[Christopher F. Rufo] Shut Down Activist Academic Departments: Lawmakers have every right to defund ideologically captured disciplines in public universities.

For conservatives, the first step in reforming the universities is to expose the abuse of “academic freedom,” which has been used as a defense of intellectual license, and to propose a clear policy that any academic departments that pursue activism instead of scholarship will lose their taxpayer funding. Administrators, faculty, and students can advance left-wing ideology in their private capacity, but the First Amendment is not an entitlement to state support and taxpayer subsidies. Lawmakers are well within their rights to demand that public universities focus on rigorous academic work over partisan polemics with a scholarly veneer. Any program that violates this compact will be abolished.

What would shutting down activist academic departments look like in practice? Here, we don’t need to speculate; we can look to the past as a guide. Some of America’s most prestigious universities have shut down academic departments that strayed too far from their mission. Two case studies are particularly notable: the decision by the University of California, Berkeley, to shut down its criminology department in 1974 and the University of Chicago’s decision to close its education department in 1998.

At Berkeley, the story is familiar. In the late 1960s, university officials capitulated to activist faculty associated with the Black Panther Party and left-wing revolutionary movements. They assented to the transformation of the criminology school, which had previously trained law-enforcement officials in the latest management techniques, into a hub for “radical criminology,” which advocated defunding traditional police departments and fomenting left-wing “prison action.”

As the department grew more radical, Berkeley administrators pushed back. First, they fired four activist assistant professors who had undermined the university’s mission. Then, in 1974, Chancellor Albert Bowker shut down the entire School of Criminology, ignoring large-scale student demonstrations, which supporters described as “militant and spirited.”

Bowker justified the closure by citing the need to make budget cuts due to an economic recession, but the political subtext was clear: the radical criminologists had degraded the university’s scholarly mission. After the chancellor’s announcement, students occupied an administrative building, but Bowker sent in law enforcement, armed with shotguns and grenade launchers, and the students were removed.