There is exactly one kind of institution in the world whose product is “thinking” — the university. This is an existential challenge for every university, Princeton most definitely included, now that nearly all artificial intelligence is purpose-built to offload the hard work of thinking.
Universities need to return to the foundations of learning with trust — and verification — at the heart of their relationship with students. They also need to be far more prescriptive about what learning looks like so that students who arrive with limited capacity for deep reading have the time and space to develop their critical thinking skills.
Some heartening higher ed news, hot off the press: faculty value viewpoint diversity! In our latest report published yesterday, Faculty Attitudes Toward Diversity in Their Disciplines: A National Survey, we asked over 3,500 faculty from 80 different institutions about the extent to which they think teaching and research are improved by exposure to a wide range of viewpoints along eight specific dimensions of diversity.
One year after Columbia signed its resolution agreement, the university remains something of an example, for others in the sector and for the Trump administration. But what many have called Columbia’s capitulation hasn’t been a full win for either side.
Dozens of organizations have cropped up promising to foster “civic discourse”, “dialogue across difference” and “viewpoint diversity”. Together, they make up a fast-growing ecosystem that has ballooned, by some estimates, into a $200m a year business some skeptics have billed the “civility industrial complex”.
A new report on the state of humanities scholarship made waves in higher ed circles when it was released Friday, and has since drawn criticism from professors across the humanities.
Commissioned by Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier and Washington University in St. Louis chancellor Andrew Martin, the “State of Scholarship” report finds fault with disciplines including anthropology, philosophy and history—not for their content but for the quality of their scholarship, which the report’s authors argue is too often driven by political ideology rather than the pursuit of truth and knowledge. Critiques of the report are broad and varied.
In March 2026, the journal Theory and Society published a sweeping analysis of academic social science research spanning 1960 to 2024. The paper, “The ideological orientation of academic social science research 1960-2024,” ran over 600,000 article abstracts through a large language model to map the ideological orientation of an entire field across six decades.
James Manzi, a DPhil (PhD) student in sociology at the University of Oxford, unleashed a wide-ranging discussion across social media with the publication of his paper. In the conversation below, Manzi walks us through the paper’s central findings, responds to questions about methodology, and sketches next steps.
One in 10 faculty members working in states that restrict academic speech are seeking jobs out of state, according to survey data released this week. Six percent reported they are trying to leave the academy altogether.
The new data on relocating researchers underpins anecdotal stories about faculty members fleeing red states in search of greater academic freedom. Researchers with Ithaka S+R, a nonprofit higher education consultancy, surveyed 4,003 researchers at U.S. four-year colleges and universities via email about a slate of topics, but their first look at the data is focused on academic freedom in research.
University commencement ceremonies occupy a distinctive place in academic life. At once celebratory, ceremonial, aspirational, and institutional, they mark the culmination of years of study and the transition of students to the next stage of citizenship and professional life. At institutional events — organized, sponsored, and symbolically endorsed by schools and universities — speakers chosen to address graduates at commencements should respect the purpose of these events by not politicizing them.
Daniel Diermeier has become one of the most visible college leaders. The chancellor of Vanderbilt University joined a panel Thursday in Washington, D.C., to make his case for rebuilding public trust — by taking politics out of research and the classroom, and restraining institutions from issuing statements on matters not directly related to their mission or operations.
After Thursday’s discussion at the Reagan Institute Summit on Education — an event that provided largely supportive views of his positions — Diermeier talked with The Chronicle about politicization in higher education, attempts to limit academic freedom, and why he’s publicly pushing so hard for reforms to higher education while working quietly behind the scenes with federal officials.
It’s been a month since the Department of Education issued a public letter to college presidents and boards, calling on them to answer questions about how they’re meeting the priorities of the Trump administration. Public-college systems in Florida and North Carolina have replied enthusiastically, but most institutions seem to be doing some version of waiting and seeing.
The sparse replies contrast with how college leaders reacted to a similar letter that the Education Department posted last year, the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” That document drew a number of relatively swift, high-profile rejections. This time, colleges have until the end of the year to respond to the letter, issued August 3 and titled “A National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards.”
A new study commissioned by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression indicates that donations from faculty at top universities have become increasingly one-sided, with the range of opinion becoming concentrated on the left.
Eight of the ten most politically diverse faculty bodies were at universities located in the U.S. South, a region where conservatives are more plentiful (the other two were Kansas State University and Brigham Young University). Meanwhile, four of the ten least intellectually diverse campuses were located on the West Coast, and four were Ivy League schools in the Northeast.
College students want to debate but are afraid to do it, according to a recent report from Banjo, an online platform “dedicated to the civil, peaceful exchange of ideas.”
The survey of 1,019 students across more than 600 institutions found that 92 percent of students were “slightly” to “extremely” interested in engaging in debates with their peers. Yet 66 percent of the students surveyed reported avoiding debates to prevent conflict in the past two weeks, and 64 percent reported feeling anxious when discussing controversial topics during that time period.
Today, the teachers I’m talking about tend to feel like dissidents within the academy, like they are doing something countercultural. That’s because at most schools, humanistic education has been pushed into the remote corners of academic life. It’s not that people woke up one morning and decided to renounce the humanistic ideal, it’s just that other goals popped up. It was easier to fundraise for them, easier to sell them to tuition-paying parents. The idea of forming students into the best version of themselves sort of got left behind.
The good news is that things are changing. There is an interesting pattern in the history of higher education: Universities reform after confrontations with barbarism.
A year ago, I partnered with the chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis to commission an independent committee of leading scholars — chaired by philosopher Paul Boghossian — to examine the state of the humanities and humanistic social sciences. We asked the committee to assess whether ideological commitments were eroding scholarly standards and distorting the objective pursuit of knowledge.
The reaction to this report has been lively. Some responses challenged its conceptual foundations. Some criticized its evidentiary basis and how it was produced. Others said it should have proposed more reform steps. That is how scholarly debate should work. But others ascribed sinister motives to those involved or asserted that the report had been commissioned to advance a broader political agenda.
There’s a common trope that liberals, especially liberal college students, often support using violence or shoutdowns to stop people they disagree with from speaking. It’s no secret that there are plenty of examples of this behavior. But are those isolated incidents, or do they reflect a broader pattern? Are liberal students more violent?
There used to be a massive gulf in support for violence between “very liberal” students (and democratic socialists, a separate ideology option in our survey) and everyone else, especially conservatives. That gap is gone, replaced by a gender gap, such that every male ideology is now more violent than its female counterpart.
Thirty percent of college students say that using violence to stop campus speech is acceptable at least in rare cases, according to a new report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
It’s a slight decrease from a year ago, when a record-high 34 percent of students said the same, but it remains 12 points higher than in 2020, when 18 percent of students said violence was an acceptable response, at least in rare cases, to campus speech.
The letter, dated February 12, on South Florida State College letterhead and hand delivered by the Director of Human Resources, contained four sentences.
I would be placed on administrative leave with pay till the end of my contract. The contract would not be renewed. I would be relieved of all teaching duties immediately. A concluding sentence offered contact information if I had any questions.
I had many.
The Department of Justice has found that George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Services intentionally discriminated against white and Asian students in admissions by admitting Black and Hispanic students with lower standardized test scores in 2024 and 2025, according to a news release.
In the announcement, the DOJ said GWU’s medical school also used essay questions “that were designed to elicit information about an applicant’s race or ethnicity” and then used that information to decide which candidates to interview.
At a time when the average tenure of a college president has dipped below six years, Ronald J. Daniels is beginning his 18th year at the helm of the Johns Hopkins University. He’s weathered numerous crises, though perhaps none as severe as the second Trump administration.
As part of the leadership of the Association of American Universities, Daniels had several discussions with members of the Trump administration about its recent open letter, “A National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards.” I spoke to Daniels over Zoom about his decision to advise on that open letter, how conservative scholars have been “systematically excluded” from the academy, and whether his emphasis on political diversity has come at the expense of racial diversity.
I studied in the academic department at Cambridge that later employed Jason Arday. My degree was in ‘Politics, Psychology and Sociology’, and one of my papers was on the Sociology of Education. Arday became a professor of Sociology of Education a few years after I left.
I want to give a few examples of the scale of progressive ideological capture even then, pre-Peak Woke, in 2012 (when I graduated). As well as to try to illustrate the sheer intellectual bankruptcy of so much of what gets passed off as chin-rubbingly profound academic scholarship at some of the most elite educational institutions in the world.
Florida’s war against woke indoctrination has hit a speedbump. On July 7, a panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s injunction against the Stop WOKE Act, the state’s attempt to ban public university employees from inculcating trendy beliefs about racial superiority and privilege.
My research team at Heterodox Academy has been tracking faculty job ad content for the last two years with an eye towards understanding how required Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) criteria have changed. Our recently published research report showed that the share of jobs requesting DEI statements — whether standalone, within cover letters, or within research or teaching statements — declined sharply, falling from approximately 25% in 2024 to 11% in 2025.
An arbitrator ruled that Sang Hea Kil, a tenured San José State University professor who was fired in 2025 after participating in pro-Palestinian student protests, should be reinstated, the California Faculty Association announced Monday.
The arbitrator deemed Kil’s termination to be an “excessive” punishment and said it should be reduced to a one-month unpaid suspension, according to the news release. Kil was the first tenured full professor to be fired for pro-Palestinian advocacy.
Last fall, the University of California announced that it would sunset a key diversity-hiring initiative tied to its President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). Less than two weeks later, the UC system reversed course, cowed by a backlash led by the very “scholar-activists” whom the program had spent four decades and more than $162 million cultivating. The episode offers a sobering lesson for reformers: when a university sustains an agenda long enough, that agenda becomes self-sustaining.
The PPFP functions as a social-justice career accelerator—and a kind of side-door to the faculty lounge. Through the program, UC hires postdoctoral fellows with a heavy emphasis on DEI, and the postdocs then get special favor for tenure-track faculty jobs.
It’s now widely (though not universally) conceded that improving viewpoint diversity on campus would improve university teaching and research. Faculty on American campuses are overwhelmingly cut from the same ideological cloth, and this homogeneity has harmful effects on all aspects of the professoriate, including teaching, research, and service.
But suppose you had the opportunity to fix this. You could wave a magic wand and improve viewpoint diversity in any part of campus. Where should you work your magic? Where does viewpoint diversity matter the most?
Colleges and universities face a moment of crisis, with their missions, funding, and operations under threat. At the same time, US public opinion surveys show that support for higher education is at historic lows. The Trust Agenda outlines a response to these challenges that can build public trust, make campuses more trustworthy, and enable colleges and universities to defend their missions successfully.
The report’s recommendations include a combination of internal reforms, external communications, and collaborative defense strategies. The unifying theme of The Trust Agenda is a need for increased and meaningful connection in higher education—between campuses and their communities; among faculty, staff, students, and administrators; across institutions; and with society as a whole.
There is widespread agreement that higher education is politicized, but there is disagreement over who is to blame. The left argues President Trump and various red states enacting policies are injecting conservative dogma into teaching and research. The right argues that the left politicized academia over the past several decades, and that the new policies are merely trying to reverse the current politicization. There is some truth to both stories.
Fortunately, there is a solution to depoliticize universities – establish heterodox centers, or colleges within the existing university, that would add missing perspectives and compete with the traditional departments.
You’ve heard the critique.
The humanities and social sciences have been corrupted by political aims, and their disciplines have tossed out rigorous research standards in favor of advancing social-justice causes favored by the political left. This has made for an impoverished scholarly landscape, filled with laughable claims and obscure jargon.
Over the past several months, a group of high-profile scholars convened privately to study whether this criticism holds water across several fields within the humanities and social sciences. “The first thing to say,” they concluded in a report published Friday, “is that we reject the complaint in this bald form.”
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.
From the outset, DEI at MIT was controversial even before it became a target of outside political scrutiny. Initial objections came not only from skeptics who opposed DEI as ideology or bureaucracy, but also from DEI supporters who believed it wasn’t enough. Some student activists and steering-committee members argued that the draft plan had been weakened by senior administrators. They criticized what they saw as closed-door changes, fear of upsetting faculty and donors, lack of transparency, and a plan that risked becoming “mostly performative” unless leadership accepted stronger, centralized standards.
The criticism from both directions showed that DEI at MIT was controversial before it became a target of outside political scrutiny. MIT’s DEI project was caught between competing criticisms: too ideological and bureaucratic for some, too weak and decentralized for others.
On April 11, 2025, the president of Yale, Maurie McInnis, convened a Committee on Trust in Higher Education. On April 10, 2026, the ten tenured faculty members on the committee submitted their report—unanimously. Detailed and running to fifty-six pages, it is a model of clarity.
There is much to admire in the report, and I will not stint on praise. But in addition to the appropriately strong words about many things that plague America’s colleges and universities, there is also a lack of strong words about other highly relevant things that Americans care and fight about. For example, the committee skirts around the dreaded trio of diversity, equity, and inclusion and does not mention the current U.S. president by name. I will have more to say on this subject, as well as on the need for the committee’s strong words to be followed by strong actions.
A federal judge on Friday blocked in 17 states the Trump administration’s demand that public colleges and universities submit detailed race- and gender-related admissions data stretching back seven years.
The ruling, by U.S. District Court judge Dennis Saylor IV of Boston, was in response to a March 6 lawsuit by the attorneys general from the group of Democratic-led states. Their lawsuit argued that forcing colleges and universities to complete the new Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement survey was unlawful, “arbitrary and capricious” and exceeded the authority of the agency that approved it, the Office of Management and Budget.
The Trump administration’s investigations and demands for admissions data have extended beyond undergraduate colleges and universities, The New York Times reports. Now, the Department of Justice is requesting years’ worth of information about applicants at major medical schools.
The three institutions currently under investigation—Stanford University, Ohio State University and the University of California, San Diego—have been asked to turn over the reports by April 24. If they don’t, according to the Times, the DOJ says federal funding for their professional programs could be on the line.
Some colleges and universities now have until April 6 to collect and report admissions data that the Education Department says it plans to use to identify unlawful race-based admissions practices, a federal judge decided Tuesday.
It’s the latest development in a lawsuit 17 Democratic state attorneys general filed against the department earlier this month over the Trump administration’s original demand that colleges and universities with selective admissions policies complete the new Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement survey by March 18.
If Johns Hopkins University wanted to signal its seriousness about creating an alternative to the left-leaning orthodoxy that permeates higher education, it couldn’t have done better than the recent hire of economist Peter Arcidiacono.
Imagine if, at a certain university, the Astronomy Department gradually morphed into the Astrology Department. Hard evidence was replaced by unfalsifiable speculation. Telescopes were traded for horoscopes. How, exactly, could the university’s leaders — responsible for excellence but not themselves trained astronomers — recognize the change? What signs could they have spotted earlier, before all trust was lost?
This is part of the provocative framing of the Vanderbilt-WashU “State of Scholarship” report that has drawn intense debate this week. Commissioned by the chancellors of the two universities, the report was written by a distinguished committee of scholars charged with assessing the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social science fields. All is not well, the report says. The pursuit of knowledge in humanistic fields is, not always but too often, distorted by politicization — skewed by a priori commitments to certain results and muddled by selective skepticism about knowledge itself.
Being at Yale over the past two years gives me an interesting perch. From here I can watch the capitulation of a once-great institution in real time. It gives me an inside view of what must have gone down at the law firms, tech companies and the other universities that have bent the knee to the orange menace.
And things are doubleplusgood at Yale these days. Earlier this month, Yale College scheduled a mandatory lecture (officially, a “conversation”) for all first-year students, on the university and democracy. Let’s set aside the curious nature of insisting that all who have just arrived on Yale’s campus must get the “official” story about this place and its role in the world as it is in 2026, even before they’ve set foot in a classroom.
The 80+ scholars who gathered at UC Berkeley for HxA’s West Coast Regional Conference didn’t come to vent or to mourn a lost university. They came to get organized and lead their campuses in reform. Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier set the tone from the first minutes of his keynote about what must be done for change in the academy to occur.
“There used to be times when it took just a letter to get a speaker disinvited,” he said. “This is not the case right now.” Institutional neutrality is gaining ground. Diverse speakers are being welcomed on campuses where they once weren’t. On these things, “we look back and things are moving in the right direction.” But Diermeier was clear that acknowledging progress is not the same as declaring victory. Much work remains.
We now assess Eisgruber’s peculiar take on the relation of the university to the nation that has treated it with increasing hostility in recent decades. Critics may wail that the universities have to be brought to heel for producing fanatics, snowflakes, and crybullies, but Eisgruber turns their argument on its head: it’s actually the nation that could afford to learn from the campus, he argues; to the extent universities are struggling with civility norms, they are simply a dirty mirror for broken civil discourse. Otherwise they are a model for balancing speech and other values with a “more vigorous” culture of speech than “most sectors of society.”
This thesis has two component parts, which can be asked as distinct questions. Are critics wrong to identify a free-speech crisis on campus? And, to the extent such issues arise, are universities merely replicating national problems of polarization in microcosm?
Now we can get to the heart of the book. Eisgruber’s novel approach to campus free speech issues builds on this foundation, to argue that campus free speech issues aren’t really campus issues, and aren’t really about free speech. Rather, campuses reflect national divisions in microcosm, and the division is not about speech and its discontents, but about “the meaning of respect and, ultimately, what it means to treat people as equals.” He ultimately concludes that while speech has to foster constructive dialogue and truth-seeking, the controversies making waves are about the terms on which that constructive dialogue occurs—which is a good thing, as Eisgruber and his critics alike agree—and that universities are closer to being models (albeit imperfect ones) than sources of the problem. It’s this surprising take that gives Terms of Respect its punch and has made Eisgruber a minor folk hero among academia’s defenders.
Almost a decade after the "Hypatia Affair" nearly ended her career, the philosopher reflects on public shaming and being a cautionary tale.
Alan Garber’s lawyer told him he shouldn’t speak at the Economic Club on Thursday, in the midst of his institution’s protracted legal battle with the Trump administration over federal research funding.
Thirty-eight percent of Americans currently report having “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to this year’s Gallup poll, down from 42% last year and just two points above the record lows of 36% recorded in 2023 and 2024. Last year’s uptick, it turns out, was not the start of a recovery so much as a blip.
For a report released this week, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) surveyed 1,959 law faculty at 192 ABA-approved law schools. The findings reveal a profession caught in a contradiction: law professors overwhelmingly endorse free expression in principle, yet many describe an academic culture that discourages them from practicing it.
PHILADELPHIA, June 9, 2026 — A new survey of law school faculty paints a bleak picture of free speech and inquiry in the legal academy, with respondents reporting self-censorship, political litmus tests, and attacks on speech from the left and right alike.
Over the course of a month and a half, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression surveyed thousands of faculty members at 192 of the 197 ABA-accredited law schools, seeking their perspectives on the state of free speech and discourse within their programs.
What would it take to open up a research field that has narrowed without anyone quite noticing? That sociology of knowledge question animated Jesse Smith’s presentation to the HxSociology virtual community. An assistant professor at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State University — one of the new civic-thought centers reshaping the institutional landscape of higher ed — Smith builds his case from four premises: that values irreducibly shape research, that they can distort inquiry when they harden into a closed paradigm, that sociology today operates under just such a progressive paradigm, and that closed paradigms only crack open when a competing paradigm, grounded in opposing values, offers genuine alternatives rather than mere critique.
Harvey C. Mansfield, who enrolled at Harvard in 1949, joined the faculty in 1962, and retired in 2023, has been called many things: “great dissenter,” “prophet,” “racist, homophobic and misogynist,” “sophist,” “slipshod.” Mansfield prefers “annoying Socratic gadfly.” A dean once advised that he’d be more persuasive if he argued less. Mansfield says he tried, but it didn’t work. “Retirement seems to strengthen my voice.”
Mansfield spoke to us over zoom from his house in Ipswich, Mass., where he now spends the bulk of his time. Dressed in a suit and red tie, he discussed affirmative action for conservative professors, why the academy needs bipartisanship more than nonpartisanship, and whether old professors stick around too long. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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.
