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Adam Harris
The Atlantic
America’s colleges have had a rough go of it in recent years. After the Great Recession sent students flooding back to campus, schools have faced one evolving crisis after another: COVID, government interference, protests, and the chaos of AI tools in the classroom. Despite some positive enrollment trends, schools are also staring down a very near future where there will simply be fewer 18-year-olds to fill their seats.
Is the purpose of college just to get a good job, or is there more to it? And though the nation’s colleges and universities have been in rough spots before, is it finally time to start rethinking their entire model? On this week’s Radio Atlantic, the Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost and I sift through the fraught landscape of American higher education.
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Rep. Elise Stefanik’s withering questioning of presidents of prominent colleges during a congressional hearing on antisemitism became a flashpoint in the national debate over campus speech. Then the New York Republican wrote a book about it.
In Poisoned Ivies, published earlier this year, Representative Stefanik decries the “academic rot” at prestigious institutions like Columbia and Harvard Universities and the University of Pennsylvania, whose leaders eventually resigned amid criticism of their handling of 2024 protests over the war in Gaza. But Stefanik levies her critique more broadly at “American colleges and universities,” “campuses across the country,” and a “broken system.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s widely criticized rule limiting how long international students can stay in the country won’t take effect Sept. 15 after a federal judge postponed the rule as part of a lawsuit challenging the policy.
Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts wrote in a 48-page order that Trump officials didn’t respond adequately to public comments on the rule or consider alternative options, among other violations of the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how departments create regulations. The department also failed to show a rational connection between the rule and its purported national security objectives.
The grief Emily Taylor had been holding at bay finally washed over her in January. It had been four months since a lone gunman shot Charlie Kirk in the throat at Utah Valley University, killing the conservative commentator in minutes. That winter “was the first time in my entire life that I didn’t go back to school,” said the former English professor, holding back tears.
Taylor had resigned from her tenured position in December to save her tiny college in South Carolina from a political witch hunt in which lawmakers threatened to pull her school’s funding because she’d written a brief essay acknowledging that before his violent death, Kirk had employed violent rhetoric.
