Your Cart is Empty
John Tomasi
Free the Inquiry, Heterodox Academy
Excerpt: In a rare and admirable act of institutional defiance, Harvard University has rejected demands from the Trump administration that would have compromised its autonomy, chilled academic freedom, and upended core principles of academia. The government’s letter to Harvard — citing a broad civil rights investigation — demanded detailed records, ideological audits, and structural changes that amount to an effort at direct political control. Harvard was right to say no.
The administration’s demands are a serious threat to academic freedom. Yet Harvard's resistance will ring hollow unless it pairs its bold defense of independence with an equally honest reckoning about the internal failures that made it vulnerable to such scrutiny in the first place.
Comments will be approved before showing up.
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.
