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Harvard University leaders have been soliciting wealthy donors for $10 million contributions to fund endowed professorships with the stated goal of expanding “viewpoint diversity” on campus.
Pardon me for finding this hypocritical. Over the past year, the University has systematically curtailed, suspended, or restructured every program with a serious focus on studying Palestinian rights and raising up Palestinian voices targeted by the Trump administration’s April 11 demands. It’s abundantly clear that some views are not welcome on this campus.
This report is addressed to university chancellors and presidents who are concerned about the state of academic scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences and who may wish, within their purview, to promote excellent scholarship in these vital fields. The charge to the committee, submitted in August 2025 and formulated by Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew D. Martin, Chancellor of Washington University.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) recently released a study by David Primo measuring faculty viewpoint diversity through campaign-contribution data. The average faculty donor scored only slightly to the right of progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
The findings and criticism traveled quickly. John K. Wilson, writing in InsideHigherEd, pronounced the study “worthless” because most faculty never make campaign contributions, so a sample of donors cannot describe the average professor. On the narrow point he is right: a sample of donors is not a sample of all faculty. “Worthless” is a serious conclusion—a verdict that, applied consistently, would discard nearly every measure we have.
A massive financial crunch has hit many schools because of sagging tuition revenue growth—reflecting falling enrollment or more aggressive discounting of tuition fees—and reduced public financial support in the form of federal and/or state aid and stagnant private philanthropy, all occurring in an environment of heightened inflationary pressures increasing the dollars needed to operate.
Higher education works hard to avoid destruction while also avoiding needed moves designed to promote efficiency coming from increased outputs or lower costs, because its “owners” lack incentives to do so.
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.
