Christopher Rufo Wants To Shut Down ‘Activist’ Academic Departments. Here’s Why He’s Wrong.

In an essay published this week in City Journal, conservative activist Christopher Rufo argued that universities—or rather, the state legislatures governing these universities—should shut down “activist” academic departments. But rather than protecting higher education, forcibly shutting down left-wing academic departments would be nothing more than routine censorship.

Rufo argued that conservatives don’t have to sit idly by while “activist academic departments that push left-wing ideology in the guise of dispassionate scholarship” grow at American universities. “The activist disciplines are not inevitable, and decline is always, in part, a choice—one that can be reversed with sufficient courage, insight, and will,” he wrote.

“Conservatives have an opportunity to move beyond critique and enact meaningful reforms that will restore the pursuit of truth as the telos of America’s public universities,” Rufo continued. State legislators, he argued, “should propose the abolition” of activist academic departments.

Rather than being a novel concept, Rufo argued that there is precedent for these kinds of closures. He gave two examples: the closure of the University of California, Berkeley’s criminology department in 1974, and the shuttering of the University of Chicago’s education department in 1998.

However, neither case involved state legislatures. Regarding Berkeley, Rufo wrote that “Chancellor Albert Bowker shut down the entire School of Criminology, ignoring large-scale student demonstrations, which supporters described as ‘militant and spirited.'” According to Rufo, “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.”

The story is similar at the University of Chicago. According to Ru