The academic DEI apparatus that grew up over the past decade seems to be collapsing even more abruptly than it arrived. Even the University of California system, a pioneer in using diversity statements to shape faculty hiring, just announced it will stop using them.

The diversity statement’s demise is a reminder that though the Trumpian remedy may be excessive and destructive, it aims to cure a real problem: These statements were often political litmus tests, one of many ways academia delivered the message “no conservatives need apply.” The intellectual monoculture this promoted was prone to groupthink and a political liability for institutions that depend heavily on public support. No one should be sorry to see them go.

But conservatives who are giddy about such victories should note that this is a very limited win. After all the diversity offices are renamed and the diversity statements withdrawn, academia will remain near-monolithically left. This is a problem for conservatives on campus and an even bigger problem for society, because it takes a lot of scholarly expertise to maintain a modern industrial economy. Scholarship that excludes half the available ideas isn’t up to the job — if only because such lopsided expertise can’t command the public trust.

That problem can’t be cured, however, by forcing academia to abandon the most overt and annoying manifestations of its political skew. Nor can the right simply demand that academia hire more conservatives, because in most disciplines there aren’t enough conservative PhDs to staff ideologically balanced campuses, or even provide otherwise left-leaning campuses a vibrant conservative counterweight.

Getting to that point means rebuilding a pipeline of right-leaning academics that will have to start with graduate students and spit out full professors 20 years later. That will mean convincing potential graduate students that they won’t have to run through an ideological gantlet to get a job.

That will be a hard sell. Rational students know their CV and publications will often be reviewed by committed progressives looking for reasons to blackball. Even where that isn’t the case, there are subtler ways that majority groups inadvertently exclude minorities. Their work will often be held to a higher standard, simply because a thousand objections will flood the minds of left-leaning colleagues reading it.

If you really want to rebalance academia, you’ll need something much more ambitious to overcome those human realities — something, in fact, that looks similar to what we call DEI.

Imagine yourself as a university president desperate to diversify your school ideologically. You’d want to convince prospective graduate students and faculty that your campus is a welcoming place for people like them, not a progressive hothouse where they’ll be left in the cold. Stern memos would warn professors of the importance of making their conservative students and colleagues feel included, and you should probably create a special campus center for conservatives where they can just relax and be together. It might be worth conducting training, too, where your left-wing faculty are exposed to the basics of conservative thought so they won’t accidentally say something offensive.

While you’re at it, revamp your brochures and website to highlight the great times conservatives are having on campus. It would also be smart to create some scholarships aimed at pro-life or MAGA students, to ensure enough critical mass to form a community. Armed with these materials, you can begin an aggressive outreach program to the places where conservatives are likely to be found, such as home-schooling communities and smaller religious schools. And when you’re deciding between a conservative candidate and yet another progressive — well, shouldn’t the conservative candidate get a little “plus factor”?

This thought experiment isn’t just a warning to conservatives to think bigger. It’s also a reminder that for all its excesses, DEI had its heart in the right place. Universities should want to “look like America” — ideologically, economically and, yes, racially. Building that kind of community from a country of 340 million wildly different people takes a lot more work than formally announcing you won’t discriminate.

Which is also, of course, a reminder to progressives: They have failed to live up to their own beliefs. Progressives are right that majorities of any kind tend to exclude those who don’t fit the mold — sometimes deliberately but often inadvertently. And they’re right to push back when exclusionary majorities interpret their dominance as a sign that there’s something wrong with the excluded minority, rather than a problem with their own behavior. If they took their own ideas seriously, progressives would have been the ones leading the charge for more ideological diversity, rather than spearheading the efforts to oppress it.