Your Cart is Empty
Thomas Chatterton Williams
The Atlantic
Excerpt: President Donald Trump’s assault on what he broadly calls DEI has been slapdash and sadistic. That doesn’t mean the system under attack should be maintained. Racial preferencing in university admissions as well as in employment and government contracting—more commonly understood as affirmative action—might once have been necessary, but long ago became glaringly unfair in practice.
Affirmative action in college admissions continues—despite being banned by the Supreme Court in 2023—through the use of personal essays, interviews, and other proxy mechanisms. It continues in businesses’ hirings and promotions. It’s possible to believe two truths simultaneously: Judging individuals by race instead of merit has to end, in no small part because it hurts the very people it is supposed to uplift; and Trump’s approach to ending it is harmful.
Comments will be approved before showing up.
The early nineteenth century was a formative era for American higher education, a time when colleges were fragile, small-scale institutions, often caught between their colonial legacies and populist hostility to privileged elites studying the liberal arts.
These tensions came to a head in the case Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, which helped to establish the independence of American higher education from governmental control. At issue was the very nature of a college. Is it a public utility, subject to the demands of the state? Or is it a self-governing institution whose autonomy deserves constitutional protection?
Daniel Diermeier has become one of the most visible college leaders. The chancellor of Vanderbilt University joined a panel Thursday in Washington, D.C., to make his case for rebuilding public trust — by taking politics out of research and the classroom, and restraining institutions from issuing statements on matters not directly related to their mission or operations.
After Thursday’s discussion at the Reagan Institute Summit on Education — an event that provided largely supportive views of his positions — Diermeier talked with The Chronicle about politicization in higher education, attempts to limit academic freedom, and why he’s publicly pushing so hard for reforms to higher education while working quietly behind the scenes with federal officials.
Being at Yale over the past two years gives me an interesting perch. From here I can watch the capitulation of a once-great institution in real time. It gives me an inside view of what must have gone down at the law firms, tech companies and the other universities that have bent the knee to the orange menace.
And things are doubleplusgood at Yale these days. Earlier this month, Yale College scheduled a mandatory lecture (officially, a “conversation”) for all first-year students, on the university and democracy. Let’s set aside the curious nature of insisting that all who have just arrived on Yale’s campus must get the “official” story about this place and its role in the world as it is in 2026, even before they’ve set foot in a classroom.
