Professors: Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity are Not Essential to Higher Education

John Tomasi 
Free the Inquiry, Heterodox Academy

Excerpt: In a rare and admirable act of institutional defiance, Harvard University has rejected demands from the Trump administration that would have compromised its autonomy, chilled academic freedom, and upended core principles of academia. The government’s letter to Harvard — citing a broad civil rights investigation — demanded detailed records, ideological audits, and structural changes that amount to an effort at direct political control. Harvard was right to say no.

The administration’s demands are a serious threat to academic freedom. Yet Harvard's resistance will ring hollow unless it pairs its bold defense of independence with an equally honest reckoning about the internal failures that made it vulnerable to such scrutiny in the first place.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: Yes, Harvard should have already made some of these reforms, and I know it’s trying to enact some of them, but allowing political forces to control how colleges and universities are run takes one of America’s glories–the quality of its higher education that already attracts students from throughout the world–and turns it into an arm of one political party or another.

Susan Svrluga
Washington Post

Excerpt: With billions of dollars in federal funding at risk, Harvard University officials on Monday rejected Trump administration demands to make sweeping changes to its governance, admissions and hiring practices. The administration responded Monday night by saying it would freeze more than $2 billion in federal funding to the Ivy League school.