Catie Ratliff
C-ville.com
Excerpt: WUVA, the sole student broadcast news and culture outlet at the university published an exclusive interview with interim President Paul Mahoney on October 12. Fourth-year Sophia Bangura, one of the student journalists who worked on the project, was terminated from the organization three days later for “insubordination” for asking follow up questions during the interview and declining to apologize to the interim president’s office.
Douglas Belkin
Wall Street Journal
Excerpt: President Trump has made an example of Ivy League universities, attacking, cajoling and fining them in brisk succession. There’s a notable exception: Yale University. In New Haven, Conn., the school’s conspicuous absence from the crosshairs has become a subject of intense campus speculation—among professors, students and even parents.
During a talk with moms and dads, university President Maurie McInnis was asked why Yale had been spared. She said there was no obvious answer, according to the Yale Daily News.
Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: House Republicans have accused George Mason University president Gregory Washington of lying to Congress about diversity practices at his institution, ratcheting up pressure on the president to step down.
Washington has denied breaking the law through efforts to diversify GMU’s faculty and staff, telling Congress that the university did not practice illegal discrimination under his leadership.
Jeff Yass
The Free Press
Excerpt: I am giving $100 million to the University of Austin because the feedback mechanisms of higher education are broken.
Almost every system that works, works because of feedback. Evolution works because helpful mutations survive while harmful ones die off. Democracy works because voters support effective leaders and remove ineffective ones. Markets work because prices tell producers when to ramp up or scale back. Science works because the data from an experiment tells the scientist how likely their hypothesis is to be false.
Graham Piro
FIRE
Excerpt: FIRE has previously argued for colleges and universities to adopt institutional neutrality, both as a boon for the campus climate and as an insurance policy for the university. By declaring itself neutral on major political and social issues, a university ensures that it does not chill potential dissenters on campus by constantly taking official positions on unresolved topics.
But recently, two public universities demonstrated that they misunderstand what institutional neutrality entails. They used the principle to restrict student speech under the guise of protecting university neutrality.
Aziz Huq
The Atlantic
Excerpt: On first appraisal, the nine universities that the Trump administration singled out appeared to have no real choice but to concede to the administration’s demands. As set forth in the so-called Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, these include an oath to abide by the White House’s biological theories of gender and to show respect for “conservative” (but not liberal or centrist) values. Framed as a question of who is first in line for federal funding, the compact warns that nonconforming universities will have to go their own way fiscally.