There are tides of change in American higher education, and Christopher Rufo and the Manhattan Institute are leading the charge. Earlier this week, Rufo released the Manhattan Statement: a bold call to restore truth, civic virtue, and institutional neutrality to the nation’s elite universities. Backed by new polling data, the document arrives at a critical moment in the nation’s history.
President Trump has already begun his second-term push against elite campuses. Now, he needs a blueprint. This might just be it.
The statement reads like a Declaration of Independence for American universities. Thirty-odd signatories—academics, journalists, and policy leaders—list their grievances, assert six founding principles, and demand action. Among those principles: truth over ideology, colorblind equality, free speech, civil discourse, administrative transparency, and institutional neutrality.
That these now sound revolutionary is a measure of how far higher education has drifted from its original vision.
To be clear, Trump has already made higher ed a battlefield. In the wake of recent campus protests and the anti-Semitic debacle at Ivy League institutions like Harvard and Columbia, he threatened to cut federal research funding to schools that tolerate “ideological extremism and harassment.” His education secretary has launched inquiries into DEI compliance and foreign funding disclosures.
Conservatives, long slow to react at the national level, now stand to really shake things up.
And the public is with him. According to the Manhattan Institute’s survey, only 15% of Americans say they have “a great deal of trust” in the Ivy League — a stunning collapse of cultural credibility. Fifty-seven percent want DEI bureaucracy significantly reduced. Fifty-one percent say universities should protect free speech at all costs, including disciplining those who try to silence speakers.
For decades, the right talked about the academic pipeline without building one. Now, for the first time, we are seeing a serious movement: new journals, policy centers, reformed state universities, and statements like this one. The Manhattan Statement isn’t just another polemic, but a governing document and a set of standards to which all institutions receiving public funding should be measured.
At the heart of the crisis, however, is something deeper than DEI: a collapse of rigor. The loudest voices in the university are often well-credentialed but incapable of engaging opposing views with clarity. This is a catastrophe. Academic rigor requires humility, argument, and depth—all traits sacrificed at the altar of ideology and the activist view of administrators. If American students spent the three hours of federally-mandated work per college credit doing actual work instead of filling time with extracurriculars and “professional development,” perhaps these deficiencies would sort themselves out.
As it turns out, the American liberal arts tradition was never about moral relativism or professional credentialism. Horace Mann’s common schools, the land-grant colleges, and the mid-century university boom were all somewhat rooted in a shared belief that education should prepare free people for self-government.
Edmund Burke observed of the American Revolution that it was not a radical break but a defense of inherited liberties. So too with the push to reform higher education. Rufo and his co-signees do not request something new—they’re asking for a return to something vaunted.
Something that works.
The Manhattan Statement offers President Trump a clear path: to use the levers of government to restore it instead of mere jabs at certain actors. This might amount to the crowning achievement if the Trump administration gets this right. This entails demanding more: more seriousness, more accountability, and more courage from the institutions that shape our elite and take our tax dollars.
The battle has begun. But the fight will be won with policy and not mere posturing.