Erin Shaw
Free The Inquiry, Heterodox Academy, Substack
Excerpt: Although requests for DEI statements in faculty hiring may be well-intentioned, they can actually undermine open inquiry by setting up ideological filters that exclude those who don’t share – or are unwilling to pretend they share – specific political opinions and worldviews.
But how common is the practice of asking for DEI statements in faculty hiring, and what patterns exist among such requests? At the top level, we found that 22.3%, or over one out of every five, of the 10,000 faculty job advertisements analyzed requested some kind of DEI-related material as a part of the application process. In other words, about one out of every five faculty members hired within the last year probably had to espouse a particular set of political views to have a chance of landing the jobs they sought.
Rose Horowitch
The Atlantic
Excerpt: Even before the Ivy League upheavals of the past two years, Jewish students had been slowly drifting away from the elite campuses of the Northeast. Now, as some seek respite from the protest movement that erupted after the Israeli response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of southern Israel, the drift has become more like—sorry—an exodus. And selective colleges outside the Northeast, sensing an intensifying disdain for Ivy League schools among Jewish teens and their parents, are tripping over one another to recruit these students.
Frank Bruni
New York Times
Excerpt: What Trump and his allies are doing is no targeted effort to correct that. It’s a sweeping, indiscriminate, performative smackdown of elite institutions by a crew trying to solidify its power under the banner of anti-elitism. It doesn’t attempt to usher those institutions from a place of bias and extremism to one of neutrality and moderation. It answers excess with excess, orthodoxy with orthodoxy, censorship with censorship. And it disregards the damage it’s doing.
Cathy Young
The Bulwark
Excerpt: Last week's right-wing freakout over the Cracker Barrel logo redesign—apparently amounting to white-guy erasure—had more than its share of sublimely ridiculous moments. But none, perhaps, were more emblematic of the current “anti-woke” crusade than the call to action from author, activist, and Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo.
Of course, what also makes it noteworthy is that Rufo isn’t just some random social-media blowhard. In recent months, he has emerged as the unofficial ideologue of the Trumpian assault on the liberal cultural establishment.