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Ian Bogost
The Atlantic
Sitting in my office, I began searching for some cause for hope, some reason to believe that higher ed could stanch the damage for the next generation of students. It occurred to me that I’d been hearing less despair from colleagues at certain smaller schools that offer undergraduate study in the “liberal-arts tradition,” a broad and flexible approach to education that values developing the person over professional training. I wondered if these schools—especially the wealthy ones that cluster near the top of national rankings—might enjoy some natural insulation from the fires raging through the nation’s research universities.
Current and former heads of both research universities and liberal-arts colleges confirmed my intuition: Well-resourced and prestigious small colleges are less exposed in almost every way to the crises that higher ed faces.
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Rep. Elise Stefanik’s withering questioning of presidents of prominent colleges during a congressional hearing on antisemitism became a flashpoint in the national debate over campus speech. Then the New York Republican wrote a book about it.
In Poisoned Ivies, published earlier this year, Representative Stefanik decries the “academic rot” at prestigious institutions like Columbia and Harvard Universities and the University of Pennsylvania, whose leaders eventually resigned amid criticism of their handling of 2024 protests over the war in Gaza. But Stefanik levies her critique more broadly at “American colleges and universities,” “campuses across the country,” and a “broken system.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s widely criticized rule limiting how long international students can stay in the country won’t take effect Sept. 15 after a federal judge postponed the rule as part of a lawsuit challenging the policy.
Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts wrote in a 48-page order that Trump officials didn’t respond adequately to public comments on the rule or consider alternative options, among other violations of the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how departments create regulations. The department also failed to show a rational connection between the rule and its purported national security objectives.
The grief Emily Taylor had been holding at bay finally washed over her in January. It had been four months since a lone gunman shot Charlie Kirk in the throat at Utah Valley University, killing the conservative commentator in minutes. That winter “was the first time in my entire life that I didn’t go back to school,” said the former English professor, holding back tears.
Taylor had resigned from her tenured position in December to save her tiny college in South Carolina from a political witch hunt in which lawmakers threatened to pull her school’s funding because she’d written a brief essay acknowledging that before his violent death, Kirk had employed violent rhetoric.
