It’s rare when you can acknowledge a conservative viewpoint was given a full airing on taxpayer-funded National Public Radio.
But on Friday, the New York Times podcast The Daily — which airs across the country on NPR — offered a platform to Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo, under the headline “The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges.” Rufo effectively made the case that when universities accept federal funding, they should accept it comes with conditions.
It’s definitely worth a listen.
This was offered as a balance to Wednesday’s episode with Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber. It was titled “The University President Willing to Fight Trump.” It’s the usual labeling double standard: “Conservative Activist” vs. “University President.”
The Times comfortably chatted with Eisgruber about his warning in The Atlantic about Team Trump taking money away from woke universities: “The greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s. Every American should be concerned.”
Eisgruber acknowledged that conservatives should feel free to speak their mind on campus, but “There are political divisions about things like climate and vaccines right now. And there is no obligation on the part of the universities to reflect what is the political division of opinion on those subjects or about, say, capitalism and investing.”
Host Michael Barbaro cited research on the dramatic tilt at universities: “The data point that I found worth mentioning here is that the ratio of liberal to conservative faculty has reached, according to this research report, 8 to 1 in political science, 17 to 1 in history, 44 to 1 in sociology, 48 to 1 in English, and 108 to 0 in communications and interdisciplinary studies, which you note includes race and gender studies.”
Rufo said this extreme imbalance came to a head in the George Floyd riots of 2020. “All of a sudden, those ideas and that structure, that language, those symbols, those narratives, those arguments, they escaped the laboratory of academia and were then imposed throughout society via all of the surrounding institutions. And so it was in your kids’ school curriculum. It was in your work’s HR training. It was in your television news program.” Wokeness broke out.
Barbaro suggested that was all real passion: “I just want to pause here to ask, in your mind, was there anything about that was organic, and just a natural outpouring of grief and frustration over what had happened to George Floyd, and about the history of racism in the United States that lay behind that?”
Rufo said “Of course. I mean, cancer is organic.” The passion was real: “You have what I think are some honest emotions at the heart of these protests. But none of these elite, left-wing initiatives come close to even identifying or offering even a plausible remedy for those problems.”
Barbaro presented Eisgruber’s argument about “academic freedom,” “His belief that academics, academic researchers, administrators at the university, they should not have terms dictated to them by the government.” Rufo rebutted:
RUFO: Princeton has decided to take hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, but that taxpayer money comes with basic terms and conditions, basic rights and responsibilities. And so the federal government is well within its right to say, we’re not going to keep cutting you a blank check unless you meet certain basic standards and requirements that are necessary for the good stewardship of these public dollars.
And so Princeton had a choice many years ago to accept government money with the inevitable reciprocal responsibilities or to refuse government money and to maintain its academic independence and its academic freedom. Hillsdale College, where I’m a distinguished fellow, decided to reject public funding so that it could maintain its institutional independence. Princeton is at liberty to make the same choice, to refuse taxpayer money, and then to not have to negotiate with the taxpayers through the democratically-elected administration, to come to a mutually beneficial and mutually agreeable terms.
PS: Some MSNBC hosts couldn’t handle this show:
FTM Rachel Maddow is sputtering. First, it’s quite the slip that he uses “affirmative action” as an insult, even though he supports it. Second, the idea that I’ve benefited from race-based favoritism is absurd. I’m very good at what I do—and I have the scalps to prove it. pic.twitter.com/5VArStYlT5
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) April 12, 2025
