“Academe needs reform. It suffers from administrative bloat and has lost substantial public support. But these problems should not be used as a cudgel for injecting authoritarian politics.”

When we read Jim Mittelman’s recent column, “Trump Is Drilling into our Psyches,” in the Daily Camera on May 29, we applauded his success at summing up a complex dilemma in twenty-eight crystal-clear words.

Drawing on our recent experiences, we recognize Mittelman’s statement as a call to action with perfect timing.

Thanks to Elon Musk and his mobilization of the Department of Government Efficiency, universities and colleges now have an unparalleled opportunity to restore their credibility and regain public confidence.

In ways that the leaders in higher education have not yet realized, Musk has inadvertently mapped a route to the redemption of higher education.

What could we mean by that initially mystifying claim?

Few sectors of society have outperformed higher education in the production of a bloated bureaucracy and in the proliferation of rules and regulations for that bureaucracy to interpret, implement and enforce.

At the same time, in an arena detached from the offices of university officials, few sectors of society can draw on anything close to the knowledge, expertise and narrative skill concentrated in history departments.

A remarkable percentage — probably as many as 50% — of historical studies lead to searching appraisals of the rise and growth of bureaucracies in many different eras and in many different locales.

And yet, instead of mobilizing that extraordinary talent pool, the leaders of higher education have directed enormous resources to maintaining and expanding administrative bureaucracies.

Among other unfortunate outcomes, this skewing of priorities has made it impossible for academia to offer a persuasive critique of the chaotic operations of the Department of Government Efficiency, without courting accusations of hypocrisy.

The upshot?

Universities and colleges are perfectly positioned to mobilize the enormous talent pool of academic historians 1) to track the historical pattern by which bureaucracies grow until they obstruct their original purposes; 2) to design reasonable and evidence-based remedies to correct that pattern; and 3) to put those remedies to work on higher education itself, thereby offering a compelling alternative to the disordered and chaotic operations of the Department of Government Efficiency.

We bring this horizon of promise and hope to the attention of a wider public because we have both loved CU for decades, and we expect to love it even more in the future.

The University of Colorado, we believe, is positioned to lead the nation on this journey to redemption.

We invite you to join us in this belief.

Stan Garnett is a former Boulder County District Attorney. Patty Limerick is the Faculty Director of the Applied History Initiative at CU Boulder.