Institutional Governance & Accountability

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: If you’re interested in the campus protests, you’ll want to read the whole thing, but I’ll just post one excerpt about the concessions that universities made to protestors. Some are serious, others performative, but all were made to stop encampments and protestors.  

Maybe I’m a grumpy old man, but I would stop illegal disruptions, like encampments, in their tracks using sanctions, and would be very loath to “bargain” with protestors who enacted illegal disruptions. (If protests are legal and student “demands” worth considering, it’s another matter. But institutional neutrality, at least a Chicago, would prohibit almost any concessions for protestors, as it did indeed.)

Philanthropy Roundtable

Excerpt: Throughout commencement season, colleges and universities around the country continue to grapple with how to handle a new wave of protests, encampments and even violence as pro-Palestinian activists disrupt campus life and engage in antisemitic behavior. As a result, the responses from higher ed administrators are under intense scrutiny as they make decisions on how to deal with protester demands, campus safety and the rights and freedoms of students and faculty.  

Philanthropy Roundtable encourages donors to continue supporting higher education to help advance the reform it desperately needs. In this piece, we discuss one such strategy: by supporting an existing academic center or founding a new one, donors can engage in effective and high-impact grantmaking to improve the intellectual environment at universities.

Peter Berkowitz
RealClearPolitics

Excerpt: Following Hamas’ bloodthirsty Oct. 7 assault on Israel’s southern border communities, woke leftists and jihad enthusiasts on campuses and beyond formed a perplexing alliance. The left advocates social justice; celebrates diversity, equity, and inclusion; and professes special concern for historically oppressed minorities. Meanwhile, Gaza’s Iran-backed jihadists torture and kill based on race, ethnicity, and sexual preference; loathe and wage war against Israelis, Jews, Americans, and the West; and, by all available means, seek to establish Islamist theocracy. What could unite two such seemingly mutually exclusive camps?

Adam Kredo
Free Beacon

Excerpt: Harvard University failed to implement a sweeping set of recommendations from its in-house Antisemitism Advisory Group (AAG) and turned a blind eye to numerous instances of campus harassment even after they were raised with the school's leadership, according to a congressional report.

Eliot A. Cohen
The Atlantic

Excerpt: The protest season at universities usually crescendos just before commencement: The weather is balmy and most term papers are done, but what student or professor would wish to stay around campus during summer break if they did not absolutely have to? This year, the protests have taken an uglier turn, as encampments have sprouted up. The demonstrators—most of them students, many not, often masked—are calling for divestment by their universities from companies based in or doing business with Israel. Some of the protesters see this goal as an interim step toward the destruction of the state of Israel.

John Engler and Jeffrey O. Nelson
Wall Street Journal
 
Excerpt: Justice Samuel Alito this month warned that freedom of speech on campuses and in many corridors of American society is imperiled.

Chaos is crippling America’s universities, which are now hubs of protest rather than learning. Anti-Israel encampments on some campuses have become beachheads for violence where reasoned debate and expression once flourished.