The Return of the Fellowship

The American university is broken. The people running the universities know it, which is why they have redoubled their efforts to make sure you can’t do anything about it.

The story has been told so many times in conservative circles that retelling it risks being a bore: William F. Buckley warned us in 1951 about the free fall that had already begun in higher education. Allan Bloom sounded the alarm in 1987. Ross Douthat offered his critique in 2005. A generation of conservatives has poured time, treasure, and talent into reforming higher ed. We’ve funded centers, endowed chairs, launched institutes, filed lawsuits, and written enough op-eds to fill the Library of Alexandria. Yet still—still—the average graduate of an American university is more likely to be able to explain the nuances of “systemic oppression” than to tell you who wrote The Federalist Papers.

That should be a sign that the old approach, whatever its merits, was fundamentally wrong—not because the diagnosis was wrong, but because the strategy was. As Aristotle says, we should deliberate about means, not ends. Conservatives have been trying to reform the university from within a system that is designed, at every level, to resist exactly the kind of reformation we seek. It is time to stop playing a rigged game and build our own system.

The Unassailable Fortress

To understand why reforming higher education is so difficult, you must first understand what the American university used to be. It was once a place where the Puritan Cotton Mather could write lovingly about Harvard’s mission to train ministers for the Reformed churches of New England. Now Harvard is dead, as the departure of James Hankins clarifies. What we have now is something else entirely.

The modern American university is a node in what can only be described as the Higher Education Industrial Complex—an interlocking system of federal agencies, accreditation bodies, loan servicers, compliance offices, and ideological gatekeepers that together form one of the most formidable bureaucratic apparatuses in the Western world. If you want to understand why it is nearly impossible to start a new university—or reform an existing one—you need to achieve comprehensive awareness of the nature of these entanglements.

Start with money. The federal government’s provision of roughly $150 billion per year to higher education comes with compliance requirements that touch every corner of institutional life, from Title IX enforcement to accreditation standards to DEI mandates, that function in practice as loyalty oaths to the reigning ideology. And since nearly every student in America finances their education through federal loans, a university that lacks access to those funds is, for all practical purposes, dead on arrival.

Then there is accreditation, in which regional bodies determine which institutions may confer degrees that employers and graduate schools recognize. The process is opaque, slow, ideologically captured, and self-referential. The accreditors are staffed and governed by the same academic establishment that has produced the crisis in higher education.

Layered atop this are the professional licensing regimes. Want your graduates to become lawyers, doctors, engineers, or teachers? They will need credentials from institutions recognized by professional boards that are themselves embedded in the same ecosystem.

The whole system is a closed loop, a self-reinforcing cartel that makes market entry for new competitors extraordinarily expensive and ideologically perilous.

This is why conservatives who have tried to reform the system from within have repeatedly failed. You can endow a chair at a major university, but the department will marginalize its occupant. You can fund a center for the study of the American Founding, but the administration will surround it with hostile faculty who treat it as an ideological quarantine ward. You can elect friendly governors and state legislators, and they can demand changes—as we’ve seen in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere—but the bureaucratic inertia of the university is astonishing. It does everything it can to slow-walk reform, knowing it is one election away from more ideologically favorable leadership. The system was built to resist external pressure and infiltration, a task it carries out to perfection.

Disintegration from Within

Meanwhile, the actual knowledge and skills transmitted by the average undergraduate program continue to decline. Universities are engaged in what I have elsewhere called psychoforming—not imparting knowledge but reshaping the souls of students into smaller, more sterile, more regime-compliant versions of themselves. An education degree that never requires direct engagement with fundamental reality, as I have argued, is not education. It is catechesis in nihilism.

And then there is AI. A motivated young person can now access a personal tutor of extraordinary capability for essentially no cost. The entire corpus of Western civilization is available online—the great books, the primary sources, the scholarly commentary. AI can explore a variety of interpretations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics line by line, quiz you on constitutional law, walk you through organic chemistry problem sets, and do so with infinite patience at three in the morning. The knowledge function of the university—its claim to be the necessary intermediary between the student and the truth—is being disintermediated in real time.

A young person with discipline, a library card, an internet connection, and a good AI tutor could learn substantially more than the average college student for a fraction of the cost, and in a fraction of the time. This is not speculation. This is happening now.

Combine all of this, and you arrive at an inescapable conclusion: the higher education model as we have known it is dying. Though Harvard’s $50 billion endowment will keep the lights on for a long time, the vast middle of American higher education—the regional universities, the small liberal arts colleges, the directional state schools—is in serious trouble.

But serious trouble means serious opportunity.

Enter the Fellowship

But a fellowship? A fellowship is the Wild West. I would know, being in the fifth year of running the Cotton Mather Fellowship at American Reformer, which equips Christian men to lead the church and the nation to confront the challenges of the 21st century.

But are fellowships really a path forward to rival the university? It is worth remembering that the university and the fellowship share a common root—and that the fellowship is, historically speaking, the elder sibling.

The medieval universitas was not a campus with a registrar and a football team. It was a fellowship—a voluntary association of scholars bound together by a shared commitment to inquiry under the authority of a master. The colleges of Oxford and Cambridge are still, in their legal structure, fellowships of scholars living in common. The word “fellow” in academic usage is not a metaphor; it is the original thing. What we now call “the university” is a late accretion of bureaucracy, real estate, and state entanglement around what was once a simple reality: a small group of people who trusted each other enough to learn together, and whose collective reputation served as a credential for each member.

The modern fellowship is not, therefore, some scrappy alternative to the university. It is a return to the form that preceded the university, and that may yet outlast it. We are not innovating. We are remembering.

There are, as a matter of law and custom, almost no regulations governing fellowships. There is no accreditation process. There are no federal student loans involved—and therefore no federal compliance requirements. No Title IX coordinators. No DEI offices. No bloated administrative apparatus consuming 40 cents (or more!) of every tuition dollar. A fellowship can be as selective or as open as its founders wish. It can select for any qualities—intellectual, moral, spiritual—that its founders deem important. It can teach whatever it likes, for as long as it likes, structure its curriculum however it sees fit, and provide formative experiences unconstrained by the ideologically captured bureaucracy that has consumed campus life.

Most importantly, a fellowship can credential its graduates, not with a generic piece of paper backed by a regional accreditor, but with something more unique: a reputation. When a Cotton Mather Fellow is hired at Anduril or the Center for Renewing America, the fellowship and the fellow validate each other. The relationship is symbiotic. The fellow benefits from the fellowship’s reputation; the fellowship benefits from the fellow’s accomplishments. Over time, this cycle of mutual validation builds a credential that is in some ways more meaningful than a university degree, because it is grounded in demonstrated competence rather than bureaucratic box-checking.

I say this not as a theorist but as a practitioner. Running the Cotton Mather Fellowship has confirmed what I suspected at the outset: the fellowship model is not merely a workaround for the failures of higher education. In important respects, it is superior to the university model for accomplishing the things that matter most.

Building the Phalanx

What strikes me most about the fellowship model—and what distinguishes it from the university—is its intentionality about formation. It does not run students through a conveyor belt of general education requirements and elective buffets. It deliberately forges a group of men who can, as I have written, “stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a phalanx to confront the challenges of the Negative World.” The fellowship is small enough to be genuinely formative. The curriculum is focused enough to produce actual knowledge. And the community that emerges—the fellowship in the deepest sense—persists long after it’s over.

Mather himself understood this. When he wrote about the founding of Harvard in Magnalia Christi Americana, he emphasized that the Puritans created the college because they could not import enough pastors from England to serve the needs of their growing communities. “Without such a nursery for such men among ourselves,” Mather wrote, “darkness must have soon covered the land.”

The solution was not to reform Oxford or Cambridge from across the Atlantic. It was to build something new, on their own terms, in their own land, to serve their own people. And what strikes us reading his account today is how modest the initial investment was. A few books, a few hundred pounds, a building—“all that a small farming community could scrape together.” Yet the academic standards of that original Harvard, where students were expected to “read any classical author into English, and readily make and speak true Latin,” far exceeded anything produced by today’s $50 billion version.

We at the Cotton Mather Fellowship have taken this spirit to heart. Outside the main summer fellowship, American Reformer co-sponsors a Greek language immersion camp with the Ancient Language Institute, because we believe it is not only possible but also necessary to revive the old standards for pastors and civic leaders. If the Puritans could do it with so little, what excuse do we have?

The Fellowship Tradition

We are not inventing the model from scratch. The Claremont Institute has been running successful fellowship programs since 1979—its Publius Fellowship, Lincoln Fellowship, and John Marshall Fellowship, among others, have trained generations of conservative leaders. Mary Kissel, a Wall Street Journal editorial board member, once said that the Lincoln Fellowship “taught me more about the American founding in a week than I learned in four years of a politics degree.” That single sentence is an indictment of the entire university system and a vindication of the fellowship model in one breath.

Other organizations have built similar programs. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has its Honors Program and various fellowships. The Hertog Foundation runs intensive seminars in political thought. The James Wilson Institute offers a fellowship in natural law. Each of these programs, in its own way, demonstrates that serious intellectual formation does not require a four-year residential degree, a football team, or a $60,000 annual tuition bill. What it requires is great teachers, great texts, and a community of students who are genuinely hungry to learn.

And now corporate America is catching on. Peter Thiel—who once compared the modern university to the corrupt Roman Catholic Church of 1514, where people bought indulgences much as today’s students buy diplomas—launched his Thiel Fellowship in 2011, offering $100,000 (now $200,000) to young people willing to skip college and build something instead. The program has produced over a dozen unicorn companies. Its alumni include the founders of Figma and Scale AI. Whatever one thinks of Thiel’s libertarian framework, the results speak for themselves.

More recently, Palantir launched its Meritocracy Fellowship with the tagline: “Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination. Get the Palantir Degree.” The program offers high school graduates a four-month paid position with the possibility of full-time employment—no college required. Over 500 applicants competed for 22 spots in its inaugural class. When a defense technology company valued at over $100 billion concludes that the American university system is no longer a reliable pipeline for talent, something fundamental has shifted. As Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp put it with characteristic bluntness: “Everything you learned at your school and college about how the world works is intellectually incorrect.”

Now the Defense Analyses and Research Corporation is extending this logic into the heart of national security. Through its new DARC Fellowship for Summer 2026, promising young researchers, recent graduates, and early-career analysts are being deployed directly into Ukraine for immersive, four-plus-week field research in an active combat zone. Imagine a modern university trying to attempt anything close to this.

Instead of absorbing secondhand theories from the safety of D.C. think tanks or university classrooms, fellows embed with military units, defense technology firms, and civil-military organizations near the front lines—confronting the drone swarms, open-source intelligence revolutions, and decentralized command structures that have shattered conventional wisdom about warfare. The program provides full funding for travel, equipment, living expenses, and compensation, while demanding physical fitness, tolerance for austere conditions, and the mature acceptance of real risks befitting college-age adults. When even defense policy turns to expeditionary fellowships over the credentialed pipelines of legacy institutions, the verdict on the university model is unmistakable.

We are entering an era in which the fellowship—not the university—may become the primary institution for identifying, forming, and credentialing talented young people. This is not a fantasy. It is the trajectory of the current moment, driven by forces far larger than any single institution or ideology. And if that thesis proves overly optimistic, at least the return on dollars and years of effort spent will be greater than pouring more and more into traditional universities for less and less reform.

The Road Ahead