Francie Diep, Eric Kelderman, and Shea Vance
Chronicle of Higher Education
When the Trump administration waged a campaign to reform Columbia University last year, it aimed to set a precedent. Columbia was the first institution from which officials withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding over accusations that it had countenanced antisemitism on campus. The pattern soon repeated at Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, and Harvard Universities.
One year after Columbia signed its resolution agreement, the university remains something of an example, for others in the sector and for the Trump administration. But what many have called Columbia’s capitulation hasn’t been a full win for either side.
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If you’re looking for a reason to despair over the state of American education, there are many places you could start. Something that deserves more attention is damage to free expression—not in the classroom but in the public sphere of high school: the realms of student newspapers, student government, and other aspects of everyday life. School is meant to prepare students for the real world, but too many institutions are training kids to be silent.
Higher education in the United States and the faculty members central to its mission are under unprecedented, destructive, and sustained attack, part of a larger assault on democratic governance, civil society, and knowledge itself.
The University of California at San Diego’s medical school discriminated on the basis of race in admissions decisions over the course of three cycles, the Justice Department claimed this week.