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Claire Murphy and Brock Read
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Nine universities are currently weighing whether to adopt the Trump administration’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which would require them to make a wide-ranging series of commitments to uphold admissions and hiring practices, foster “viewpoint diversity,” and cap international enrollment, among other items.
The letter set an October 20 deadline for “limited, targeted feedback” on the compact, leaving university leaders scrambling to evaluate its terms. The Chronicle is documenting official university responses to the document, along with faculty statements, as they are made public.
Letitia James, William Tong, Kathy Jennings, Kwame Raoul, Keith Ellison, Matthew Platkin, Charity Clark and Nick Brown
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: The Supreme Court, even in striking down diversity initiatives, still made clear that universities could explore race-neutral alternatives to achieve equity. The use of socioeconomic and geographic factors is exactly such an alternative. Despite U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi’s recent nonbinding guidance warning against the use of geographic indicators as “proxies” for race, make no mistake: Abandoning consideration of these elements of an applicant’s background is not a legal requirement but a political choice, reflecting fear rather than courage.
Neetu Arnold
City Journal
Excerpt: Universities have let progressive dogma degrade their academic missions, eviscerating public faith in higher education. College leaders willing to admit this truth are rare. Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier is one. He has long been a champion of political neutrality and has called out the politicization of scholarly associations—approaches other university leaders are only now catching up on.
Adopting these policies and principles can be challenging for university leaders, partly because they fear how their own faculty or academic departments might respond. Yet Diermeier’s love of universities emboldens him. In a recent interview, transcribed below, he told me that education and research are “noble work,” but only if they are grounded in core principles. And he emphasized how politicization in some departments overshadows the good work conducted in others.
Brendan Cantwell
Ungated, Substack
Excerpt: The Trump administration on Wednesday evening released a memo inviting University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia to enter into a “compact” (henceforth The Compact) with the federal government.
I will say that if the provisions outlined in The Compact were required by law, it sure seems like the administration would not need a special deal that offers preferred client status as an incentive to get what it wants. Read The Compact for yourself. It’s about 10 pages long. In the meantime, here is my assessments for why this is a rotten deal.
Sabrina Tavernise
New York Times
Excerpt: Two days after Charlie Kirk was killed, Suzanne Swierc, an employee at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., woke up to a cascade of missed calls, texts and voice mail messages from numbers she did not know.
Ms. Swierc (pronounced swirtz) discovered that the barrage stemmed from something she had posted on Facebook the day before: “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.” Her Facebook settings were private, but one of her followers must have taken a screen shot and sent it on without her knowledge.
Henry F. Haidar
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: Out of all the faculty The Crimson recently surveyed, only one percent described their political beliefs as very conservative. Think about that: someone is three times more likely to get into Harvard than to encounter a conservative faculty member here.
Much can be — and has been — said in favor of viewpoint diversity in higher education. Yet those decrying the relative lack of conservative faculty overlooks a basic point: The structure of universities themselves lends itself to a professoriate whose politics do not perfectly map on to that of the public writ large. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
