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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.

Cornell University has long been an example of an academic echo chamber where conservative and libertarian faculty have been largely purged from departmental ranks. For example, a study by The College Fix found that Democrats outnumber Republicans 98 to 1 among Cornell professors across six of the humanities departments. Cornell professors disrupt events, launch campaigns to fire the remaining conservative faculty, and foster a cancel campaign culture on campus. However, the faculty recently decided to review its own record and found . . . wait for it . . . that there really are no concrete measures needed to address their own overwhelming ideological bias.

According to a 238-page faculty report from the Committee on the Future of the American University, there was no consensus on ideological bias or how to handle it. Moreover, some faculty members insist that, while there is an ideological imbalance, it is not a problem because liberal faculty can explain or incorporate conservative values when needed.

My 40-year career has been focused on joyously and avidly preparing, interviewing, counseling, and placing college grads from across the US into their best possible first jobs. Seeing a grad land a role that will challenge and inspire them is my passion. Things went great for the first 25 years of my career–I went around the US finding fabulous kids who hungered for the best opportunity to launch their career and follow their passion. 

Starting around 2015, however, I first noticed a shift in capability and engagement in a growing  percentage of the seniors with whom I interacted. By 2020, job retention among those hired in  ensuing years was dramatically declining.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

For almost all of the past 65 years, I have been a part of Harvard — from that day in 1960 when I walked up the steps of Thayer South to begin my freshman year, to my time at Harvard Medical School, both as a student and a professor. But never, in all that time, have I been so deeply ashamed of the University, nor as fearful about its future, as I am now.