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Lee C. Bollinger
The Atlantic
Excerpt: The nation’s leading universities are locked in an unprecedented battle with a president and an administration that have chosen to withhold billions of dollars in vital federal research funding in order to take control of institutions for which freedom of thought and expression are among their most essential values.
So, here is my thesis: American universities are rooted in the bedrock of human nature and the foundations of our constitutional democracy. They are every bit as vital to our society as the political branches of government or quasi-official institutions such as the press (often even referred to as the “fourth branch” of government). Universities, as institutions, are the embodiment of the basic rationale of the First Amendment, which affirms our nation’s commitment to a never-ending search for truth.
Tal Fortgang
Commentary
Excerpt: Intersectionality is in crisis. It is reeling from the Republican-led assault on left-wing radicalism, retreating to its campus redoubt. If it passes from our public discourse, its epitaph should read: “Often wrong, never in doubt.”
Triumphalism is premature, though. During its brief, wondrous heyday as a progressive shibboleth, intersectionality exerted enormous power over American life. Intersectional ideas fueled BLM, the Women’s March, and gender ideology, all of which blended into one “omnicause.” It is on the decline, but the underlying ideas that ignited it in the first place may persist. Ensuring that intersectionality dies and stays dead requires understanding those ideas and developing the vocabulary to explain why the movement that intersectionality spawned inevitably fails.
Katherine Mangan
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Four years ago, the University of Virginia Board of Visitors endorsed a call to double the number of underrepresented faculty by 2030 and to develop a plan for building a student population that better reflected the state’s racial and socioeconomic diversity. The university’s president, James E. Ryan, said the move signaled that “becoming a more diverse, equitable place is both the right and the smart thing to do.”
On Tuesday, the board voted unanimously to rescind any such numerical goals as part of a sweeping effort to wipe out evidence of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. The Trump administration had warned university officials, only the day before, that it had received complaints that the university wasn’t acting fast enough to carry through on its promise to “dismantle DEI apparatuses.”
James Piereson
City Journal
Excerpt: The Trump administration is trying to fix what ails American universities by freezing billions of dollars in pledged research grants due to be paid to Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, and other prominent institutions, on the grounds that the schools have not done enough to counter anti-Semitism on their campuses or have evolved into left-wing hothouses with little diversity of opinion.
The Trump administration has tried to influence institutions by freezing payment of federal funds, but there is a more effective way to do this—one less likely to cause mayhem in scientific programs and medical schools and less prone to being overturned by the courts: Trump should use the leverage of prospective grants to induce institutions to abide by federal law and begin reforming their internal operations.
Nicholas H. Wolfinger
Unsafe Science
Excerpt: “A new McCarthyism has descended on higher education”
If I had a dollar every time I read that phrase, I could afford to endow a chair in McCarthy studies. Centrists and conservatives used it a lot during the Great Awokening of the 2010s. Progressives got their turn after the October 7 Hamas attack. And, of course, the second Trump presidency and its assault on higher education has been manna for the McCarthyism-pronouncers. None of these folks are wrong, except perhaps for their reliance on a tired trope.
John Warner
Academic Freedom on the Line, AAUP
Excerpt: As one of the small number of non-academics among the fellows of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, I’m continually impressed with how much my fellow fellows from academia know, and how deeply they’ve thought about issues in their areas of expertise.
As we see in the Q&A below, the present crisis in higher ed has both deep and broad roots, and, in my view, acknowledging and addressing these roots are the only way to move forward toward a system of post-secondary education that is accessible and oriented around the interests of free people in a democratic society.
