Your Cart is Empty
Emma Pettit
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Whether college students are confronted with the proper texts, ideas, and arguments is the subject of intense, often politicized debate. Critics on the right think the average undergrad is fed a steady diet of progressive fare and is starved of anything more moderate or conservative. But many professors say that’s an exaggeration, and that their classrooms are the site of constructive intellectual conflict.
Yet for all the disagreement about college teaching, what texts students actually engage with is something of a black box. A new working paper from professors at Claremont McKenna and Scripps Colleges attempted to peer inside it, by examining how three political and moral controversies — racial bias in the criminal-justice system, the ethics of abortion, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — are taught.
John Tomasi
Heterodox Academy
Excerpt: Last week, the Manhattan Institute issued a statement on university reform, calling on the “President of the United States to draft a new contract with the universities.” Many of the signatories hold university and faculty appointments. Two days after the statement was issued, UATX President Carlos Carvalho responded with a forceful endorsement of the statement, which has led to controversy that has already prompted the resignation of Lawrence H. Summers from that institution’s board of advisors.
The Manhattan Institute statement’s recommendations for university reform are not novel; in fact, they are similar to a number of the reforms HxA recommended last month in our Open Inquiry U Reform Agenda. But there are important distinctions between the two reform agendas that must be explicitly called out.
Franklin Foer
The Atlantic
Excerpt: The email landed at 10 minutes to midnight on a Friday in early April—a more menacing email than Alan Garber had imagined. The Harvard president had been warned that something was coming. His university had drawn the unwanted and sustained attention of the White House, and he’d spent weeks scrambling to stave off whatever blow was coming, calling his institution’s influential alumni and highly paid fixers to arrange a meeting with someone—anyone—in the administration.
Garber wanted an audience because he believed that Harvard had a case to make. The administration had been publicly flogging elite universities for failing to confront campus anti-Semitism. But Garber—a practicing Jew with a brother living in Israel—believed Harvard had done exactly that.
Ashley Mowreader
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: The U.S. Department of State issued 12,689 fewer F-1 visas in May 2025 compared to the May before, which could forecast a decline in international students able to attend U.S. universities this fall.
While visa issuances can help predict international student enrollment trends, they don’t tell the full story, said Rachel Banks, senior director for public policy and legislative strategy at NAFSA, the association of international educators. Still, the trend line isn’t positive. “We’re not really going to know until we get through September to know everyone who arrives, to know what the enrollment really looks like,” Banks said. “But it’s certainly not encouraging.”
Christopher F. Rufo
City Journal
Excerpt: America’s colleges and universities have long been the bright lights of our civilization. For nearly four centuries, they have pioneered new fields of knowledge, brought the arts and sciences to new heights, and educated the men who built our republic. But over the past half-century, these institutions gradually discarded their founding principles and burned down their accumulated prestige, all in pursuit of ideologies that corrupt knowledge and point the nation toward nihilism.
Now, the truth is undeniable. Beginning with the George Floyd riots and culminating in the celebration of the Hamas terror campaign, the institutions of higher education finally ripped off the mask and revealed their animating spirit: racialism, ideology, chaos.
Greg Lukianoff with Scott Galloway
Prof G Media
Excerpt: Greg Lukianoff, a free speech advocate, first-amendment attorney, and president of FIRE, joins Scott to break down the rise of cancel culture and its chilling effect on free speech. They discuss why social media supercharged censorship, how college campuses became ground zero for speech suppression, and why younger generations may be more fragile and less free.
