THE REMEDY FOR CENSORSHIP IS LESS CENSORSHIP.

That sounds like an obvious point, but when Republican state legislators are attempting to mandate viewpoint diversity at universities that seem to be dominated by Democrat court intellectuals, it's an important point to make.  Here's Heterodox Academy's Nick Phillips.  "So if viewpoint diversity is cratering in academia, why not use legislation to support it? There are a few good reasons to be skeptical."

First, because people will resist being told It's. For. Your. Own. Good.  (That's what makes nanny-state, self-styled progressives, so annoying.)  Bet on emergence.

When social change is mandated by a top-down command, the resulting system is fragile. It has little authentic buy-in from essential stakeholders and it can be easily reversed by future legislatures. Durable social change comes from the bottom up. It happens when citizens are moved to action by a vision of the truth, not a threat of punishment.

Second, recognize that censoring the censorious isn't going to end well. "Free speech is threatened on campus because students have been taught to seek authoritarian, administrative solutions to social frictions."

Third, let the people running higher education come to the consciousness that they're antagonizing people.

In 2015, just 37 percent of Republicans rated the effect of universities negatively, but in 2017, this shot up to 58 percent. That means if progressives want to turn universities into ideological fortresses, conservatives will build battering rams. As always, our civic health will be the collateral damage.

And yes, the people running higher education are antagonizing people.

Disdaining the society on which it depends for everything—students, money, freedom—doesn’t seem like a good long-term trajectory.

The proponents of the new anti-Americanism fully understand this. They know American society as it has been and is still now (though in a weakened form) profoundly incompatible with a form of higher education that regards that society as racist, sexist, homophobic, and oppressive through and through. The leadership of our colleges, however, sees the solution as the transformation of American society into higher education’s own image. Once we Americans wake up, we will remodel ourselves in the image of the campus left. America will become, so to speak, Burlington, Vermont writ large.

No, it won't, because American society has had fifty years to make that transformation and it hasn't. That is what scares the people running (the commanding heights of) higher education.

Americans are growing more and more aware that their colleges and universities see themselves as the vanguard of a new social and political order forged in reactionary hatred of political, economic, and social freedom. That points to a future in which those colleges and universities will lose what they now think is permanently theirs: a sanctuary for the anti-American left. We will, in time, see the reforestation of that barren landscape, as Americans recapture their colleges or universities or build new ones. As in Rutland County, some hobby farms will remain, where gentlemen farmers can tend a few sheep with some well-trained border collies. Perhaps that will be Harvard’s future. The rest of us can look forward to the return of colleges and universities that prize debate, robust diversity of ideas, educational excellence, well-ordered curricula, and mindful attention to the ideals of our republic.

The regeneracy, when it comes, will likely be evident first among the community colleges and regional comprehensives and mid-majors, where Ivy Emulation is less likely to work as a career move.