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Some heartening higher ed news, hot off the press: faculty value viewpoint diversity! In our latest report published yesterday, Faculty Attitudes Toward Diversity in Their Disciplines: A National Survey, we asked over 3,500 faculty from 80 different institutions about the extent to which they think teaching and research are improved by exposure to a wide range of viewpoints along eight specific dimensions of diversity.
Soon after President Donald Trump retook office, researchers and academics across the country began receiving startling news. They were abruptly informed, often mid-project, that their federal grant funding had been terminated. Form letters bearing the news often offered few details beyond that their work no longer aligned with agency priorities.
Alan Garber’s lawyer told him he shouldn’t speak at the Economic Club on Thursday, in the midst of his institution’s protracted legal battle with the Trump administration over federal research funding.
University President Maurie McInnis has engaged in private conversations with student leaders, as well as the faculty senate chair, about Yale’s attempts to settle with the Trump administration — a venture that has faced widespread backlash from students, faculty and alumni.
Thirty-eight percent of Americans currently report having “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to this year’s Gallup poll, down from 42% last year and just two points above the record lows of 36% recorded in 2023 and 2024. Last year’s uptick, it turns out, was not the start of a recovery so much as a blip.
Sociology has long taken on society's biggest questions — inequality, social movements, declining birth rates — questions Pamela Paul notes shape political and cultural fault lines. But according to one sociologist quoted in the piece, the field has drifted from producing "intellectuals who think deeply and insightfully about the world" toward producing technicians and activists instead — prompting him to wonder aloud whether the discipline should simply be liquidated. The essay ties this to a critical spring report from Vanderbilt and Washington University describing a pattern of politicization across the social sciences.
