Christopher F. Rufo, Ryan Thorpe
City Journal
Excerpt: Omar Sultan Haque has spent 23 years at Harvard University. He is furious about what has happened within the school.
While the media have framed the recent fight between Harvard and President Donald Trump in partisan terms, Haque believes that the problem goes much deeper than political score-settling. As he rose through the ranks—from graduate student to postdoctoral fellow to medical researcher to faculty member at Harvard Medical School—Haque watched the university gradually abandon the pursuit of truth and replace it with left-wing racialism.
Tal Fortgang of the Manhattan Institute
Fox News
Excerpt: With the Trump administration threatening to cut off its federal support, Harvard recently released its long-awaited internal report detailing rampant national-origin discrimination on campus – especially against Israelis and Jews. The administration claims that Harvard is rotten to the bone, hollowed out by ideological one-sidedness and an emphasis on social-justice activism rather than genuine inquiry. The university has countered that while it is working on rooting out discrimination, the administration has "overreached" to target the substance of what is studied and taught.
Ellie Avishai
Quillette
Excerpt: On 8 November 2021, the founders of the University of Austin (UATX) announced the launch of their new project—a school where students would receive “an education rooted in the pursuit of truth.” Unlike Ivy League universities, where “illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life,” the school’s founding president declared, this would be a place “where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized.” On a web page titled, Our Principles, UATX pledges that it will “renew the mission of the university, and serve as a model for institutions of higher education by safeguarding academic freedom and promoting intellectual pluralism.”
Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: All the pieces of House Republicans’ plan to cut trillions in federal spending are now public, and if the package becomes law, colleges and universities could face crippling repercussions, higher education experts say.
“It is a full-out assault on the ability of students—especially low-income students—to access and afford higher education,” said Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education. “It will have a dramatically negative impact, not just on higher ed, but on the whole population.”
Jonathan Allen, Nate Raymond
Reuters
Excerpt: Harvard University is dedicating $250 million of its own funds to support researchers after U.S. President Donald Trump's administration froze nearly $3 billion in federal grants and contracts in recent weeks, the university announced on Wednesday.
The elite Ivy League university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of Trump's most prominent targets. The Republican president has been making an extraordinary effort to revamp private colleges and schools across the U.S. that he says foster anti-American, Marxist and "radical left" ideologies. He has criticized Harvard in particular for hiring prominent Democrats to teaching or leadership positions.
Alice Dreger
Free the Inquiry, Heterodox Academy
Excerpt: Two questions – what counts as activism in academia and what (if anything) should be done about it – formed the core of our lively webinar last Wednesday as I spoke with the University of Wyoming’s Martha McCaughey and the University of Chicago’s Tom Ginsburg and took questions from Heterodox Academy members.