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.
Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: The University of Virginia and Dartmouth College have become the latest higher ed institutions to publicly reject the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education." Now just three of the nine institutions that the federal government originally presented with the document have yet to announce whether they will sign.
Neetu Arnold
City Journal
Excerpt: Universities have let progressive dogma degrade their academic missions, eviscerating public faith in higher education. College leaders willing to admit this truth are rare. Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier is one. He has long been a champion of political neutrality and has called out the politicization of scholarly associations—approaches other university leaders are only now catching up on.
Adopting these policies and principles can be challenging for university leaders, partly because they fear how their own faculty or academic departments might respond. Yet Diermeier’s love of universities emboldens him. In a recent interview, transcribed below, he told me that education and research are “noble work,” but only if they are grounded in core principles. And he emphasized how politicization in some departments overshadows the good work conducted in others.
Yascha Mounk
Persuasion
Excerpt: As recently as a decade ago, a big bipartisan majority of Americans said that they have a lot of trust in higher education. Now, the number is down to about one in three.
To change the massive shift in public perception of academia, it would, it seems to me, be necessary to take radical steps to change its current nature. And so I want to make a modest proposal for how universities can refocus on their core mission of teaching and research—and become both much more affordable, and much more deeply embedded in the fabric of American society, in the process.
E. Thomas Finan
The Atlantic
Excerpt: The Trump administration and its allies are upending American higher education: freezing funding, launching investigations, ratcheting up taxes, and threatening to do much more. Not so long ago this would have been political poison. But in the last decade, Americans’ faith in colleges and universities has plummeted. In 2015, 57 percent had either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to Gallup. As of last year, that group had shrunk to 36 percent, only a few points larger than the share who have “very little” confidence or none at all.
L. Rafael Reif
The Atlantic
Excerpt: Whatever halfway measures Congress or the courts may take to stop President Donald Trump’s assault on universities, they will not change the fact that a profound agreement has been broken: Since World War II, the U.S. government has funded basic research at universities, with the understanding that the discoveries and innovations that result would benefit the U.S. economy and military, as well as the health of the nation’s citizens.
There is a way forward… It is based on the premise that, because universities are not the sole nor even the most significant beneficiaries of the scientific research they conduct, they should not be alone in trying to save their R&D operations. And it is focused not on Washington but on the individual states that have relied most on federal research spending.
Keith E. Whittington
Volokh Conspiracy, Reason Magazine
Excerpt: Public and private universities are currently being scrutinized by politicians and political activists in ways that they have not been in many years. Moreover, government officials at both the state and federal level are intervening in the internal affairs of universities in ways that are nearly unprecedented.
In a new paper I take a more empirical and positive political theory approach to our current situation. There is an extensive literature on the politics of "independent" government institutions, from the judiciary to bureaucracies to central banks to international organizations. The conceptual apparatus and logic of those models can be turned toward thinking about the political conditions and political boundaries of university autonomy from government interventions.
Michael C. Bender
New York Time
Excerpt: When President Trump wants to rattle academia, he turns to his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. And then Mr. Miller turns to May Mailman.
Ms. Mailman, a 37-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer, is the most important, least-known person behind the administration’s relentless pursuit of the nation’s premier universities. The extraordinary effort has found seemingly endless ways to pressure schools into submission, including federal funding, student visas and civil rights investigations.
William C. Mao and Veronica H. Paulus
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 has told faculty that a deal with the Trump administration is not imminent and denied that the University is considering a $500 million settlement, according to three faculty members familiar with the matter.
The University is seriously considering resolving its dispute with the White House through the courts rather than a negotiated settlement, Garber said, according to the three faculty members.
John Warner
Academic Freedom On The Line, Substack
Excerpt: If you were to page through the decade-plus years of archives of my Inside Higher Ed blog you will find many criticisms of our nation's elite private universities.
My complaints and grievances as catalogued in these pieces are almost too numerous to mention. I do not approve of their distorting effects on college admissions; I find their claims of being meritocracies hollow; I decry their lousy leadership; I lament the amount of attention and money they suck up relative to their paltry share of the overall higher education sector. I'll end whatever suspense I've generated and say that no, Trump's proposal to significantly increase the tax on university endowments is not something I support.
Jonathan Allen, Nate Raymond
Reuters
Excerpt: Harvard University is dedicating $250 million of its own funds to support researchers after U.S. President Donald Trump's administration froze nearly $3 billion in federal grants and contracts in recent weeks, the university announced on Wednesday.
The elite Ivy League university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of Trump's most prominent targets. The Republican president has been making an extraordinary effort to revamp private colleges and schools across the U.S. that he says foster anti-American, Marxist and "radical left" ideologies. He has criticized Harvard in particular for hiring prominent Democrats to teaching or leadership positions.
Joe Cohn
Heterodox Academy
Excerpt: When protesters took over Columbia University’s Butler Library on May 7, prevented others from using the library for their studies, vandalized the building, and apparently assaulted university staff, they were not just violating the university's rules. They were also engaged in criminal activity.
As HxA has previously stated, the right to protest from any point of view on any topic is an essential aspect of freedom of speech vital to the health of college campuses. But the right does not extend to occupying buildings, excluding others from shared spaces, vandalism, violence, or any other attempt to disrupt the functioning of an institution of higher education. Those activities prevent others from engaging in open inquiry (including research and studying) and can—as they did at Butler Library—also endanger people.
William C. Mao and Veronica H. Paulus
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: At a Tuesday meeting of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra braced faculty for long-term changes amid what she acknowledged would be a drawn-out struggle with the Trump administration.
“Now, in this time of unprecedented challenge — more than ever — we need your collective wisdom to chart a path forward,” Hoekstra said. “These efforts will not be easy. Nothing about the current time is easy. The issues facing Harvard, and higher education as a whole, are as profound as any time in our nation’s history.” The meeting came one day after Secretary of Education Linda McMahon announced that the federal government would stop awarding grants to Harvard — and weeks into Harvard’s legal battle for more than $2.2 billion in frozen federal funds.
Nikki Han
Daily Princetonian
Excerpt: Princeton University faculty can only vote on proposals that are “actionable within the context of university operations,” not those simply expressing political positions or beliefs, after a vote at the faculty meeting on April 28.
Hundreds of faculty members filled the entire lower section of Alexander Hall in Richardson Auditorium for the vote. Ultimately, an overwhelming majority of faculty members supported the passing of the following amendment to Section II.C.2 of the Rules and Procedures of the Faculty, introduced by the Ad-hoc Committee on Faculty-Wide Statements:
Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution is True
Excerpt: Yes, Harvard should have already made some of these reforms, and I know it’s trying to enact some of them, but allowing political forces to control how colleges and universities are run takes one of America’s glories–the quality of its higher education that already attracts students from throughout the world–and turns it into an arm of one political party or another.
Michael I. Kotlikoff
New York Times
Excerpt: Cornell University recently hosted an event that any reputable P.R. firm would surely have advised against. On a calm campus, in a semester unroiled by protest, we chose to risk stirring the waters by organizing a panel discussion that brought together Israeli and Palestinian voices with an in-person audience open to all.
The week before, I extended a personal invitation to our student community, explaining that open inquiry “is the antidote to corrosive narratives” and is what enables us “to see and respect other views, work together across differences and conceive of solutions to intractable problems.”
Deborah Lipstadt
The Free Press
Excerpt: Until last week, I had been seriously considering teaching at Columbia University next year as a visiting professor. But I’m now convinced that to do so would be folly—to serve as a prop or a fig leaf. Moreover, I feel doing so would mean putting myself and my students at risk.
FIRE
Excerpt: The Senate is gearing up to vote on the Kids Online Safety Act as early as tomorrow. FIRE urges opposition to both the Senate (S. 1409) and House (H.R. 7891) versions of the bill because they treat Americans’ speech not as a fundamental right and an indispensable ingredient of human progress, but as a hazardous product.
This opens the door to insidious government regulation of speech of both minors and adults, which the bill enables by empowering the Federal Trade Commission to define how social media platforms can operate.
By Leslie Spencer
Princetonians for Free Speech
It’s no surprise that the University of Chicago has made by far the biggest, boldest and most serious move of any university in the country to confront the crisis of free speech and academic freedom at American universities. Chicago ranks #1 on FIRE’s survey for a reason. On October 5-6, the University of Chicago launched a new permanent entity, the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, with a ground-breaking inaugural event bringing together the country’s leading lights on the state of free speech at American universities to examine what the problem is, how we got here, and what might be done.
Excerpt: When Suha Chowdhury started a chapter of the humanitarian aid organization Islamic Relief at the University at Buffalo, she envisioned joining with her peers to fundraise for global causes and help Buffalo-area nonprofits—all with the support of her university.
On Feb. 28, U.S. and Israeli forces launched joint attacks on Iran, starting a war that has now lasted nearly four weeks.
Despite the 6,000-mile distance between New Jersey and Iran, many University community members have expressed concerns about the destruction happening in the Middle East, as well as confusion about American motivations for entering the war.
Princeton spent $240,000 on congressional lobbying in the first three months of the year, the second-highest spending total of any quarter in recorded history. The University’s Lobbying Disclosure Act filing shows lobbying efforts spanning issues including scientific research, financial aid, immigration issues, and the recently increased endowment tax.
The increased spending comes after the Trump administration cut hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants to the University, investigated Ivy League institutions over allegations of antisemitism, and ended a program sponsoring active-duty service members in graduate studies.
Last spring, Yale University President Maurie McInnis asked a group of faculty to examine why Americans were losing confidence in higher education—and to propose remedies to restore it.
Their much-anticipated findings, released Wednesday, call for changes to address everything from perceived political bias among faculty, to opaque admission standards and crushing student debt. “In its report, the committee calls on Yale to reflect on and take responsibility for our role in the erosion of public trust,” McInnis wrote. “I accept this judgment fully.”
More than 100 years ago, Stanford University terminated economics and sociology professor Edward Ross and set in motion a wild chain of events that would eventually result in the formal establishment of academic tenure in the United States.
Tenure isn’t solely a tool that protects controversial, outspoken faculty. It also protects faculty who conduct research that may lead them down risky paths, allowing them to pursue their research to its limits and previously unknown conclusions. It protects faculty whose work runs counter to the interests of the people in power. And it protects faculty who explore new pedagogical methods in the classroom as they attempt to innovate and push higher education in new directions.
The probability that universities can reform themselves from within, in the absence of powerful external pressure, is very close to zero.
People who have seriously thought about the state of our universities are not only skeptical about the possibility of reform from within, but are also pessimistic even about the possibility of creating successful new universities. My intention is not to discourage people from trying, far from it since I consider myself firmly in the camp of reformers, but rather to draw attention to the enormous obstacles we face.
Almost immediately after Donald Trump took office for the second time, the White House and the Department of Education launched a shock-and-awe assault against its perceived foes in higher education, announcing a new investigation or seizure of funding seemingly every week. Their targets appeared overwhelmed by the speed and severity of the offensive.
But the aggressive pace that won the administration so many early victories eventually proved to be its great weakness. The government could move so quickly only by skipping almost all of the procedural steps required by federal law. Once universities and their allies recovered from their shock and challenged the Trump administration, they were able to block many, if not most, of the White House’s moves in court. Trump has certainly left his mark on America’s universities. But he has not broken them.
Last month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made several announcements, stating he was ending partnerships with multiple highly selective colleges and universities that have long educated military service members. But it remains unclear what he’s actually canceling, why specific universities have been targeted or favored and what he plans to replace these programs with.
