E. Thomas Finan
The Atlantic
Excerpt: The Trump administration and its allies are upending American higher education: freezing funding, launching investigations, ratcheting up taxes, and threatening to do much more. Not so long ago this would have been political poison. But in the last decade, Americans’ faith in colleges and universities has plummeted. In 2015, 57 percent had either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to Gallup. As of last year, that group had shrunk to 36 percent, only a few points larger than the share who have “very little” confidence or none at all.
Comments will be approved before showing up.
When university researchers started to receive notice last year that the Trump administration was canceling their grants, they often didn’t get a clear explanation why beyond that their project “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”
A new episode of the Academic Freedom Podcast has been released. The podcast is sponsored by the Academic Freedom Alliance and the Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech at Yale Law School.
The growing (though not unanimous) acknowledgement that academia has lost public trust may be increasingly uncontroversial. But identifying remedies to repair that broken trust is proving to be much more contested.