Defending Ed Supports Proposed Legislation to Restore Academic Excellence, Ideological Diversity, and Excellence in Teaching at America’s Colleges and Universities

On December 2, 2025, Defending Education, along with the Goldwater Institute and the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, proposed the American Higher Education Restoration Act. The goal is to restore ideological diversity and intellectual seriousness in faculty hiring and turn off the spigot of
automatic taxpayer funding for intellectually unserious “research” projects of activist academics.

The Goldwater Institute’s new report that accompanies the proposed legislation, “Peer Review Gone Wild: Flagship Political Science Journal Shows How Academic Gatekeepers Promote Ideology Over Scholarship,” outlines the need for such legislation:

For too long, the actual teaching of students has taken a back seat in our public institutions of higher education. Instead of encouraging a commitment to excellent classroom instruction, faculty members have been encouraged to pursue academic research and publishing above all else. And as the Goldwater Institute has uncovered in this report, the very pursuit of academic research has been infected with ideology, forcing professors to conform to the prevailing agenda of the day or risk their careers. To these institutions’ detriment, their own structure and the incentives for academic career advancement have ensured that there is little thought given to student outcomes in prestigious academia. The time for reform is now. The American Higher Education Restoration Act makes certain that our colleges and universities will return to one of their core responsibilities–excellence in teaching students.

The last half-century has seen our institutions replace classroom instruction with research output. To combat this trend, this legislation will establish new tenure pathways that focus on rewarding the instructional performance of professors. A key component of this legislation is to include actual student feedback in faculty review. Additionally, this legislation will establish a minimum teaching load for faculty with common sense exemptions for outside-funded research or university-approved research. Students should not expect the vast majority of their tuition dollars to fund faculty who have little to no classroom interaction with them. 

Fundamentally, our public institutions exist not only to pursue high-quality research, but also to provide top-notch undergraduate and graduate education and to serve the broader public. The American Higher Education Restoration Act ensures that universities prioritize these goals, and, most of all, that excellent and dedicated teaching is rewarded. We owe it to our students and our posterity to make clear that higher education is first and foremost about education.

Read the full language of the proposed legislation below: