, he claimed, “things are going to get worse before they get better.” The good news, he offered, is that “there is only so far universities can go before people start saying, ‘I’m interested in what University of Austin is going, I’m interested in what Hillsdale is doing. I’ll send my kids there instead.’” Pressure from the market, he said, is what will really kick start change. 

Such pressure is already being seen. Harvard, for example, saw the largest year-over-year drop in donations in over a decade this year. According to the school’s annual financial report, total philanthropic contributions fell by $151 million, or 14 percent, from 2023 to 2024. The report confirmed suspicions that donors, dissatisfied with the university’s response to anti-Israel protests that exploded on campus after Hamas’s October 7 attack, would put their money where their mouth is.  It remains to be seen, however, whether Harvard cares.

One thing that university presidents should not be doing? “Calling the president of the American Enterprise Institute and asking us to provide speakers periodically,” Mr. Doar said. 

He worries that AEI and other conservative-leaning think tanks are being used by university administrators as “window dressing” to make “donors feel a little better” without actually enacting meaningful change. He returned to the suggestion that university leaders need to “go out and recruit” and “push through the hiring of faculty that changes this imbalance.” 

“The reputation of these great universities has been tarnished.  Some people have gone on to create new universities and start fresh. Others are trying to get the great universities to reform and get better,” he said. “We need to do both.”