The Next Campus Battle after Free Speech: Viewpoint Diversity at America’s Elite Universities

What the series has not yet addressed, however, are the genuinely difficult legal and cultural questions that Terms of Respect has evaded. By seemingly resolving tensions between speech and equality, and reframing what appears to be a free-speech debate as an ongoing push-and-pull about civility norms, Eisgruber avoids discussing ways in which our laws, norms, and culture already treat, and sometimes curtail, expressive freedom, and how universities can apply their obligations and stated commitments faithfully. 

The probability that universities can reform themselves from within, in the absence of powerful external pressure, is very close to zero.

People who have seriously thought about the state of our universities are not only skeptical about the possibility of reform from within, but are also pessimistic even about the possibility of creating successful new universities. My intention is not to discourage people from trying, far from it since I consider myself firmly in the camp of reformers, but rather to draw attention to the enormous obstacles we face.

Princeton’s honor system, as-is, emphasizes the responsibility of students to uphold Princeton’s commitment to academic freedom, rigor, and integrity. As the chair emerita of the Honor Committee, which handles suspected academic violations on in-class exams, I have intimate knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the system’s fidelity to the pursuit of knowledge.

Recently, however, the Honor Committee has experienced new strains, including an uptick in cases in the last year and challenges such as generative AI, and student sentiment has recognized that its procedures need to better reflect the current challenges to academic integrity. For years, the Committee has had conversations about introducing proctors into exam rooms, to serve as another potential witness and reporter — and the time has finally come to take this step.

The Trump administration launched two new investigations into Harvard University “amid allegations that it continues to discriminate against students on the basis of race, color, and national origin,” the Department of Education announced in a news release Monday. 

The department’s Office for Civil Rights said it received new complaints about antisemitic harassment on Harvard’s campus—an issue the administration has already spent a year investigating and which the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit about last week. OCR will also investigate claims that Harvard is continuing to use race-based preferences in admissions.

Allen is the rare liberal academic who appeals to both Harvard and the American Enterprise Institute. Her willingness to take conservative criticisms of academe seriously has earned her cross-ideological credibility and influence. “I wish we had a lot more scholars like Danielle,” Frederick Hess, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me. Her ecumenism reflects a core commitment: The university can’t ignore its critics; it must win some of them over.

To do that, she contends, universities will have to change. These changes include encouraging vigorous debate and a greater pluralism on campus, among other institutional transformations aimed at controlling costs, recentering a civic mission, and making admissions less opaque. Such changes will involve giving certain things up. 

Sian L. Beilock seems to be everywhere. You’ll find Dartmouth College’s president in the pages of The Atlantic, sharing her plan for “Saving the Idea of the University.” And in The Wall Street Journal, asking whether a four-year degree is worth it.

And it’s not just that she’s seizing the bully pulpit; it’s what she’s using it to say. Beilock represents a new breed of college president willing to take shots at her own sector. Higher education, in her formulation, has lost its way by becoming too expensive and too political. And it shoulders much of the blame for retribution from the partisan right and flagging confidence in colleges and the value of the credentials they provide.