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Jeff Yass
The Free Press

Excerpt: I am giving $100 million to the University of Austin because the feedback mechanisms of higher education are broken.

Almost every system that works, works because of feedback. Evolution works because helpful mutations survive while harmful ones die off. Democracy works because voters support effective leaders and remove ineffective ones. Markets work because prices tell producers when to ramp up or scale back. Science works because the data from an experiment tells the scientist how likely their hypothesis is to be false.

Daniel Miller and Jaweed Kaleem
LA Times

Excerpt: The University of Southern California on Thursday rejected the controversial education compact the Trump administration offered it and eight other schools, saying it would undermine “values of free inquiry and academic excellence.”

Henry F. Haidar 
Harvard Crimson 

Excerpt: Out of all the faculty The Crimson recently surveyed, only one percent described their political beliefs as very conservative. Think about that: someone is three times more likely to get into Harvard than to encounter a conservative faculty member here. 

Much can be — and has been — said in favor of viewpoint diversity in higher education. Yet those decrying the relative lack of conservative faculty overlooks a basic point: The structure of universities themselves lends itself to a professoriate whose politics do not perfectly map on to that of the public writ large. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Jeannie Suk Gersen
New Yorker

Excerpt: Last time U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs sided with Harvard in a case about the university’s alleged discrimination, it ended with the Supreme Court declaring race-conscious admissions unlawful at schools across the country. Harvard won its battle in the lower court on the way to losing the broader war.

On Wednesday, Judge Burroughs gave Harvard a win that vindicated broad principles at stake for universities and the rule of law. But the victory will not end Harvard’s pain, and it remains to be seen whether higher education can triumph in the end.

William C. Mao and Veronica H. Paulus
Harvard Crimson 

Excerpt: A Harvard administrator told two professors on Tuesday that a Black Lives Matter sign displayed in their office windows would be taken down by this Saturday, describing it as a violation of University-wide rules on using campus space.

Bence P. Ölveczky and Mansi Srivastava, professors of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, posted large block letters in their windows spelling out “Black Lives Matter” in 2020 as protests broke out nationwide over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Since then, the letters have faced out from the Northwest Science Building, where their labs are located.

By Jameel Jaffer, Alex Abdo, Katy Glenn Bass, Nadine Farid Johnson & Larry Siems
Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University 

Excerpt: After months of negotiation, Columbia University announced on July 23 that it had reached an agreement with the Trump administration to resolve investigations into alleged violations of federal anti-discrimination laws. 

We recognize that Columbia might have made some of these commitments on its own accord, without unconstitutional coercion from the Trump administration. But even if we assume, against the evidence, that Columbia would have adopted all of these commitments on its own, the settlement is a significant surrender of autonomy because the university has ceded the right to revise these commitments during the agreement’s three-year term.

Autumn Billings
Reason 

Excerpt: Secretary of State Marco Rubio launched an investigation into Harvard University's compliance with the government-run visa program for international students and professors on Wednesday—the latest flashpoint in the ongoing feud over campus control. 

In a letter reviewed by The New York Times, Rubio demanded records related to the school's participation in the Exchange Visitor Program, a program designed to promote educational and cultural exchange by bringing scholars and students to the United States for teaching and researching opportunities. "In a statement, Mr. Rubio said the investigation was aimed at verifying that the visa program does not 'compromise the national security interests of the United States,'" reported the Times.

Steven Pinker
New York Times

Excerpt: I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.”

Harvard is an intricate system that developed over centuries and constantly has to grapple with competing and unexpected challenges. The appropriate treatment (as with other imperfect institutions) is to diagnose which parts need which remedies, not to cut its carotid and watch it bleed out.

Tal Fortgang of the Manhattan Institute
Fox News

Excerpt: With the Trump administration threatening to cut off its federal support, Harvard recently released its long-awaited internal report detailing rampant national-origin discrimination on campus – especially against Israelis and Jews. The administration claims that Harvard is rotten to the bone, hollowed out by ideological one-sidedness and an emphasis on social-justice activism rather than genuine inquiry. The university has countered that while it is working on rooting out discrimination, the administration has "overreached" to target the substance of what is studied and taught.

Nick Gillespie 
Reason 

Excerpt: Today's guest is Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker and Reason's Nick Gillespie discuss recent shifts at Harvard toward greater institutional neutrality and free speech, while warning that threats to academic freedom now come from both internal ideologies and external political forces—including pressure from the federal government under President Donald Trump. 

John Tomasi 
Free the Inquiry, Heterodox Academy

Excerpt: In a rare and admirable act of institutional defiance, Harvard University has rejected demands from the Trump administration that would have compromised its autonomy, chilled academic freedom, and upended core principles of academia. The government’s letter to Harvard — citing a broad civil rights investigation — demanded detailed records, ideological audits, and structural changes that amount to an effort at direct political control. Harvard was right to say no.

The administration’s demands are a serious threat to academic freedom. Yet Harvard's resistance will ring hollow unless it pairs its bold defense of independence with an equally honest reckoning about the internal failures that made it vulnerable to such scrutiny in the first place.

Megan O'Rourke
New York Times

Excerpt: The rumors had been building for months: The Trump administration was coming for the universities. In the weeks after the president issued his first executive orders in January, the effects rippled through my academic world: A Rutgers conference on H.B.C.U.s was canceled; graduate students on visas asked a professor I know if it was safe for them to travel; a colleague at a public university texted about an undergraduate crying in his office, worried about the job landscape. 

Conservatives have been trying to reshape the American university since the federal government began funding it in earnest in the mid-20th century. But now the Trump administration appears prepared to destroy it.

David French
New York Times

Excerpt: Columbia University is now the epicenter of the American culture war. The Trump administration is targeting a former Columbia student — and the university itself — as a test case for its new authoritarian regime.

The story of Columbia isn’t simply about Mahmoud Khalil, a former graduate student in international affairs there who was one of the leaders of the pro-Palestinian protests that burst into view almost immediately after the Hamas terror attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. But when federal immigration officials showed up at his apartment building last weekend and whisked him away to a facility in Louisiana to begin deportation proceedings, they brought the malice and incompetence of the Trump administration into stark relief.

FIRE

 

Excerpt: It’s been three days since the government arrested and detained Mahmoud Khalil for deportation. This afternoon, the administration finally stated the basis for its actions. Its explanation threatens the free speech of millions of people.

 

Yesterday, an administration official told The Free Press, “The allegation here is not that [Khalil] was breaking the law.” This was confirmed today by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who announced Khalil is being targeted under a law that she characterized as allowing the secretary of state to personally deem individuals “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America.”

April 2, 2025 Roundtable
Should Universities Engage in Politics? A Roundtable Discussion on Academic Freedom and Institutional Neutrality
Anton Ford, Randall Kennedy, and Keith Whittington 
Princeton Council on Academic Freedom 

Excerpt: Please join us for a wide-ranging conversation about the philosophical and political stakes of academic neutrality, academic activism, and academic freedom - and the ways in which they intersect. Numerous peer institutions have recently adopted neutrality policies, which prohibit universities from adopting positions on political and social matters not directly tied to the mission of the university. Yet the merits of neutrality, as well as its feasibility, remain highly contested.

This event brings together three leading scholars who hold a range of differing positions on these questions in order to discuss whether, when, and how universities should take institutional stances on social and political issues, and the implications of such stances for academic freedom.

Nathan Heller
New Yorker

Excerpt: There would be debate about who struck the match that lit the fuse that spiraled around campus, but the sequence of events was plain enough to everyone who saw it burn. On October 9, 2023, two days after Hamas-led fighters from Gaza invaded Israel, killing twelve hundred people and taking more than two hundred hostages, Claudine Gay, the new president of Harvard University, exchanged e-mails with a small group of colleagues to draft a suitable response. Should they call the attacks “violent”? (Too charged, they decided.) Should they denounce a letter, signed by more than thirty student groups, which called Israel “the only one to blame”? The matter seemed delicate, and the administrators took time to work over their language. 

Santiago A. Saldivar
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: In the face of brazen governmental recommendations, Harvard must uphold the value of diversity.

About two weeks ago, the Department of Education released a Dear Colleague letter declaring all race-based decision-making by federally funded institutions illegal under the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision outlawing race-conscious admissions. Last year, after the long-overdue release of the class of 2028 admissions data revealed a four percent drop in Black enrollment, I called on Harvard to lay out its plans for increasing racial diversity in admissions. In light of the Trump administration’s attacks on race-conscious practices, that call to action remains more important than ever.

Tanya J. Vidhun
Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: Harvard Vice Provost for Advances in Learning Bharat N. Anand said the University is encouraging teachers to broach controversial subjects in classrooms at a Harvard Graduate School of Education virtual event on Thursday.

The University has been widely criticized in recent years for both speech policies and a perceived lack of ideological diversity. After a year of exceptional protest activity, Harvard officials have launched a series of initiatives aimed at improving dialogue and understanding the campus speech climate and academic freedom.

Jerry Coyne 
Why Evolution is True

Excerpt: As you know the University of Chicago was the first higher-ed school in America to adopt a position of institutional neutrality. This was done in 1967, with the principle embodied in our Kalven Report.  Kalven prohibits the University or its units, including departments and centers, from taking official stands on political, moral, and ideological issues—save in those cases where the issue is one that could affect the mission of our University.  According to FIRE, which approves of this position of institutional neutrality, some 29 other colleges or boards of education have joined Chicago in adopting one.

Deviations from the position of neutrality are rare, but this morning we learned that our President, Paul Alivisatos, has declared official University opposition to the Trump’s administration of slashing “indirect costs” on NIH grants.

Stephanie Saul
New York Times

Excerpt: Columbia University and one of its longtime law professors, Katherine Franke, have severed ties after an investigation stemming from her advocacy on behalf of pro-Palestinian students.

It was the latest fallout from student and faculty activism related to the Gaza War on a major university campus. Ms. Franke, a tenured professor known primarily for her work as founder and director of Columbia’s Center for Gender & Sexuality Law, had been an advocate for pro-Palestinian students as protests erupted on the campus last school year.

John Aubrey Douglass
University World News

Excerpt: Over the past five years or so, there has been a significant increase in faculty votes of no confidence in their university and college presidents in the United States. These votes are an indicator of an evolving and increasingly challenging environment for university and college leadership, as well as evidence of a decline in shared governance – an environment that will likely become even more complex with Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Michele Exner
Law & Liberty

Excerpt: Higher education is an important part of our society, so the question then becomes, how do we work to restore trust in these institutions? How can we work to truly make them neutral learning grounds where students can come to discuss ideas without having to fear retribution for their political beliefs?

In You Can’t Teach That! The Battle Over University Classrooms, Keith Whittington, a professor and scholar who has spent decades writing on the cross-section of academic freedom and the US Constitution, provides a well-researched and resourced analysis of the current issues facing colleges and universities, specifically public institutions.

Talia Barnes
Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression

Excerpt: In an August 14 letter to the campus community, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik announced her resignation after serving in the role for just over 13 months. She referred to “a period of turmoil where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community” and “tension, division, and politicization” that has “disrupted our campus over the last year.”

Jeffrey Flier
The Atlantic

Excerpt: In a recent op-ed in The Harvard Crimson—“Faculty Speech Must Have Limits”—the university’s dean of social science, Lawrence Bobo, made an extraordinary set of claims that seriously threaten academic freedom, including the chilling idea that faculty members who dare to criticize the university should be punished.

Bobo is a senior administrator at Harvard, overseeing centers and departments including history, economics, sociology, and African and African American studies. When he writes about faculty free speech, those within and outside his division listen.

Philanthropy Roundtable

Excerpt: Throughout commencement season, colleges and universities around the country continue to grapple with how to handle a new wave of protests, encampments and even violence as pro-Palestinian activists disrupt campus life and engage in antisemitic behavior. As a result, the responses from higher ed administrators are under intense scrutiny as they make decisions on how to deal with protester demands, campus safety and the rights and freedoms of students and faculty.  

Philanthropy Roundtable encourages donors to continue supporting higher education to help advance the reform it desperately needs. In this piece, we discuss one such strategy: by supporting an existing academic center or founding a new one, donors can engage in effective and high-impact grantmaking to improve the intellectual environment at universities.

Bill Ackman
The Free Press

Excerpt: In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.

I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem. It was simply a troubling warning sign—it was the “canary in the coal mine”—despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.  I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

Coco Gong and Judy Gao
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: The long-running debate about whether or not Universities should release statements on national and global events debate has been thrust into the limelight with recent Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action and abortion, as well as international conflicts that impact members of the student body. The recent conflict in Israel and Gaza, for instance, has placed considerable pressure on universities across the nation regarding their official statements, and different University leaders have taken different stances on how to respond.

Richard Corcoran
Wall Street Journal

Excerpt: Anti-Semitism has reared its ugly head at Harvard. Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre of some 1,400 Israelis, Jewish students there have reportedly been bullied, intimidated, spat on and, in at least one case, physically assaulted. Student-led protests call for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people with chants of “Intifada! Intifada! Intifada!” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free!”

John Tierney
City Journal

Excerpt: After Harvard student groups blamed Israel for Hamas’s atrocities, the global backlash was so fierce that the university’s president, Claudine Gay, released a video statement that in some ways proved even more puzzling. “Our university rejects the harassment or intimidation of individuals based on their beliefs,” she said. “And our university embraces a commitment to free expression. That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous.”

This was news to the scholars with unpopular views at Harvard who have been sanctioned by administrators, boycotted by students, and slandered by the Crimson student newspaper.

Michael Powell
New York Times

Excerpt: Yoel Inbar, a noted psychology professor at the University of Toronto, figured he might be teaching this fall at U.C.L.A. Last year, the university’s psychology department offered his female partner a faculty appointment. Now the department was interested in recruiting him as a so-called partner hire, a common practice in academia. The university asked him to fill out the requisite papers, including a statement that affirmed his belief and work in diversity, equity and inclusion. He flew out and met with, among others, a faculty diversity committee and a group of graduate students.
 
But a few days later, the department chair emailed and told him that more than 50 graduate students had signed a letter strongly denouncing his candidacy. Why? In part, because on his podcast years earlier, he had opposed diversity statements — like the one he had just written.

Rick Sobey
Boston Herald
 
Excerpt: Just as the school year kicks off and students return to campus, Harvard University has been ranked as the worst college for free speech in the country. Harvard ranked last out of 248 colleges in a survey of more than 55,000 students across the U.S., receiving the only “Abysmal” rating in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and College Pulse free speech rankings.

“Each year, the climate on college campuses grows more inhospitable to free speech,” said FIRE Director of Polling and Analytics Sean Stevens.

By Todd J. Zywicki
Minding the Campus

Excerpt: Identifying the problems does not answer the more important question: what is to be done? What practical, real-world policy responses are available that might arrest, then reverse, the decline of modern American higher education? And, equally important, what policy proposals will not have unintended consequences that will actually make matters worse?

Kate Hidalgo Bellows and Jasper Smith
Chronicle of Higher Education

Excerpt: Faculty members at Columbia University say they disagree with a pro-Palestinian student group’s recent endorsement of violence, but some support the group’s right to express that sentiment.

On October 8, Columbia University Apartheid Divest — or CUAD — revoked an apology it made in the spring on behalf of a student activist who posted a video of himself saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” The group, an unrecognized coalition of student organizations, said in last week’s statement that the apology was written by several organizers, not the student, and did not represent the group’s values.

Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed

Excerpt: After months of delaying a planned vote on the issue, the University of California’s Board of Regents voted 13 to 1 Thursday to prohibit academic departments and other academic units from posting political statements on their website homepages.

The ban comes after some UC departments posted statements supporting Palestinians. Josiah Beharry, the student member on the board, was the only no vote.

Abigail Anthony
National Review

Excerpt: Columbia University president Minouche Shafik condemned the “intimidating and harassing behavior” that has occurred on the New York City campus over the past several days and announced that classes would be held remotely on Monday.

“Antisemitic language, like any other language that is used to hurt and frighten people, is unacceptable and appropriate action will be taken,” Shafik said in a statement. She further suggested that “tensions have been exploited and amplified by individuals who are not affiliated with Columbia who have come to campus to pursue their own agendas.”

Hayk Yengibaryan
Daily Princetonian

Excerpt: Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence in Princeton University’s politics department and the director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, announced in a public Facebook post Monday that he has resigned from the board of trustees of the Heritage Foundation after six years. George’s resignation came amid a weeks-long controversy in the right-wing think tank after its president defended Tucker Carlson’s interview with far-right commentator Nick Fuentes.

George did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication