Legislation Can’t Solve All of Academia’s Problems

By Tao Tan, December 16, 2025

The Goldwater Institute, Defending Education, and the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal recently proposed an American Higher Education Restoration Act for state universities.

This model bill would create a teaching-only tenure track for faculty in Americanism and Western Civilization with no research requirement, shifts control over most new faculty hiring to governing boards, raises the standard non-STEM teaching load to six courses per year, and permits reductions only through external funding, board-approved administrative roles, or waivers granted by a politically-appointed Taxpayer Funded Research Award Committee.

The pathologies that the proposal calls out are real: teaching is systematically undervalued, entire fields can be fairly accused of ideological gatekeeping, and the line between scholarship and activism continues to blur. The bill’s proponents’ frustration is justified. But the proposed solution, which entrenches political oversight of research, hiring, and tenure and carves out an alternate, arguably second-tier structure for Americanism and Western Civilization, risks unintended consequences that would undermine the very goals it seeks to achieve.

Mandates work… up to a point

Interest from state governments in university reform has focused so far on managerial issues, such as DEI practices, shared governance, and student and faculty conduct. But these interventions have  reached the point of diminishing returns; legislative mandates can clean up disciplinary processes, clarify the roles of faculty senates, and set up new compliance bureaucracies—all necessary and welcome—but what they cannot do is directly change the culture and the scholarly output of academics, for the simple reason that administrators have little control over those things.

The reason for this rests on the distinction between a university’s administrative functions and its academic mission. Students and alumni naturally think of the university as the dormitories, dining halls, and student clubs, which are all parts that administrators control. But the academic work at the heart of the university’s mission—what gets researched, how scholarship is evaluated, what counts as knowledge—happens in faculty seminars, peer reviews, and conferences. These are faculty-led spaces that administrators can shape, stifle, or support—but not command. Governments can no more build a world-class faculty through legislative fiat than it can mandate entrepreneurial success.

Presidents propose, faculty dispose

To understand why, one must first understand the incentives that drive faculty behavior.  Academia is a labor sorting mechanism that attracts people who prize autonomy and intellectual freedom over higher salaries. Constrain that freedom through political control, and the sorting mechanism reverses: top scholars will seek positions elsewhere, and talented potential academics will choose other careers.

The formal and informal hierarchies of universities reinforces this pattern. A faculty member’s “boss” is not their department chair or dean or provost or president. Their most important colleagues are their departmental peers, who have the most influence over their tenure and promotion. Once tenured, employment is protected except for extraordinary misconduct or financial exigency. The chain of command familiar to corporate America simply does not exist.

This protects academic freedom by insulating scholars from pressure external to their departments and fields, but it also creates a fundamental tension. The decision paralysis universities faced after October 7, 2023 demonstrated this tension between academic freedom (a faculty prerogative) and legal obligations on nondiscrimination (an administrative requirement). And that’s the rub: the parts of a university where cultural problems run deepest are precisely the parts most insulated from administrative intervention. Any serious reform effort must grapple with this reality.

The law of unintended consequences

External efforts to influence higher education which fail to do so have typically made four critical errors. The proposed bill risks repeating all four.

First, it strengthens direct political influence, going well beyond fiduciary oversight, over universities. Specifically, it shifts oversight from the institution to the individual. State legislatures can and do prescribe broad focus areas for their state institutions, such as agriculture or nursing, but these are institutional missions, not annual political approval of individual faculty research portfolios. The proposed Taxpayer Funded Research Award Committee runs the risk of devolving into a spoils system. When the parties in power change, expect tit-for-tat retaliation, politicizing individual research rather than depoliticizing institutional culture.

Second, it creates a two-tier system that stigmatizes precisely the people it aims to champion. The source of legitimacy for faculty at the university level is original contributions to the body of knowledge. Those who earn fast-track tenure without a research portfolio are unlikely to hold the respect of their peers, gain stature in their fields, attract ambitious graduate students, or exercise influence in departmental or faculty-wide decision-making.

Third, it creates isolated pockets disconnected from the rest of the community. Creating protected, specialized, and accelerated tenure pathways for carved-out programs places barriers between them and the rest of the university, and risks discouraging others from collaborating with those faculty. The scholars attracted to these positions will be those willing to accept second-class status or those unable to compete in regular departments. Neither outcome serves the goal of intellectual pluralism.

Fourth, it expects that externally-imposed hires and structures can create lasting culture change. But academic culture changes slowly, through generational turnover and the gradual accumulation of credibility: new research and publications shift a debate, citations from other scholars attest to its quality,  and a cadre of excited students springs up to carry that research program forward. In contrast to this organic process, external impositions activate institutional antibodies, producing not reform but a siege mentality.

These are not hypothetical concerns but wholly predictable failure modes that any would-be reformer must anticipate, based on our experience of how universities actually function. But that same experience tells us there are other approaches that can succeed.

The road to reform

Field-shaping shifts emerge when exciting new scholarship displaces dominant paradigms and attracts new scholars with different perspectives, incentivizing faculty to see pluralism as an advantage rather than resenting it as an imposed quota. For example, the field of law and economics succeeded not by winning a culture war but by being genuinely innovative, introducing novel ways of examining legal problems with testable ideas and workable policies that attracted interest from beyond the academic bubble.

The problems the proposed American Higher Education Restoration Act identifies are real and urgent. When universities neglect to teach constitutional principles and traditions of liberal inquiry, they undermine the transmission of the very ideas that sustain a free society, not to mention their own institutions. But the answer to the legitimate concerns the model bill raises should come from academic excellence that wins the respect of the field, not mandates that activate institutional antibodies by setting different (read: lower–at least in the eyes of faculty) standards.

The road to reform is not a smooth one, but neither does it run through uncharted territory. The way forward is through underinvested, underappreciated fields producing rigorous, innovative scholarship, which in turn offers the best chance to foster genuine and lasting intellectual pluralism.