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Eric Kelderman
Chronicle of Higher Education
Sian L. Beilock seems to be everywhere. You’ll find Dartmouth College’s president in the pages of The Atlantic, sharing her plan for “Saving the Idea of the University.” And in The Wall Street Journal, asking whether a four-year degree is worth it.
And it’s not just that she’s seizing the bully pulpit; it’s what she’s using it to say. Beilock represents a new breed of college president willing to take shots at her own sector. Higher education, in her formulation, has lost its way by becoming too expensive and too political. And it shoulders much of the blame for retribution from the partisan right and flagging confidence in colleges and the value of the credentials they provide.
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I recently listened to Ross Douthat’s interview with the philosopher Jennifer Frey. She is a serious thinker and an unusually courageous academic entrepreneur. What she built at the University of Tulsa before it was dismantled is exactly the sort of thing more universities should be attempting. Yet almost every argument she offered for the humanities is, I think, completely unpersuasive to anyone not already on our side of the table.
This report presents findings from a national survey of 1,959 law school faculty at 192 American Bar Association (ABA) approved law schools in the United States, conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). As one of the largest surveys of law faculty on free expression and professional norms, the data reveal a profession that strongly endorses free speech principles while struggling to live them out in practice.
I just returned from the University of Wyoming, where I debated the President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Todd Wolfson over the need for colleges and universities to maintain institutional neutrality. The debate was organized by the Steamboat Institute and was live-streamed.
The formal question presented for debate was: “Is institutional neutrality necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry rather than an actor in political disputes?” I spoke in favor of institutional neutrality while Wolfson argued against it as a necessary component to higher education.
