The University is the Engine of the Regime
Editor's Note
Public debate about the university fixates on surface disorders — ideological fashions, campus radicalism, technological distractions. This essay from Scott argues that the real crisis is older and deeper: the replacement of the republican tradition of liberal education with a Progressive model that treats the university as an engine of social management. The modern university is where the regime reproduces its assumptions about knowledge, authority, and human purpose.
This places higher education at the center of the cold civil war over the future of the American order. The hour is late. Marginal reform will not suffice; renewal demands the courage to treat the Progressive University as a historical choice rather than a permanent inheritance — and to build new institutions ordered toward truth and self-government. Yenor’s essay, here, is an adaptation of a talk given at the Claremont alumni retreat in October 2025.
Critics examining corruption in higher education have all felt the need to identify a moment before things turned bad, and then pinpoint a change that explains the decline. Some blame social media and iPhones, implying that things were better in 2005 or so. Most blame the ‘60s or the later rise of multiculturalism and critical theories, suggesting a return to healthy higher education would mean a return to the practices of the 1950s.
Each of these is only a small part of the larger problem. Today’s educational progressivism, with all its attendant troubles, is downstream of what I call the Progressive University: the whole system of education (and the philosophy upon which it is founded) that replaced the old republican framework of liberal education at the turn of the twentieth century. Few consider that this system itself might be the origin of the problem, leaving reformers shadowboxing with corruption without touching the heart of the enemy. They fritter around the edges of a superstructure they take for granted.
Today’s regime expects universities to do several things at the same time — to prepare an elite while providing mass education; to educate students and conduct useful research; to provide general education in skills (or maybe citizenship) and specialized workforce training. In many cases, these goals are not just competing but conflicting; a house divided against itself cannot stand.
As in politics, the nature of the present crisis demands that we reconsider the fundamental institutions of our education system. This is not to suggest we reinstate the pre-Progressive higher education system. There is no Garden of Eden to return to, since the goals of higher education are not written in nature. But we must think through to the root of our current system to see how it contributes to today’s corruption and to imagine a better way forward.
Understanding the Progressive University
The Progressive University is the product of a particular time, a revolution in American higher education begun in earnest as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. Its aim was to produce, as John Dewey later put it, “socially organized intelligence,” making higher education central to the rational production of human progress. Sometimes “organized intelligence” meant a rigorous application of the scientific method and the principles of evolution to the study of nature — including human nature. Social science disciplines explained the evolving conceptions of the human mind that grounded the moral foundations of successive historical eras.
This specific historical goal — education ordered toward social evolution — required a particular form, one that is best understood in comparison to what came before.
Before the Progressive University, the world of American higher education consisted of small, classical colleges. The administrators of the pre-Progressive era were high-level professors who set the overall vision for education through hiring. Teachers or tutors were amateurs (no PhDs).
These colleges were not divided into departments. A student’s course of study was mandated, with a certain set of first-year classes and then a set of second-year classes, and so on. Colleges developed their own admissions tests for students, not relying on standardized tests or accepting certification from high schools. Preparatory schools arose to equip students for such admissions tests.
Professional schools in law, medicine, and theology, for instance, came after college, for those so inclined and who could pass entrance exams. No accreditors existed. There were no professional organizations connected to fields of study or maintaining “professional” standards. No national meetings for the American Political Science Association.
The Progressive University, borrowed from Germany in many ways, but adapted to the American situation, reversed all of these practices. Though its goal (the reordering of society) is ambitious and effectively universal, the Progressive University in practice relied on specialization, professionalization, and fragmentation: the division of the university into departments; the demand for PhDs to staff those departments; the demand for research and publications from those PhDs; the division of courses of study into majors, general education, and electives; the building of a K-12 system to credential those eligible for admission into higher education; the rise of national tests to further standardize admissions; the use of a B.A. or a B.S. degree to certify admission into professional schools; and the granting of tenure on condition of academic freedom to faculty. Public funding abetted and reinforced this system.
“Henceforth,” writes Frederick Rudolph in his indispensable study Curriculum: A History of American Undergraduate Course of Study since 1636, “order, certainty, in an institution of higher education in the United States, would be less a function of the curriculum than of the bureaucracy that held it together.” Administrators would come to define the new Progressive University and eventually be a class set apart.
These realities took root over time. Accreditation reached its adolescence after the First World War. By 1919, organizations like the American Council on Education and the National Conference Committee defined higher education institutions, as Rudolph catalogues, as requiring “for admission the completion of a four-year secondary course approved by a recognized accrediting agency and correlated to the college course to which the student was admitted; that required for graduation the completion of at least 120 semester hours of credit; that supported a faculty of at least eight heads of departments,” and whose faculty had at least two years of graduate studies.
Remnants of the old classical college survived in the general education requirements, the nature of which became less classical and more skills-based over time. Universities became organized around the needs of departments, which conducted their own hiring, more and more. The best departments would build graduate programs of their own.
Instead of intelligent generalists, department hiring committees began to select professors based on research ability in a specific field, trained and demonstrated by the earning of a PhD. A majority of science and social science faculty had PhDs by the mid-1950s. Humanities followed by the early to mid-1960s. Now almost all instructors are PhDs.
The Progressive University became a magnet arranging all other education institutions. School choice advocates, for instance, know that high school graduates often want to attend college. And this means that colleges must be able to “recognize” the curriculum at a private school; this recognition limits how different private schools can be. Even the most right-wing school has parents who want their kids to go to college, so the school must adapt to the Progressive University. Likewise, professional schools require completion of a degree from an accredited university (i.e., a Progressive one). Any plan to remake higher education must deal with that reality.
Four Models for Real Reform
Conservative reform efforts have frittered at the edges of this system, always granting its fundamental institutions but seeking to reform or rearrange some elements. Some seek “tenure reform,” so as to ensure faculty keep doing research. Some seek to reform general education away from skills-based learning and toward classic texts or to remove ideological disciplines like sociology from the core. Others hope to build centers on campus where civil discourse and an older variety of classical education can find a home.
Others seek to eliminate racial preferences in admissions or hiring, but to keep the Progressive admissions tests and hiring criteria in place. Others are making their own accreditors. The more radical among us seek program reviews to eliminate disciplines so fundamentally corrupt that they have no hope of redemption. I endorse all of these reforms—and I praise the Trump Department of Education folks for bringing them about.
But all these reforms take the fundamental institutions of the Progressive University for granted. The manifest failure of modern higher education — its loss of public confidence and ideological capture combined with the fact that it produces no measurable gains in knowledge — demands that we consider more ambitious changes.
There is no return to the world before the Progressive University. The classical college will never again be the sole model for higher education in America. Universities are involved in scientific research, medical training, and more valuable functions in ways that cannot be disentangled. A reformed higher education landscape will look differently than those of 1830 or 1870, before the modern research university was hatched.
I suggest four practical models of education that will challenge the Progressive University. Many of these proposals build on alternatives that already exist in limited or imperfect form today. All would function outside the current accreditation system, which goes hand in hand with the stultifying, Progressive model Perhaps a reliance on external “board” exams certifying for expertise (like medical board exams) would suffice to certify the adequacy of the institution. Law schools and medical schools would have to move to rigorous entrance exams and away from admissions based on degrees from accredited schools.
Polytechnic Universities.
These schools are dedicated to scientific rigor, research, and practical training for particular kinds of advanced jobs, especially in the hard and applied sciences. Cal Poly (one of the premier polytechnic schools in the U.S.) had only agricultural and engineering programs until the late 1960s, when it was drawn into the education blob. Massachusetts Institute of Technology held out longer, but eventually gave in to the Progressive University model.
For genuinely polytechnic schools, there would be no general education requirements and perhaps no need to have 120 credits to graduate. A high school diploma may suffice for general education — or perhaps an entrance exam tailored to the scientific mission. Perhaps such schools would only hire PhDs, and perhaps they would have tenured faculty, but the key would be to keep hard science at the heart of the enterprise. The natural science model of producing knowledge would govern the school, and it would produce benefits in that area alone. Perhaps it would most resemble a really serious two-year college.
Workforce Academies.
Just as plumbers and electricians learn how to perform a specific job in trade school, the content of many “majors” on campus could be better taught through a hands-on model with an apprenticeship component. Accountants, marketers, graphic designers, and more could well learn trades in dedicated professional academies, releasing a major portion of workforce training from the grip of the Progressive University.
Again, there would be no general education requirements. There would also be no need for PhDs to teach, and certainly no need for faculty to conduct research. Accountants can prepare accountants. Nurses can prepare nurses, and graphic designers prepare graphic designers. Such academies could also reach down into high schools to enroll students and get them rolling on productive careers even earlier.
Instead of accreditation, such workforce academies would simply rely on their success rates on “board” exams as a way of certifying their excellence. Do accounting academies produce graduates we can pass the CPA? Do nursing academies produce nurses who pass boards? Do the graduates of engineering academies, if such there are, pass the Fundamentals of Engineering or Principles and Practice of Engineering exams? Any other form of accreditation would simply be unnecessary bureaucracy.
Breaking Up the Progressive University.
Having one model of professional preparation for teachers of hard sciences, social sciences, and the humanities detracts from all. One way of restoring the integrity of each is breaking up universities into colleges with distinct visions of education. This model would allow reformers to totally transform the structures that have defined the Progressive University without starting completely from scratch and building new institutions.
A College of Sciences could be arranged like a polytechnic university, with policies appropriate to the research university. A College of Humanities, in contrast, would not have to hire PhDs for music, literature, philosophy, or history. Different kinds of exit exams could be administered in each school. No science would be needed in the college of humanities; no humanities for the college of science. Research would be required for hires in science, but not for hires in humanities or languages. The distinct faculties would be subject to different teaching loads and administrative structures. Only the same football team!
Classical Colleges.
Classical colleges are the inverse of polytechnic institutions, in that they stay in the humanities lane and are grounded in tradition rather than scientific progress. Many classical colleges are already forming — Luther Classical College, Wyoming Catholic College, New Saint Andrews, and more. No departments are necessary. Administrators have teaching functions.
Classical colleges are hampered, however, by the need to hire PhDs for faculty. Finding broadly educated PhDs is difficult given that all come necessarily from Progressive institutions, with their emphasis on research and narrow expertise. Every faculty member is a species of miracle. Such colleges do not usually have departments, but every faculty member was produced by a department. Perhaps someday hiring their own graduates will suffice to staff such classical colleges.
The Time to Act Is Now
The Progressive University leveled and homogenized higher education, because it could only conceive of one purpose for learning: historical progress, facilitated through one form or another of social engineering. At the same time, however, it reorganized colleges into specialized departments, fragmenting educational practice and the processes of learning. The result was the worst of both worlds: a one-size-fits-all approach that nonetheless neglected the real meaning of a general, liberal education. The graduates of the Progressive University are rarely trained well in any professional skills, or in any particular discipline, much less in the art of citizenship.
Conservatives must assault the Progressive University head-on. Small-ball adjustments to the status quo, however helpful, will not go to the root of the problem. Homogenizing and stultifying, the Progressive University has run its course. It is time to imagine a new future.
This new future will often require fundamental adjustments to policy — a move away from PhDs as a requirement for teaching; smaller, more specialized schools, both for workforce training and for liberal education; the blurring of administrative and faculty lines. The demographic cliff and the collapse of institutional performance have created a rare opening for real change.