Your Cart is Empty
Leo Shane III
Politico
Harvard University will allow active-duty troops to defer their admission for up to four years in response to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ban on academic involvement with the school — a rebuke of his attempt to sever ties between the Ivy league school and the military.
The university will also work with students accepted into the Harvard Kennedy School’s programs to get expedited consideration at four other graduate schools that have not been banned by the Defense Department, according to a person familiar with the plans and a letter written for prospective students obtained by POLITICO.
Last month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made several announcements, stating he was ending partnerships with multiple highly selective colleges and universities that have long educated military service members. But it remains unclear what he’s actually canceling, why specific universities have been targeted or favored and what he plans to replace these programs with.
I regularly teach a freshman seminar at Sarah Lawrence College. And every semester, without fail, the same scene plays out. A student lingers after class, or appears at my office door, or sends a carefully worded late-night email, sharing a view they would never dream of voicing to their peers. Sometimes it’s a defense of Israel, or abortion rights, or gun control, or simply to confide that they are not extremely liberal.
I thought about those students when I read the new Gallup and Lumina Foundation report, “The College Reality Check: What Students Experience vs. What America Believes.” Its central message is reassuring: the critics of higher education are exaggerating. But before accepting that reassurance, it helps to know who’s offering it. The Lumina Foundation is one of the most influential funders in American higher education, with an endowment of roughly $1.4 billion and a mission organized explicitly around equity and increasing college access and graduation rates.
The fact is that foundations that have successfully influenced academia have learned to use a set of levers that are precisely calibrated to work effectively within the existing structures of higher education. These levers align with academia’s distinctive norms, work with natural intellectual incentives, and are based in a keen understanding of the organizational psychology within colleges and universities.
What follows is a study of that architecture—a picture of ten of the levers that foundations can use to influence scholarship.
