Ross Douthat correctly notes that there aren’t enough right-wing academics in America to turn our universities away from liberalism–in other words, as I’ve noted before, you can “reform” New College, but not UF–so he wonders how Christopher Rufo plans to impose his will on them. Rufo responds, more or less, by saying that the federal government can and should use its immense financial leverage to wreck elite universities as they currently exist. It will then be up to them to find some sort of satisfactory solution to the ideology problem.
This is the Musk approach–move fast, break things, and hope the system can figure out a way to adapt. And if it can’t? The country loses one of its greatest assets and gets nothing in return.