Your Cart is Empty
Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True
Excerpt: As you know the University of Chicago was the first higher-ed school in America to adopt a position of institutional neutrality. This was done in 1967, with the principle embodied in our Kalven Report. Kalven prohibits the University or its units, including departments and centers, from taking official stands on political, moral, and ideological issues—save in those cases where the issue is one that could affect the mission of our University. According to FIRE, which approves of this position of institutional neutrality, some 29 other colleges or boards of education have joined Chicago in adopting one.
Deviations from the position of neutrality are rare, but this morning we learned that our President, Paul Alivisatos, has declared official University opposition to the Trump’s administration of slashing “indirect costs” on NIH grants.
Susan Svrluga
Washington Post
Excerpt: With billions of dollars in federal funding at risk, Harvard University officials on Monday rejected Trump administration demands to make sweeping changes to its governance, admissions and hiring practices. The administration responded Monday night by saying it would freeze more than $2 billion in federal funding to the Ivy League school.
Danielle Allen
The Atlantic
Excerpt: The life of the mind may be a deeply personal thing, but as embodied in colleges and universities, it is also a very public thing—and the two go hand in hand. Since taking office, the Trump administration has been working to dismantle the global order and the nation’s core institutions, including its cultural ones, to strip them of their power.
The future of the nation’s universities is very much at stake. This is not a challenge that can be met with purely defensive tactics. We must do what should have been done long ago: find our way to a new social contract between universities and the American people.
Ilya Somin
The Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine
Excerpt: In a previous post, I urged universities to band together to file a lawsuit challenging Donald Trump's policy of speech-based deportation of foreign students and academics. So far, I have had little, if any, success in persuading schools to do so. Many individual academics have expressed support for the idea (originated by the faculty of the Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy), but no university administrations have acted on it.
Still, I am happy to see that 86 colleges and higher education associations filed an amicus brief in a case challenging the deportations filed by the the Knight First Amendment Institute on behalf of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).
