Yeah, we're going to have to do DEI for conservatives

The editor-in-chief of The Federalist wants more ideological diversity in universities. I agree.

“What bubble?” (Illustration by andrewgenn/Getty Images)

Over the weekend, The Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway came out in favor of affirmative action. In the spirit of building a bigger tent, I’d like to say, welcome, Mollie!

“All public universities should be required to have minimum 50% of their staff be conservative professors by spring 2026. In each department,” she wrote on Twitter. When the tweets rolled in pointing out that her idea sounded suspiciously like the sort of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies she and other Republicans regularly rail against, she denied it, claiming instead that she simply wished to “remove the left-wing oppression that has destroyed American universities.”

Mollie, don’t back down! You were right. Well, at least directionally.

Opponents of affirmative action and DEI largely fall into two camps: Those who are correctly frustrated by the poor way they’ve often been implemented and those who wrongly believe that the purpose of our elite universities is solely to rank 18-year-olds by SAT score and hand out admissions like a prize. But what Mollie correctly identifies in her call for ideological pluralism is that the university is not just a capstone for hard-working teenagers but also a powerful node for idea generation with an outsized influence on our politics, our culture, and our economy.