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By Vince Bielski
RealClearInvestigations
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. Arcidiacono, a devout Roman Catholic, faced campus protests and sleepless nights after publication of his empirical findings that affirmative action can be harmful to minority students who aren’t academically prepared. He was in the spotlight again for providing the evidence in the landmark 2023 Supreme Court ruling against Harvard that effectively killed affirmative action in higher education.
Yet few realize that Arcidiacono supports affirmative action if it’s targeted properly, making him the kind of unpredictable conservative thinker, eager to engage contrary views, that appealed to William Howell. The dean of the new School of Government and Policy, Howell was so smitten with the economist that he also made Arcidiacono vice dean over the faculty.
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Rep. Elise Stefanik’s withering questioning of presidents of prominent colleges during a congressional hearing on antisemitism became a flashpoint in the national debate over campus speech. Then the New York Republican wrote a book about it.
In Poisoned Ivies, published earlier this year, Representative Stefanik decries the “academic rot” at prestigious institutions like Columbia and Harvard Universities and the University of Pennsylvania, whose leaders eventually resigned amid criticism of their handling of 2024 protests over the war in Gaza. But Stefanik levies her critique more broadly at “American colleges and universities,” “campuses across the country,” and a “broken system.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s widely criticized rule limiting how long international students can stay in the country won’t take effect Sept. 15 after a federal judge postponed the rule as part of a lawsuit challenging the policy.
Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts wrote in a 48-page order that Trump officials didn’t respond adequately to public comments on the rule or consider alternative options, among other violations of the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how departments create regulations. The department also failed to show a rational connection between the rule and its purported national security objectives.
The grief Emily Taylor had been holding at bay finally washed over her in January. It had been four months since a lone gunman shot Charlie Kirk in the throat at Utah Valley University, killing the conservative commentator in minutes. That winter “was the first time in my entire life that I didn’t go back to school,” said the former English professor, holding back tears.
Taylor had resigned from her tenured position in December to save her tiny college in South Carolina from a political witch hunt in which lawmakers threatened to pull her school’s funding because she’d written a brief essay acknowledging that before his violent death, Kirk had employed violent rhetoric.
