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Len Gutkin
Chronicle of Higher Education
A curious feature of the recently released “Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education,” which is rightly being hailed as a major statement of the academic-reform movement, is a certain gingerness when it comes to describing the shape and substance of professorial political radicalism — a significant driver of declining public faith in the sector.
True, the report names the concern that “liberal professors indoctrinate their students,” and it endorses processes to encourage “open interchange” rather than ideological conformity. But, perhaps out of a reluctance to lend aid and comfort to right-wing opponents of academic freedom, the report refrains from getting too specific about the contours of left-wing academic politicization.
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Oversized inflatable beach balls get bounced out on college campuses by student organizations that invite everyone to write on the “speech ball.” Students scrawl political slogans, insults, and provocative symbols. On some campuses, it might be a speech wall or a boulder. In all these cases, the idea, we’re told, is to exercise free expression. But what actually happens is a spectacle of empty rhetoric, where showboating and shock masquerade as meaningful discourse and campuses become stages for provocative performances rather than spaces for genuine intellectual exchange.
Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to cap “A” grades in undergraduate courses at roughly 20 percent of enrollment beginning in fall 2027. Nearly 70 percent of voting faculty backed the measure. It’s one of the most aggressive reversals of grade inflation in modern American higher education.
The signaling argument is correct as far as it goes. But it misses the more important consequence of capping “A’s,” the one that should matter most to anyone concerned about the intellectual culture of American higher education.
Virginia Tech governing board member John Rocovich has refused to resign after Gov. Abigail Spanberger removed him last week after 16 years. Rocovich stated in a four-page letter addressed to the Secretary of the Commonwealth that he will not resign before his term ends on June 30, 2027. There was no sign of him at the board’s committee meetings on Monday in Blacksburg.
Spanberger’s decision is the latest effort by her administration to shake up governing boards at Virginia’s colleges and universities, amid concerns within the higher education community about the politicization of public university governing bodies. She recently appointed four new members to Tech’s governing board.
