America 250 demands a return to the founders’ dream for higher education

Leading a major public university teaches you something the administrative class never quite grasps: Institutions are living things. Further, the people tasked with guiding them are obligated to pivot and adapt in order to remain faithful to our country’s first principles. I led the University of Alabama from 2015 to 2025. I too watched the DEI movement on the national stage begin as a professed commitment to "opportunity," but evolve into something else entirely — an ideological enforcement regime hostile to merit, to free inquiry, and to the noble aspirations that forged the American university.

When the Alabama Legislature passed SB 129 in 2024, prohibiting taxpayer-funded DEI offices, I worked hand in hand with the state to ensure compliance. In fact, we were commended by the sponsors of the legislation for our complete and swift action. Outreach to gifted students from rural and underserved communities — work that had absolutely nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with talent — continued. That is because identifying and recruiting those who are smart and burning to work hard is one of the longest-standing charges of the American public university.

That clarity of mission is why this moment matters. As America quickly approaches its 250th birthday, the nation needs university presidents who have confronted and triumphed over ideological capture and come out the other side with an even more robust view of the purpose of public higher education.

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The statesmen who built our constitutional order believed a particular kind of education was necessary to form citizens capable of self-government. Benjamin Franklin, the driving force behind the University of Pennsylvania, believed that only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia because he understood liberty could last only among a populace proficient in a range of disciplines, from history to theology to rhetoric to reason. George Washington asserted in his farewell address that virtue and morality were the necessary spring of popular government. John Adams declared that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.

These individuals regarded education, properly understood, as the most potent engine for national greatness. Their conviction transformed a group of vulnerable coastal colonies into the most powerful nation in human history.

Then much of higher education lost confidence in the very civilization that had produced unprecedented wealth, freedom, and prosperity. Many universities drifted from the righteous pursuit of truth and toward partisan activism dressed up as scholarship. Slowly at first. Then quickly and often angrily. The progressive notion of diversity, which treats identity as paramount, became the organizing principle of the campus experience. That perverse form of diversity it is inimical to truth itself. Truth is objective. There are indeed immutable boundaries. And once an institution abandons that foundational premise, even slightly, it begins to falter, and it will eventually fail.

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The consequences, having played out on campuses across the country, are impossible to ignore. Western civilization is not treated as one of humanity’s pinnacle achievements worthy of rigorous study, but as something fundamentally illegitimate. Merit became the adversary. Excellence the enemy. Patriotism the villain. Public trust in higher education collapsed for good reason. Institutions were duplicitous. They preached tolerance while being censorious. They insisted on fairness while being dogmatic. Too many universities stopped teaching students how to think and started training them in which conclusions to reach.

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Florida chose a different path. Under Ron DeSantis, the Free State of Florida became the national standard-bearer for the renaissance of public higher education. The creation of the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida in 2022 reflects a renewed civilizational confidence — a willingness to let students wrestle seriously with the enduring questions that mark free and flourishing societies.

This matters far beyond one state. Our world is geopolitically precarious and intensely competitive. The United States cannot afford institutions that manufacture fragility, cynicism, and nihilism. Boldness, resilience, distinction, and creativity are the rare earths of leadership, and great universities must be where they are mined.

I had the privilege of leading one of Alabama’s great universities, working tirelessly alongside dedicated colleagues in service to our students, our citizens, and our shared mission. I now have an even sharper view, tested by a decade of running an institution through one of the most turbulent periods for higher education in American history. The takeaway is one that the Founders understood from the start. The university exists to form citizens capable of nurturing our delicate experiment in self-government. Everything else is downstream of that.

Restoring the Founders’ vision — without qualification and without apology — is a national imperative.