First, as late as 1960, only 8% of the country went to college. The United States should move toward 8% from its current 46%. States and professional agencies should encourage paths to work around higher ed, so that they do not have a credentialing monopoly on tomorrow’s professional class. Licensing requirements should be liberalized. Credentialing demands for promotion and salary increases in public sector jobs should be eliminated. Professions like school teaching and accountancy should not require college degrees; rather, as many professions as possible should, like lawyering but on a broader scale, establish apprenticeship-like tracks to credential new professionals.

Second, the legislature should heighten efforts to reform, exacting punitive personal costs to those charged with carrying out UT’s DEI mission. Legislatures could ban racial preferences. They could adopt the University of Chicago Free Speech principles, the Kalven report banning political and social action among university employees, the Shils report on excellence in university hiring, and campus free speech policies generally. This is the typical reformist play. However, the kicker would be to make university personnel civilly liable for violations of such policies (i.e., no sovereign immunity) and to allow for private causes of action that could be brought by anyone, with steep penalties. Make those who would implement DEI policies pay a steep price for allowing the heckler’s veto or hiring on the basis of racial preferences or using their government offices for political purposes. These causes of action are not intended to reign in DEI. They should weaken and stigmatize the DEI mission, all the easier to defeat it. Model legislation allowing for generous causes of action is available here.

Third, stigmatizing should involve denying public funds to universities informed by the new vision of “inclusive excellence.” Perhaps such efforts can begin small, with proscriptions on public funding to university-level DEI offices or DEI-infused degree programs like Queer Studies. They might grow to end public funding to thoroughly politicized and sometimes dying disciplines like social work, sociology, English and history. Actions could be taken to ensure that such departments or colleges lose their accreditation too. It is painful perhaps to recognize the utter corruption of these disciplines, especially for those who love and respect the Western tradition, but whatever may be worth saving is not reproducing itself. We live in a world of Literature Lost.