Editor’s Note: This essay is part of the Texas Horn’s 2026 Inaugural Journal, “The Soul of the University.” Contact us here to request a hard copy of the journal.
What is the soul of the university? That is the question we are exploring in the Texas Horn’s inaugural journal. But before answering it, we must first consider whether the university is still worth caring about, and whether the question is worth asking at all.
I, along with many other college students on the right-of-center, believe that the university still matters; it has the potential to be wielded as a tool for good, despite its current battered condition.
However, we must ask ourselves: What is the true purpose of education? Is it merely to prepare students for careers in a modern, materialistic world? Or is there a higher, spiritual calling that universities ought to serve?
Bashing the university and calling college a “scam” has become a cliché in the conservative movement. Some on the right, especially commentators and activists, increasingly tell young people to skip college altogether.
Their argument goes something along these lines:
Universities have become a breeding ground for the left. Progressives who hate America have infiltrated these schools to push leftist indoctrination rather than teaching the classics, civics, and virtue. Professors are often more focused on activism than on education, while administrators expand the university bureaucracy to effectuate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Meanwhile, tuition costs have far outpaced inflation, and student-loan debt has burdened many young people, enslaving them to debt for the rest of their lives, just for a piece of paper and the privilege of writing “BA” on their resumes.
Or, conservatives will simply use the “Starbucks barista” argument, poking fun at the crazy, blue-haired liberal girl who took out hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a BA in Gender Studies, only to work at Starbucks for just above minimum wage.
In short, they believe that most young people should avoid college because colleges are liberal and college degrees have a negative ROI.
Despite reaching different conclusions, the “anti-college” right and the “not-anti-college” right are in almost complete agreement when it comes to public policy. They both support raising the university endowment tax to disincentivize universities from acting like hedge funds and bloating their bureaucracies; reform student loan system and FAFSA to prevent universities from artificially boosting demand for degrees; advancing alternative pathways to traditional colleges; prohibiting BA requirements for certain entry-level jobs; dismantling DEI offices; sunsetting provisions that direct federal funds towards left-wing studies and courses.
Still, some tensions remain unresolved.
College should not be viewed only through the lens of ROI or mere utility. The university should be recognized as an environment where young students can engage with each other and with scholars in an immersive community of ideas and inquiry—a place that transcends the mundane concerns of material gain.
When properly oriented, the university educates the next generation in preserving their inherited Christian civilization. The university, therefore, is not just simply a space for intellectual growth, but a crucible for the soul.
To that end, some have proposed building a parallel university economy. Institutions like Hillsdale, the University of Austin, New College of Florida, and various small Catholic liberal arts colleges aim to uphold a moral and theological vision of education.
Many flagship public universities are also beginning to revive civic education. Programs like Arizona State’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida now offer rigorous courses on the American founding, Western civilization, and civic virtue. Executed properly, these institutions will reshape the future of public higher education.
However, if the right is serious about reclaiming the culture, we cannot stop there—we must also reclaim the Ivy League and other elite institutions that have long shaped American leadership.
Elite universities remain critical to society; their alumni networks still dominate the elite ranks of finance, technology, media, and politics. To abandon them entirely would be to concede our culture and economy indefinitely to the left.
From their very beginnings, America’s elite institutions were not simply academic institutions, but bastions of moral instruction with a distinctly Christian purpose that went beyond the classroom. The Ivy League universities, though now largely secular, were founded as Christian institutions to train clergymen, promote Christian learning, and shape moral virtue.
Harvard University was founded by Puritans “Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae,” Latin for “Truth for Christ and the Church. The Harvard College Laws of the 1640s declared that the “main end of [a student’s] life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life” (quoting John 17:3), and therefore “to lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.”
Yale University was also founded by Congregationalists, in part due to Harvard’s theological drift to the left, as a “strictly orthodox” institution aligned with Calvinistic theology. Princeton University was founded “in order to train ministers” for the Presbyterian Church, especially those aligned with the evangelical New Light tradition. Columbia University began as King’s College with Anglican and Episcopalian roots. The University of Pennsylvania, though nonsectarian and more “secular,” was nevertheless founded in a Christian context, influenced by figures like George Whitefield and Benjamin Franklin, and maintained a broadly Christian moral framework even as it welcomed students of all faiths.
Yet, today these very universities, once built to be citadels of Christian learning and moral formation, have become bastions of secular, anti-Christian ideology, abandoning the higher, transcendent order, which universities were once created to uphold. The very structures that shaped the fabric of European and North American civilization have declined into institutions that reflect the materialistic, Marxist, and secular values of modernity.
