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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.

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.

Higher education groups representing administrators and faculty filed a lawsuit Monday challenging a recent executive order that threatens to strip federal contracts from colleges and other organizations over their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.

The coalition — which also includes a faculty group at the University of Maryland, College Park, as well as the National Association of Minority Contractors and one of its local chapters — took aim at this definition in the new lawsuit. The groups argued that the definition is overly broad and encompasses lawful practices that “routinely, necessarily, and legally recognize and vary based on race.”

Berkeley has long been viewed as one of the most viewpoint-intolerant universities in the United States. Conservatives and those with opposing views are rarely invited and often face protests or cancellations. Some of us have long accused the Berkeley administrators and faculty of fostering this culture of intolerance. That culture was again on full display in the cancellation of an event with Jeffrey Dean, Chief Scientist at Google, in Jarvis Auditorium on Friday, May 1.

Roughly twenty masked protesters entered the event with the intention of preventing others from hearing from Dean and discussing these issues. Soon after the event began, they reportedly disrupted it with megaphones and yelling.

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.

The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law has brought a new meaning to the heckler’s veto. Some of us criticized the law school for its failure to hold students accountable for disrupting a recent Federalist Society event featuring James Percival, general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security. 

While the law school administration does not appear interested in holding the protesters accountable, it has threatened the Federalist Society that it could face discipline if it identifies any of the students who disrupted the event. This perfectly surreal position was stated in a letter from Bayrex Martí, UCLA’s assistant dean for student affairs.

More than half of respondents to The Crimson’s annual faculty survey opposed Harvard’s efforts to solicit donations for a viewpoint diversity initiative — rejecting a push to raise hundreds of millions of dollars through $10 million endowed professorships meant to broaden ideological representation.

Nearly 47 percent of faculty respondents also disagreed that Harvard has a troubling lack of ideological diversity among its faculty, while roughly 31 percent agreed. The split was little changed from last year, when 45 percent disagreed and 34 percent agreed — putting most respondents at odds with critics, including Trump administration officials, who have charged that Harvard’s faculty is too ideologically narrow.

Students returned to campus this fall after a tumultuous summer for Yale’s relations with the federal government. Since the start of the second Trump administration, universities have faced heightened pressure through threats to federal research funds, criticism of diversity policies and scrutiny into alleged antisemitism on campuses, and many of them have reached settlements. Yale seemed to be an exception. But not anymore.

As the academic year begins, the status and details of the federal negotiations remain unclear, although University President Maurie McInnis has released several comments about Yale’s talks with the federal government as pressure mounts against any settlement with the Trump administration. The ongoing period of uncertainty in the negotiations “may well continue, and we do not know for how long,” McInnis wrote in an Aug. 21 message to the Yale community.

Ghent University suspended postdoctoral scholar Nathan Cofnas as a “precautionary measure” pending a “preliminary disciplinary investigation.” The reason he is being suspended, however, has little if anything to do with him legitimately criticizing Jason Arday’s scholarship last month by documenting plagiarism in Arday’s doctoral thesis. Ghent is instead suspending Cofnas because his expressed public views are misaligned with the university’s values and therefore “creates a reputational risk”. This is not how academic freedom should work.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon recently released a “National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards,” a less openly threatening version of the earlier “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that had been broadly rejected. More than a month prior to the release of McMahon’s letter, Vanderbilt University published “The University and Its Purpose: A Declaration of First Principles,” signed by its chancellor and board chair and adopted by its board. 

Whether this alignment is the result of happenstance or collaboration is impossible to know, but what is clear is the extent to which Vanderbilt is positioning itself as a model of the sort of elite higher education of which the Trump administration approves. This does not, prima facie, make the Vanderbilt model wrong, but, given the stakes, it does suggest that the model should be examined with great care.

What is college for? If you ask four different people, you’re likely to get four different answers. Universities teach students how to think. They produce groundbreaking research. They create citizens. They prepare students for jobs. They archive the wisdom of the past. And so on.

However, beneath the veneer of diversity, all university goals ultimately come down to the same thing. At their core, universities are epistemic institutions, committed to the creation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge.

When news of Iván Chaar López’s tenure denial broke last month, the scholar’s supporters pointed to what they believed was the University of Texas at Austin’s unstated reason: politics.

University President Maurie McInnis has engaged in private conversations with student leaders, as well as the faculty senate chair, about Yale’s attempts to settle with the Trump administration — a venture that has faced widespread backlash from students, faculty and alumni.

Last week, a committee of scholars convened by Vanderbilt University released a report on the state of humanities and social sciences scholarship across the United States.

As one of the signers of the report, I am all too familiar with the fact that activist scholars sometimes play fast and loose with logic and evidence to justify conclusions dictated in advance by a political program. Those who dissent can risk serious damage to their careers. Journals have been forced to apologize for research they have published — not because of poor logic or manufactured evidence, but because the results were politically unacceptable. 

The University of Chicago has undergone a “curriculum degradation” in the past 13 years, according to a new analysis by an accounting professor.

Professor Ivan Marinovic, who teaches accounting at Stanford University, analyzed language used in University of Chicago course titles and descriptions between 2012 and 2025 for his analysis, published at the Heterodox STEM Substack.

He found the use of “progressive” language, such as “equity” and “intersectional” has doubled, compared to the use of “Western canon” words, such as “Bible” and “Western civilization.”

Lightning rarely ever strikes the same place twice, so the fact that higher education is experiencing yet another case of self-awareness is a miraculous occurrence. 

The Harvard Medical School (HMS) released a report on April 21, 2026 following an assessment on the state of open inquiry and public discourse at HMS. This yearlong assessment began in May 2025 and was led by the HMS Open Inquiry Working Group (OIWG), culminating in a 40-page report that offers 11 key recommendations to “serve as a roadmap for fostering and advancing a culture at HMS that is dedicated to open inquiry and respectful discourse.”

A proposal for proctoring on all examinations will be considered by two faculty committees before potentially reaching a faculty vote in May, according to Dean of the College Michael Gordin. This unprecedented proposal comes amid administrative concerns about cheating, especially given the prevalence of generative AI tools.

The change would constitute the most significant alteration to date to Princeton’s honor system since its establishment in 1893. Under the Honor Code, students pledge both to refrain from infractions of academic dishonesty and to report any academic integrity breaches they witness.

A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from requiring colleges and universities to collect and report admissions data disaggregated by race and gender, Reuters reported.

The temporary restraining order, issued by U.S. District Judge Dennis Saylor IV in Boston, comes in response to a lawsuit filed last week by 17 Democratic states over the administration’s demand that colleges and universities complete the new Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement survey by March 18. Saylor’s order extends the deadline through March 25 “to permit a hearing and orderly resolution of the issues.”

“I’ve had the tremendous privilege of knowing so many fantastic students at Princeton, who I know will become extraordinary military leaders. And I think that it would be a massive shame if that potential was eliminated,” the student said in response to an announcement that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ’03 made on Feb. 27. In a video posted on social media, Hegseth announced that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) will end sponsorship for graduate students at Princeton and other Ivy League institutions beginning in the 2026–27 academic year.

University spokesperson Jennifer Morrill wrote in a statement to the ‘Prince’ that there are “a dozen active-duty military graduate students currently enrolled at Princeton, representing all four branches of the U.S. Armed services with all but two of those students enrolled at SPIA.” As the policy currently stands, active-duty service members may be unable to attend Princeton for graduate school while remaining in service.

Penn was again ranked as one of the worst universities in the United States for free speech, according to an annual report evaluating college campuses.

The ranking, released by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, placed Penn at No. 227 out of 261 schools with an F grade and a score of 54.4 out of 100. Penn moved up four places and increased its score by 2.9 points from last year’s ranking. A University spokesperson declined to comment.

Having spent most of the past 20 years in the free speech movement, I highly recommendThe Future of Free Speech. It gives a good birds-eye view of modern speech trends in the free and unfree world alike, where authoritarian countries have become more authoritarian and liberal democracies less liberal and democratic. The U.S. remains the gold standard, but the book leaves me wondering if we have the political will to keep it that way.Below are some of my key impressions and takeaways from the book.

The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law is in the midst of a free-speech emergency. When a major American law school teaches its students that the right way to respond to political opponents is to silence them, something has gone wrong. And when it then attempts to protect those disruptive students from public criticism by threatening other students’ speech, it’s a crisis.

That’s just what happened at UCLA this past month.

A new report commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University, Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences, brought together senior scholars to assess the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.    

In this webinar, recorded on June 11th, HxA President John Tomasi joins report co-author Ashley Rubin (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa) and Regina Rini (York University) to critically discuss the report’s conclusions, where it leaves work undone, and what a genuine path toward healthier scholarly norms might look like.

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.