Charlie Tyson
Chronicle of Higher Education
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.
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Violating the First Amendment will cost you. Universities and other public institutions are learning this lesson the hard way as the dust settles on a series of lawsuits brought by university faculty and staff who were punished for their comments about Charlie Kirk’s murder last September.
If Johns Hopkins University wanted to signal its seriousness about creating an alternative to the left-leaning orthodoxy that permeates higher education, it couldn’t have done better than the recent hire of economist Peter Arcidiacono.
House Republicans have now formally backed President Donald Trump in fulfilling his campaign promise to dismantle the Department of Education, voting Wednesday to advance 10 bills that would codify the White House’s efforts to disperse numerous education programs and offices to other federal agencies.