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Chapin Lenthall-Cleary
The Eternally Radical Idea
Excerpt: Suppose you’re a controversial left-wing speaker. Who do you think would be more likely to let you voice your opinions on campus: a slightly conservative man or a democratic socialist woman?
Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Citing multiple concerns, Brown University on Wednesday rejected an invitation to join the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that the Trump administration proposed.
Following MIT’s rejection, the Trump administration said the compact was open to all colleges. But of the original nine invitees, there are no takers so far, though officials at the University of Texas system have indicated they view the proposal favorably. The system’s flagship in Austin was part of the nine.
Ryan D. Enos and Steven Levitsky
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: The Trump administration’s authoritarian offensive is accelerating.
It is now openly persecuting opponents, bullying media to silence critics, and sending masked security forces to terrorize cities, and the president recently told top military commanders to prepare to fight the “enemy from within.”
Vimal Patel
New York Times
Excerpt: M.I.T. became the first university to reject an agreement that would trade support for the Trump administration’s higher education agenda in exchange for favorable treatment.
Opinion by From the Community
Standford Daily
Excerpt: The Trump administration’s new “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” is a trap.
Presented last week to a group of nine universities that doesn’t yet include Stanford, the compact proposes a list of policy changes the administration hopes universities will agree to in exchange for preferential access to federal grants. Several of the proposed reforms respond to legitimate concerns about higher education and identify real challenges that elite universities have faced in recent years. As White House advisor May Mailman put it, “Our hope is that a lot of schools see that this is highly reasonable.”
Eric J. Weiner
Academe Blog
Excerpt: Although Lisa Siraganian’s recent article ”Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity” includes important considerations for the heterodox academic community, her theses do more to distort the intentions and purposes of heterodoxical teaching and learning than to illuminate its potential conflicts and contradictions. Siraganian’s general critique of “viewpoint diversity” is that it is a thinly veiled ideological cover for radically “conservative” ideas—rather than, as advocates argue, a concerted attempt to democratize curriculum and pedagogies.
