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Harvard University will allow active-duty troops to defer their admission for up to four years in response to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ban on academic involvement with the school — a rebuke of his attempt to sever ties between the Ivy league school and the military.
The university will also work with students accepted into the Harvard Kennedy School’s programs to get expedited consideration at four other graduate schools that have not been banned by the Defense Department, according to a person familiar with the plans and a letter written for prospective students obtained by POLITICO.
I regularly teach a freshman seminar at Sarah Lawrence College. And every semester, without fail, the same scene plays out. A student lingers after class, or appears at my office door, or sends a carefully worded late-night email, sharing a view they would never dream of voicing to their peers. Sometimes it’s a defense of Israel, or abortion rights, or gun control, or simply to confide that they are not extremely liberal.
I thought about those students when I read the new Gallup and Lumina Foundation report, “The College Reality Check: What Students Experience vs. What America Believes.” Its central message is reassuring: the critics of higher education are exaggerating. But before accepting that reassurance, it helps to know who’s offering it. The Lumina Foundation is one of the most influential funders in American higher education, with an endowment of roughly $1.4 billion and a mission organized explicitly around equity and increasing college access and graduation rates.
The fact is that foundations that have successfully influenced academia have learned to use a set of levers that are precisely calibrated to work effectively within the existing structures of higher education. These levers align with academia’s distinctive norms, work with natural intellectual incentives, and are based in a keen understanding of the organizational psychology within colleges and universities.
What follows is a study of that architecture—a picture of ten of the levers that foundations can use to influence scholarship.
Two weeks after introducing a policy that allowed administrators to secretly record faculty members during class, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill chancellor Lee Roberts told faculty he would nix the rule.
“The whole idea was to create clarity and reassurance,” Roberts said during a Faculty Senate meeting Friday. “That policy clearly has not achieved that aim.” Faculty members applauded at the news. During a Q&A, Roberts confirmed that no faculty members will be surreptitiously recorded until—and if—a new policy is put in place. Administrators will continue to evaluate whether the university needs such a policy, he said.
It’s like clockwork. War breaks out. Then come the calls for censorship. After the war with Iran began over the weekend, the group Columbia University Apartheid Divest tweeted “Marg bar Amrika” — Persian for “death to America.” The group is not a recognized student organization at Columbia University, and it’s unclear who operates its X account. But that didn’t stop demands for punishment.
The group’s tweet is unquestionably protected speech. The Supreme Court has twice held that even flag burning — often a visceral, symbolic expression of contempt for the nation — is constitutionally protected. As the Court famously declared, “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”
To keep the frontier of inquiry truly open, we must address the lack of viewpoint diversity in the academy. HxA’s most recent report reviews literature on faculty political diversity, and draws attention to a potentially narrow range of political viewpoints on campus — with some important caveats. We found that left-leaning faculty are the norm, yet many faculty are apolitical or independent and only a small proportion are conservative.
Higher education faces a choice on how to proceed: build to expand, or ban to counter. Both of these competing approaches are underway, and this week’s news displayed that tension.
