davidsonians-for-freedom-of-thought-and-discourse-80376

When One Viewpoint Dominates, Everyone Loses

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:21:10 GMT

At Davidson College, just 3% of faculty fall into a political minority, highlighting a clear imbalance.

According to the North Carolina State Board of Elections , the Davidson College faculty includes very few Republican Party-affiliated scholars. A DFTD investigation of publicly available voter registration records found that Republicans make up just 3.17% of the total faculty. In comparison, nearly half ( 46.03% ) are registered Democrats, and the rest are unaffiliated (27.78%) or unregistered (23.02%). With all but six departments in the hard sciences and social sciences not currently employing a single Republican, this raises questions about ideological diversity at the college and whether certain voices may be excluded or disadvantaged in the hiring process because of their views.

While this is not evidence itself that Republicans are barred from hiring in any way, or that political party affiliation accounts for all ideological preferences or a full ideological picture of the college faculty, the implications of such an imbalance, possibly influenced by bias in the hiring process, are concerning. In 2025, DFTD successfully advocated for the removal of ideological screening via diversity statements in hiring, but it will not be enough to truly impact political or ideological diversity. With faculty-driven hiring, the closed-loop model can reinforce any preexisting biases.

The need for a hiring process that considers the importance of including a wide range of perspectives is vital to a healthy academic culture. Without it, avenues of intellectual inquiry for students in class and among their professors as a faculty body are limited, and each person is deprived of the nuanced insights and challenges that an open faculty with a wider range of viewpoints can foster through rigorous disagreement and challenges to the biases of individuals across the political spectrum.

Although political affiliation is not the only factor to consider in creating an ideologically diverse learning environment, as the excellent scholars at Davidson College are more than capable of considering and fairly representing views that differ from their own, the partisan imbalance suggests that certain perspectives may be far more prevalent throughout the college. It remains important to consider whether such an imbalance creates conditions that allow for certain types of bias that would otherwise be challenged.

The quest for political diversity in higher education is in no way exclusive to Davidson. In the essay Diversifying the Academy , Professor Brian T. Fitzpatrick of Vanderbilt Law School lays out the dilemma of achieving political and ideological diversity as he has experienced it as a longtime member of the Vanderbilt Law faculty. We encourage you to read the full essay to get a sense of the importance and difficulty of maintaining a faculty makeup that features a wide range of viewpoints at any institution.

We hope the faculty will encourage courageous inquiry that remains open to thinkers of various perspectives. Such an aspiration is essential to maintaining standards of rigorous inquiry and thoughtful work free from bias. The presence of such standards is vital so that students can continually learn from the expectation to uphold them, thus enabling their adequate preparation for lives of learning, leadership, and service.

Harvard Faculty Cut A Grades by Nearly 7 Percentage Points in Fall

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 16:31:02 GMT

By Abigail S. Gerstein and Amann S. Mahajan, Crimson Staff Writers

The Harvard Crimson

January 27, 2026

Harvard faculty awarded significantly fewer A grades in the fall, cutting the share of top marks by nearly seven percentage points after the College urged instructors to combat grade inflation, according to a Monday afternoon email obtained by The Crimson.

The email, which was addressed to Faculty of Arts and Sciences instructors and sent by Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh, reported that the share of flat As fell from 60.2 percent in the 2024-2025 academic year to 53.4 percent in the fall.

The decline follows a 25-page report Claybaugh released in October 2025 arguing that grade inflation had rendered the College’s grading system unable to “perform the key functions of grading” and encouraging stricter academic measures, including standardized grading across sections and in-person final exams.

Colleges Didn’t Only Lose Their Value—They Lost Their Way

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:55:45 GMT

Student evaluations subject professors to perverse incentives.

By Mark Schneider

The American Enterprise Institute

January 14, 2026

Last November, a faculty report from UC San Diego showed that over the past five years, the number of freshmen placed in remedial math had increased thirtyfold . Reactions ranged from sober warnings about declining readiness to claims of a collegiate “math horror show.” In response, some commentators argued that treating the findings as a problem reflected a culture-war misunderstanding about equity, student success, or what colleges “really do.”

That reaction entirely misses the point. The UC San Diego report exposed something far more consequential. American colleges are failing at one of their core economic functions: They are no longer acting as credible gatekeepers for employers.

For decades, a degree from a selective college meant something. Employers could assume they were hiring from the top of the talent pool. Not because colleges magically transformed students, but because admissions and subsequent academic standards filtered for readiness, persistence, and cognitive skills. Colleges did the sorting up front, so employers didn’t have to.

That system is now weakening, largely thanks to the choices made by colleges and universities themselves.

An analysis of admissions and transcript records from a selection of elite colleges found that standardized test scores were far better predictors of first-year academic performance than high school GPA, even after accounting for race, gender, and socioeconomic status. The research showed that students admitted without test scores perform much worse in college courses than their peers who were admitted with test scores. In other words, tests contain real information, and colleges know it.

So why have so many institutions abandoned them? A recent paper on test-optional admissions offers a blunt answer: social pressure.

Furman Free Speech Alliance has the Right Idea.

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 19:41:38 GMT

Furman Free Speech Alliance has the Right Idea.

The Furman Free Speech Alliance is an independent alumni organization and a fellow member of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance. In a January 2026 letter to Furman University President Elizabeth Davis, they engaged university leadership on the importance of pairing strong free-expression protections with genuine viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement. For Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse (DFTD), this letter underscores the growing coordination among alumni groups across peer institutions, demonstrating how members of AFSA are constructively and publicly engaging university leaders to advance the academic conditions necessary for meaningful inquiry.

January 12, 2026
President Elizabeth Davis
Furman University
3300 Poinsett Highway
Greenville, SC 29613

Dear Elizabeth:

Happy New Year. This is the bicentennial year for Furman. There is much to celebrate and much to reflect upon. The FFSA looks forward to all the plans that seek out alumni participation.

I would like to begin the year with some reflections on the idea of “a whole campus culture of open inquiry,” a phrase drawn from Heterodox President John Tomasi, who joined you at the Tocqueville Forum in October and gave a subsequent interview with the FFSA.

For a campus to support a culture of open inquiry it needs three elements says Tomasi: “First, it [needs] protections for the free exchange of ideas. Second, it [needs] a variety of viewpoints on the campus — among the faculty, students, administration, and trustees. Third, it [needs] constructive disagreement.”

One element alone is insufficient. Indeed, a campus with two of the elements, no matter how robust and imbued with institutional support they might be, will fail to build “the conditions for scholarship” at a university.

Why?

Because “if you have a university that has formal protection for the free exchange of ideas, but everyone there thinks pretty much the same way, you don’t have viewpoint diversity. If you formally protect the free exchange of ideas and you have a variety of viewpoints on the campus, but the viewpoints are all balkanized into the different groups so people aren’t listening to each other, you don’t have constructive disagreement.”

On a campus where free speech is encouraged, where there are true differences of opinion, and where disagreement is looked upon as constructive, there you have what Tomasi calls a “magical process” that creates a culture of open inquiry.

Of the three, the hardest to create is viewpoint diversity.

We know this at Furman.

Your excellent Statement on Freedom of Inquiry and Free Expression demonstrated Furman’s commitment to the first element, a culture of open inquiry through the protection of free speech. Your creation of On Discourse addresses the issue of constructive discourse by teaching skills such as active listening. Taken together, these are critical steps toward creating a campus culture of open inquiry.

But without viewpoint diversity, notes Tomasi, “‘civil dialogue’ risks becoming academic theater: earnest, well-mannered, but intellectually parochial.”

And he insists that in a monochromatic political environment, speech can be very free and dialogue can be very civil, but real inquiry can be completely sterile.

Concerns about Furman’s homogeneous political culture were a key reason we created the FFSA. (See our Mission Statement ) The Paladin’s own reporting , along with a recent survey by City Journal , finds that the faculty is far less politically diverse than the student body.

The reason this matters lies at the core of what the university stands for.

As Tomasi has written:

“the goal is not ‘balance’ for its own sake. It is to rebuild the conditions for scholarship: conditions in which bad ideas lose because better evidence comes to light, not because they are invisible (or unutterable); conditions in which students and faculty learn to evaluate arguments they dislike, not just perform tolerance; conditions in which disciplines remain curious enough to notice what they have stopped noticing.”

The lack of viewpoint diversity on campus is a major roadblock to achieving what Furman wants to achieve -- a campus culture of open inquiry.

Are there ways to address this problem? I offer two, admittedly tentative, thoughts at this point.

That you lead a forum on viewpoint diversity, through On Discourse or the Tocqueville Project, or both. Presidents at other universities also struggle with this issue. Invite them to campus, along with your faculty, students, administrators, trustees, and alumni, to analyze the problem and explore potential solutions.
As I mentioned in my last letter to you, the Furman Magazine can challenge alumni to give serious thought to campus issues. Invite Furman professors or write scholarly essays for the magazine on the topic of viewpoint diversity and the mission of the university. This would be an excellent way to start working through this issue, while bringing the expertise of your alumni to bear on this vexing problem.

All the best for the New Year,
Jeffrey Salmon
President
Furman Free Speech Alliance

2025 Wrapped

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 18:42:05 GMT

Our 2025 In Review

Dear Fellow Davidsonian,

Happy New Year to all, and many thanks to those of you who have supported us this past year! We especially appreciate your financial support of DFTD and greatly need it if we are to continue our work.

For DFTD to be successful in ensuring Freedom of Thought & Discourse, we need to ensure students can learn from each other while comfortably exchanging ideas. Students need to be educated on how to think, not what to think. We have watched and quantified how the progressive and now illegal DEI policies disable Davidson’s long-standing values of honor, integrity, and academic rigor.

Regrettably, freedom of speech and expression of ideas is not a given at Davidson or on most college campuses. It will take loyal alumni to protect these values, which is why we were a founding member of AFSA (Alumni Free Speech Association) , a group that has grown to include more than 30 coalitions of alumni advocating for freedom of expression at their respective alma maters.

These alumni groups include those from UNC, Stanford, Harvard, Cornell, MIT, Princeton, Williams, Dartmouth, UVA, Berkeley, Yale, Furman, Chicago, and many more. On our sister campuses, we’ve seen the toppling of 5 college Presidents, robust DOJ investigations, new civic institutions embedded in many, and incredibly strong alumni support. What is happening nationally through AFSA underscores the power of alumni engagement.

WE’VE HAD SOME MAJOR 2025 ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

DFTD helped to establish a group of students form a free speech group, and gave students the confidence to launch other new student organizations. One such group won the Young Americans for Freedom 2025 national Rookie Chapter of the Year award. A new Turning Point USA chapter at Davidson was also created in 2025. Students are feeling the freedom to be bold because of us!

DFTD successfully influenced the Administration to reform the hiring practices of all faculty and instructional staff . This included much-needed revised language in all Davidson College job postings so they would no longer have mandatory DEI statements and requirements that would be a deterrent for many potential applicants. We brought back true balance and meritocracy to the employment process.

DFTD, joined by FIRE, successfully advocated for the free speech rights of both an individual and a student organization facing harsh sanctions related to an alleged anonymous report of a harassment policy violation. While the student was never publicly exonerated, the issue was resolved without penalty to the individual or group. We privately advised the administration to take a different path in announcing the resolution, but when they did not, Davidson’s treatment of this issue received negative national publicity-even Elon Musk tweeted about it!

We awarded the Robert Murray Scholarship for Excellence in Free Expression, granting three students $5,000 scholarships for the 2025–26 academic year in recognition of their commitment to open inquiry and free expression. Applications open annually in the spring.

We hired 2 student interns to work with DFTD staff to support event efforts and research. One of last year’s interns joined the Heritage Foundation directly after graduation, inspired by her work with us.

DFTD hosted, and 4 members of DFTD and 2 current students were featured speakers at the 2025 AFSA National Summit held in Charlotte, NC.

DFTD expanded campus programming during the 2025 academic year by partnering with three student organizations to sponsor five guest speakers and two public debates, broadening the range of viewpoints represented in campus dialogue. (Past event recordings can be found at dftdunite.org/events ) Some of our generous supporters sponsored a particular speaker, a wonderful way to target your donations if you choose!

Many of you participated in a survey of DFTD supporters to help guide the path for DFTD initiatives. We will act on many of your suggestions.

We developed and distributed educational resources on free expression, academic freedom, and civil discourse tailored specifically to Davidson College policies and student life. This gives students a better understanding of their rights as students, the importance of free speech, and how to navigate if an issue does arise.

DFTD Board members joined other AFSA and civic groups at a US Congress in a roundtable discussion of free speech issues on college campuses throughout the United States. The roundtable was hosted by Davidson Alumnus Congressman Greg Murphy, M.D. ‘85. [Watch the replay]

In 2025, we expanded our audience across all platforms by more than 35%, with a total of over 1,350 alumni, students, faculty, and staff hearing from DFTD. Our message is spreading! Help us reach more alumni by forwarding this email to fellow wildcats.

OUTSIDE & INSIDE ENTITIES SEE THE LACK OF FREE SPEECH AT DAVIDSON:

Despite all DFTD has tried to do since its founding in 2019 to address free speech issues, in 2025, Davidson was given yet another poor free speech rating by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Davidson has repeatedly been given consecutive D ratings for its institutional failure in promoting and protecting free speech on campus. Even worse, in 2025, the prestigious Manhattan Institute gave Davidson a failing grade of 51/100 in its ability to protect student free speech based on its own independent research and survey.

Interestingly, and at great expense, the College conducted its own survey in 2025 of faculty and students on these free speech issues, but has yet to publicly release the results. Why not? Despite having criticized the methodology of the independent surveys cited, we suspect the College’s own surveys have revealed similar systemic issues, and the Administration does not want to acknowledge that those on its campus feel the restrictive pressure.

OUR WORK CONTINUES:

In 2026, we hope to continue to build on these successes and will continue to apprise you of our efforts in our Newsletters and through emails like this one. We have ambitious goals for 2026 including:

Encouraging President Hicks to agree to Institutional Neutrality, something 41 other colleges/universities have already implemented.

Advocating for the removal the anonymous bias reporting system, currently stifling free speech at Davidson and on approximately 1300 other campuses across the US.

Increasing the ideological balance of Professors and Administrators at the college by partnering with the Heterodox Academy, a nationwide group of professors who have signed up to support free speech.

Continuing to bring inspirational speakers and debates to campus. Some of you supported key speakers last year, a wonderful way to target your donation.

Shining the light on the skyrocketing costs & expenses caused by the growth of a bloated administration and DEI that has now brought the yearly tuition up a whopping $92,500 per year.

Finally, working to uncover why 75% of 2024 graduates achieved cum laude or above and pushing to ensure that all classes are of the highest academic standards, preparing students for professional success.

There is still much work to be done. Join us!

Board of Directors

Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse

The Economic Roots of Grade Inflation

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 20:47:00 GMT

Student evaluations subject professors to perverse incentives.

By Joseph Epstein

Wall Street Journal

December 11, 2025

The one form of inflation that can’t be blamed on Joe Biden is grade inflation. Evidence of this practice is the preponderance of A’s in student grades at Harvard and other formerly elite universities and colleges. Nearly everyone these days turns out to be an A student.

While many factors have contributed to grade inflation, I believe it began in earnest as student evaluations became widespread in the 1960s—an offshoot of the student protest movement of that day. At a term’s close, students graded their teachers. These evaluations could affect whether an academic department bestowed tenure on a young professor or promoted an associate professor. A large number of negative evaluations could do a teacher in, even cause him to be fired.

Student evaluations encouraged informality in the classroom. Many young professors ceased to come across as authority figures, but presented themselves as contemporaries of their students, all but equals. Professors no longer regularly wore jackets and ties or dresses to class, but came in jeans. They addressed students by their first names, and in some cases encouraged students to do the same to them. Love affairs between young professors and undergraduates, once the cause of scandal and immediate dismissal, became more common. It isn’t easy to give a C or D, let alone an F, to someone with whom you are sleeping.

Student evaluations tended to be unimpressive, if those I received during my years teaching English at Northwestern University are any example. “This guy knows his stuff,” read one. “I like his bow ties,” read another. “I wish some of the novels in this course weren’t so long,” went one, complaining less about me than about Henry James. I retired from teaching in 2002, and only one interesting evaluation sticks in my mind after all these years: “I did well in this course, but then I would have been ashamed not to have done.”

But the real effect of student evaluations was to make many professors change how they issued grades. A teacher known as “a tough grader” might fail to attract students and receive negative student evaluations in ways that could affect his professional future.

Soon, A’s were flying about the joint. An A became less a sign of intellectual superiority than a common grade, like the Gentleman’s C of an earlier day. The students attending Northwestern, as at many other schools, have what I call “the habits of achievement.” They did what their professors asked of them—read the book, wrote the paper—and usually on time. What the hell, why not give them A’s? Who gets hurt if in a classroom of 30 students you as the teacher give out 24 A’s? Nobody, really.

All that is forfeited is the notion of merit. A meritocracy sets a standard, posits an ideal, gives the more ambitious people in a society something to look up to and to shoot for. It can’t exist when nearly everyone is an A student.

Not that school grades are the only measure, or even an especially good measure, of intelligence. Many a genius has been not all that good at learning in a formal school setting: Blaise Pascal, Leo Tolstoy and Albert Einstein are notable examples. Perhaps they were bored by school; perhaps they saw too far beyond what the classroom had to offer.

Still, lowering classroom standards by inflating grades can’t help. Making everyone equal only levels out society, in some cases sending the wrong people to medical and other professional schools and allowing too many people to have an exaggerated idea of themselves. Like other forms of inflation, grade inflation ultimately means exaggeration—and neither in the marketplace, nor in the classroom, is exaggeration a good thing.

Mr. Epstein is author, most recently, of “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life.”

City Journal College Ranking -Davidson Results

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 22:45:57 GMT

Written by John Craig

December 10, 2025

On October 27, the Manhattan Institution’s City Journal published a major, breakthrough analysis of the performance of 100 prominent US (and one Canadian) universities and colleges, “Introducing the City Journal College Rankings,” For the first time, this new performance system includes data on measures (68 in all) like freedom of expression, viewpoint diversity tolerance, quality of instruction, investment payoff, and campus politicization that are not considered in the other major higher ed ranking systems.

How did Davidson measure up in City Journal’s performance assessment? On a scale of one (bottom) to five (top) stars , Davidson is among the 63 schools that received 2 stars. Schools that, according to City Journal, have “Mostly average to below-average scores in all categories with no particularly noteworthy strengths. Significant, focused policy changes are needed at these schools.” (Full rankings available here College Rankings | Rankings )

To summarize the methodology, the City Journal team selected 100 schools that are highly touted by other ranking systems, widely known to the American public, and/or of high regional importance. The researchers gathered data on 68 variables across 21 categories covering four major aspects of on- and off-campus life. The Educational Experience categories were Faculty Ideological Pluralism, Faculty Teaching Quality, Faculty Research Quality, Faculty Speech Climate, Curricular Rigor, and Heterodox Infrastructure; the Leadership Quality categories were Commitment to Meritocracy, Support for Free Speech, and Resistance to Politicization; the Outcomes categories were Quality of Alumni Network, Value Added to Career, and Value Added to Education; and the Student Experience categories were Student Ideological Pluralism, Student Free Speech, Student Political Tolerance, Student Social Life, Student Classroom Experience, Campus ROTC, Student Community Life, and Jewish Campus Climate. No other higher ed ranking system includes as many variables. (Read more about methodology at College Rankings | Methods )

The data included publicly available information from sources such as the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the Department of Education’s College Scorecard, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s College Free Speech Rankings. The researchers also developed original measures for the project, such as the ideological balance of student political organizations and the partisan makeup of faculty campaign contributions.

Each variable was coded so that higher values mean better performance and was weighted to reflect relative importance. For example, student ideological pluralism (as measured by self-reported student ideology and the left-right balance of student organizations) accounts for 5 percent of a school’s score while City Journal’s estimate of how many years it will take the typical student to recoup their educational investment to attend a given college accounts for 12.5 percent. A school’s overall score is the sum of points across the 21 categories, with the top possible score being 100. While the assessment system is for the most part hard-data-based, it has, like other ranking systems, subjective elements—like the weighing system. So methodological challenges will come and will doubtlessly lead to improvements the next time around. That said, the methodology strikes me as defensible and a marked improvement over that of other popular rating systems.

I will conclude with some comments on the findings.

Note that the Average score (out of 100) for the 100 institutions is 46 and the median score is 45.73—so overall, this is not a “high performance” group of institutions.
No institution receives a 5-Star rating, and only two receive a 4-Star rating (University of Florida and University of Texas at Austin).
Only 11 schools receive a 3-Star rating—Having “Mixed results across the four categories, showing strengths in some and weakness in others. These schools typically have several clear paths to improvement.”
Because assessment scores are generally low and tightly clustered in the middle, the rankings by score are misleading: Davidson, at 51.16 with a rank of 25, looks to be in the top quartile (between Princeton and Georgetown), but in fact gets just a 2-Star assessment

Harvard Says It’s Handing Out Too Many A’s. Students Are Fighting Back.

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 19:40:49 GMT

Report from Ivy League school finds rampant grade inflation, but students complain administration is moving goal posts

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—The last time Jake Kamnikar remembers receiving anything other than an A on his transcript was in third-grade art class. He is now a freshman at Harvard.

That streak could end soon.

A recent internal report found that Harvard is dishing out too many A’s, and that the current undergrad system is “failing to perform the key functions of grading” and “damaging the academic culture of the College more generally.”

The report prompted uproar from some Harvard students who say they already study a lot, sleep very little and face immense stress to perform academically. Many feel they worked hard to get into Harvard, only for the school to contemplate moving the goal posts.

“You admitted these students because they have straight A’s, and now they’re getting a lot of A’s, and it’s, like, ‘This is a problem.’ And I’m thinking, how on earth is that a problem?” said Summer Tan, a Harvard senior.

Harvard’s report on its undergraduate college found that about 60% of grades were A’s during the 2024-25 school year, a jump from about 25% in 2005-06. The median GPA upon graduation is now 3.83, up from 3.29 in 1985.

The average time students spend studying outside class has barely changed, from 6.08 hours a week for each of their courses in fall 2006 to 6.3 hours this spring, according to the report by Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education. New faculty reported surprise at how lenient grading is, and nearly all expressed “serious concern” about grade inflation.

Making the Grade

An internal report showed Harvard College is giving out more ‘A’ grades and students are graduating with higher GPAs.

“We’re not trying to make Harvard something that it’s not,” Claybaugh said in an interview. “We’re trying to bring it back to what it was when it was really at its best.”

The report includes recommendations to curb grade inflation and restore rigor. Harvard is considering introducing a limited number of A-plus grades, and displaying the median grade for every course on transcripts to provide more context to employers and admissions committees.

Students have bashed and bemoaned the report across campus. One told the student newspaper she was crying “the whole entire day.” Some cited the college’s increased selectivity in admissions as justification for higher grades.

One challenge in addressing grade inflation, particularly for professors, is the fear that cracking down could send enrollment plummeting. Claybaugh plans to host a dinner with faculty to discuss grading plans, and has encouraged them to revert to how they graded 10 years ago.

Steven Pinker, a professor who teaches an introductory psychology course, said he has felt compelled to inflate grades at a similar rate to the collegewide data, even though he believes student performance has sunk.

Pinker has given a similar final exam since 2003, and now sees students score 10 percentage points lower on the multiple-choice portion. (He doesn’t know whether his sample group is the same, though: It is possible better students now are skipping his course in favor of a neuroscience one).

“A course with a reputation for a tough grading distribution will repel students,” Pinker said. “Everyone has an incentive to keep inflating grades unless everyone else stops simultaneously.” A separate study published by Harvard this spring, however, found that course difficulty and grades had a minimal effect on the scores students gave instructors on evaluations.

Many students recognize both sides of the grade-inflation argument. Alfred Williamson sees a disparity between his two majors. He said he has coasted through some classes for his government major, but has to work harder in his physics major.

“The classes where you can get away with not doing readings and not studying and not engaging in discussions, and still do well—that’s the real problem,” said Williamson, a sophomore.

But too much rigor disincentivizes academic exploration, students say. Williamson thought twice about majoring in physics because he worried it could lower his GPA and prove challenging if he applies to law school.

Tan, the college senior who had straight A’s in high school, said she sleeps about six hours per night, though during some stretches of college it has been three or four. She is juggling a part-time job at an ice-cream shop and about 35 hours a week as vice president of a campus politics center, among other extracurriculars.

“It’s not like I’ve managed to breeze my way through Harvard,” she said, pointing to B’s and some humanities courses with heavy reading loads.

Kamnikar, the freshman and economics and psychology double-major, thinks Harvard students should expect to be held to higher standards. But, he added that “learning should be inquisitive and not unnecessarily stressful or demanding.”

The root of Harvard students’ stress is generally their ambition, Claybaugh said. “When they weren’t all getting A’s, they were stressed. And now that they are all getting A’s, they are still stressed,” she said.

Grade inflation isn’t confined to Harvard; the problem has drawn President Trump’s scrutiny . He asked colleges to “commit to grade integrity” in his administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” an agreement it wants universities to sign in exchange for federal-funding advantages.

“It has reached a comical level of inflation,” said Christopher Schorr, director of the higher-education reform initiative at America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank.

Princeton University capped the number of A’s starting in 2004, but discontinued that practice after finding the policy increased stress, among other issues. Other schools didn’t follow suit, creating uneven comparisons for graduates.

Experts hope that this time around other schools will follow Harvard. Claybaugh said she has heard from peer institutions since the report was released.

In any case, the debate has been raging for years. In 1894, less than a decade after the grading system was put into place, a standards committee at Harvard said that A’s and B’s were sometimes given “too readily.”

Write to Roshan Fernandez at roshan.fernandez@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications
Harvard students spent an average of 6.3 hours a week this spring studying outside of class for each of their courses, compared with 6.08 hours a week in fall 2006. An earlier version of this article incorrectly failed to state that the weekly study hours are per course. (Corrected on Nov. 12.)

Colleges Face a Financial Reckoning. The University of Chicago Is Exhibit A.

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 17:45:15 GMT

Decades of big spending, new federal funding cuts and a changing view of higher education created a perfect storm; ‘Spending Your Tuition On Its Mistakes’

The Wall Street Journal

By Sara Randazzo and Heather Gillers

October 30, 2025

The school that produced Milton Friedman and 34 other Nobel Prize-winning economists is struggling to manage its pocketbook.

The University of Chicago ran budget deficits for 14 years straight, spending big on new labs, dorms and technology to raise its profile and enrollment. Now it’s facing a financial reckoning.

Over the summer, university leaders said they needed to cut $100 million in expenses. They decided to slow tenure-track hiring, scale back new construction and pause admissions to nearly 20 Ph.D. programs for a year. They’ve been aggressively fundraising and soft launched a new capital campaign.

By the time freshmen arrived in September with their minifridges and extra-long sheets, disgruntled faculty and graduate students had printed up flyers. Families—many paying $71,000 a year—were handed a paper that read “UChicago: Spending Your Tuition On Its Mistakes.”

UChicago added dorms, labs, dining areas and an arts center to its picturesque campus, part of an effort to make the famously nerdy school a more inviting place.

The university is an acute example of the financial woes plaguing higher education. Even before President Trump’s federal funding cuts, many schools were already stretched by years of competitive spending. Their budget struggles are in many cases more than a decade in the making, and it’s not just far-flung state universities or D-list private colleges suffering.

As schools scramble to make cutbacks, they face broader questions about what kind of university they can be in this new era of financial constraint.

“Our president kept saying we’ll get ‘sharper,’” said Gabe Winant, an associate history professor at UChicago. “How does something get sharper? You file away at it.”

In the years leading up to the pandemic, low interest rates fueled borrowing binges across higher education to build snazzy academic buildings and dorms. UChicago and other schools also pushed into private equity and other alternative assets, hoping for big returns but tying up money in long-term investments even as cash grew tight.

Back-to-back years of blockbuster market performance haven’t solved the problem. Moody’s Investors Service now rates the general outlook for higher-education bonds “negative,” while Fitch Ratings deems the sector “deteriorating.” Across the country, administrators are working to right the financial ship.

New York University recently issued more than a billion dollars in bonds, swelling its debt load even as its fundraising capabilities—in S&P Global’s view—remain “modest relative to its size.” The University of Southern California is running deficits as it manages an increase in student aid and other costs. The school has paused some hiring and merit-pay raises and tightened spending on travel and other areas.

Swarthmore, a selective college in Pennsylvania, is in danger of losing its AAA rating from S&P as debt mounts and expenses rise due to inflation and increased salary costs. A school spokeswoman noted that Moody’s, which also rated Swarthmore AAA, gave the school a stable outlook and both ratings firms cited its overall strong financial performance.

John Boyer, who served as dean of UChicago’s undergraduate college from 1992 to 2023 and wrote a history of the university, said the spending spree was aimed at positioning the institution for the future.

“I’m convinced 30 years from now people will see those investments as very wise and forward-thinking,” Boyer said.

‘Nobody plans to run deficits forever’

The University of Chicago’s hard-grinding reputation earned it the unofficial slogan “Where fun comes to die.” About 20 years ago, the school started trying to become a more inviting place.

It was the mid-2000s, the housing market was booming, and the incoming president, mathematician Robert Zimmer, was a master fundraiser deeply invested in UChicago’s profile on a global stage. Zimmer, who died in 2023, would lead the school until 2021.

UChicago built new dormitories, dining areas, a new library and an arts center that takes up a whole city block. The school also worked to burnish its reputation in harder sciences, building a molecular engineering program from scratch and a 10-story state-of-the-art biomedical research center.

It worked: The undergraduate student body grew from 3,500 students in the 1990s to its current size of about 7,500. The acceptance rate plummeted from around 70% to an exclusive less than 5% in the same time frame. The vast majority who are admitted say yes, giving the university among the highest so-called yield rates in the country, at 88%.

The current financial duress hasn’t directly affected undergrads, student leaders said, though the future of graduate programs and the university’s principles does color campus conversations.

But all those new buildings were costly.

For much of the 2010s, the university issued hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bonds a year. It sometimes passed up the below-market interest rates reserved for nonprofit infrastructure projects in favor of often more-expensive borrowing that can be used to make debt payments or cover operating costs, according to bond filings.

Some of the borrowing financed projects that don’t qualify for the lower nonprofit rates, UChicago said, such as the business school’s Hong Kong campus and a renovation of the university’s Rockefeller Chapel.

The school has produced 35 Nobel Prize-winning economists and now boasts a coveted acceptance rate. But like other universities, it’s having to figure out what its role is in a new era.

The school also increased what it charged students, in step with other private colleges. UChicago’s tuition and fees have doubled over the past two decades, an increase of about 30% when adjusted for inflation.

Endowment returns, meanwhile, were underwhelming—at least compared with elite peers. For the 20 years ending in 2024, UChicago reported earning an annualized 8.2%, compared with a 9.2% average for a group of 10 Ivies and other top schools calculated by Markov Processes International, a financial-technology company.

In a Q&A posted this fall, the university said it took a conservative stance following the 2008 financial crisis that resulted in lower returns in boom times and higher ones in downturns. But in 2022, when endowments declined at almost all of the 10 schools tracked by Markov, UChicago still ranked near the bottom.

Like at those elite peers, private equity and other less-liquid assets created additional strain. Private-markets fund managers can request hundreds of millions of dollars of previously committed cash at any time, a tricky reality to navigate when cash is tight.

At UChicago, that cordoned-off cash has doubled over the past decade to $2.3 billion, according to the school’s 2024 financial statements. A spokesman said the university has strategies in place to make sure enough liquidity is available.

While the cuts have drawn anger from some on campus, university leaders say they’re necessary for future stability.

Other long-term shifts in higher education weighed on the budget.

Over the past half-century it became standard for doctoral programs at elite institutions to offer full scholarships and modest stipends. Before that, Ph.D.s were far less accessible to students who lacked an independent source of tuition and living expenses. Compensation costs for staff and tenured faculty grew, too.

By the time Zimmer stepped aside in 2021 following brain-tumor surgery, a changing economic environment was pushing the school’s mounting financial problems into the spotlight.

A tuition freeze during the pandemic had dented revenues. Inflation drove up labor costs and deepened the school’s annual deficit. Higher interest rates meant to tame inflation made debt harder to manage.

As the 2023-24 school year wrapped up, UChicago rolled borrowing going back 20 years into a billion-dollar bond issue, its biggest ever, bond filings show. The school has as much debt as Princeton or Yale—even though it had less than half those schools’ assets, according to all three schools’ 2024 financial statements.

In fall 2024, Zimmer’s successor, Paul Alivisatos, announced a four-year plan to eliminate a $288 million shortfall in the $3.3 billion university budget.

The university added the other $100 million in cuts this summer after the Trump administration said it would pull grants at UChicago and made moves to drastically cut reimbursement rates for scientific research at universities nationwide.

Undergrads haven’t been directly affected by the financial strains, student leaders say.

UChicago, which has prided itself on a campus culture that fosters a range of political perspectives, has avoided the kind of Trump scrutiny faced by universities like Harvard and Columbia. Even so, it lost about 65 federal grants.

UChicago also stands to lose significant revenue if full-tuition-paying international students, who make up the bulk of some of its master’s degree programs, choose to study outside the U.S. amid the uncertain landscape here.

The cuts, combined with aggressive fundraising, have earned the school a stable outlook from Moody’s despite its outsize debt load. UChicago raised an annual average of about $760 million in 2022, 2023 and 2024, according to Moody’s. The school said it raised more than $1 billion this year.

UChicago is also in the quiet phase of a new capital campaign, a person familiar with the matter said. The last capital campaign raised more than $5 billion.

Its debt load will remain a burden for years to come. Principal payments on the school’s roughly $4.5 billion in outstanding bonds are expected to more than double by 2029.

University officials said the increase is manageable, adding that investments have grown faster than the debt over the past few years.

Provost Katherine Baicker said the school has made significant progress toward a balanced budget; it shaved its deficit down by more than the planned 25% in fiscal 2025, the first year of its four-year deficit reduction plan.

“Nobody plans to run deficits forever,”

Baicker said, adding that the investments were aimed at increasing the university’s academic eminence.

Now, the school is focused on the financial stability and sustainability of its programs. “We’re making a really important effort with our faculty to prioritize the areas where we’re having the biggest impact,” Baicker said.

Winant, a leader in faculty organizing, said he and colleagues have bristled at the description of the deficit as always being part of the plan but also now an emergency.

“Both things cannot be true,” he said.

Defining the future

In the humanities division, the cutbacks mean the school is pausing Ph.D. admissions for a year in disciplines like comparative literature, Germanic studies and art history. The pullback has many faculty questioning whether the vitality of their disciplines will survive.

When Carolina López-Ruiz received an offer to teach religion and classics at UChicago in 2022, she didn’t hesitate. She had moved from Spain to earn her Ph.D. at the school before spending 17 years at Ohio State University. When she returned to her alma mater, it seemed to be thriving.

A few years later, the extent of its debt and budget issues became a talking point among faculty and graduate students, with some professors writing op-eds in local and university press to sound the alarm. A rally this month organized by the graduate student union and faculty groups drew well over 100 people despite drizzling rain. Signs proclaimed “Down With the Board of Butchers” and dubbed the school “DOGE University,” a reference to Trump’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency.

For López-Ruiz, reality set in this summer when, instead of having time to catch up on her research of ancient Mediterranean cultures, she found herself sitting in weeks of meetings.

The dean of the arts and humanities division, Deborah Nelson, commissioned groups to study the future of graduate programs and languages, divisional organization and undergraduate teaching. López-Ruiz, who chairs the classics department, landed on a committee looking at what to do with the more than 50 languages offered.

Emotions ran high, she said, and faculty focused on proposals to define the division’s future before administrators made decisions for them. They tried to keep the big picture in mind: “We have all this treasure of language instruction,” López-Ruiz said. “If we don’t preserve it, who is going to?”

The committee concluded no languages should be cut, suggesting instead ways to boost enrollment.

But as the committees met, Nelson, the humanities dean, announced that eight departments would halt Ph.D. admissions for a year. A faculty committee insisted other departments, like English and linguistics, be included too out of solidarity. Leadership acquiesced, putting a near-total pause on humanities Ph.D. applications this fall.

Some humanities faculty worry the pause will have a lasting impact. Will prospective students write off UChicago? What about the doctoral students starting this fall, who won’t have any colleagues joining them for collaboration and class discussions? At what point does a Ph.D. program become too small to function?

The university has said it plans to shrink the number of doctoral students it funds by 30% by 2030. “It’s not sufficient to just keep doing what you were doing before, because the field evolves and the world evolves,” Baicker, the provost, said of the humanities changes.

At the heart of the debate is whether such programs should be judged based on graduates’ future employment prospects, or by the creation of knowledge.

“I don’t think the goal of doctoral education should be academic jobs for everyone,” said Clifford Ando, a classics professor.

All told, the changes are moving UChicago to what Ando sees as a place where graduate education is de-emphasized, the undergraduate college is expanding and more students are taught by cheaper, non-tenure-track faculty. A spokesman said the university is dedicated to the central role of tenure-track faculty but draws on a wide set of talent to complement course offerings.

Ando thinks all research universities need to come to terms with what they’re selling and whether it still makes sense.

“If we’ve changed our core values,” he said, “we haven’t fessed up to that.”

Stop Meeting Students Where They Are

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 17:50:50 GMT

North Carolina colleges should correct a bad academic habit.

Over the past several years, a common refrain in education has been that educators need to “meet students where they are.” Equally common is the promise to do just that—and we’re hearing it more and more in North Carolina.

The idea of “meeting students where they are” is most commonly invoked in non-academic contexts. For example:

DeVetta Holman Nash, assistant director of student wellness services and coordinator of student academic success at UNC, proclaims, “I meet students where they are individually.”
UNC Charlotte touts a new “all-pathways [‘collegiate recovery’] program model to meet students where they are.”
After partnering with Amazon’s Career Choice Program in 2022, UNCG chancellor Franklin Gilliam, Jr., declared, “With this exciting partnership, we are transforming the way we provide coursework to meet students where they are.”

Universities Sued Over Racial Discrimination in Hiring

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 18:57:52 GMT

Cornell and George Mason have allegedly violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

By George Leef

October 08, 2025

So strong is the desire for “diversity” (at least racial diversity) in higher education that school and college officials often turn a blind eye to the law against racial discrimination in employment. The 1964 Civil Rights Act forbids racial discrimination in employment. It does not read that racial discrimination is illegal unless you think you have a good reason for doing so. Unfortunately, education leaders often act as if it does, engaging in blatant discrimination against candidates who don’t have the desired ancestry.

A complaint recently filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Cornell University shows how audacious its leaders were in ignoring the law.

Dr. Colin Wright is an evolutionary biologist. He had long desired to pursue a career in science, earning his Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara followed by a postdoctoral position at Penn State. Wright won a competitive National Science Foundation fellowship and published many papers in peer-reviewed journals. One would think that he’d be an excellent candidate for a tenure-track position at any leading university. In 2019 and 2020, he applied to numerous universities with faculty openings. Among them was Cornell University, for a position in its neurobiology and behavior department—but Wright was not considered for it.

Education leaders often engage in blatant discrimination against candidates who don’t have the desired ancestry.

Several years later, he found out why.

Cornell wanted to hire a biologist but was looking only for black candidates. Since Wright is not black, he had no chance. Cornell officials wanted to keep their racially restrictive search a secret.

Fortunately, the truth eventually came to light when a whistleblower leaked several internal emails showing that the department had engaged in a “diversity hire,” meaning that only black candidates would be invited to apply. Here is what one member of the hiring committee wrote : “What we should be doing is inviting one person whom we have identified as being somebody that we would like to join our department and not have that person [be] in competition with others.” (It’s fortunate that someone who knew about Cornell’s racial discrimination leaked the emails, but, of course, that individual has to keep his or her identity a secret for fear of retribution by the university.)

From the emails, we know that, in December 2020, the assistant dean for diversity and inclusion told the faculty to “do something a little out of the ordinary” by conducting a search that would be racially restrictive. That certainly is out of the ordinary, since it has long been standard practice (and legally obligatory since the Civil Rights Act of 1964) to advertise faculty openings to all and consider applicants on the basis of individual merit, not race.

In his July 30 Wall Street Journal article , Wright observed that the discriminatory search that ruled him out on the basis of race was not unique:

In addition to orchestrating the discriminatory hiring scheme, Cornell created other racially filtered hiring pipelines, including a $16 million National Institutes of Health-funded initiative called the Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program, or First. This program, the stated purpose of which is “enhancing compositional diversity,” required hiring committees to revise applicant lists repeatedly until they were diverse enough.

What a nice euphemism—compositional diversity. That is a pleasant way of concealing the truth that the university’s policy is intended to keep out individuals who are of the wrong race.

Cornell, of course, is not the only university that has been elevating race over individual merit in faculty hiring. In her 2018 book The Diversity Delusion (which I reviewed here ), Heather Mac Donald showed how pervasive the notion that student bodies and faculties must be made “diverse,” so that all groups are proportionally represented, has become. She pointed out that the absurd diversity mania is “dividing society, reducing learning, and creating an oppositional mindset that prevents individuals from seizing the opportunities available to them.”

That is precisely what Cornell did to Colin Wright and all the other scholars who were prevented from knowing about and competing for faculty openings that were closed to people who were not of the desired race.

“Compositional diversity” is a pleasant way of concealing the university’s policy of keeping out individuals who are of the wrong race.

Another university that is now facing legal trouble for its racially discriminatory hiring practices is George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. As we read in this August 25 Wall Street Journal editorial , “The Education Department announced a finding that under President Gregory Washington’s leadership, the Virginia public college violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act by ‘illegally using race and other immutable characteristics in university practices and policies, including hiring and promotion.’”

Officials thought it was more important to “diversify” the department and figured they could get away with it.

Cornell therefore is not alone in now facing legal trouble for having decided to engage in “diversity hiring” rather than evaluating everyone on his or her objective merits.

Rather than admitting its racial discrimination, Cornell released a statement declaring that it “strictly prohibits unlawful bias or discrimination” and that it “maintains an office that investigates and addresses any claims of bias or discrimination.” That sounds good, but the emails make clear that the neurobiology and behavior department did not let that office know what it was doing. Moreover, Wright’s case is far better handled by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission than by a Cornell office that would have a strong incentive to sweep the matter under the rug.

In its statement, Cornell also tries to depict this case as just a minor error, declaring, “In thousands of hiring decisions in hundreds of departments and units, misunderstandings of policies can occur.”

Nice try, but it’s evident that the officials behind the decision to restrict the search only to black candidates were not operating under any “misunderstanding” about university policy or federal law. They thought it was more important to “diversify” the department and figured that they could get away with it. Like so many other colleges and universities that have engaged in illegal behavior, such as the cases I discussed here , Cornell seems inclined to spend a lot of money on legal bills rather than owning up to its racial bias.

What a refreshing change to have two different federal agencies finally targeting racial discrimination in university hiring and promotion. At least for now, we have turned the clock back to the 1960s, when the goal of equal opportunity for all was taken seriously. The Cornell and GMU cases should send chills up the spines of many college and university officials who thought that they could get away with discriminatory hiring because they did it for “good” reasons. The one and only criterion for making faculty decisions should be individual merit, and a person’s race has nothing to do with that.

George Leef is director of external relations at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

Universities Sued Over Racial Discrimination in Hiring — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

My Alma Mater is Quashing Conservative Speech … So We Filed a Civil Rights Complaint

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 18:21:15 GMT

The Daily Signal

By Hannah Fay

October 07, 2025

"On Sept. 5, we filed a civil rights complaint with the Department of Education and the Department of Justice against our alma mater, Davidson College. We did not make this decision out of anger towards Davidson but from our hope that Davidson can become an institution of free expression that encourages students to pursue truth.

We had chosen Davidson as student athletes and recall being high school seniors, eager to attend a college where we could simultaneously pursue a high level of athletics and academics and be challenged to become better competitors, students and, most importantly, people. We believed that Davidson would be the perfect place for our personal growth, where we would be encouraged to encounter new ideas while contributing our own. Little did we know that Davidson does not welcome students with our convictions .

During our senior year, we decided to restart the Davidson chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, a national conservative student organization, which had been disbanded. With this decision, we knew that we would receive backlash from peers. Before the school semester even started, we received hateful online comments such as “Who let y’all out of the basement?” We saw how other universities treated conservatives and had even experienced hostility firsthand at Davidson, being called “homophobic” or “uninclusive” for our involvement in Fellowship of Christian Athletes, whose statement of faith declares that marriage is between a man and a woman. We realized that, although we were friends with progressive individuals for the past few years, fully aware and accepting of their political beliefs, they would likely distance themselves from us once they learned of ours.

While we were prepared for this reaction from our peers, we did not expect to receive such opposition from Davidson administrators. We naively believed that despite the college’s leftist indoctrination efforts (requiring cultural diversity courses, mandating student athletics to watch a documentary arguing that all white people were inherently racist, having a DEI office, designating secluded spaces for LGBTQ+ students, etc.), they would still surely encourage free speech. After all, a liberal arts institution should cultivate a space where students can freely inquire, peacefully debate, and form decisions for themselves.

Before the semester even began, we faced resistance from the administration as we could not get approval to restart the club from the Director of Student Activities Emily Eisenstadt for three weeks after a follow-up email and a faculty advisor request. Other conservative organizations also faced irresponsiveness from the Director of Student Activities. However, when leftist groups wanted to bring Gavin Newsom to campus, they had no problem getting a swift response.

Despite continued administrative opposition, we hosted speakers, including pro-life activist Abby Johnson and President Ronald Reagan’s economic advisor Arthur Laffer; organized events such as the 9/11 “Never Forget”; and attempted to engage in civil conversations about abortion. Our efforts even led to us being awarded “Chapter Rookie of the Year” by Young America’s Foundation.

Our most notable event, and the reason for our complaint, was our “Stand with Israel” project, in which we placed 1,195 Israeli flags into the ground to memorialize the innocent victims of the Oct. 7 Massacre by Hamas. We also laid out pamphlets on tables in the library and student union titled, “The Five Myths About Israel Perpetrated by the Pro-Hamas Left,” provided to us by Young America’s Foundation.

This event led to two significant outcomes. First, our flags were stolen overnight. When we brought this to the attention of Davidson administrators and the Honor Council, they dismissed the case and chose not to investigate, despite their so-called commitment to the Honor Code.

Second, on Feb. 26, 2025, over four months after the event, we received an email from Director of Rights and Responsibilities Mak Thompkins informing us that we faced charges of “violating” the Code of Responsibility. We had allegedly made students feel “threatened and unsafe” due to our distribution of pamphlets that allegedly promoted “Islamophobia.”

This was ironic to us, given that we did not even know who our accusers were, let alone not ever having interacted with them. What’s more, we knew of Jewish students who genuinely felt targeted because of the rampant antisemitism on our campus. For example, a massive Palestine flag was hung across our main academic building the day after President Donald Trump won the election, and the student group ‘Cats Against Imperialism’—Davidson’s college moniker is “Wildcats”—distributed pamphlets promoting their aggressive pro-Palestinian agenda. Yet, unlike us, they faced no consequences.

Davidson’s biased treatment towards pro-Israel students led to our filing a civil rights complaint with the DOJ and Department of Education. Davidson College must be held accountable for its blatant discrimination and violation of Title VI and Title IX ; it should not receive any federal funding until it complies with the federal law.

In light of the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, it is now more important than ever that higher education promotes free expression. Colleges and universities are predominantly controlled by leftists who demonize conservatives and the values we stand for. If Davidson cannot commit to shaping students who understand the equal dignity of every person made in the image of God, regardless of religion, it risks corrupting individuals and prompting them to support, or even commit, acts of political violence.

We hope that Davidson will become a community that values all perspectives and treats all students with dignity and respect, including the Jewish population.

Though we are not of Jewish descent, we strongly support Israel and the Jewish people and faced discrimination based on the content of our support. If we had, as our counterparts did, expressed antisemitism, Davidson officials would have treated us differently.

Hannah Fay is a communications fellow for media and public relations at The Heritage Foundation.

WILLIAM BENNETT: What Charlie Kirk's murder tells us about the American mind

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 18:05:41 GMT

Evidence Backs Trump on Higher Ed’s Bias

Fox News

William J. Bennett

September 21, 2025 7:11am EDT

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

William Butler Yeats wrote those words about Europe after the Great War, but they ring with terrible clarity this week as we bury Charlie Kirk, murdered at 31 for the crime of arguing in public. The young man who built an empire of discourse from a suburban garage has been silenced by someone who apparently found bullets more persuasive than words.

But here is what strikes me as I reflect on this tragedy: Charlie Kirk may have been the last American who genuinely believed you could change someone's mind with a good argument. Think about that. When was the last time you saw someone actually switch positions during a debate? When did you last witness someone say three of the most treasured words in the English language: "I was wrong?"

My younger son understood this belief. He called me after Kirk’s death and shared something that possibly captured our national descent. "Dad," he said, "I used to be like Charlie Kirk— I used to think people could be persuaded with reason."

My son learned otherwise during the 2016 election, while in graduate school. He started getting several calls a day from classmates wanting to understand how he could support someone they genuinely believed was the modern-day equivalent of Hitler. These graduate students—educated, intelligent people pursuing MBAs—literally thought Trump was on par with Hitler and were calling my son because they could not reconcile how someone like him could support such evil.

So, in good faith, he engaged everyone who contacted him. From his own account: "I came to business school to learn things like accounting, not to practice defending myself from being called a Nazi. I lost friends through this period, and it ended up being one of the hardest times of my life."

Let me advance an unconventional thesis: Charlie Kirk died because we have forgotten how to hate properly . G.K. Chesterton observed that "the true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind [or next to] him." We fight not for hatred of our enemies but love of our fellow soldiers and the ideals of our country. We have inverted this wisdom. We teach our young people to hate their opponents rather than love their own principles. We have made politics a blood sport precisely because we have drained it of transcendent meaning. When you believe in nothing greater than your own righteousness, the only thing left is to destroy those who challenge your certainty.

As my son lost friends, he did something quite understandable. Shortly after Trump's election, he stopped actively participating in politics—watching the news, talking about it with friends, and reading the articles he used to read daily. "I found myself getting physically uncomfortable when the news came on," he told me. "Defending yourself against being called a Nazi, racist, sexist, endlessly just for communicating relatively common-sense ideas like boys go to the boys' bathroom and girls go to the girls' bathroom, or that throwing Molotov cocktails into police cars is a bad idea (something a classmate of his actually did during the George Floyd protests) just gets really draining after a while."

My son learned a hard, unfortunate lesson during graduate school, one countless other students have learned in recent years. The modern university, where Kirk met his end, has become the opposite of what John Henry Newman envisioned when he wrote "The Idea of a University." Newman imagined institutions where "a habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom." Instead, we have created factories of fragility, where students pay $70,000 a year to have their prejudices confirmed and their triggers avoided.

The founders would have recognized Charlie immediately. Franklin with his junto, Hamilton with his newspapers, Jefferson with his correspondence, they all understood that democracy is an argument, not an answer. Madison wrote in Federalist 10 about the dangers of faction, but he never imagined we would solve the problem of faction with assassination.

Here is another unconventional thought: The problem is not that our universities are too political. They are not political in the classical sense of "political" that Aristotle meant when he called man a political animal. The university problem is that they are factories of indoctrination, especially in the liberal arts. Real politics requires engagement with difference, the ability to live alongside those you disagree with, the skill of persuasion rather than coercion. Our campuses have replaced politics with theology, and a particularly intolerant theology at that.

We have made the cost of conviction so high that capable, principled people retreat from public engagement entirely.

My son concluded his reflection with words that haunt me: "In those moments, having made the wrong choice at that juncture many times before, I hope I have the conviction and bravery to live it like Charlie and live it like Bill." He meant Charlie Kirk, of course. The other Bill he referenced was his father — me. I am humbled by the comparison but troubled by his confession. While he admittedly tossed his hat out of the ring, and entered the non-political world of finance, he has found his comfort and happiness. But at what cost to our society?

This is what we have done to our young people. We have made the cost of conviction so high that capable, principled people retreat from public engagement entirely. We have created a world where it is safer to be silent than to speak, safer to conform than to question, safer to hide than to stand. There is a certain relief in that. But it does not come without a cost.

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The question before us is not whether we will have more Charlie Kirks—young people willing to brave hostility for their beliefs. We will. The question is whether we will have more like my son—capable people who retreat from public engagement because the cost has become too high. Few of the brightest people I know dream of entering politics—they dream of venture capital, private equity, the places where talent can still flourish without ideological inquisition. It makes brutal sense: Make enough money, and perhaps you can affect the change you want to see in society, safely insulated from the mob.

If we cannot make America safe for argument again—not just civil argument, but vigorous, passionate, even angry argument—then we should stop pretending we live in a democracy. In its literal etymological sense, democracy means "power of the people"—today it feels more like power of the perpetually aggrieved. If you are not consumed with rage, you are at home raising your family and going to work. So radical political movements naturally attract the angriest among us, not necessarily the wisest.

Charlie Kirk is dead at 31, but the idea he represented—that Americans can argue their way to truth rather than shoot their way to silence—must not die with him. My son's generation deserves better than the choice between silence and death. They deserve what Charlie Kirk tried to give them: a place at the table, a voice in the conversation, and the right to speak without being murdered for it. Our children and grandchildren deserve it.

William J. Bennett joined FNC as a contributor in 2017.

The former Secretary of Education under President Ronald Reagan and the nation's first Drug Czar under President George H.W. Bush, Bennett is one of America's most recognized voices on cultural, political and educational issues. He also served as a professor at Boston University, the University of Texas, and Harvard University.

A native of Brooklyn in New York City, Bennett studied philosophy at Williams College (B.A.) and the University of Texas (Ph.D.) and earned a law degree (J.D.) from Harvard.

In addition to his role at FNC, Bennett currently serves as chairman of Resilience Learning and is the Founding Provost of Jefferson Classical Academies. He has written or co-authored more than 25 books, including the Book of Virtues.

Charlie Kirk assassination underscores rejection of civil debate | Fox News

The latest FIRE Campus Free Speech Rankings show work remains at Davidson

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 17:07:57 GMT

DFTD Newsletter

9/11/2025

The latest Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) survey results are here. While this year’s results show some consistency with previous years, they also highlight that significant work remains to build a campus culture where open dialogue and a wide range of viewpoints are welcomed at Davidson College.

A concerning 60% of students remain uncomfortable disagreeing with a professor on controversial political topics in class, and nearly as many (58%) hesitate in written assignments.

One in four students openly self-censor while interacting with professors at least a couple times a week, while 48% report feeling uncomfortable in classroom discussions. Outside the classroom, the problem worsens , where 70% of students are too afraid to express unpopular opinions on social media.

Equally troubling are students’ attitudes toward disrupting speech. More than a third, or 37%, of Davidson students think it’s acceptable to shout down a speaker, 19% would block others from attending an event, and 15% condone violence to stop a campus speech. These numbers suggest that, despite Davidson’s reputation for civility, many students believe intimidation is an acceptable tool for undermining the very notion of open discourse.

While trust in the administration has improved and fewer students now doubt the College will defend them from censorship, significant skepticism remains. 34% of students believe peers could be reported for expressing controversial ideas, and a similar number, 37%, believe the same for professors.

Davidson has made important strides, but the culture of open expression between students and professors is still fragile. The FIRE survey underscores the importance of freedom of expression in more than policies on paper. It requires a campus climate where students feel safe to speak their minds.

DFTD calls on the College to take the following concrete steps to strengthen free speech and viewpoint diversity at Davidson;

Adopt a policy of Institutional Neutrality whereby the College and Departments do not take ideological or political positions
Expand ideological diversity among faculty, staff, and trustees
Make the College’s Commitment to Freedom of Expression Statement a key part of New Student Orientation
Conduct a thorough review of all policies and procedures related to speech

With these actions, Davidson College has the opportunity to lead by example, showing how a liberal arts education can prepare students to engage thoughtfully and confidently in the world beyond campus.

The Great Grade Giveaway

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 15:54:31 GMT

You get an A! And you get an A! On campuses this fall, some students might feel like they’ve wandered into their own Oprah episode, except the prize is a transcript filled with top marks.

The Daily Signal

By Madison Marino Doan

August 19, 2025

You get an A! And you get an A! On campuses this fall, some students might feel like they’ve wandered into their own Oprah episode, except the prize is a transcript filled with top marks.

For decades, the share of As has been swelling like a balloon. At Harvard, nearly 80% of grades in the 2020-2021 school year were in the “A” range. Back in 2001, Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield called this out , warning that grade inflation “devalues the currency of the academic realm” and turns grades into “worthless tokens of self-esteem.” Two decades later, his point is looking uncomfortably prophetic.

Why the flood of top grades?

Partly, it may be the erosion of core curriculum requirements. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni recently found that fewer than 20% of colleges require a U.S. government or history course. Not only that, but of the 1,100 institutions reviewed, less than a third mandate literature. Without foundational skills, students may shy away from harder classes, and schools, eager to keep them enrolled, may make the easy ones easier still.

Scholar George Leef has another explanation : the rise of the “consumer culture” in higher education . He points out that students increasingly see themselves as “buying” a degree, and that the rapid expansion of colleges and universities over the last 50 years has left many schools “extremely hungry for students” and more focused on maintaining enrollment than on upholding academic standards.

The numbers tell the story.

A 2011 study found that in 1960, only 15% of all college grades were A’s; they were outnumbered by both D’s and F’s combined, and the most common grade was a C. By 2013, the most common grade was an A (43%), and A’s and B’s accounted for almost three-fourths of all grades at public institutions and 86% of grades at private ones.

Another study based on 40 years of student survey data found that in 1969, only 7% of students said that they had an A grade-point average or higher, but by 2009, that figure had risen to 41%.

Some schools are pushing back.

Dartmouth, Columbia , and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have adopted measures to indicate what a grade means in a given course, such as listing the average or median grade, or the percentage of the class receiving that grade, alongside the student’s grade on the transcript.

Texas lawmakers have proposed “Honest Transcript” legislation, requiring public universities to display course-wide grade averages next to individual grades (with exceptions for courses with 10 or fewer students) and grade independent study courses as pass or fail. The measure passed the state’s House but stalled in the Senate.

Even student leaders have gotten involved, with six student body presidents representing more than 200,000 students urging President Donald Trump to require, via executive order, all Title IV universities to include the median (or average) grade for each class on students’ transcripts.

“Higher education commits academic dishonesty,” they wrote, “by treating a hard-earned A in a challenging course the same as an easy A in a remedial class.”

Restoring rigor isn’t just about fairness to high achievers. It’s about preserving the value of a college degree. Honest transcript policies won’t solve grade inflation overnight, but they would shine light into the system, curb inflationary pressure, and help employers and graduate programs tell the difference between an outstanding student and an average one with a transcript full of A’s.

If we want to restore confidence in higher education , it’s time to trade in the fanfare for a little more honesty and a lot more accountability .

https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/08/19/great-grade-giveaway/

Announcing Major Gift from Dr. William Winkenwerder '76

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 15:24:07 GMT

DFTD Newsletter

8/19/2025

Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse is honored to announce a multi-year, major gift from Dr. William Winkenwerder. This generous commitment will ensure that the Davidson community can engage directly with leading voices who shape global affairs and national security policy.

A 1976 graduate of Davidson College and former member of the Davidson College Board of Trustees (2015-2022), Dr. Winkenwerder is a nationally recognized physician and health care executive who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs under President George W. Bush and as a senior leader at the Department of Health and Human Services under President Ronald Regan. His long-standing dedication to public service and his commitment to robust, open discussion on critical issues of foreign policy have been a hallmark of his career.

Dr. Winkenwerder’s support will bolster DFTD’s programs by creating the Winkenwerder Policy Series on the Middle East , allowing students to welcome distinguished guests exploring some of today’s most challenging global issues. In collaboration with students and faculty, this series of speakers will offer the Davidson campus and community the chance to hear firsthand perspectives from experts in US Defense Policy, Middle East relations, and international policy at large.

This transformative gift from Dr. Winkenwerder will enable vital conversations that foster open discourse and inspire Davidson students and the campus community to explore global issues with curiosity and purpose.

Evidence Backs Trump on Higher Ed’s Bias

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 18:00:18 GMT

Evidence Backs Trump on Higher Ed’s Bias

The Wall Street Journal

By Jon A. Shields and Yuval Avnur

Aug. 13, 2025 11:42 am ET

Like most of our academic colleagues, we aren’t supporters of Donald Trump . But we have to admit he has our profession’s number on a critical point—and we’ve conducted a study that proves it. College teaching is politically one-sided to an extreme, and until professors change our ways, we won’t recover the trust of the public.

Our new study, conducted with Stephanie Muravchik, draws on the Open Syllabus Project, a nonprofit organization that maintains a database of more than 27 million syllabi scraped from the web. We use it to see how contentious subjects like racial bias in the criminal justice system and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are taught, with an eye to whether professors expose students to the broad scholarly controversy around these issues. We found they usually don’t.

Take the teaching of racial bias and the criminal justice system. Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” (2010) shows up in thousands of syllabi, as it should given its scholarly and public influence. In the U.S. it is assigned more often than “Hamlet” and nearly as often as John Locke’s “Second Treatise of Government.”

Ms. Alexander argues that America’s war on drugs is akin to Jim Crow—a system designed to control and subjugate black Americans. Her work invites scholarly controversy, drawing criticism from historians and social scientists. Among them is James Forman Jr., a Yale law professor, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” (2017). While Mr. Forman is no fan of mass incarceration, he doesn’t think it’s the product of a racist conspiracy. He notes that tough-on-crime policies have enjoyed the support of black leaders trying to halt soaring crime rates in their cities.

In courses that teach Ms. Alexander’s book, Mr. Forman’s book is paired with it less than 4% of the time. Works by other prominent critics of “The New Jim Crow”—including political scientist Michael Fortner of Claremont McKenna, law professor John Pfaff of Fordham and sociologist Patrick Sharkey of Princeton—are assigned with Ms. Alexander even less often.

Who is generally taught with Ms. Alexander? Works that make hers look moderate. The top three titles are by Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michel Foucault. Ms. Davis, a two-time vice-presidential nominee of the Communist Party USA, has said that “the only true path of liberation for black people is the one that leads toward a complete and total overthrow of the capitalist class in this country.” In his 2015 book, “Between the World and Me,” Mr. Coates wrote that “in America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” Even Ms. Alexander, reviewing his book for the New York Times , said she was “disappointed” that it offered “little hope . . . that freedom or equality will ever be a reality for black people in America.” Foucault (1926-84), a French theorist, reduced all Western societies to intricate and oppressive systems of social control.

Courses on the Middle East are similarly skewed. Edward Said (1935-2003) was Israel’s most influential scholarly detractor, chiefly because of the outsize influence of his 1978 book, “Orientalism.” It is the 16th-most-assigned text in the database, appearing in nearly 16,000 courses worldwide, and it is almost as popular as Ms. Alexander’s book in the U.S. The title describes what Said saw as a prejudiced view that places the advanced, democratic West permanently above the backward Arab world. He further saw American support for Israel as an expression of that prejudice. Said aimed to flip Westerners’ prevailing understanding of Israel on its head: Rather than either a refuge from antisemitism or an outpost of democracy, Said said Israel was the fruit of a “Zionist invasion and colonization of Palestine.”

Like Ms. Alexander, Said attracted admirers and critics. One of his most influential intellectual competitors was Samuel Huntington (1927-2008), author of a 1993 essay and a 1996 book both titled in part “The Clash of Civilizations.” Huntington didn’t deny the existence of anti-Arab prejudice, but he thought the differences between the West and the Arab and Islamic worlds were deep and profound.

“The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism,” he wrote. “It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.” Said called Huntington’s book “belligerent” in an essay (published shortly after the 9/11 attacks) titled “The Clash of Ignorance.”

Huntington wasn’t Said’s only prominent critic. Historian Bernard Lewis (1916-2018) wrote a sharp critique in his 1993 book, “Islam and the West.” “Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies” (2004), by Ian Buruma and Ivishai Margalit, also challenges Said’s thesis, arguing that Western intellectuals have a long tradition of painting the West in disfigured, grotesque ways.

How often are such critics paired with Orientalism? Again, it’s uncommon. The most assigned text that is in tension with Orientalism is Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations,” which is taught with Said less than 5% of the time. The other critics are almost never assigned. For “Occidentalism,” the rate is 0.86%.

What is assigned with Said? The most popular authors are critical theorists whose work supports Said’s approach, and who often share an antipathy to the West, including Foucault, Frantz Fanon and Judith Butler.

We also looked at the most assigned texts that narrowly focus on the history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. We found that the most commonly assigned works were sharply critical of Israel. Those that show sympathy for Zionism are less popular and rarely paired with more critical texts. The strongly anti-Israel Rashid Khalidi, who has been part of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s delegation in negotiations with Israel and is now the Emeritus Edward Said Professor at Columbia, is a popular choice. And he is generally taught with like-minded critics of Israel.

More of us should follow the minority of professors who teach the real controversy—not only the dominant texts but also work that is critical of them. Doing so is good for developing citizens and for maintaining the public trust of the university. It’s hard for us to see a path toward restoring public confidence in the university that doesn’t involve curricular reform. If we shut out the views of half or more of the population, we shouldn’t be surprised when the democratic process leads to the diminution of our subsidies and other privileges.

We depoliticize higher education only by politicizing our courses—in the sense of building more contention into them.

Mr. Shields is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. Mr. Avnur is a professor of philosophy at Scripps College.

Evidence Backs Trump on Higher Ed’s Bias - WSJ

An Open Letter to the Davidson College Biology Department

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 15:54:53 GMT

By Hannah Fay '25

Dear Davidson Faculty and Biology Professors,

I recently graduated from Davidson College in May with a degree in biology. For much of my undergraduate experience, I was on the pre-PA track, driven by a passion for helping people. However, during the fall of my senior year, I reevaluated my long-term goals, making a pivotal shift toward health policy, health reform, and politics. I decided to no longer pursue PA school when I got involved in Young Americans for Freedom and during an internship with Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse. While this did not change the classes I took in college, the lens from which I took them had changed. This transition led me to Washington, D.C., where I joined The Heritage Foundation — a prominent conservative think tank — as the Communications Fellow. I’m excited to contribute to the conservative movement and drive impactful change in health and public policy.

My career aspirations shifted the moment I started asking questions.

I’ve always been conservative. While it’s true that Davidson is not widely known for conservative voices, many of my peers quietly share my convictions. Yet, they hesitate to speak up in class or challenge professors’ perspectives out of fear of grave consequences and being ostracized by classmates. That said, my intent is not to dwell on this issue, but to address the Biology Department directly: I urge you to foster critical questioning and ideological diversity in biology, empowering students to become true critical thinkers.

As a liberal arts institution, students attend Davidson to engage in critical thinking. Learning how to think is different from learning what to think. Many Davidson College students pursue biology to help and heal people while others pursue cancer research, probe the origin of life, or tackle pressing environmental challenges.

Learning how to think requires engaging in rigorous, high-level discussions. These conversations go beyond one-sided opinions or theories; they involve deconstructing every premise, interrogating narratives, and exposing blind spots. This forges true critical thinkers, shapes our values, and determines facts.

I realize professors bring established beliefs into the classroom — yet I urge biology professors to be facilitators rather than dictators over students’ beliefs. Reflecting on my time at Davidson, I grew exponentially in classes when professors played devil’s advocate — challenging arguments and demanding reasoning behind students’ positions. Though these courses were undoubtedly the most rigorous, that very rigor defines the challenging, growth-focused experience Davidson students seek.

Students come to college at the impressionable ages of seventeen or eighteen, likely leaving the familiarity of home for the first time. Some students seek to escape the protective bubble their parents created, others rebel against those expectations, many search for a belief system to embrace, and still others wish to strengthen their existing convictions.

Yet, to strengthen, one must be stretched. I've found that true growth often comes from being questioned — it's in those moments that I'm pushed to understand and articulate why I hold certain beliefs. If I can’t explain the reasoning behind my convictions, do I genuinely believe them? Some of my most meaningful conversations at Davidson were with people whose perspectives differed from mine. These discussions stretched me to defend my beliefs thoughtfully, which not only strengthened my convictions but also deepened my understanding of another perspective. At the same time, being open to questioning creates space for evolving perspectives.

Thoughtful inquiry must begin with the professors. When faculty consistently question assumptions, it signals to students that intellectual exploration is not just encouraged — it’s nonnegotiable. Yet, from my personal observation, there has been a decline in students actively questioning, though I don’t believe this stems from a loss of curiosity (although this is a point worth considering). A study from 2021 revealed that only 4.3% of students ask questions ‘often.’ This study suggests that common barriers to asking questions include being afraid of judgement and not knowing enough to ask a ‘good’ question.

Students hesitate to ask questions that challenge what they perceive to be their professors’ viewpoints. Students are more likely to speak up when they see their professors humbly wrestling with difficult questions, modeling the very curiosity and analytical rigor that higher education claims to foster. In an era when many young people feel pressure to conform or self-censor, inquiry from professors becomes a powerful tool: it legitimizes uncertainty.

Moreover, ideological diversity has become a lost art at Davidson College. During my undergrad, I rarely encountered a balance of ideology in the classroom. Most — if not all — of my classes advanced the liberal agenda. For example, after the 2024 election, I had many biology classes cancelled the next day in response to President Trump winning the election. One of my professors spoke to the class as if everyone in the class should be mourning the outcome of the election, without any regard to the fact that many students voted for President Trump. If the outcome were the other way around, I am certain that not a single class would have been canceled. A close friend of mine went to her class the day after the election and found what seemed to be a funeral service being held in the classroom. The professor had turned the lights off, was crying, and gave each student a hug as they walked into the room. There were countless stories from professors all over campus of their reactions to the election and how they pressed their agenda onto their students — telling them that their rights were going to be taken from them and lying about President Trump.

This is particularly disappointing given Davidson’s identity as a liberal arts institution, one that should celebrate intellectual diversity and the exchange of differing viewpoints.

Differences in thought strengthen a community, not divide it, as they too often do in education today. I urge biology professors to actively foster ideological diversity in your classroom — even when those views differ from professors’ own. Professors — please take care not to silence conservative voices, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue, and help ensure that all students feel free to speak, question, and engage without fear of their grades suffering or facing rejection from peers.

Please, when presenting a biologist’s research, do not declare, “Her research is important because she was openly gay in the 80s.” How incredibly insulting to her intelligence. Her ideas — not her sexual identity — should be the reason the biology department teaches her work.

Do not tell students that if they get pregnant, they should come to you so you can “help them take care of it.” Parents are not paying $85,000 a year for a professor to tell their daughter to get an abortion, or for a professor to encourage their son’s casual sex. Not to mention, biologists, more than any other person, should understand that life begins at conception. Thus, termination — of any kind, for any reason — of a fetus after conception is murder. Moreover, educators are not parents and have no mandate to recommend abortion. And professors must face the fact: encouraging casual sex does not empower students.

Professors should keep their political affiliations private: they must not impose an unsolicited agenda on students.

Davidson College attracts minds full of brilliant questions. The biology department must become a crucible for genuine thought, not indoctrination. Welcoming diverse inquiries — subjecting each to the same scrutiny — models the open-mindedness at the heart of a liberal arts education. I hope biology professors do their own research before presenting information to students as “fact.” I hope office-hour conversations become a safe space for students to challenge and explore convictions, even when those convictions differ from their professors. Davidson students have the opportunity to learn from some of the best and highest-minded professors in academia – it would be a disservice to both parties to not welcome proper discourse. I hope the biology department considers my recommendations for balanced ideological thought in their classrooms.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Hannah Fay ’25

Hannah Fay graduated from Davidson College in 2025 with a Bachelor of Science in Biology and currently serves as a Communications Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

A Rebuke for George Mason

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 19:08:01 GMT

The school’s president keeps his job, for now, but the Board of Visitors votes to eliminate DEI programs.

The Wall Street Journal

By The Editorial Board

August 4, 2025

Trustees and boards are supposed to set policy at universities, but too often they settle for football tickets and a child’s admission. That’s one reason it’s good to see the Board of Visitors take its obligations seriously at George Mason University.

We reported last week on the debate at the Northern Virginia school over racial and gender preferences. At a meeting on Friday, part open and part closed to the public, the board voted to eliminate a variety of diversity, equity and inclusion programs that had become fronts for discrimination in admissions and hiring at the school.

This is a rebuke to Gregory Washington, the George Mason president, a vociferous advocate of “diversity” preferences who had long opposed the anti-DEI move. But it was necessary if the school is going to avoid tough sanctions from the federal Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. The DOJ is investigating the school’s policies for possible violations.

Press reports on the meeting have portrayed it as a victory for the president and Mason faculty because Mr. Washington kept his job. The Faculty Senate had rallied in support of the president against the Board of Visitors, whose members are appointed by the Virginia Governor. The current Governor is Republican Glenn Youngkin.

But the board gave Mr. Washington the lowest salary increase allowed under the law and denied a bonus payment. His future at the school may depend on what the Civil Rights Division’s report says about the school’s policies and Mr. Washington’s role in promoting and enforcing them. The report is expected soon.

The ground is shifting in higher education as the Trump Administration looks to enforce the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions case. This has come as a shock to many administrators and faculty who have long believed they have a right to run these institutions based on their progressive political views.

George Mason is a public university supported by taxpayers. The Board of Visitors represents the public and has a duty to enforce the law against discrimination by race.

A Rebuke for George Mason - WSJ

Meet the 2025-26 DFTD Scholarship Recipients

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 21:11:35 GMT

Please join us in congratulating the 2025-26 recipients of the Robert Murray Scholarship for Excellence in Free Expression! These three exceptional students, each receiving a $2,500 scholarship, embody the values of DFTD in promoting open inquiry and civil dialogue at Davidson.

Robert F. Murray was a founding member of Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse (DFTD) and a central figure in shaping its mission. His belief in free expression, viewpoint diversity, and open dialogue was instrumental to the organization’s founding and early success. In recognition of his lasting impact, DFTD established the Robert Murray Scholarship for Excellence in Free Expression to support students who embody the values he championed: intellectual courage, respectful dialogue, and a commitment to expanding the range of ideas at Davidson College.

We at DFTD are proud to support Stephen, Arshi, and Jonathan in their continued efforts to uphold these values in the Davidson community.

Stephen Walker '26

Class Year: 2026

Major: Political Science and English Double Major

Davidson Activities:

College Republicans President
Deliberative Citizenship Initiative Co-Convener and Senior Fellow
Review Board Student Representative
Founder of Davidson Political Review (Student Newspaper)
PreLaw Society Alumni Relations Chair

About Stephen:

An instrumental figure in reenergizing political discourse on campus, Stephen leads with a collaborative spirit. He played a key role in organizing the long-standing tradition of the Phi-Eu Hall presidential debate in 2024. As President of the College Republicans, Stephen has worked with DFTD to bring conservative speakers to campus including Congressman Greg Murphy ‘85 in March of 2024 and Jeremy Carl, who now serves in the Trump Administration as the Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, in March 2025.

Stephen believes that democracy and intellectual progress depend on the open exchange of competing ideas. He is committed to advocating for a campus culture where disagreement is not only tolerated but valued as essential to learning. Stephen’s openness to dialogue in his work with the Deliberative Citizen Initiative and respect for opposing views have made him a trusted voice across campus.

We are grateful for Stephen’s courage and persistence in expanding the boundaries of free expression at Davidson, and we look forward to seeing the impact of his work in the years to come.

Arshi Husain '26

Class Year: 2026

Major: Economics and Philosophy double major

Davidson Activities:

Davidson Investment and Finance Association Administrative Director
Senior Admission Fellow
Deliberative Citizenship Initiative Senior Fellow
Chidsey Leadership Program Fellow and Application Grading Chair
The Davidsonian Newspaper Features Editor and writer

About Arshi:

Having grown up in Pakistan and now pursuing her education in the United States, Arshi brings a global perspective to conversations about free expression. She has seen firsthand how the suppression of dissent can erode trust. At Davidson, she has also witnessed how ideological conformity and fear of social retaliation can limit the exchange of ideas.

Yet rather than retreat, Arshi continues to push for spaces where disagreement can lead to deeper understanding. A rising Senior Fellow with the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative, Arshi has previously led and co-organized campus forums on polarizing issues, most notably a discussion on transgender medical policy in 2024 that brought together students from across the political spectrum.

Whether through op-eds, forums, or direct conversations with those who disagree with her, Arshi argues that democracy demands the freedom to challenge, reason, and coexist. Her intellectual courage and her determination to make Davidson a campus where truth-seeking transcends identity and political orthodoxy are admirable qualities that we are proud to support.

Jonathan Jarecki '28

Class Year: 2028

Major: Biology

Davidson Activities:

Free Speech Alliance President
Host of Whole Health Podcast
Reformed University Fellowship

About Jonathan:

Jonathan (Jono)’s commitment to free expression is grounded in his Christian faith and scientific curiosity. As incoming President of the Free Speech Alliance, Jono has emerged as a thoughtful advocate for viewpoint diversity and respectful conversation across lines of difference. In partnership with the Free Speech Alliance and DFTD, he helped bring a visiting biologist to campus in March of 2025, demonstrating his belief that academic inquiry must remain open to challenge from all angles.

Outside the classroom, Jono has consistently created spaces where students can wrestle with complex questions, from founding a startup protein bar company (Forward) to hosting The Whole Health Podcast . His interdisciplinary mindset reflects a conviction that meaningful understanding emerges when science, faith, and philosophy are brought into one conversation.

For Jono, free speech is not just a civic right, but it is a sacred responsibility tied to our human nature and capacity for reason. He works to model the kind of humility and clarity that make genuine disagreement possible in everyday conversations. We look forward to continuing our work with Jono and the Free Speech Alliance this year to support a culture of open inquiry on campus.

The Diversity Game Is a Gigantic Con

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 18:32:21 GMT

A new book shows how the trick works—and how to fight it.

The James G. Martin Center

By George Leef

July 16, 2025

In his famous story “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Hans Christian Andersen imagines a situation where everyone fears to speak the truth about an obvious falsehood, namely that the emperor’s supposedly magnificent new suit of clothes does not actually exist. He is naked, fooled by a con artist who got him to pay for nothing. Finally, a child blurts out the truth.

Something quite similar has taken place in the U.S. The con in our case is the way a group of pseudo-intellectuals managed to get leaders in our business and especially education communities to pay them for their self-proclaimed expertise in addressing an imaginary problem—America’s deep, intractable racism. Using clever tactics, they extracted billions for speeches, seminars, training sessions, and administrative sinecures. As this unfolded, few people spoke up to say that it was (and is) grifting on a prodigious scale. But now, Drexel University professor Stanley Ridgley has done so with his book DEI Exposed .

Ridgley’s big point is that there is no intellectual substance to the mania for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” that has swept through our colleges and universities. It took root and spread because it fit so perfectly with the ideology of most of our higher-education leaders, who couldn’t resist spending loads of money on DEI programs. How delightful for them to signal their ideological virtue with other people’s money. Ridgley writes, “In the non-profit world, results are not easily measured and America’s higher education system of colleges and universities are part of that world. This renders them the perfect petri dish for con games. It’s why hokum finds it way in and remains ensconced even as profound absurdities pass as results.”

The central claim of the DEI movement boils down to this: Our colleges are complicit in the nation’s abiding racism and should atone for it by establishing a host of diversity offices, paying diversity consultants, and subjecting students to diversity propaganda. This was a well-calculated guilt trip aimed at wealthy, “progressive” whites who were eager to be seen as allies of the “oppressed.” Of course, it’s ridiculous to believe that there’s even a smidgen of racism at work in our colleges and universities, which have been bastions of liberal enlightenment for generations.

But the diversity grifters understood the psychology of their marks. They figured that guilt-ridden white leftists would fly into a moral panic when accused of racism and then pay dearly for absolution. Especially after the death of George Floyd, our higher-education leaders plunged headlong into the contrived “crisis” where, as Ridgley notes, “public handwringing was obligatory.”

How did this big con game work? Ridgley shows how in fascinating detail.

Crucial to the DEI con is what he calls idea laundering. You start with a highly dubious idea that supports the alleged need for DEI programs—say, that black students are relentlessly harmed by “microaggressions”—then get a research paper saying so published in what looks like an academic journal, run by allies. Once it has been published, sympathizers will cite it in other journals, articles, blog posts, and so on. Of course, no one ever critiques the original paper; the point is to repeat its “findings” so often that people will think it must be true. Anyone who dares to challenge it will be smeared as a racist. Since no one in the education establishment wants that, DEI ideas build momentum.

One of the pillars of the DEI con is that America is gripped by “white supremacy,” supposedly very damaging to people from other races. The purveyors of the DEI con knew that white leftists would fall for the notion that America can’t realize “social justice” unless we fight this profound evil. But where did the “white supremacy” notion come from?

Ridgley has located its origin. The “white supremacy” concept was the work of Tema Okun, who was a corporate “diversity trainer” in the mid-1990s. After a frustrating day (many of the employees she was “training,” unlike academics, dared to disagree with her views), she jotted down a list of the things she disliked about the people who had resisted her message about racism in modern America. That is how her now-famous list of characteristics of white supremacy began—merely a fit of pique, as Okun herself has admitted.

Then, the idea laundering began. Okun posted her list on a friendly website, where other diversity zealots began spreading it. Later, Okun enrolled in a program to get her “doctor of education degree” and wrote her dissertation to embellish her “white supremacy” list and give it the appearance of academic research. After receiving her degree, Doctor Okun turned her dissertation into a book that was published by a “progressive” publisher, and the book was favorably reviewed by DEI allies. Before long, Okun’s list was being “taught” in schools and colleges as if it were fact.

That’s how ridiculous “diversity” notions are smuggled into mainstream academia. Once those notions have gotten in, they have to be protected against critical analysis. That is where campus “mindguards” (as Ridgley calls them) enter the picture. These are administrative personnel whose job is to crack down on dissenters. The DEI con must be protected at all costs from intellectual scrutiny, just as communist regimes had to protect Marxist orthodoxy. Thus, colleges and universities devote resources to “diversity” personnel throughout the institution, whose job it is to frighten and silence critics. To give an example, Ridgley cites the instance of a professor who was on a search committee. When he objected that the imposed limits of the search (women and minorities only) were not legal, he was stiffly informed by the diversity apparatchik that his point was not appropriate.

The worst thing for the DEI grifters would be for people to conclude that there is really no problem of racism on our campuses, so they work hard to create the impression that there indeed is a problem. Ridgley goes through an array of techniques they employ, such as the “climate survey.” For $12,000, a school can commission a survey from the Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California. For that, it will get a “study” that will invariably find that the racial climate on campus needs to be improved—naturally through more DEI programs and personnel. Spending on DEI begets more spending on it.

Another method for creating the appearance of need for more DEI work is the hate-crime hoax. There have been plenty of them (racist graffiti, nooses, and so forth), always leading to a flurry of activity on campus. Sometimes these are investigated and revealed to be hoaxes. But, even then, the perpetrators are apt to be lauded by school officials for “raising consciousness.”

One of Ridgley’s most devastating arguments is that the soothing rhetoric about how DEI is merely devoted to understanding and bringing people together was shown to be false by the response of the diversity crowd to the anti-Semitic outbursts following the October 7 massacre. He writes, “DEI staffers were adept at running workshops and hectoring innocent students about their implicit biases, but they proved incompetent to deal with the real world of real hate experienced by real people threatened with death because of their ethnicity. And it turned out that the DEI folks didn’t want to do so in any case. The DEI creed told them not to.” Why? Ridgley answers, because “Jewish victims were not DEI approved.” In the artificial world of DEI, white people can never be victims, and Jews are regarded as white. No need for any concern about them.

The DEI people aren’t just grifters—they’re hypocrites.

How well has the DEI con paid off? Very well indeed. Most colleges now have “chief diversity officers” who pull in big salaries, along with large numbers of middling administrators who share in the take. All of those are make-work jobs for people with useless degrees and no marketable skills, but who are useful to the “progressive” movement. The DEI ideology, after all, supports its goal of radically transforming America.

In the end, Ridgley is optimistic that we may be past the high-water mark for DEI. Corporations that once embraced it are reversing course, a sign that you can stop wasting money on this lunacy and survive. More importantly, the Trump administration is pressuring our education institutions to abandon their divisive and discriminatory DEI programs. Ridgley’s book will undoubtedly help, since it so plainly shows that DEI is an intellectual fraud—just like the emperor’s clothes.

George Leef is director of external relations at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

The Diversity Game Is a Gigantic Con — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Christian professor who criticized DEI wins battle for tenure at Michigan State U.

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 17:49:52 GMT

Internal documents reveal how administrators use “diversity checks” to influence the hiring process and engage in discrimination.

The College Fix

By Pedro Rodriguez-Aparicio

July 11, 2025

Civil rights group says school violated professor’s First Amendment rights

An accomplished nematologist now has tenure at Michigan State University after initially being passed over following her criticism of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Professor Marisol Quintanilla recently won tenure from the public university in Lansing after intervention from the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.

The civil rights group intervened after Quintanilla ( pictured ) failed to obtain tenure despite two decades of teaching experience and “21 peer-reviewed publications, over $6.2 million in grants, and 189 extension talks,” according to a news release .

The group argued in a January letter that the school discriminated against Quintanilla after she faced backlash in 2022 for criticizing DEI policies. She also declined to list her gender on university forms, “believing these questions implicitly endorsed ideological positions contrary to her faith.”

“FAIR’s advocacy for Dr. Marisol Quintanilla reflects our core commitment to protecting academic freedom and ensuring that faculty members can express their deeply held convictions without facing professional retaliation,” a spokesperson for the non-profit told The College Fix .

Michigan State U. said the letter did not lead to tenure.

“A letter from any outside organization would have no bearing on the review process,” spokeswoman Amber McCann told The Fix via email.

“Each submission for reappointment, promotion and tenure (RPT) review is considered on the merits of the case, according to university policy and procedure,” McCann said.

A free speech group who previously helped Professor Quintanilla called the resolution a “positive outcome.”

“The university cannot dictate a professor’s speech. It is a positive outcome that the university reversed course and offered the professor tenure,” Graham Piro with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression told The Fix on a phone call.

In 2023, the group helped Quintanilla when her department chair, Hannah Burrack, mandated the professor “write a DEI statement as part of her annual review.” Burrack also had asked Quintanilla to retract an article criticizing diversity initiatives.

The College Fix contacted Burrack via email on Thursday morning to ask for her side of the story, but she deferred to McCann, the university spokeswoman. She said DEI statements are not required for performance reviews.

Piro said the university did not act in alignment with previous court decisions, where courts sided with people who chose not to disclose their gender identities.

“It is worth noting that there is a decision from a 2006 Circuit Court of Appeals that was a violation of the professors first amendment right and expression of religion,” Piro told The Fix on behalf of the free speech group. “The court believed that addressing the student by their identity fell on the ideological side.”

“If there is a blanket requirement of the preferred pronouns it would be an infringement of the First Amendment right,” Piro said.

“Universities have the right to limit faculty speech in a particular way but a generic requirement that dictates how a faculty is addressed would not be allowed.”

Harvard Explores New Center for Conservative Scholarship Amid Trump Attacks

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 15:02:16 GMT

The Ivy League school has discussed an effort to ‘support viewpoint diversity’ with potential donors, says it ‘will not be partisan’.

The Wall Street Journal

By Douglas Belkin , Juliet Chung, Emily Glazer, Natalie Andrews

July 10, 2025

Harvard leaders have discussed creating a program that people briefed on the talks described as a center for conservative scholarship, possibly modeled on Stanford’s Hoover Institution, as the school fights the Trump administration’s accusations that it is too liberal.

The idea has circulated at the university for several years but gained steam after pro-Palestinian protests began disrupting campus in late 2023. Harvard has discussed the effort with potential donors, people familiar with the matter said. The cost of creating such a center could run somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion, a person familiar with Harvard’s thinking estimated.

A spokesman for Harvard said an initiative under discussion “will ensure exposure to the broadest ranges of perspectives on issues, and will not be partisan, but rather will model the use of evidence-based, rigorous logic and a willingness to engage with opposing views.” He added that the school has been accelerating efforts to set up the initiative, which would “promote and support viewpoint diversity.”

A 2024 survey by Harvard found that only one-third of the college’s graduating class felt comfortable discussing controversial topics, and a 2023 survey by the student newspaper found that just 3% of faculty at Harvard College identified as politically conservative.

Harvard President Alan Garber helped promote an “intellectual vitality” program to reinvigorate debate on campus and ensure students engage in discussions free of self-censorship.

Garber faces a delicate challenge in squaring off against President Trump : Any changes the university makes that could be perceived as bowing to the president would face blowback by large groups of faculty, alumni and students, but Trump has many levers to pull to inflict damage on the school .

Harvard has been battling the Trump administration for months over the school’s federal funding and autonomy, after the government accused it of tolerating antisemitism and promoting what the White House views as discriminatory diversity, equity and inclusion practices. The administration has pulled or frozen billions of dollars in federal funding, threatened the school’s tax-exempt status and targeted its ability to enroll international students .

Harvard has sued . A court hearing is scheduled for later this month.

The broader negotiations between the Trump administration and Harvard have hit repeated snags, delaying any settlement, people familiar with the matter said. Harvard is reviewing a new proposal from the administration after the White House deemed an earlier offer from the school a nonstarter, one of the people said.

Decision-making around admissions and faculty have been points of tension, with Harvard resistant to ceding authority on which types of students it admits, the faculty it hires and what professors teach, according to people briefed on the discussions.

The Trump administration would view the creation of a new institute as window-dressing and wouldn’t see it as a meaningful part of their negotiations, said a person familiar with the administration’s views.

“We’re negotiating hard, I think we’re getting close to having it happen, it’s not wrapped up as fast as I wanted it to, but we’re getting there,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said at a Tuesday cabinet meeting while discussing the status of the administration’s continuing talks with Harvard and Columbia University, whose board has been discussing terms of a possible deal .

The idea of creating a center that would encourage a range of viewpoints has been considered at Harvard for years.

Before he stepped down from running Harvard Business School in 2020, then-Dean Nitin Nohria discussed creating such an institute with several prospective donors, said people familiar with his efforts. Harvard Provost John Manning is helping to lead the current effort and has discussed the idea with some donors who could help fund the effort.

Some members of the Harvard Corporation, Harvard’s governing body, view the center idea as not unreasonable and as one that could foster a diversity of viewpoints while maintaining Harvard’s independence, said a person familiar with their thinking.

During his campaign, Trump vowed to rein in progressive ideas on elite college campuses, which he said amounted to a “Marxist assault on our American heritage and Western civilization itself.”

Central to changing campus culture is controlling who is hired and what they teach. Harvard President Garber has said the school won’t cede that authority . An institute would open the possibility of hiring new faculty focused on classically liberal ideas which, on many of today’s campuses, are often read as conservative. Those ideas, in turn, could reinvigorate debate, which even Harvard administrators say has atrophied .

The Hoover Institution, which resides on Stanford’s campus and champions free markets and small government, dates back decades. Academic institutes elsewhere devoted to civics, American history and Western civilization began popping up, mostly at public universities in red states, about a decade ago.

They are generally nonpartisan and champion classic liberalism rooted in the study of Western civilization. In some instances, Republican legislatures doled out money to schools to create programs as a counterweight to what they saw as liberal faculty.

Arizona State University launched its School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership in 2016. Founding director Paul Carrese said there are now more than a dozen centers on public university campuses and several more at private schools.

At the University of Florida’s Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education, University of North Carolina’s School of Civic Life and Leadership and Yale University’s Center for Civic Thought, students read classic texts, apply lessons to current problems and hash out differences in small group discussions.

“This is a national reform movement,” Carrese said.

Write to Douglas Belkin at Doug.Belkin@wsj.com , Juliet Chung at Juliet.Chung@wsj.com , Emily Glazer at Emily.Glazer@wsj.com and Natalie Andrews at natalie.andrews@wsj.com

How DEI Bureaucrats Control University Hiring

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 15:35:12 GMT

Internal documents reveal how administrators use “diversity checks” to influence the hiring process and engage in discrimination.

City Journal

By John D. Sailor

July 7, 2025

In early 2021, Carma Gorman, an art history professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the designated “diversity advocate” for a faculty search committee, emailed John Yancey , the College of Fine Arts’ associate dean of diversity, seeking approval to proceed with a job search.

“I wanted to make sure that the demographics of our pool pass muster,” Gorman wrote. She noted that 21 percent of applicants were from underrepresented minority groups, with another 28 percent self-identifying as Asian.

“The 21% is enough to move forward,” Yancey replied, but he cautioned that concerns could arise depending on how the applicant pool was narrowed. “If 20 of the 23 URM applicants are dropped in the early cut,” he wrote, “then things don’t look good anymore.”

The exchange, which I obtained through an open-records request, offers a window into a diversity practice adopted at many universities. Documents I’ve acquired from institutions across the country—hiring plans, grant proposals, progress reports, and internal emails—show that routine diversity checks are now embedded throughout the hiring process, often enforced with serious consequences for searches that fail to “pass muster.”

This practice raises not only significant legal questions but also highlights how such policies can concentrate power in the hands of individual administrators, granting them effective veto authority over one of a university’s most consequential decisions: the hiring of tenure-track faculty.

In 2023, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 17, banning racial preferences and the employment of diversity officers. But just two years earlier, the situation at UT–Austin looked very different.

The documents tell the story. As diversity advocate, Gorman—coauthor of the annotated bibliography Decentering Whiteness in Design History—proposed a detailed diversity plan for her search committee. The plan, which I obtained via a records request, outlined a rigorous process for monitoring diversity at every stage of the hiring process.

“Once we’ve sorted everyone into Qualified and Unqualified groups,” Gorman wrote of the first stage in the search process, the committee would ask an administrator to “check the demographic characteristics” of the initial cut. “If it is a diverse enough group to merit moving forward with the search, fantastic!” But if the pool was deemed insufficiently diverse, the committee would revisit candidates from underrepresented groups who were initially considered unqualified, expand job advertising, or simply “cancel the search entirely.” This step would be repeated for both the shortlist and the finalist slate.

The practice raises obvious legal red flags—particularly when it involves canceling searches outright, effectively denying all candidates a fair opportunity based on immutable characteristics. Yet documents I’ve obtained show that more than a dozen universities have adopted some version of this approach.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), for instance, search committees routinely receive reminders about the institution’s diversity-check policy. “Every week, [the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences] will send the diversity of the pool report of your faculty search to the unit for review,” wrote Amy Lawrence Elli, a director of human resources, in an email to several departments .

These emails also included department-specific demographic goals. “For your specific search, [the college] has set a strategic goal to hire more U.S. ethnic/racial minority and female faculty in your unit,” Elli wrote in an email to a microbiology committee .

At UIUC, this scrutiny of race and sex would continue right up to the selection of finalists. Deans would review a “diversity of the pool report” for semifinalist and finalist slates. If the makeup was deemed “sufficient,” then search committees could proceed with interviews; if the pool was deemed “insufficient,” the college would “contact the executive officer and search chair to discuss options within 1-2 business days.”

The policy is not limited to universities in progressive states. In a video I previously reported on , Susan Olesik, the Ohio State University’s divisional dean of math and sciences, told a department that “diversity of the candidates has to be as high of a priority as the scholarship.”

To ensure that priority, Olesik noted that approval for finalist slates would depend on their having the right demographic balance. “If the slate of candidates that you bring forward are not diverse, I will ask you to simply keep searching,” she said.

Emails show how the policies played out in practice. As I’ve reported , one Ohio State search committee seeking a dean’s approval boasted that it was “incredibly fortunate to have found three fantastic Native women scholars/candidates who all identify as Native.” Dana Regna, the divisional dean of arts and humanities, wrote that she supported the list “based upon recruitment and diversity of finalists.”

Regarding another search, Regna’s approval, predicated at least in part on “diversity,” was even more enthusiastic : “I definitely approve! What a diverse process, pool, and finalist list.”

Heavily redacted emails from UIUC show several administrators poring over proposed finalists, at times voicing their concerns. “Attached is the diversity of the semi finalist pool for the AAS search,” Elli noted , along with another comment that was redacted. She added that the college “had set a goal for URM.”

Lloyd Munjanja, the university’s associate director of graduate diversity and program climate, responded, “I will talk with the Associate Deans about this as well before the search moves forward.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the records show how this diversity-checking policy encouraged controversial and potentially illegal hiring practices—most obviously, disparate treatment based on race.

For searches that didn’t pass muster, Gorman’s plan proposed adding the highest-scoring minority candidates dropped from consideration back to the shortlist and finalist slate. “I suppose we could each pitch our favorites,” Gorman added parenthetically, “which might surface some folks who were underestimated by the committee as a whole—but just seeing who has the next-highest number of stars seems like a good starting point.”

By threatening to shut down or indefinitely postpone searches, diversity checks create an incentive for departments to adopt additional DEI litmus tests for hiring. At UIUC, Elli listed several strategies for getting a “diverse set of semi-finalists or finalists,” including requiring applicants to submit DEI statements and making the “ability to enhance the diversity of your department” an evaluation criterion. DEI statements, which Elli promoted repeatedly in boilerplate emails, have grown increasingly unpopular, even among progressive academics, and are seen by many as ideological litmus tests .

Diversity checks reveal something more subtle about the DEI era. These overbearing, often clever policies have not just sanctioned a legally tenuous obsession with race. They also confer power—giving administrators, many pursuing an ideological agenda, the ability to delay, halt, and redirect departments in their most important decision-making capacities.

If there’s one key lesson here, it’s that the desire for power, not ideology alone, gave rise to the social-justice university. More than likely, power will also prove its undoing.

John D. Sailer is the director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

How Trump’s Anti-DEI Push Is Unraveling College Scholarships

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 15:13:20 GMT

Some programs are being discontinued, while others are being broadened to include more students

The Wall Street Journal

By Tali Arbel

July 5, 2025

Colleges, companies and philanthropic organizations are retooling millions of dollars in scholarships that for years supported minority students.

Under threat from the Trump administration and activist groups over diversity programs, some are scrapping scholarships entirely. Others are broadening the programs to focus on low-income students in general or tweaking applications to try to keep their original missions.

“We’re seeing widespread fear of litigation prompt many scholarship providers to re-evaluate,” said Jackie Bright, president of the National Scholarship Providers Association.

In June, $56 million in scholarships in the NSPA database had race, ethnicity or gender criteria, a decrease of 25% from March 2023. The database is a small but indicative slice of the billions of dollars of financial aid available in the U.S.

As part of President Trump’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion programs, the Education Department told schools in February that using race in financial aid could threaten their federal funding. Some universities are under investigation for their scholarships.

Even before Trump took office, the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that found it unconstitutional to consider race in university admissions had forced changes to scholarships. Many interpreted the decision to mean that other race-conscious programs in higher education could be “legally suspect,” said Suzanne Eckes, a professor at the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. State officials and legislatures also pushed to eliminate race from aid.

Education experts said the changes could make it harder for minority students to graduate from college. “There’s going to be a decline in college affordability and completion rates for those students,” Bright said.

Killing the scholarship

The University of Michigan’s alumni association in March told students it was canceling the Lead Scholars program, a week before the school announced it was closing its DEI offices . The alumni group said it ended the scholarship to comply with the law and with guidance from the federal government.

More than 800 students have received awards since Lead Scholars began in 2008. It was meant to support minority students after the state of Michigan banned using racial preferences in public-college admissions, and offered at least $5,000 a year as well as community events.

Ana Trujillo Garcia, a rising senior studying art and design, with a focus on furniture, said the financial benefits—$5,000 a year—have been important, but so was the environment Lead Scholars created. She made friends through the program and shared her art at a cultural showcase.

“ It was great to have a community of only minorities,” she said. “’Cause on campus, you see everyone. But in that one, you saw everyone that was like you.”

Other scholarships have dwindled or are on pause. The Justice Department in April said that the state of Illinois and six schools—including Northwestern University, Loyola University of Chicago and the University of Chicago—suspended a scholarship for minority graduate students called Diversifying Higher Education Faculty in Illinois after the department threatened a lawsuit over racial discrimination.

“This Department of Justice is committed to rooting DEI out of American institutions,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The Illinois Board of Higher Education said the program wasn’t suspended, but the state had agreed to evaluate the fellowship—which is enshrined in state law—along with the Illinois General Assembly.

Northwestern withdrew from the program in March, a school spokesman said. Loyola and the University of Chicago didn’t respond to requests for comment. The University of Illinois-Chicago on its website said its participation in the program was paused because of “funding restrictions from sponsor.”

Changing the Scope

Earlier this year, McDonald’s removed a Hispanic-ancestry requirement from its 40-year-old Hacer college scholarship program, after a lawsuit from an activist group that challenges the use of race in scholarships. Instead, Hacer applicants must show their contribution to the Hispanic community through activities and leadership.

Scholarship recipients said the money was important to their success, but winning the prize also made them feel recognized as Latinos who had overcome barriers.

“It felt like you were seen because of your accomplishments, but also because you are part of a group that’s been marginalized for years,” said Erick Soto, a 2024 graduate from the University of Arkansas and 2020 Hacer recipient. His scholarship was for $20,000 over four years.

McDonald’s declined to comment beyond a January statement saying it disagreed with the claim that the scholarship was discriminatory but wanted to protect the program.

Edward Blum, whose group was behind the lawsuit that led to the 2023 Supreme Court decision that banned affirmative action, also brought the McDonald’s lawsuit.

“You can’t remedy past discrimination with new discrimination,” he said. “Treating people differently because of their race or ethnicity is legally wrong.”

The Gates Foundation in April removed race and ethnicity from the Gates Scholarship, saying anyone eligible for a federal Pell Grant could apply. The foundation said on its website that it began evaluating in September how to reach the broadest range of low-income students and that it takes “its compliance obligations seriously.” It didn’t return requests for comment.

Blum, the activist, said he had filed a complaint in April with the Internal Revenue Service, asking it to investigate the Gates Foundation’s tax-exempt status because of discrimination against white students.

In March, Hawkeye Community College in Waterloo, Iowa, sent LaTanya Graves a letter saying the $250-a-semester scholarship her family set up for Black students in 2020 likely had to change because of the government’s position on “nondiscrimination obligations” for schools that get federal funding. Hawkeye said out of more than 460 scholarships its foundation awarded each year, 10 had race as criteria.

Graves, who had created the scholarship in honor of her mother, bristled at the letter. But she said she blamed the government, not the school.

“How can the government dictate what a family sets up?” she said.

Write to Tali Arbel at tali.arbel@wsj.com

Appeared in the July 7, 2025, print edition as 'Trump’s Anti-DEI Push Unravels College Scholarships'.

How Trump’s Anti-DEI Push Is Unraveling College Scholarships - WSJ

Presidents in the Hot Seat

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 15:22:01 GMT

National Association of Scholars

By Kali Jerrard

July 1, 2025

CounterCurrent: Week of 06/30/25

The past six months have made one thing clear: the role of college president is no longer safe from political or public accountability. Since the start of President Trump’s second term, a series of Executive Orders (EOs) and higher education reforms have put colleges and universities—and their leadership—under intense scrutiny. Institutions slow to comply, particularly with mandates to dismantle “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs, are finding themselves in the federal crosshairs.

The result? A wave of resignations, stalled appointments, and mounting pressure on presidents and administrators to abandon progressive orthodoxies in favor of transparency, viewpoint diversity, and legal compliance. The recent shake-up at the University of Virginia (UVA) may be only the beginning.

Last week , I wrote about UVA and its administrators’ apparent failure to comply with the EO to dismantle DEI on campus. To summarize, the UVA Board’s March and April Resolutions—which sought to discard DEI and increase viewpoint diversity—were “stonewalled” by administrators. The school is under federal investigation as well for failure to comply with anti-DEI directives. Now, different news out of UVA has made the top of the news cycle.

On Thursday evening , news broke that UVA President Jim Ryan stepped down after nearly seven years as president, sparking a firestorm of debate over the circumstances.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) apparently demanded Ryan’s resignation after UVA failed to entirely eliminate DEI on campus. This coincided with the DOJ’s investigation into the school. While schools like Columbia and Harvard are being publicly investigated, UVA has been quietly scrutinized by the DOJ for months. According to a New York Times article ,

The Trump administration has privately demanded that the University of Virginia oust its president to help resolve a Justice Department investigation into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, according to three people briefed on the matter.

While some at UVA rejoiced, others protested last Friday, accusing the government of overreach. Lest we not forget that as a public institution of higher education, UVA is beholden to the law in order to receive federal funding. Such violation of anti-DEI directives by failure to comply or by hiding DEI under different names on campus put UVA in the Trump administration's direct line of fire.

What happens next at UVA remains to be seen. While some thought Ryan’s resignation was necessary to “protect the university’s core values of depoliticization and intellectual diversity,” others in the community have said “they will not go quietly.”

In light of recent scrutiny directed at institutions like UVA, Columbia, and others now in the Trump administration’s crosshairs, a major question is circulating: Are more college and university presidents being positioned to resign? It seems increasingly likely. Since January, the administration’s heightened focus on higher education—particularly its push to confront anti-Semitism and dismantle DEI bureaucracies—has placed mounting pressure on campus leadership. With job instability growing and public demands intensifying, more resignations—or even forced removals—may well be on the horizon. The same trend could extend to other top administrators as well.

Candidates looking to fill administrative vacancies may also run into more snags than in previous years. For instance, take Santa Ono, whose appointment as president of the University of Florida (UF) was blocked by the Florida Board of Governors in a vote of 10-6 after his track record of promoting DEI policies came to light. Ono’s effort to walk back his prior embrace of DEI and progressive campus dogmas failed to convince Florida’s political leadership that he was the right choice for the job at UF. Currently, UF is still on the hunt for a president, with Dr. Kent Fuchs filling the role as interim president. The school is also looking for five new deans —however, this search is somewhat predicated on finding a new president first.

The rapidly changing higher education landscape is paving the way for much needed reforms. Ridding classrooms of DEI, reestablishing gender distinctions under Title IX protections, and removing animus-fueled ideology from curricula—to name a few—have leveled the ground for higher education to rebuild its commitment to providing an excellent education and educating virtuous citizens. Higher ed’s growing pains, though unpleasant, are necessary—including the reshaping of leadership at major institutions.

Until next week.

P.S. New positions have opened at Cleveland State University as part of its new Center for Civics, you can review the jobs by clicking here and here .

P.P.S. Ahead of Friday, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) wishes you and your loved ones a Happy 4th of July! Be sure to follow Minding the Campus’s American Revolution Series , which—in preparation for America’s 250th anniversary next year—is tracing the key events that led to our independence. And keep an eye on the NAS website for upcoming events, articles, and updates.

The Public Needs Campus Viewpoint Diversity

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 18:58:06 GMT

The radical-left monopoly is a threat to America’s democracy, institutions and national well-being.

The Wall Street Journal

By John Ellis

June 16, 2025

President Trump began acting on his pledge to end wokeness by targeting DEI and critical race theory in universities and the federal government. While this was a good first step, shutting down woke programs goes only so far; it limits what bad actors in academia can do, but it leaves those bad actors in place.

Without broader staffing reforms, radical left-wing professors will still control higher education. Several states are trying to dictate what professors should and shouldn’t teach, but these efforts similarly don’t reach the core of academia’s sickness—the political monopoly that guarantees its continued malignancy.

The Trump administration’s April 11 letter to Harvard takes aim at that issue. To receive federal funding, Harvard must establish faculty viewpoint diversity and end viewpoint discrimination in faculty hiring. It would be better if this policy didn’t have to be imposed from the outside, but a militant political monopoly will never reform itself.

The letter aims for political balance, but that would set in motion more-profound changes. Radicals captured the universities to use them for promoting a political ideology that could never prevail at the ballot box. Only the ideological monopoly that they created made possible the repurposing of academia for their political activism. Accordingly, political balance matters most because it will enable a return to appointing thoughtful scholars, whether on the left or right, instead of political activists.

Ending woke foolishness and returning universities to their former brilliance is possible only if the political monopoly is broken up. In his essay “On Liberty,” John Stuart Mill explained that “a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life. . . . It is in a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity.” Only a political monopoly could have given us the collection of silly, faddish notions that is wokeness: criminals as victims, pronoun madness, defunding the police and so on.

It’s easy to understand how a monolithic political group loses its grip on sanity. A party that faces strong opposition will have its weakest and most fanciful arguments picked off and weeded out. That will clear the field of all but its strongest ideas, and leadership will then flow to people who build their party’s agenda on these strong ideas. Without the discipline of an opposition, leadership will flow instead to people who advocate the most ambitious and exciting ideas, which without opposition will gradually degenerate into absurdity.

What makes university reform so urgent is that woke folly inevitably spreads from campuses throughout our society. Children have abysmal scores in math and English partly because radical professors in college education schools persuade their teachers to give priority to “social justice” over the three Rs. The notorious political bias of the legacy media developed partly because journalists are trained in activist college journalism schools. Other professions have suffered similarly.

Universities collectively are now the national headquarters of the radical left. Radicals use them as a base from which to infiltrate and gain control of professional associations, foundations, nonprofits, advocacy groups, corporate offices, editorial boards, government departments, even churches.

Democrats are waking up to the realization that their party’s leaders are excessively influenced by the pseudointellectuals of higher education. Two-thirds of Democratic voters oppose men in women’s sports, yet House and Senate Democrats were nearly unanimous in voting against legislation this year that would have protected female athletes from male competitors. The healthy two-party political system that we once had may not be possible while radicals dominate the Democratic Party through their control of academia.

The federal government’s Harvard letter rightly confronts a crucial question: Should public money support institutions that have all but abandoned much of their original purpose? States have an even clearer path to reform because their influence over higher education is greater and more direct. The Trump administration has used research funding as leverage against Harvard, but states could go even further, as they provide general funding for public universities. What’s lacking even in most red states is the will to use the tools at their disposal.

Americans have seen a series of major scandals in recent years, but none of them—not even the coverup of a sitting president’s mental decline—compares with the scandal that is higher education. The rot we have allowed to fester in our colleges and universities, including antisemitism and anti-Americanism, is a serious threat to the nation’s well-being.

Conditioning continued funding of the universities on reform shouldn’t be controversial. If the political monopoly were broken up, that would take care of DEI, critical race theory and even antisemitism, because these are all created by the monopoly. Attempting to tackle these ideologies while leaving the monopoly in place would only hide them from public view while leaving them to fester in campus classrooms.

Mr. Ellis is a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of “A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism.”

Music after DEI

Tue, 20 May 2025 17:52:09 GMT

On an agenda for classical music in DEI’s wake.

The New Criterion

By Don Batton

May 20, 2025

The adage that “the death of classical music is its oldest living tradition” is a cliché for a reason. In 1600, the theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi publicly condemned the madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi, one of music history’s great innovators. The composer’s crime? His outlandish belief that the strict rules of harmony and part-writing might sometimes be set aside in order to express the psycho-emotional content of the text being set to music. Artusi worried that Monteverdi’s heresies were setting the compositional craft on a slippery slope from which it might never recover. As it turned out, those heresies proved foundational to the Classical and Romantic styles. The vast majority of what we today call “classical music” might never have happened without them.

Over the ensuing centuries, musicians, critics, and tastemakers have periodically followed in Artusi’s footsteps, forecasting doom for our industry—degradation of artistic quality, loss of funding, dwindling audiences. Again and again, they’ve been proven wrong. Many of the changes most feared while they were occurring turned out, in hindsight, to be blessings. In cases when the prognosticators had legitimate concerns, the classical-music industry turned out to be more durable and adaptable than they had feared.

It is my belief that a few decades from now, this is how we will think about the strange period starting around 2015 and reaching its regrettable zenith in 2023, when the classical-music industry in North America (and to a lesser extent, the world) grew obsessed with diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our industry is now showing early signs of awakening from its DEI fever dream. But for classical music to regain its health fully and avoid a relapse, it needs to make a thorough accounting of what went wrong.

Ibelieve that the mistakes made over the last decade fall into five major categories. As I discuss them, I will link to longer treatments I have done on each subject.

What went wrong:

We allowed the average quality of the compositions we perform to decline by prioritizing DEI criteria in our selection of repertoire. Many orchestras set unofficial quotas on the number of works written by women or racial minorities to be performed per concert and per season. Therefore, the compositional archives needed to be combed to identify the few composers and works from the periods audiences most appreciated (the Classical and Romantic) that fit the bill. Occasionally, these findings were neglected gems (do yourself a favor and listen to William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony), but typically—as in the cases of exhumed “forgotten geniuses” like the French Caribbean Chevalier de Saint-Georges or the black American Florence Price—they were not. Knowing the relative underrepresentation of non-Europeans and women in classical composition before the twentieth century, this is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the degree to which performers have sought to ignore the obvious compositional shortcomings of composers like Saint-Georges or Price, programming them incessantly while seeming to dare listening audiences to respond with anything but unqualified, astonished praise. Inasmuch as we have elevated these weaker works, we have blunted classical music’s strongest intrinsic sales pitch to audiences both new and old: the soul-satisfying power and clarity of our greatest compositions.
In our hiring and guest-artist-selection processes, we have allowed race- and sex-based criteria to replace meritocracy. In many orchestras, the famously equitable blind-audition process, in which musicians audition without being seen, has been altered to ensure that candidates from favored groups advance in the process. In their collaborations with living composers, guest artists, and conductors, organizations have likewise prioritized race and sex. Young composers who hail from minority backgrounds find themselves buried under more commissions and performance requests than most composers field in a lifetime, while equally talented composers of different backgrounds go mostly ignored. Women conductors are prioritized to the point that at America’s top ten orchestras during the 2023–24 season, a female conductor had twice the probability of being invited to guest-conduct as did a male conductor. This erosion of meritocracy has resulted in four unfortunate outcomes: first, young artists are thrust under the most glaring spotlights too early because they fulfill a racial or gender quota; second, we miss artistic talent by casting our net too narrowly; third, young musicians of disfavored racial or gender backgrounds survey the contorted musical landscape and are discouraged from pursuing music professionally; and fourth, talented musicians of favored backgrounds can’t help but go through their careers wondering if their professional success is due primarily to their talents, or to their race or sex.
We have funneled money that we don’t have into useless race and gender initiatives. One would be hard-pressed to find an orchestra in America that has not hired (and kept on) a “Chief Diversity Officer” in recent years. Meanwhile, many of those same orchestras are stuck in contract negotiations with musicians that they claim they can’t afford to compensate fairly. The League of American Orchestras, which is funded in part through orchestra-administrator membership fees paid by member orchestras, continues to spend much of its resources on DEI. In its steady stream of case-study and best-practices reports, it has still failed to identify a link between diversity initiatives and their stated goal: a durable, diverse audience. Indeed, about a data release from 2024, the LOA admitted: “The proportion of tickets sold to Asian, Black and Hispanic audience members in 2023 only slightly surpassed that of 2019.” And that is a time period over which the proportion of Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics in the overall population increased, meaning that DEI efforts cannot even claim any positive correlation to minority representation in audiences and have likely had zero impact with regard to their stated goal.
We have patronized minority audiences. The reasons why classical music’s audiences remain on average whiter and more Asian than America at large are multifaceted, and we are right to seek to understand them. But after several years of failure, we can say quite conclusively that those reasons do not include an excess of Beethoven or paucity of Price on concert programs, orchestras’ failure to publish diversity statements or land acknowledgements, or their decision not to program academic lectures about the evils of slavery before concerts. While programs or activities pandering to minority audiences will occasionally attract diverse audiences, those audiences typically do not return. The world of classical music once believed that our greatest music is for everyone. Through our self-flagellating programming, we have in effect told minority audience members that this is no longer true. Why would they willingly subscribe to racist institutions in a racist industry?
We have criminalized the cultural curiosity, mixing, and borrowing that, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, built classical music into an emotional lingua franca for the whole world. By making cultural identity proprietary, we have insisted that composers cannot “borrow” any idea from cultures more deeply “oppressed” than their own; to do so would be “cultural appropriation.” The inevitable result of this proscription has been siloing—composers writing music only in their own languages, only about their own countries, their own people, themselves. If musicians had thought this way in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the oeuvres of Gottschalk, Debussy, Bartók, Britten, Milhaud, Tippett, and Stravinsky, among many others, would have changed the world far less than they did. And with today’s composers forced to stay in their own cultural lanes to avoid accusations of “appropriation,” their oeuvres are less innovative and less likely to be remembered one hundred years from now than those of their pathbreaking forebears.

A daunting list. It’s almost enough to make one wonder whether, after so many false cries over the centuries, the wolf of classical music’s decline and fall may finally be at the door. At the very least, it is a sobering reminder of just how much damage can be done in a few short years by the forcible insertion of political ideology into art.

But ever the optimist, I believe that correcting the missteps on the foregoing list can form the foundation for a post-DEI agenda for classical music. In that spirit, I am setting forth eight agenda items that I believe our industry should pursue to heal its self-inflicted DEI injuries and return to health and relevance. C. S. Lewis famously wrote that “if you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.” For that reason, I am dividing the list into two categories: the things our industry is still doing that are still harming us and that we must stop doing, and the things we must start doing to meaningfully move forward.

First, the things we must stop doing:

Entirely end the selection of concert repertoire based on the race or sex of the composer. Frequently, DEI pushers in orchestra administrations justified their repertoire picks by claiming that they were offering audiences something new. In fact, they were usually offering audiences derivative compositions that simply sounded like less-deftly-composed versions of music they already knew. Orchestras should expose audiences both to new and unfamiliar old musical ideas by seeking diversity within the music itself. Minority and female composers that have something fresh and interesting to say will rise to the top naturally on their own merits. We do not need to go searching for them on any basis other than their music.
End the selection of musicians based on race and sex. On this matter in particular, all ensembles must do is turn back the clock about fifteen years. Blind auditions should be used whenever possible, and all avenues for allowing applicants with preferred identities to circumvent the blind-audition process should be closed. Orchestras should drop all official or unofficial quota systems for guest artists and ensure that, on average, hired guest conductors of both sexes and all racial backgrounds are similarly credentialed and experienced. It is likely that this return to genuine fairness will result in a near-term decline in the number of female and minority musicians serving as guest artists. At some organizations, this is already happening. That is an acceptable outcome. The long-term goal of our industry should be to pitch a wide tent and invite new communities into it, not to engage in tugs-of-war over the services of a small group of female and minority musicians while their equally qualified peers get ignored.
End the tacit assumption that the canon of traditional classical music is something only white audiences (or perhaps white and Asian audiences) can appreciate. It’s patronizing, counterproductive, and false.
Stop relying upon ideologically captured organizations like the League of American Orchestras and OPERA America for ideas and guidance. In a recent piece for The New Criterion, I argued that the Kennedy Center can help fill this vacuum by starting a council that helps musical organizations transition into life after DEI.

And second, the things we must start doing:

In programming, prioritize the “forgotten middle.” By and large, the steady diet of DEI-selected repertoire did not crowd out the masterpieces of Beethoven, Brahms, or Tchaikovsky—the godlike composers who keep classical music’s more conservative audiences coming to the concert hall. Instead, it choked out any sort of creative programming that lacked a racial or gender angle. This often meant the exclusion of high-quality music that introduced audiences to unfamiliar sounds, whether by forgotten old masters or new ones. It is a common pitfall for musical groups moving on from DEI to program only the warhorses. For its first post-DEI season, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra announced last month that it would be programming one of its most boring concert seasons in memory—hardly an unfamiliar work in sight. In an extended screed blasting the symphony’s “bland and shapeless” upcoming season, the San Francisco music critic Joshua Kosman asked for more female and black composers. He has the right diagnosis but the wrong prescription. The symphony needs new sounds, but not at the price of weaker music. Otherwise it simply substitutes one “bland and shapeless” season for another. This will always be the result if we select on the basis of race and sex rather than the music itself.

Encourage the composition and performance of new music, particularly the composition of approachable new music that audiences are interested in listening to. In the process, we should remove the DEI-fueled taboos around “cultural appropriation,” allowing composers to absorb influences wherever they can in order to create new sounds reflecting our complex, globalized world. There is nothing wrong with a composer turning inward for inspiration from time to time, but how much greater is his potential when the whole world is his canvas!

Celebrate and promote new settings for musical performances and creative collaborations with other art forms or cultural institutions. Many arts organizations have long realized that the traditional evening-length concert format appeals less to today’s young audiences than those of the past. But during the DEI era, many had difficulty conceiving of new concert concepts or settings that were not somehow informed by DEI. Indeed, I recall a discussion of artistic collaborations at a League of American Orchestras conference in which no one could think of a collaboration they had done that did not involve the legacy of slavery, the death of George Floyd, or the oppression of women. Over the coming decades, arts organizations that can creatively collaborate on venues and content with visual artists, writers, cultural and historical sites, the food and beverage industries, and other institutions, and that can do so in ways audiences enjoy, will come out on top. Those that collaborate only for the purpose of self- or audience-flagellation won’t.

Close all DEI offices and eliminate all vice presidencies for DEI. Reallocate that funding to music education and orchestral outreach programs. The lack of diverse audiences and diverse player bases in classical music is due mainly to two factors: poor music education in majority-minority areas and the invisibility of classical-music organizations in those communities. Since cash-strapped school systems typically cut the arts first, orchestras and other classical-music organizations have a vital role to play in filling the gap. Classical-music organizations should ensure, through music-in-schools and mentorship programs, that no student in their city comes of age without having heard classical music live, and that no student interested in pursuing a musical education is unable to do so due to lack of access or funding. Likewise, ensembles must market in low-income communities and lower the financial barriers for such audiences to attend concerts. The pursuit of these two highly ambitious goals is far likelier to deliver diverse player bases and audiences in the future than DEI. Further, it does not require any racial criteria to be used at all. If orchestras simply target neighborhoods where the financial resources are weakest, other forms of diversity will follow.

Don Baton is the pen name of a conductor working on the East Coast. He writes the Substack newsletter “The Podium.”

“Music after DEI,” by Don Baton

Harvard Researcher: the University Is “Totally Corrupted”

Tue, 20 May 2025 17:29:10 GMT

Omar Sultan Haque condemns the school for abandoning truth in favor of racialism.

City Journal

By Christopher F. Rufo , Ryan Thorpe

May 20, 2025

Omar Sultan Haque has spent 23 years at Harvard University. He is furious about what has happened within the school.

While the media have framed the recent fight between Harvard and President Donald Trump in partisan terms, Haque believes that the problem goes much deeper than political score-settling. As he rose through the ranks—from graduate student to postdoctoral fellow to medical researcher to faculty member at Harvard Medical School—Haque watched the university gradually abandon the pursuit of truth and replace it with left-wing racialism.

Rather than stay silent, Haque has spoken out. Last year, he wrote an essay about his experience and has continued to criticize the university throughout the recent campus turmoil. As Haque sees it, Harvard cannot be reformed from within. It’s an unconscious patient and requires CPR to survive.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

City Journal: Give us a sense of the ideological landscape and your experience at Harvard.

Omar Sultan Haque: Unlike many others at Harvard, I have no dramatic cancellation, or intellectual persecution, or struggle session to report. I stopped teaching at Harvard last year primarily because of its anti-truth-seeking culture, radical left-wing bias, racial and gender discrimination, and prevailing anti-intellectualism, which made continued participation a poor use of time. There are exceptions, but on the whole Harvard has strayed from its foundational mission of unbiased truth-seeking and has become ideologically driven, too often resembling a secular church or a partisan think tank. The university’s culture and practices prioritize ideological conformity over open inquiry and debate, suppressing dissenting viewpoints and compromising academic freedom. This shift undermines the core values of a secular university and poses a threat to the integrity of academia and broader society.

CJ: How have DEI initiatives affected day-to-day life at Harvard?

Haque: The university may have changed the official name of its DEI office to use more nebulous euphemisms, but DEI and “Diet DEI” (a diluted form) have the same effects in practices, norms, and the larger culture of orthodoxy and taboo. Diet DEI is just more dishonest. The university has made some progress by eliminating racially segregated graduations and required DEI loyalty oaths in one of its many schools—mandatory diversity statements when applying for a job—but the larger culture of DEI is the problem. Some tropes remain popular on campus that are legacies of left-wing racism, such as the idea that a person’s racial identity is central to one’s academic study; that people should be sorted into “oppressor” and “oppressed” groups by their immutable characteristics; that racism is specific to one race rather than a universal, sinful propensity in human nature; and that lowering academic or behavioral standards for certain racial groups is not happening (when advocates are confronted with evidence that it is happening, they argue that the practice is justified). These beliefs infect teaching, research, grading standards, hiring, promotions, campus debate, what is considered an acceptable topic for invited lectures, what projects get funded, and so on.

CJ: In your observation, has Harvard continued to engage in discriminatory admissions and hiring?

Haque: Yes, of course! There is endless evidence at Harvard, in student admissions and faculty and staff hiring, that people are, in effect, sorted via a left-wing segregation filter: competing primarily against others of the same race and sometimes gender. One colleague at Harvard Law School who served for years on the admissions committee flat-out admitted this to me recently. That is why Harvard tries to cover its tracks and hide admissions data and post-admissions performance metrics that predictably result from separate and unequal admissions standards. The eye-popping data on biases against Asians and whites in admissions have already been exposed [in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard]. A corporation with identical racist practices would have been sued out of existence decades ago; why the exception for a wealthy university? The data on faculty and staff hiring and promotions reveal even more obvious evidence of discrimination. Just examine whether people in the same positions are similarly accomplished. No need to call Sherlock Holmes.

With SFFA, I thought the discrimination would end. But after the ruling, I saw Harvard’s first essay prompt for applicants to the university: “Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?”

So, Harvard has this sneaky, but technically legal, escape hatch from the Supreme Court ruling. Admissions officers can ask about “life experience” (wink, wink), and use that to sort applicants by race and assess them accordingly. They don’t ask about patriotism or spirituality, only diversity. The university’s recalcitrance and denial, its commitment to DEI, and its rationalization of racial discrimination has been truly shocking.

CJ: What is your sense of the political makeup of Harvard’s students, faculty, and administrators?

Haque: Per surveys, Harvard has become much more ideologically homogeneous than conservative and religious schools like Hillsdale. As a result, Harvard is too narrow-minded in scholarship, myopic, intolerant, and anti-intellectual. It favors progressive viewpoints to the detriment of open inquiry, especially on social, moral, and political topics in teaching and research. Courses, exams, research, trainings, grants, and campus life too often become predictable exercises in mouthing univariate explanations and dogmatic platitudes. Harvard’s institutional culture increasingly functions as a combined finishing school and seminary, not for a traditional religion, but for the progressive Left and the Democratic Party. It’s a totally corrupted institution.

CJ: What is your sense of how Harvard’s administration is responding to its ongoing fight with the Trump administration? Do you believe that Harvard deserves federal funding?

Haque: I think the Trump administration overstepped by making illegal requests in addition to legitimate ones, and may have undermined the prospects of long-term change. Yet, Harvard should follow the Civil Rights Act; defying it will not end well. President Alan Garber is incorrect that the government can’t enforce laws regarding whom the universities can admit and hire. (Editor’s note: in a public statement , Garber said that “No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”) Yes, the government can: racial discrimination is illegal, and no one should be admitted, hired, or promoted based on race, gender, or sexual orientation. Harvard appears to me to be willing to sink the ship to keep its racist policies and practices going, because those ideals are so central to the self-concept of the median wealthy liberal.

CJ: Do you still consider Harvard a university in the proper sense of the word?

Haque: Outside of fields where people use equations, Harvard is a non-sectarian university only in name. It has been captured and subverted: from syllabi to exams, from admissions to graduation, from hiring to promotion. Harvard remains in denial of its own radicalism. It sneers and looks down on most of America and on American values like color-blind equality, meritocracy, free speech, hard work, and individual responsibility. Today, Harvard resembles an aging billionaire secluded in his mansion, consumed by narrow moral obsessions, clutching his treasures, disconnected from a world he scorns. He fades into sanctimonious irrelevance, even as the world moves on to create alternative, courageous, and truly American educational institutions—better ones—unapologetically committed to the pursuit of truth, wherever it leads.

Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution . Ryan Thorpe is an investigative reporter at the Manhattan Institute.

Harvard Researcher: the University Is “Totally Corrupted”

Alumni group calls on UVA to fire President Jim Ryan: ‘Politicized and feckless leadership’

Tue, 20 May 2025 17:24:00 GMT

Group takes out full-page ad in Richmond Times-Dispatch, launches online campaign

The College Fix

By McKenli Myers - Utah State University

May 20, 2025

A group of concerned University of Virginia alumni are calling for the termination of President Jim Ryan, arguing his six-year tenure has been beset with scandal and his leadership has overseen an academic and reputational decline at the venerable institution.

The Jefferson Council recently took out a full-page ad in the Richmond Times-Dispatch and published an online campaign called Reset UVA to lobby for change.

The ad cites what the council contends are “seven major leadership failures under President Jim Ryan.” They allege he “enabled the worst outbreak of antisemitism in UVA history,”
“allowed UVA’s historic Honor System to deteriorate,” and “instituted a political agenda under the guise of DEI,” among other concerns.

“Jim Ryan’s politicized and feckless leadership combined with his institutionalization of double standards has led to an unprecedented series of tragedies, scandals, and government investigations that have severely damaged UVA’s core values and reputation,” reads the headline of the Jefferson Council’s Reset UVA website.

Joel Gardner, president of the Jefferson Council, told The College Fix in a telephone interview that group members believe “in a depoliticized campus, where the governing body and the president are neutral on political and social agendas.”

“We believe in the principles of freedom of expression and speech. UVA and Jim Ryan have strayed from these principles and have pushed a social agenda in the guise of DEI,” he said.

The University of Virginia’s media relations team has not responded to repeated requests from The College Fix seeking comment.

In March, the university’s governing board voted unanimously to dissolve the DEI office and any other practices pertaining to race-based systems. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice sent a letter to UVA demanding it comply with the directive.

A spokesperson for Gov. Glenn Younkin told The College Fix : “The Board of Visitors will hold UVA’s administration accountable for ending DEI at the University, as the board has already unanimously voted to do.”

The campaign against Ryan comes as the University of Virginia also fields criticism from the Jefferson Council for rebranding its identity-based graduation ceremonies.

The university changed its “Lavender Graduation,” an LGBTQ+ graduation ceremony, as well as the “Multicultural Graduation,” to “Recognition Ceremonies” in an effort to comply with federal anti-discrimination laws.

But the Department of Education’s Dear Colleague Letter sent in mid-February clarified that such ceremonies violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act if they exclude or favor students based on race.

Several universities across the nation, including Harvard, have canceled their affinity-based ceremonies in response to the federal guidance.

The council launched a website called “DEI at UVA” to highlight what it contends are DEI infractions at the university.

“It’s just a change of name. What the school has done is rebrand, but they still function under DEI,” Gardner told The Fix , adding it is another example of the “social and political justice agenda that has crept into every little bit of the university.”

“Despite the language of inclusivity, the [renamed grad] events are clearly identity-based and contribute to the fragmentation of campus life along racial and sexual orientation lines—directly at odds with the principle of equal treatment in public education,” the council states on the website.

The council also argued that the “ Donning of the Kente Ceremony ,” which is sponsored by UVA’s Office of African-American Affairs, “is yet another instance of a de facto segregated graduation ceremony, thinly veiled as a cultural celebration.”

https://www.thecollegefix.com/alumni-group-calls-on-uva-to-fire-president-jim-ryan-politicized-and-feckless-leadership/

Jerry Hughes ’88, contributor to shanty towns attack, moderates Dartmouth Dialogues co-sponsored panel about free speech

Mon, 12 May 2025 20:20:14 GMT

As a student, Hughes was involved in the 1986 destruction of shanties that were built to protest South African Apartheid.

The Dartmouth

By Iris WeaverBell

May 12, 2025

On May 8, Jerry Hughes ’88 moderated a panel about free speech at the Rockefeller Center for Public Policy. Hughes was one of the Dartmouth students who took part in the 1986 sledgehammer attack on the shanties that were built on the Green to protest South African Apartheid.

The Dartmouth Free Speech Alliance — an alumni group dedicated to improving free expression on campus — invited Hughes back for the event. Seven people attended the panel, which also featured two Dartmouth administrators and Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression program officer Conor Murnane. The panel was co-sponsored by the College’s ongoing “Dartmouth Dialogues” program, which facilitates conversations across differences.

In an interview after the event, Hughes said the DFSA planned the event with Dartmouth Dialogues and Alumni Relations to inform alumni about the state of free speech at the College.

“We have a lot of alumni who are very interested in what’s going on and just find it hard to know,” he said.

Hughes said that the state of free speech is different today than when he was a student.

“There were definitely issues in the ’80s, and there were lots of protests,” Hughes said. “Some things were easier — the day to day interactions with your fellow students.”

According to Murnane, who focuses on “campus advocacy” for FIRE, Dartmouth is better off than other colleges like Harvard. Dartmouth was ranked 224 out of 251 colleges in FIRE’s 2024 rankings, based on a survey of over 200 undergrads that asked about their perception of speech on campus, including how likely they were to self-censor or how likely it is for protests to be suppressed.

According to Murnane, 26% of respondents in the 2024 Dartmouth survey said it was “sometimes acceptable” to respond to speech with violence. Fifty-nine percent said it was acceptable to “shout down” a speaker.

Panelist and assistant dean of faculty Samuel Levey oversaw the update of Dartmouth’s Freedom of Expression and Dissent policy, which now states that any limitation by administrators on students’ expression must be “content and viewpoint neutral and narrowly tailored to serve a substantial institutional interest.” Levey said this was a “self-conscious” effort to mirror the First Amendment.

Levey said that a “key difference” between the First Amendment and Dartmouth’s policy is a “reciprocity principle — students need to respect the opportunity for other students’ free expression.” This includes “anti-heckling” policies.

After the College revised its bias reporting protocol that allowed students to report jokes and stereotyping and introduced the Dartmouth Dialogues project, Dartmouth became the only Ivy League university speech policy to receive a “Green Light” — as opposed to yellow or red — from FIRE, according to Murnane.

Panelists agreed that cultural solutions are needed to achieve more free and more respectful speech that allow for students to build dialogue skills.

Senior vice president for community and campus life Jennifer Rosales pointed to programs including Dartmouth Dialogues, the student-led Dartmouth Political Union and “Bring your Friend to Shabat” night at the Chabad Center for Jewish Life as examples of reducing harmful speech through community-building.

“These structures help demonstrate to our community the importance of relationship building — you can engage in conversation across differences and we support it,” Rosales said. “Some of it is skill-building, and some of it is facilitating the spaces where [dialogue] can happen.”

Rosales also said she worked with Town Manager Rob Houseman to change permitting requirements so that organizers can get a permit two days before an event instead of eight after hearing student feedback.

“Protests, demonstrations and vigils — they’re responding to the moment,” she said. “They need to happen now.”

Rosales also said that an Office of Student Life program that trains administrators in de-escalation techniques “ensures that deplatforming doesn’t happen.” She said she hopes to “scale up” the program.

“When we bring speakers in, there would be an administrator for students to have a support system,” she said. “This was someone who knew who to de-escalate [in case of] heckling or things that would disrupt the event.”

Murnane added that he was “excited” to see how these programs will affect this year’s Dartmouth survey results, which will come out in late August.

“I’ve been out there recommending Dartmouth’s programming to every campus I go to,” he said.

Levey added a “caveat” to the freedom of speech on campus.

“Speech can harm people, even where it’s not illegal,” Levey said. “We can track blood cortisol levels and see what happens.”

In the Q&A following the event, an audience member said he was “troubled” that cortisol levels are a justification for suppressing free speech.

Murnane agreed that suppression leads to more sensitivity to controversial speech.

“I think it’s a cultural problem that [my generation was] built up with this mentality of ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,’ and now that’s gone,” he said. “That came with the rise of speech codes.”

Rosales added that it is less about speech itself and more about “pedagogical practices” — the ways and structures in which speech is communicated.

“It’s really important to think about [Dartmouth] not as an open forum for anyone to say anything, but to think about those structures that need to be put in place for that to actually happen,” she said.

Attendee Peter Slovenski ’79 said it was “very good to hear Dartmouth is working on [heightening free speech]” and that the new speech policy is “helpful” because it promotes discourse. Still, he said he hopes for a better balance of speech from different ideological perspectives at Dartmouth.

“It’s hard to talk about free for both [conservatives and liberals] when the numbers of students and faculty who are on either side are not in a good balance yet,” he said.

https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2025/05/weaverbell-free-speech-event

Harvard Briefing: Understanding the Legal Landscape at Harvard and Beyond

Fri, 02 May 2025 20:35:16 GMT

On May 2, 2025, Harvard Alumni for Free Speech (HAFFS) welcomed Robert Shibley, Special Counsel for Campus Advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), for an in-depth discussion on the legal challenges currently surrounding Harvard University.

The conversation comes at a pivotal moment. With over $2 billion in federal funding suspended, scrutiny ov er Harvard’s charitable status intensifying, and the university filing a lawsuit against the federal government, the relationship between higher education and federal authority is undergoing significant strain. Shibley, a leading voice in campus civil liberties, offered an expert perspective on the broader implications these developments may have, not just for Harvard but for colleges and universities nationwide.

If you’re concerned about the future of higher education, free expression on campus, or Harvard’s evolving role in these debates, this is a conversation you’ll want to explore.

Universities Can Appease the Right: It’s time to get serious about ideological balance on campus. Here’s how.

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 17:51:21 GMT

By Russell T. Warne

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

April 30, 2025

Universities are currently experiencing a full-blown assault from the federal government and from red-state politicians. Tired of subsidizing universities as a hotbed of ideological activism, Republican leaders are cutting budgets, forcing reorganizations , asserting control of university governance , and taking control of the general-education curriculum at state universities.

Republicans have generally been more skeptical of generous funding of public education, including at the postsecondary level, but this is different. According to Gallup , 56 percent of Republicans in 2015 had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. In 2024, only 20 percent of Republicans did, and 50 percent had “very little” or no confidence in higher education. In that time, support for higher education has also dropped among independents (from 48 percent to 35 percent) and even Democrats (from 68 percent to 56 percent).

There are multiple reasons for the loss of confidence in higher education, but the most common is that universities have become too politicized.

There are multiple reasons for the loss of confidence in higher education, but the most common reason given in the Gallup poll was that universities have become too politicized. Given the ideological bent of university faculty and administrators, this politicization is almost always in favor of leftist causes. This makes Republican legislators, governors, and the current White House administration question why they should use tax dollars to subsidize their political enemies.

Universities have brought this crisis of confidence—and the attendant reductions in funding and independence—on themselves.

Quite frankly, universities have brought this crisis of confidence—and the attendant reductions in funding and independence—on themselves. For the past generation, universities have become not just more politically left-wing but actively hostile to the Right and even centrist thought.

The professoriate at American universities has long had a leftist ideological slant. When asked to self-identify , almost half of faculty in 2016-17, 48.3 percent, said they were liberal, and 11.6 percent said they were “far left,” while only 11.7 percent said they were conservative, and 0.4 percent said they were “far right.” These self-reported data underestimate the percentage of leftist faculty at universities. Many people eschew the extremist labels of “far-left” and “far-right” even when the label applies.

Studies of professors’ behavior show a much stronger leftist bent. One study of professors’ public tweets found that 69.1 percent of professors were “far left” or “left,” while only 15.4 percent were “moderate,” and only 13.4 percent were “conservative” or “far right.” Even this study overstates the number of moderates and undercounts leftists: The average professor in the study (who would be labeled as “moderate”) is almost one full point (on a five-point scale) to the left of the general population. This means that the average professor on Twitter at the time was more liberal than approximately 80 percent of the general population. These are the “moderates” of academia.

Professors are not the only people who work at universities, and broadening our horizons to all employees working in higher education confirms the ideological imbalance. Voter registrations of people who work at educational institutions reveal that registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by two-to-one. However, the most lopsided data come from political donations. In the 2024 election cycle, 93 percent of donations from employees in higher education were given to Democratic candidates.

Of course, such an ideological monoculture will have an impact on the scholarship that universities produce, and it would be naïve to think otherwise. It is easy to get a scholarly paper published if it flatters left-wing politics and social views. The grievance-studies hoax proved this most vividly, but the problem is not limited to the “studies” fields. It is possible to build a career in the social sciences using shoddy methods if the results support left-wing assumptions.

For example, “stereotype-threat” theory claimed that lower performance by some groups on academic and cognitive tests was caused by negative stereotypes about these groups influencing the testing situation. This was a darling idea in social psychology for nearly 30 years, but evidence is growing that stereotype threat is an artifact of bad research practices . Large-scale attempts to replicate stereotype threat in females on math tests have failed , and skepticism is growing about the reality of the phenomenon in racial minorities.

Yet, for a generation, psychology professors touted stereotype threat as a demonstration of how a racist and sexist society operated, to the disadvantage of women and minorities. Because the message matched leftist social and political views, the idea rose to a greater prominence than it would have attained otherwise.

Basic academic standards go by the wayside when the Left’s sacred ideals are at stake.

It is not just methodology that suffers under the academic monoculture. Basic academic standards go by the wayside when the Left’s sacred ideals are at stake. This is seen most clearly in diversity “scholarship,” which is so rife with plagiarism that the accusations have almost become routine. In criminology, Florida State University professor Eric Stewart was fired for publishing “false results” due to his “extreme negligence and incompetence” in his two decades of research. Cynics will not be surprised that Stewart’s work invariably showed that bias resulted in blacks being treated more harshly in the criminal-justice system.

In contrast, it is impossible to imagine a low-quality study that supports conservative talking points reaching prominence.

It is incredibly easy to find bad research that flatters the leftist worldview , much of which led to widespread acclaim for its authors . In contrast, it is impossible to imagine a low-quality study that supports conservative talking points reaching prominence—let alone people being able to build a career in academia on such research. Ironically, this means that the research that does support right-wing ideals often is methodologically stronger than average.

In an earlier era, concerns about ideological imbalance at universities focused on how it created scholarly blind spots , led to self-censorship , and damaged the intellectual climate. Those things are bad, but they were not an existential threat to universities.

The situation is very different now. Republican politicians see very little collateral damage to their side if they attack universities. And there is little universities can do because they often have no one who can speak conservatives’ language to defend university funding. Universities also often lack politically connected insiders who can push back against funding cuts in red states or the Trump administration.

You don’t need a PhD to see the problem. With most universities relying on state and federal funds, it was a bad idea to alienate the members of one major political party. This was foreseeable. Indeed, it was foreseen—by a lot of people. Rutgers psychologist Lee Jussim has compiled a list of over 100 books, scholarly papers, op-eds, and other sources in which authors sounded warnings about the dangers of politicizing academia. He even calls the compilation “ We Tried to Warn You .”

So now—belatedly—there is a recognized need for more ideological balance in universities. Fundamentally, the shortage of right-wingers at universities can be understood as a problem of a high left-to-right ratio among faculty. There are two general ways to fix the problem: hire more conservatives or reduce the number of liberals. Either method will reduce ideological imbalance, and both working together will be more effective than either operating alone.

If the imbalance could correct itself, it would have done so by now. But there is no sign that this is happening. Therefore, those with decisionmaking power—university presidents, trustees, administrators, deans, and others—need to take matters into their own hands and remove hiring from the purview of the faculty. Here are some practical actions reformers can take that will reduce the ideological slant on campus.

The easiest way to reduce the ideological imbalance at universities is to selectively lay off untenured faculty. These should not be indiscriminate firings; rather, untenured faculty should be evaluated first and eliminated using objective criteria that indicate that they contribute to ideological imbalance. One characteristic of ideological new faculty is whether they were hired under plans or programs that reduced the competitiveness of the hiring process. In the wake of the George Floyd riots, for example, many universities started practices, such as cluster hiring and fellow-to-faculty pipelines , that almost always resulted in the hiring of left-wing radicals and activists. These faculty contracts should be discontinued and the professors invited to reapply for their positions under new criteria that open the process to all applicants. University leaders need to act quickly, though. The first faculty hired under these programs are up for tenure as early as this year.

The easiest way to reduce the ideological imbalance at universities is to selectively lay off untenured faculty.

Pre-tenured faculty who were required to submit a diversity statement should be subjected to the same procedure. These statements—which were opposed by a majority of faculty in a 2024 survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)—function as ideological litmus tests. They filter out moderates and conservatives and probably do more to contribute to ideological imbalance than any other policy.

Academic departments and programs that are the most ideologically imbalanced need to be reduced in size or dissolved completely.

Second, academic departments and programs that are the most ideologically imbalanced need to be reduced in size or dissolved completely. Everyone knows which departments these are: race and gender studies, humanities, sociology, and anthropology. Some of this reduction can come from natural attrition from retirements and other departures. Other reductions can occur by discontinuing pre-tenured faculty contracts.

At many universities, tenured faculty can be laid off and entire programs dissolved when a university is in a fiscal emergency. This provision gives decisionmakers a powerful opportunity that they can seize. University reformers can apply Rahm Emanuel’s insight that “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” When the budget cuts come—and, at some universities, they already have—reformers can take advantage of the crisis and prioritize eliminating or slimming down the faculty headcount in ideologically captured departments. Many of these majors are declining in popularity , and enrollment numbers may not justify current headcounts anyway.

Cutting the number of liberal faculty is comparatively easy. Increasing the number of conservatives is difficult. But it is possible, and reformers have the tools to do so. Indeed, the Left created these tools and has used them for decades. It is not unseemly for the Right to wield them when they have the power to do so.

The first tool is to establish scholarly centers that are staffed with experts in an area. There are hundreds of university centers for the intellectual study of cherished ideas on the left, like social change, climate change, and gender and sexuality. Universities serious about ideological balance should take stock of these centers and create an equivalent number of conservative centers with equal levels of staffing and funding. Universities could create centers dedicated to the advancement of marriage, the study of the canon of Western literature, the exploration of human intelligence, the reversal of falling birthrates, military history, and other intellectually mature ideas that are attractive to conservatives and moderates. Staffing them with qualified scholars would create a community that would be healthy enough to resist the ideological monoculture at many universities.

Creating a center is a great way to attract groups of scholars, but reformers can also target individuals. Universities have a long history of using the “direct-hire” process to identify specific scholars who bring desired expertise and ideas to universities. There is no reason why established, prominent conservatives and moderates cannot be “poached” from their current universities to improve the viewpoint diversity at left-wing campuses.

But, if universities are so infested with liberals, where will these conservative professors come from? The data show that they are out there. In FIRE’s faculty survey of 55 universities, the three most politically balanced were the University of Texas, Dallas (34-percent liberal, 36-percent conservative); Brigham Young University (39-percent liberal, 41-percent conservative); and the University of Arkansas (51-percent liberal, 35-percent conservative). This gives a hint of where the conservative academics are found in large numbers: public universities in red states and religious universities. Some of these faculty can be lured away if they are incentivized and valued for bringing their perspective to a liberal campus.

Some conservative faculty can be lured away if they are incentivized and valued for bringing their perspective to a liberal campus.

Even at universities with some political balance, many of these people fly “under the radar” to protect their careers, or they may simply think that their political beliefs are irrelevant for their teaching and scholarship. The social sciences have a method of identifying these people anyway: snowball sampling. The theory behind snowball sampling is that “birds of a feather flock together,” even in hidden groups. Just as smokers are more likely to know other smokers and illegal immigrants are more likely to know other illegal immigrants, conservative and moderate academics are more likely to know other scholars who belong to their political tribe. Administrators can identify known conservative or moderate scholars and ask for recommendations for other conservative or moderate scholars who are worthy targets of direct hiring.

Universities should also stop rewarding activism—which is almost always left-wing.

Establishing centers and engaging in direct hires are explicit processes to alter the ideological balance of a university. But other implicit reforms would make universities more welcoming to conservatives. Eliminating diversity statements in hiring and promotion is essential, and more universities are discontinuing this requirement.

Universities should also stop rewarding activism—which is almost always left-wing. Hiring-and-tenure criteria should explicitly state that political and social activism will neither help nor hinder a candidate’s evaluation. Universities should also stop paying for professors’ memberships in professional organizations that take official political stances and cease paying for travel to these organizations’ conferences. Volunteering for these organizations should also not count towards faculty members’ career advancement. This will encourage faculty of all political persuasions to focus on their research, teaching, and non-activist service.

Universities should also establish content-neutral standards for the research that gets rewarded. Across disciplines, activist research has certain characteristics in common: using a “framework” in which data and facts are forced to fit an ideology, prioritizing identity over the content of ideas, and creating an immunization to falsification. Administrators, trustees, and other leaders are fully within their rights to veto hiring or tenure decisions if a scholar’s research fits these characteristics. It is not necessary to have extensive training to see that papers on “ feminist glaciology ” or research that uses “autoethnography” to pass off anecdotes and personal experience as data are not substantial contributors to knowledge.

In contrast, universities should reward data-based contributions to the creation and dissemination of knowledge in faculty members’ fields. In the sciences, this will be research that subjects theories to serious falsification tests and uses data to come to conclusions. This is the dominant paradigm in the sciences, and it will not be hard to reinforce it at universities. In the humanities, universities should reward scholarship that uses primary sources and relevant context to reach new understandings. For example, Australian professor David McInnis is a Shakespeare scholar who has used textual fragments, historical records, and literary allusions to lost plays to gain new insights into the theatrical tastes and practices of Shakespeare’s era. This work has created new understandings of Shakespeare’s work and is far more valuable than a thousand papers that use the Procrustean bed of literary theory to torture a new interpretation out of a text.

Faculty job announcements are another area in need of reform. Many job listings specify a narrow range of expertise that will permit an applicant to be considered. Often, this takes the form of leftist buzzwords, such as “intersectionality,” “anti-racism,” and “diversity.” But a more subtle form of ideological conformity occurs in ads that seek expertise in specific subfields. For example, one colleague’s psychology department is already dominated by social psychologists, and yet most of the department’s job ads request applicants in social psychology. This is a problem because this subfield is more dominated ( 85-percent or more ) by liberals than most areas of psychology. Unless there is a specific curricular need that must be filled, job listings should be as broad as possible so that applicants with as many viewpoints as possible should feel welcomed to apply. Additionally, job listings for faculty positions should explicitly state that the university welcomes heterodox viewpoints as long as the applicant’s conclusions are grounded in evidence and accepted methodologies.

None of these recommendations infringes on academic freedom or mandates a dominant ideology on campus.

Note that none of these recommendations infringes on academic freedom or mandates a dominant ideology on campus. They also do not punish professors for having or expressing political beliefs. These recommendations also respect tenure and due process. Exact practices will vary across universities, but efforts to remedy ideological balance must protect all views. Ideological balance requires respecting disagreeing viewpoints—not suppressing them.

It is also important to state what reforms should not be considered to bring ideological diversity to universities. Quotas and ideologically based affirmative action for conservatives and moderates are a non-starter. Being a “diversity hire” has become a scarlet letter for female and minority faculty members, and no conservative will want to risk getting labeled with that epithet. Quotas and affirmative action are verboten to conservatives anyway. As a group, they are much more comfortable with discrepancies in group outcomes, and there is unlikely to be any large-scale agitation for the professoriate to perfectly reflect the political makeup of the country.

Change comes slowly, especially at universities, which have never fully shed their medieval heritage. But they must start tempering their ideological imbalance if they want to avoid the worst attacks from Republicans. Universities have a choice: either reform themselves or let politically hostile politicians do the reforming without faculty input. When that is the choice, having a few conservatives in the faculty lounge suddenly seems like small price to pay for avoiding the attacks and interference that some universities are already experiencing.

Russell T. Warne is a former associate professor of psychology in the Department of Behavioral Science at Utah Valley University.

Universities Can Appease the Right — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Test scores only: University of Austin debuts ‘merit-first admissions’ policy

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 17:57:16 GMT

By J ennifer Kabbany

The College Fix

March 31, 2025

‘We care about two things: Intelligence and courage,’ university stated in announcing policy

No essays. No recommendations. No resumes. No GPA. Just test scores.

That’s a quick breakdown of a new admissions policy rolled out Monday by the University of Austin, a relatively new independent university that prioritizes free speech, academic inquiry and intellectual diversity.

The independent-minded university bankrolled by center-right billionaires aims to break new ground with this policy, which will grant admissions for applicants, ages 17 and 23, whose standardized test scores are at or above 1460 on the SAT, 33 on the ACT, or 105 on the CLT.

For those below that threshold, the policy will look at student applicants’ AP scores and three sentences about their achievements.

The “Merit-First Admissions” policy was announced as Ivy League university acceptance decisions are being rolled out, with some stories making the rounds of highly qualified students being rejected.

TAX campus leaders bill it as the most meritocratic admissions policy in the country.

“We care about two things: Intelligence and courage. Intelligence to succeed in a rigorous intellectual environment (we don’t inflate grades). Courage to join the first ranks of our truth-oriented university,” the university stated on X on Monday.

A copy of the three-page policy, provided to The College Fix, also points out a few qualifiers, such as applicants must possess a high school diploma or GED equivalent, they must disclose any disciplinary, criminal, or unethical conduct history, and administrators reserve the right to ask for an interview.

While some of the documentation needed to confirm these measures include information on a student’s grade-point average, the university’s website notes that “GPA is not a criterion for admission to the University of Austin.”

Critics of affirmative action praised the development in emails Monday to The College Fix.

“For decades, research has shown consistently that standardized testing is a better predictor for academic success and preparedness in college than high school GPA, essays and recommendation letters,” Wenyuan Wu, executive director of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, said via email.

“With the widespread problem of grade inflation in which some schools’ ‘straight A’ students fail state standardized tests, test scores are becoming ever more important. UATX is taking a strong stand against the ideologically motivated war on merit and taking responsibility for the students it pledges to educate. Way to go!”

And Nan Zhong, whose son earned a near perfect 1590 score on his SAT yet he was rejected by 16 colleges he applied to, told The College Fix he thinks there are many benefits to the policy.

“Perhaps counterintuitively, this simpler admission process could actually benefit students from low-income families by making expensive private college admissions counseling largely irrelevant. Additionally, it may improve students’ mental health by significantly reducing the unpredictability and stress associated with the current admissions process,” he said via email.

In recent years, a parade of Ivy League universities and other elite schools re-instituted policies requiring the SATs, including Stanford, Harvard, and Yale. The schools had dropped the requirement after the COVID pandemic.

For years standardized tests were deemed by progressives as inherently biased, but more recently even left-leaning scholars have acknowledged that a student’s future academic success can be measured most accurately by standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT.

They have also argued that requiring the test actually improves student body diversity.

MORE: Teen hired by Google was rejected by 16 colleges. Now he’s suing for discrimination.

IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Students take a test inside a classroom; Panitan Photo / Shutterstock

Test scores only: University of Austin debuts ‘merit-first admissions’ policy | The College Fix

Davidson College Republican and Davidson College Libertarian Presidents: We stand for free speech at Davidson

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 16:20:26 GMT

By Gabriel Russ-Nachamie ’27 and Stephen Walker ’26

The Davidsonian

March 19, 2025

Davidson’s public commitment to free expression is admirable, but recent anti-speech actions by the College contradict its guarantees to students and set dangerous pro-censorship precedents. This paradox threatens to stifle the open discourse we as a community all grow and benefit from.

For context, a 2021 press release announcing Davidson’s commitment to freedom of expression states the College intends “to build a culture where everyone can participate and be heard” and acknowledges that “freedom of expression can’t exist when some people are barred from the conversation” solely on account of allegations that their speech is seen as wrong or offensive. Davidson’s pledge in the free expression statement itself commits the College to upholding protections of student expression for all because “Dissenting voices cannot and should not be censored.” Recent actions against the College Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter and its president, Cynthia Huang ‘25, threaten to undo these efforts in ways harmful to each and every one of us.

In a letter published by YAF’s Davidson chapter, the College accused Huang of “Harassment” for publishing political content online and distributing pamphlets that “allegedly includes misinformation” promoting “Islamophobia” and “Transphobia” that made students report feeling “threatened and unsafe on campus.” Davidson offered to “resolve” the matter by forcing Huang to either admit responsibility for the alleged violation and agree to an “Accountability Plan” demanding action to avoid further sanction or a “Code of Responsibility Council Hearing,” which is reserved for actions constituting “serious prohibited conduct in a single incident or a persistent pattern of less severe prohibited conduct,” according to Davidson’s student handbook.

The content that triggered this response was political material responding to ideas and policies the YAF chapter disagreed with. It is wrong to classify disagreement as harassment simply because the disagreement “offended” students. The content in question was meant to spark discourse surrounding certain political policies and ideologies. According to Davidson’s own standards, this content should be protected speech.

The content that Huang faces potential sanctions for did not explicitly or implicitly promote any action against specific people or groups on account of their identities. For example, the pamphlet from YAF notes the link between Islamic fundamentalist theology and Hamas. However, this is not “Islamophobic” but a historical and scholarly argument about justifications of violence that rely upon religious interpretations. In fact, Hamas is an acronym that stands for the “Islamic Resistance Movement” and the group uses Islamic theology to justify their actions. Discussing the impact of religion on violence, whether it be Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, is protected speech and not bigotry. The club did not in any way target students and the material was freely available for anyone to engage with or ignore. Serious political disagreement on issues always has and will continue to offend individuals who dislike competing opinions. However, a small group of students being “offended” never justifies institutional backlash against political speech.

We are not the only individuals or groups concerned about this restriction on speech. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonpartisan national organization dedicated to protecting free speech for all Americans, recently sent a letter to President Doug Hicks ‘90. FIRE urged Davidson to drop the charges against the YAF chapter and change its policies to align with the Chicago Principles of free speech, commonly known as the Chicago Statement which Davidson has allegedly committed to upholding.

Adjudicative bodies should not base their decisions purely on perceptions motivated by personal feelings and biases. These actions by the college against YAF risk violating Davidson’s commitment to ensuring free speech and robust debate among students. No threats or harassment against students were included in YAF’s content, and anybody who does not like what they have to say is not being forced to engage with their content in any way. The only discernible motivation for going forward with sanctions is that YAF is a political minority that has questioned political orthodoxies in a way that is upsetting to others. The College’s Commitment to Freedom of Expression was made to protect this type of conduct. The Commitment directly states, “Davidson College’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate, discussion, and deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even most members of the college community to be offensive or unwise.” Sanctioning YAF for political arguments violates our rights as students and has dangerous implications.

The aforementioned press release announcing Davidson’s commitment identifies “self-censorship” as a problem for Davidson and a motivator for its creation of the Commitment to Freedom of Expression statement. When students see that the only person who has spoken out against the majority in a political debate is facing sanctions because others did not like the content that student shared, said administrative action sends a message that dissent is unacceptable. This potentially triggers more self-censorship among all those who may disagree with this and countless other political ideas.

As the presidents of the Davidson College Republicans and the Davidson College Libertarians, we stand for the free speech rights of all Davidson students. As a leading liberal arts school receiving taxpayer dollars, Davidson has publicly committed itself to upholding free speech rights for students and faculty. We call on the College to uphold its proclaimed principles and reject punishing students and political clubs for speech that some might disagree with or find offensive. We call on the College administration to change the Code of Responsibility to align with the Chicago Statement, as FIRE argued is crucial for Davidson in its letter to President Hicks.

Finally, we firmly reject the anti-intellectual, adolescent mindset that has motivated the support for YAF’s censorship. Unwillingness to coexist with peers you may disagree with is unbecoming of students at such a prestigious institution like Davidson. You can’t take away your peers’ rights just because people’s feelings are hurt.

Gabriel Russ-Nachamie ‘27 is an economics and mathematics double major from Lincolnton, NC and can be reached for comment at garussnachamie@davidson.edu.

Stephen Walker ‘26 is a political science and English double major from Philadelphia, PA and can be reached for comment at stwalker@davidson.edu.

https://thedavidsonian.news/1063/perspectives/davidson-college-republican-and-davidson-college-libertarian-presidents-we-stand-for-free-speech-at-david son/

Jeff Bezos Note to the Washington Post

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 17:06:08 GMT

"I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:"

By Jeff Bezos

X Feed

February 26, 2025

I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:

I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.

There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.

I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity.

I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t “hell yes,” then it had to be “no.” After careful consideration, David decided to step away. This is a significant shift, it won’t be easy, and it will require 100% commitment — I respect his decision. We’ll be searching for a new Opinion Editor to own this new direction.

I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.

Jeff

https://x.com/JeffBezos/status/1894757287052362088

Former Governor Weighs In on the Future of DEI at Davidson

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 15:00:32 GMT

By James (Jim) Martin '57

The Davidsonian

February 26, 2025

As a loyal alumnus, I love Davidson College. There are few things here that I don’t love. Perhaps you feel the same, for similar or different reasons.

While privileged to teach chemistry here for twelve years, I got into politics as a Mecklenburg County Commissioner. For five decades since retiring from the faculty to become a member of the US Congress, I followed Davidson mostly in passive ways. My annual giving was modest until I was in a position to increase my donation and deliver a significant gift from Duke Energy while on its Board.

This and generous friends endowed Professor Malcolm Campbell’s multidisciplinary Genomics Program and a chair in chemistry honored to support Professor Erland Stevens. While Governor of North Carolina, I received an honorary degree and spoke at graduation.

All this is a self-aggrandizing way to say I’m part of Davidson College and fully committed to helping it become the best it can be.

This was tested when our Trustees decided that the President and the majority of Trustees need no longer be Christian. I joined eleven other former Trustees in a statement objecting to what we believed would undermine Davidson’s tradition and Statement of Purpose. This angered some alumni, especially recent graduates. You might be amused at how many defended the change simply by denouncing us as “old white men.” This trifling trifecta of accursed identity was true, but ignored thoughtful reasoning.

This drew me to an even smaller, unofficial group of concerned alumni, Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse ( www.dftdunite.org ). Since 2018, its founders had petitioned Davidson College to adopt the Chicago Principles on Freedom of Expression. Pleading from a conservative viewpoint, they got little respect. Even with support from hundreds of alumni representing a wider range of interests, ages and viewpoints, DFTD continued to be disregarded.

In 2021, President Carol Quillen heeded a similar appeal from several faculty members, whose interests weren’t aligned with ours. She appointed me to a group of six chaired by Professor Issac Bailey to compose a Davidson vision for academic freedom of expression reflecting Davidson’s commitment to ideals of diversity.

The resulting document containing every element of the Chicago Principles was deferred until the arrival of new President Doug Hicks. With his calm inspiration, earnest discussions among faculty won growing acceptance. In early 2023, “Davidson’s Commitment to Freedom of Expression” was affirmed by a nearly unanimous vote.

DFTD found ways to support greater diversity of viewpoints on campus. A student chapter of Free Speech Alliance was founded and DFTD was pleased to provide funding for their and others’ invited speakers. This led individual students to entrust us with suspected violations of their academic freedom.

Most alarmingly, we heard about several dozen academic courses with syllabi requiring students to confess themselves “oppressors,” repent and atone . . . religious conditions irrelevant to the subject matter. Ironically, DEI is Latin for “gods.”

We learned from other students about an astonishing “mandatory” order that all Davidson athletes attend a one-sided, provocative documentary entitled, “I’m not Racist…am I?” Its message? If you are white, you are racist. If you’re non-white, you can’t be racist. Melanin matters.

While we don’t object to anyone studying such controversial notions, we protested the coercive way highly partisan objectives were imposed as a condition for participating. After several months with no assurance that our concerns were taken seriously, we reported this to our subscribers. Our purpose was to bring about a remedy, not punish or accuse any individual as was making national headlines at other schools. We figured some may have felt they were doing what was expected of them.

One of us mentioned this campus issue in an interview on Fox News. This exploded into far wider circulation than we had foreseen or intended. Faculty and administration were flooded with vile communications from hundreds of anonymous individuals. At the time, this threatened to damage the reputation of Davidson College as well as DFTD, likely among opposing factions. I see no consequent injury against the College today, and DFTD’s standing has become more respected or tolerated even among some who dispute us.

We made a point to welcome Dr. Chloe Poston as DEI Vice President at Davidson. She listened to our encouragement to explore ways to reform those abuses. Was it fair, in the cause of including diversity, to blame students for past discriminatory practices for which they bore no personal responsibility?

We were pleased to discover, not long after the fall term began, that every course whose syllabus had defamed students as “oppressors” had dropped the insulting indoctrination. To us, this was good news, reflecting a less divisive and more welcoming attitude on campus.

We commend those among faculty, administration, and students whose thoughtful contributions led to these corrections. Other reforms may need attention. Do any departments still require DEI allegiance in ways that filter out conservative scholars? Do students or faculty still feel intimidated to self-censor their thoughts and questions? Will Davidson adopt institutional neutrality for ideological controversies?

There’s now the question whether Davidson‘s more welcoming, less doctrinaire approach to inclusion of a wider diversity of attributes, cultures and viewpoints will survive the national backlash against DEI. The federal government has declared a campaign to eradicate any trace of it.

Among our DFTD membership we’ve learned to respect divergent views among friends, but I can tell you there is division over this. Some are convinced the same old divisive malpractices will simply be continued behind new titles, concealing the enforcement of identity politics. Others trust that Davidson’s new approach can be a positive model for others.

Davidson can demonstrate a standard of healthier assurance that every student, without regard to their culture, religion, attitude, politics or appearance, will be genuinely welcomed and encouraged to grow intellectually, socially and spiritually. Large universities with massive DEI staffing must choose to fold or fight. If Davidson can restore diversity’s original ideals without the partisan excesses, other elite colleges might choose to defend this more sensible approach.

The Davidsonian 2/26/25 by Davidsonian - Issuu

DEI Dies Without PIER Pressure

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 17:16:16 GMT

An announcement from the Department of Energy will have a tectonic effect.

By Lawrence Krauss

Wall Street Journal

February 12, 2025

I thought the academic DEI juggernaut was unstoppable. Then, a week after President Trump’s inauguration, I got an email with an announcement from the Department of Energy: “The Office of Science is immediately ending the requirement for Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) Plans in any proposal submitted. . . . Reviewers will not be asked to read or comment on PIER Plans. Selection decisions will not take into consideration the content of PIER Plans or any reviewer comments on PIER Plans.”

PIER plans, which the Biden administration instituted in 2022, required every grant application to “describe the activities and strategies of the applicant to promote equity and inclusion as an intrinsic element to advancing scientific excellence.” In the words of the announcement, “The complexity and detail of a PIER Plan is expected to increase with the size of the research team and the number of personnel to be supported.”

The end of the PIER Plan and other DEI-related requirements is seismic. The major source of physical science research support in the country has sent a message to universities: Stick to science. It may be the death knell of what appeared to be an invulnerable academic bureaucracy that has been impeding the progress of higher education and research for at least a decade.

The massive, expensive and overwhelming DEI infrastructure at universities is motivated in large part by the need to respond to and comply with regulations associated with federal support of research and education. The DOE’s Office of Science is the single biggest funder of physical sciences in the U.S. It provides support for university programs and oversees the 10 U.S. National Laboratories, which provide facilities used by university faculty across many disciplines.

Last year a colleague of mine and I used ChatGPT to examine all 12,065 awards made by the National Science Foundation and classified more than 1,000 of them, accounting for more than $675 million, as focused on DEI rather than science. And under Biden decrees, even science-focused grants were evaluated on DEI grounds.

Given the reach of the Office of Science, it is inevitable that the National Science Foundation will feel pressure to dismantle its massive DEI programming infrastructure, including its initiative, Includes—an acronym for Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoveries in Engineering and Science.

The Education Department announced on Jan. 23 that it would end its DEI programming, training, and its Diversity and Inclusion Council and the unwieldily named Employee Engagement Diversity Equity Inclusion Accessibility Council. Without DEI guiding federal funding of scientific research, the rationale for universities to maintain their expensive DEI bureaucracy will largely disappear.

As recently as a few months ago, it was impossible to imagine that a single executive order could free the scientific community in this country to do what we do best: science.

Mr. Krauss, a theoretical physicist, is president of the Origins Project Foundation and author of “The Edge of Knowledge: Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos.”

DEI Dies Without PIER Pressure - WSJ

Tracking the Removal of DEI in Higher Education

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 20:29:49 GMT

In recent years, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have faced significant challenges across higher education in the United States. In North Carolina, the University of North Carolina (UNC) System's Board of Governors repealed its DEI policy in 2024, resulting in the elimination of 59 DEI-related positions across its 17 campuses. At UNC-Chapel Hill, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion was shut down, marking a major victory for those advocating for a merit-based, politically neutral approach to education.

Nationwide, similar efforts are gaining momentum, with President Donald Trump leading the charge against DEI. Legislative action has also played a role in rolling back DEI, with states like North Carolina introducing bills to ban political litmus tests in university hiring and admissions. (Find a DEI Legislation Tracker here) . As more institutions move away from DEI, these changes aim to restore academic excellence to higher education.

The information below was compiled from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Read more about each individual institution HERE.

DFTD Executive Director Kenny Xu Featured on Fox News

sldamon97@gmail.com ( Savannah Damon) — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 15:15:43 GMT

Kenny Xu on Fox News at Night - YouTube

Critical Race Theory Is an Inversion of History

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 16:05:58 GMT

Tribalism and racism were universal until Britons and Americans developed a new way of thinking.

By John Ellis

Wall Street Journal

January 5, 2025

It’s a tribute of sorts to critical race theory’s success that the Trump administration will make its eradication a priority. The Biden administration had quietly implemented policies throughout the federal government based on this theory, and it is being taught in colleges and schools throughout the country. It has overrun much of the corporate world, and it has even secured a place in the training of many professions. The accusations made in closed training sessions are astonishingly venomous: Arrogant white supremacy is ubiquitous; white rage results when that supremacy is challenged; whites hold money and power because they stole it from other races; systemic racism and capitalism keep the injustices going.

All of this is based on categorically false assumptions about the past. We need only look at how the modern idea of our common humanity originated and developed to see that critical race theory has everything backward. A realistic history tells us that the thinkers and engineers of the Anglosphere, principally England and the U.S., are the heroes, not the villains, of this story, while the rest were laggards, not leaders.

For most of recorded history, neighboring peoples regarded each other with apprehension if not outright fear and loathing. Tribal and racial attitudes were universal. That’s a long way from the orthodoxy of our own time, which holds that we are all one human family. Before that consensus arose, a charge of racism made no sense. By today’s standards, everyone was racist.

It’s not hard to understand why tribalism once reigned everywhere. Without modern transportation and communication, most people knew nothing about other societies. What contact there was between different peoples often involved warfare, and that made everyone fear strangers. The insecurity of life in earlier times added to this anxiety. Protections we now enjoy didn’t exist: policing, banking, competent medical care, social safety nets. The supply of food was uncertain before trucks and refrigeration. In a dangerous world people clung to their own kind for safety, and that was a natural and even necessary attitude.

How did we get from this mindset to the idea of a common humanity? The practical impediments to the world’s peoples getting to know and eventually respect each other were largely removed by British and American engineers. They invented the steam engine, then used it to develop the first railways. They followed this by inventing and mass-producing cars, trucks and finally airplanes. They pioneered radio, television, films, newspapers and the internet. The result was that ignorance of other peoples was turned around.

But in the 18th century the British did something even more important: They began to develop our modern outlook on race.

Why Britain? Liberalizing political developments beginning with the Magna Carta and the first representative Parliament, called by Simon de Montfort, fostered greater liberty for the British subject. Liberty led to increasing prosperity, and prosperity to a rapid increase in literacy. Widespread literacy created the first large reading public: By the beginning of the 18th century, dozens of newspapers and periodicals were being published in Britain. An extensive reading public allowed public opinion to become a powerful force, and that set the stage for manifestos and petitions, even campaigns about matters that offended the public’s conscience.

A series of British writers began to promote ideas about the conduct of life and the role of government. Among the most important was John Locke, who argued that every human life had its own rationale, none being created for the use of another. Another was David Hume, who wrote that all men are nearly equal “in their mental power and faculties, till cultivated by education.” These and many others were launching what would become the modern consensus that we are all one human family. The idea gained ground so quickly that in Britain, and there alone, a powerful campaign to abolish slavery arose. By the end of the 18th century that campaign was leading to prohibitions in many parts of the Anglosphere, while Africa and Asia remained as tribalist and racist as ever.

As this idea took hold it made the British see their empire differently. Like other European countries, Britain had initially sought empire to strengthen its position in the world—others would add territory if Britain didn’t, and Britain would be weakened. But if the peoples of the British Empire were one human family, how could some be subordinate to others? The British began to consider themselves responsible for the welfare and development of their subject peoples, and for giving them competent administration before they had learned to provide it themselves. That change inevitably led to the dissolution of empire, and to a consensus that the time for empires (of which there had been hundreds) was over. The world’s most influential anti-imperialists were British.

The idea of a common humanity spread across the globe as the power and influence of the Anglosphere grew. First, this new ideology spread throughout the quarter of the globe’s peoples that were in the British Empire, where different races were learning to live and work together. Next, the Anglosphere’s cultural influence went worldwide as Britain’s industrial revolution set off a culture of innovation that resulted in a universal civilization—that is, modernity. As that way of life spread throughout the world, it carried with it the idea of a common humanity.

There’s a simple explanation for what critical race theory calls “white privilege.” Because the Anglosphere developed prosperous modernity and gave it to the world, English-speakers were naturally the first to enjoy it. People initially outside that culture of innovation are still catching up. Asians and Asian-Americans have done this with great success, but critical race theory impedes the progress of other groups by persuading them to demonize the people who created the modern values they have adopted. It betrays those values by stoking racial hatred. Critical race theory tells us that all was racial harmony until racist Europeans disturbed it, but the truth is rather that all was tribal hostility until the Anglosphere rescued us.

Mr. Ellis is a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author, most recently, of “A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism.”

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North Carolina Governor’s School Is Miseducating Elite Students

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 21:47:39 GMT

By David C. Phillips

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

December 16, 2024

The North Carolina Governor’s School (GS) was established in 1963. The program was the first of its kind in the nation: a residential summer program for the state’s most academically and artistically gifted high-school students. Over 60 years later, GS has both an East and a West campus, and approximately 800 rising seniors and juniors from across the state arrive each June to spend the next four weeks living in college dormitories, eating in college dining halls, and attending advanced classes in college classrooms.

The resemblance to collegiate life isn’t incidental. The program’s webpage describes GS as “clearly situated between high school and college,” boasting that it “grants students many freedoms associated with university study.” In other words, it is self-consciously a stepping stone for our state’s elite high-school students in their quest to become North Carolina’s—and, indeed, our nation’s—elite university students.

This is why it should be profoundly concerning that GS has lost its way.

I attended the West Campus of GS (Governor’s School West or GSW) in the summer of 1995, and from 2013 to 2021 I was a member of the GSW faculty. I taught English primarily but also, occasionally, a course on “ Self and Society .” In those roles, I had the privilege of teaching hundreds of incredibly bright, passionate, and ambitious students. To my great joy, I remained in touch with scores of them, watching as they graduated from high school, entered college, declared majors, earned bachelor’s degrees, pursued graduate studies, and began promising careers. I even had the honor of writing letters of recommendation for a dozen or more along the way.

At the same time, however, the program was becoming increasingly dominated by an ever-narrowing set of acceptable ideas and arguments. From my first day on the faculty, in June of 2013, it was clear that GSW was not a welcoming environment for social, political, or religious conservatives. I wasn’t surprised: The same had been true when I had attended GSW as a student. Even then, the ideas, perspectives, and arguments presented had tended toward the left end of the ideological spectrum. They became increasingly slanted in this direction, however, during my tenure as an instructor.

During that period, a general preoccupation with “social justice” found more precise expression in obsessions with “identity,” “intersectionality,” and “privilege.” These concepts were most firmly entrenched in the aforementioned “Self and Society” courses. But as calls for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” began to spread—aided by “critical race theory” and doctrines of “anti-racism” and “white fragility”—they became more prevalent in “ Applied Philosophy ” courses designed to teach “critical, creative, and philosophical thinking.” DEI also became more prominent in standard disciplines such as the social sciences and mathematics. And it increasingly informed more and more of the extra-curricular “optional seminars” offered by GSW faculty.

The problem wasn’t that students were exposed to these things; it was that they weren’t regularly presented with meaningful alternatives or equipped with the means to question or critique DEI-related assumptions. Indeed, conservative, libertarian, and classical-liberal ideas were widely disparaged, as were those who were brave enough (or foolish enough) to express them. I witnessed and experienced this firsthand. Conversations with liberal/progressive and conservative or libertarian students alike only exacerbated my concerns.

By the 2021 session, GS was a place where citing empirical statistics that challenged progressive narratives was widely deemed “problematic” by staff. Factual data were dismissed by faculty on the grounds that they failed to capture “the lived experience” of certain members of preferred groups. Merely claiming that “identity” might not be the most important criterion by which to judge others was enough to put a target on one’s back. Suggesting that there are valid alternatives to identity politics, intersectionality, and critical theory incited opposition. And arguing that a lack of viewpoint diversity has negative consequences—and that students benefit from considering alternative points of view and opposing arguments—was not tolerated.

In other words, GSW had become what Jonathan Haidt calls a “ tribal moral community ”: a social group that coheres around a set of sacred values. A “sacred value,” according to Phil Tetlock, a social psychologist whom Haidt quotes, is “any value that a moral community implicitly or explicitly treats as possessing infinite or transcendental significance” and that therefore cannot be questioned or contradicted without threatening the group and its unity. Perceived violations are, therefore, taboo.

By the time I left GSW in the summer of 2021, it had long since sacralized the values of the contemporary American Left:

“Diversity” (which in practice meant the promotion of minority and historically marginalized groups and the denigration of “majority populations”).

“Equity” (which in practice meant “leveling the playing field” to enforce equality of outcomes).

“Inclusion” (which in practice meant the affirmation not only of declared “identities” but also of the theoretical frameworks and worldviews that supported them).

These values have supplanted and often stand as an obstacle to the open inquiry, intellectual exploration, and free thinking that are necessary to discover the truth. The great irony is that these are precisely the ideals that GS claims to value, practice, and promote. What the program actually valued, practiced, and promoted was ideological groupthink.

Groupthink is linked to any number of cognitive biases and logical fallacies—from motivated reasoning and confirmation bias to selective sampling and cherry-picking. It is antithetical to the academy’s traditional truth-seeking mission and the modern liberal values that underlie it.

(To better understand academic groupthink see Daniel Klein and Charlotta Stern’s 2009 paper “ Groupthink in Academia: Majoritarian Departmental Politics and the Professional Pyramid ” and Neema Parvini’s 2018 Quillette article “ The Incentives for Groupthink .”)

What makes groupthink so formidable is that there is often a double incentive structure at work:

Individuals who conform their thinking to that of the group are rewarded with the sense of security and pleasure that come from belonging—a basic human psychological need.

Free thinking and inquiry are punished, as James Mortimer notes , by “mind guards” who “protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group’s cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions.”

This idea of “protection” was taken literally by the self-appointed “mind guards” at GSW, who enforced taboos by appealing to the “safety” of those who were “harmed” by any challenge to their ideological assumptions and assertions. Students weren’t merely taught, implicitly or explicitly, that only socio-political progressivism, postmodern epistemology, and critical theory have intellectual and moral validity. They also learned what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt call the three Great Untruths , as well as how to wield them as ideological weapons:

“What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.”

“Always trust your feelings.”

“Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”

These are the lessons that GSW alumni took with them at the end of the summer when they returned to their communities and began to apply to colleges and universities throughout the country.

The substantial number of students who are marginalized at GS are only the most obviously injured. All of the students are ill-served, for they are deprived of the educational experience that the program advertises and that they might mistakenly believe they are getting. That genuinely educational experience is also the one that we as a society need them to have.

The picture of the academy that is painted for these students by GS faculty, staff, and administrators informs the assumptions and expectations that they take with them to the institutions of higher learning where they matriculate. It informs the academic values that they adopt and the intellectual habits that they cultivate. It informs the way that they approach their studies and the way that they process information. It informs how they evaluate and make arguments. It informs the discussions that they participate in or shout down. It informs the relationships that they cultivate or preclude. It informs virtually everything about the experiences that they choose to have and the experiences that they allow others to have in their college careers and beyond.

It’s been more than three years now since I left GSW. I don’t know if the culture and climate are what they were in June 2021. If nothing else has changed, at least this much has. This past spring, as part of a lawsuit settlement , the North Carolina Governor’s School adopted a policy that commits to offering “elective seminars that present a wide range of viewpoints” and to allowing “faculty members the freedom and responsibility to craft academic and intellectual experiences that reflect their unique viewpoints and expertise.” I hope that these are more than just words in a faculty/staff handbook. I hope that they are the first step in turning toward the program’s stated mission and vision. And I hope that the next class of the North Carolina Governor’s School will have the kind of experience that they—and we—deserve.

David C. Phillips is an English teacher who lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.

North Carolina Governor’s School Is Miseducating Elite Students — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Cautious Optimism Was The Keynote at a Congressional Forum on Campus Free Speech

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 16:38:40 GMT

By Sean Paige

Alumni Free Speech Alliance

December 12, 2024

When North Carolina Congressman Greg Murphy convened the first Campus Free Speech Roundtable on Capitol Hill four years ago, few outside of the hearing room probably noticed. The issue seemed so “back burner,” the cause so hopeless, and the prospects of meaningful change so remote that attendees probably wondered whether it would be the first and last such congressional hearing.

But a lot has changed in four years.

This year’s panelists — including 4 with ties to the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, or AFSA — voiced guarded optimism that their efforts to steer the ship away from the rocks were seeing results. And the lawmakers who launched the effort — most notably Murphy, Education & the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC), and Utah Republican Rep. Burgess Owens — surely must have felt some measure of vindication, seeing that these formerly “back burner” issues are now squarely front and center in Congress and high priority agenda items for an incoming Trump administration.

That doesn’t mean participants were brimming with bravado and confidence. All who work on higher education reform understand that the crisis is real, the problems are deeply rooted, and small victories can be short-lived if constant and consistent efforts aren’t applied. But notes of cautious optimism could be heard as representatives of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance , Young America's Foundation , Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression , American Council of Trustees and Alumni , and Speech First spoke and fielded questions.

"Free speech on campuses across the country has been under attack for decades," Murphy told participants. "Progressive political ideologues have infiltrated and overtaken college administrations and faculties. Rampant anti-Semitism and egregious DEI programs have replaced the principles of civility, freedom of expression, and equality on which institutions of higher education were founded. Students, in record numbers, self-censor in classrooms. Faculty force their own political ideologies on students. Administrators abuse their position of authority to push a political agenda. Congress plays a role in oversight of public universities and must protect students' First Amendment rights. I appreciate the ongoing commitment of groups who fight for free speech so that we ensure our nation's colleges remain robust learning environments that cultivate tolerant, well-rounded individuals capable of contributing to our dynamic society."

ASFA’s affiliation with four of those who spoke is an impressive measure of the momentum and visibility the movement has gained in just 3 years. Our grassroots network has grown to nearly 30 chapters, stretching from coast to coast. Our active and engaged alumni are proving to be a potent force for constructive change at the schools where our groups exist — and more are on the way.

AFSA affiliates who spoke and fielded questions were (pictured below, left to right) Princetonians for Free Speech Co-Founder and Executive Committee Member Edward Yingling, AFSA Chairman and Jefferson Council Board of Advisors Member Tom Neale, Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse Chairman John Craig, and Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse Executive Director Kenny Xu.

The Roundtable can be replayed here in its entirety . (Please note that the opening statements begin at the 18-minute mark.)

The opening statements of AFSA participants are below.

JOHN CRAIG REMARKS FOR DECEMBER 11, 2024 ,CONGRESSIONAL FREE SPEECH ROUNDTABLE.

Good morning,

My name is John Craig, and I am the chairman of Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought & Discourse. Thank you, Congressman Murphy, for chairing this important annual Roundtable, and to the other members of Congress present. Also, thanks to Congressman Murphy for his strong support of our work to promote freedom of expression and viewpoint diversity at our shared alma mater Davidson College.

Let me say upfront that we are making some progress in the struggle for campus free speech & viewpoint diversity.

At Davidson, we achieved adoption of a Commitment to Freedom of Expression Statement and have rallied students to form the student Free Speech Alliance and rebirth the Young Americans for Freedom and Libertarians chapters. And just two weeks ago, the students brought supply-side economist Art Laffer to campus—something that would have been unheard of even a year ago!

In the wake of last year’s Congressional Hearings post-October 7th , leadership changes occurred at Harvard, Penn, and Cornell.

Harvard’s interim president has just endorsed the recommendations of the Harvard Working Group on Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue, which, among other things calls for a required course for new undergraduates on constructive disagreement and review of policies for investigating alleged violations of discrimination, bullying, and harassment.

And misguided and ineffective DEI programs in the corporate world and in some universities are being dismantled.

So, to some degree, the campus free speech movement is currently riding a wave.

But make no mistake about it, the forces for one-sided ideological intolerance and speech control on many American campuses are entrenched and are using every tool at their disposal to maintain the status quo and combat us freedom fighters.

This is why, in the possibly narrow window of opportunity before us, we need the Federal government to use every instrument possible to support freedom of expression and viewpoint diversity. We need help especially in tackling the Critical Race Theory/oppressed vs. oppressor mentality that underpins DEI programs and many courses.

The most important tool, of course, is the power of the purse. So, I suggest that Congress rid all NIH, NEA, NEH, etc. grant applications of DEI requirements.

Make federal grants for research and teaching contingent on the absence of DEI loyalty oaths — obvious screening devices—in faculty recruitment and promotion documents.

Mandate that institutions receiving federal funds publish on their websites all course syllabi.

The biggest money, of course, is in the Federal Student Loan Program, whose thorough reform will be a big undertaking. But certainly the recent loan forgiveness excesses should be scrapped, and I hope that some way can be found to make universities and colleges liable for substantial portions of defaulted loans.

I emphasize the urgency of reforms like these. We out in the field need every ounce of support that Congress can provide. We saw this time last year how powerful Congressional hearings can be in shining light on the fault lines in US higher ed. We need more such hearings, and our hats are off to you members of Congress for the courage and leadership you are demonstrating in this battle for the American mind.

Thank you.

The Opening Statement of Davidsonians for Free Thought and Open Discourse Executive Director Kenny Xu

A dental school student formerly enrolled at Columbia University School of Dentistry tells me that one of the first questions he was told to ask a pregnant mother dealing with pelvic pain was whether she wanted to keep the baby.

An NC State transfer student at the Poole College of Management reports to me that the first two weeks of her business school experience was spent listening to seminars on DEI and SDGs, which stands for “Sustainable Development Goals,” instead of the basics of business such as how to make a proposal and how to receive funding for your idea.

If not reflected in policy, the academic experience for a young conservative student is full of slights, subtle degradations, and the constant threat of harassment. As a result, nationally, the free speech of conservative and other politically nonconforming students is impaired. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) nationally compiled and found that about 70 percent of students nationwide (out of a sample size of over 30,000) state that they feel uncomfortable sharing a disagreeing view with a professor in class.

The American Association of Medical Colleges, which helps state medical boards evaluate and license physician schools, put out a release of 72 criteria based on Critical Race Theory-related social justice tenets for schools to follow in order to be deemed accreditation-worthy. Such acts caused prestigious medical schools like UNC Medical Schools to issue large-scale social advocacy platforms that ultimately proved needlessly distracting and even discriminatory to their future doctors’ medical education.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prevents discrimination according to race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, and a whole host of other factors. It’s time to add political orientation to that list.

The whole purpose of American education is to teach people to be empathetic creatures capable of seeing multiple viewpoints and sides. If that is not the purpose of diversity, then diversity has no purpose. Today’s higher education system, with its relentless liberal/progressive orientation and disregard for indulging alternative viewpoints, is the opposite of that. Tolerance, it now is obvious, it only for the tolerated.

DEI statements in hiring, mandatory DEI trainings, and surveillance of “harassment” complaints through anonymous reporting agencies are now used to discriminate against conservative students for simply stating and defending their beliefs. This creates reticence among conservative students to pursue their academic and career goals, leading to a dearth of those students in essential fields like education and healthcare, which require continuing education. This, of course, leads to the one-sided political bureaucracy that we all know and hate.

The only way to stop the march of higher ed against conservative students is to aggressively promote intellectual diversity and protect conservative students who speak out. There needs to be at every public college in America a contingent of the school that aggressively and openly defends the right of ideologically nonconforming students to speak. Whether that is an actual school or a part of the administration, it must be given broad leeway to call out, for lack of better word, “higher education B.S” where they see it. Stocking universities with such people must be a new civil service mandate at the new Trump administration.

I believe as much as anybody in people’s ability to speak and reason freely. What I don’t believe in is using one’s powers of speech to exercise raw power over others and making people conform to your ideologies and beliefs. America is a nation built on the capacity to see that other perspectives exist. President Trump, you must take the lead and ensure that the presence of those who believe in you and your education agenda is felt in the places that most hate conservatives. You must ferociously and tirelessly enforce all civil rights protections to apply to conservative students as well as any other student.

Cautious Optimism Was the Keynote at a Capitol Forum on Campus Free Speech

In Praise of Institutional Neutrality in Academia

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 16:24:15 GMT

By Mark McNeilly

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

April, 22 2024

I f you are up on the latest trends in academia, you’ll know that “institutional neutrality” is in the news as more universities consider or adopt it. In my view, this is a good thing, as it maintains the role of the university as a neutral arena in which faculty and students can freely express and debate a wide range of viewpoints constructively rather than feel stifled when their university takes a public stance on a political or social issue. However, there is confusion within academia on what institutional neutrality means and how to implement it.

What Is Institutional Neutrality?

The free-speech organization FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) defines institutional neutrality as “the idea that colleges and universities should not, as institutions, take positions on social and political issues unless those issues ‘threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.’ Instead, these discussions should be left to students and faculty.”

Most point to the adoption of the Kalven Statement by the University of Chicago in 1967 as the seminal moment for institutional neutrality. During the turbulent Sixties, when debate over the Vietnam War and civil rights rocked the United States, the Kalven Statement outlined the proper role of a university in terms of societal change:

The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.

Since the university is a community only for these limited and distinctive purposes, it is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness.

Why Universities Are Adopting Institutional Neutrality

For decades, Chicago was the sole university that had committed to institutional neutrality. That changed in 2022 when University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill trustees passed a resolution adopting institutional neutrality. That action raised the visibility of the subject in academia, as it ran counter to the usual flurry of political statements being made by university leaders on what seemed like every political and social event or issue. Nevertheless, there are a myriad of good reasons for university leaders to follow UNC’s lead and adopt institutional neutrality, as I laid out in this article on the Heterodox Academy blog.

The propensity to take stances on every issue was reexamined by higher-ed leaders after the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack that killed hundreds of Israeli civilians and the disastrous House hearings featuring the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT. Pushback from alumni, donors, and the public, combined with internal tensions on the left that fractured the usual ideological unity, led many college presidents and chancellors to reconsider the wisdom of continually making political statements. While there is still a long way to go, this list from FIRE of universities that have formally adopted the Kalven Statement shows progress.

To encourage more universities at this propitious moment, FIRE, Heterodox Academy, and the Academic Freedom Alliance have joined forces to issue a joint call to institutions to stop taking political stances and instead adopt institutional neutrality:

It is time for those entrusted with ultimate oversight authority for your institutions to restore truth-seeking as the primary mission of higher education by adopting a policy of institutional neutrality on social and political issues that do not concern core academic matters or institutional operations.

Institutional Neutrality Simplified

Institutional neutrality seems like a simple concept, but implementing it raises many questions and often leaves faculty and university leaders confused. Some faculty think institutional neutrality means they cannot speak out on issues, when in reality it exists to make faculty feel more comfortable in speaking out (as long as they make clear they are not speaking for the university). University leaders, meanwhile, are not sure what they can and cannot say. For example, what is considered an internal issue (those on which the university can take a stance) as opposed to an external social or political issue (on which the institution should stay silent to allow faculty and students the ability to speak freely)? My goal here is to try to make the concept more understandable with a short explanation and a visual.

First, let’s separate the internal campus issues from the external social and political ones.

Internal campus issues refer to matters that directly pertain to the university’s core functions and responsibilities, including education, research, and the maintenance of a community where academic freedom is protected and fostered. These issues might involve policies on admissions, faculty governance, curriculum development, academic standards, campus safety, resource allocation, and the establishment of an environment conducive to learning and inquiry. The Kalven Report suggests that the university is not only justified but also obligated to engage in and take positions on these internal matters, as they directly affect its ability to fulfill its educational mission.

External social issues of the day, on the other hand, encompass a wide range of political, social, and economic concerns that exist outside the university’s immediate academic and administrative responsibilities. These issues might include national or international policies, social-justice movements, political elections, and other societal debates not directly related to the university’s primary mission of education and research. The Kalven Report advocates for the university to maintain a position of neutrality on these external matters, arguing that taking institutional stances on such issues would compromise the university’s commitment to academic freedom and its role as a platform for open inquiry and debate among individuals with diverse viewpoints.

Given those definitions, the following visual illustrates my interpretation of who is allowed to make statements on the two types of issues.

When external events occur about which university leaders feel some type of statement should be made despite the commitment to institutional neutrality, I offer the following template.

External Event Statement Template:

[University name here] follows a policy of institutional neutrality. This means our university will not take a position or make statements on the domestic or international issues of the day.

However, we recognize that the [external event here] may be affecting faculty, staff, or students on campus. For those affected by these events, university leadership has made the following resources available for your assistance [resource list here].

Next Steps on the Path to Institutional Neutrality

Institutional neutrality is the best way forward for a university to encourage its faculty and students to speak freely on issues of the day, stay true to its mission of the pursuit of truth, and maintain support from alumni, donors, and the public. More institutional leaders must take UNC’s step of formally adopting those principles and explain to their constituents what the concept means.

To help do so, there are many resources now available. A more in-depth examination of the principles of institutional neutrality and how to implement it is offered by Heterodox Academy in its Model Statement of Neutrality. FIRE also has excellent resources on the implementation of institutional neutrality here. I recommend both highly.

The time has come for universities and colleges to embrace institutional neutrality as a core principle. University leaders and governing bodies should formally adopt policies of neutrality to return our institutions to being bastions of diverse thought and debate and to restore trust among students, faculty, alumni, and the wider community. We can prioritize truth-seeking and intellectual freedom by adopting institutional neutrality today.

Mark McNeilly is a professor of the practice at the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. The views expressed are his own and are not meant to represent the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

In Praise of Institutional Neutrality in Academia — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue at Harvard

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 19:55:57 GMT

Published October 1, 2024

Dear Members of the Harvard Community,

For the past six months, the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group has sought to understand how we communicate with one another and how we might do better. It has explored how we experience our classrooms and the broader campus environment. It has researched how we teach and learn. And it has assessed how various tools and techniques support robust debate and rigorous discourse. We write now to share the Group’s report and recommendations .

Drawn from Faculties from across the University, the Working Group hosted 23 listening sessions, conducted online surveys, and gathered direct input from students, faculty, staff, and alumni representing every Harvard School. More than 600 affiliates participated in the listening sessions, while thousands more lent their perspectives through surveys and correspondence. Thank you to all who took the time to share their views—we need to hear from all parts of our community if the work ahead is to be fully successful. As the report states, “excellence through the free and respectful exchange of ideas demands much of every member of the community.”

The insights gleaned from these many points of engagement are detailed in the report, which notes that some community members are reluctant to share their views or to discuss controversial issues because they fear being judged by peers, criticized on social media, or subjected to reputational or professional damage. To address and help overcome this reluctance, the Working Group highlights good work already under way across our campus to cultivate habits, norms, and practices supporting open inquiry and constructive dialogue. These efforts informed the Working Group’s own wide-ranging recommendations, including the establishment of norms, propagation of best teaching practices, creation of new teaching modules, and development of responsible social media policies.

We accept the recommendations of the Working Group and look forward to working with the deans, faculty, staff, and students to put them into practice. Our work will undoubtedly take time and will take many forms across the University. As our community rededicates itself to this vital pursuit, we encourage you to read the report and use it as a resource in efforts—large and small—to further open inquiry and constructive dialogue. More about the report is available in this Gazette Q&A .

As we noted when we announced the Working Group in April, excellence in discovery and learning requires the ability to try ideas on for size, to explore them fully, to challenge accepted wisdom, to disagree productively, and to take risks. We are immensely grateful to the members of the Working Group, especially co-chairs Tomiko Brown-Nagin and Eric Beerbohm, for their tremendous contribution to this important effort. As the report notes, we are at an “inflection point in the history of our institution, our nation, and the world,” and “we must practice—even enshrine—habits, norms, and practices that facilitate the excellence for which we all strive.” This report points the way.

Sincerely,

Alan M. Garber

President

John F. Manning

Provost

UNC Tries to Create a ‘Free-Speech Culture’

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 14:38:19 GMT

Jed Atkins, head of the Chapel Hill campus’s new School of Civic Life and Leadership, wants to teach students to be tolerant, in an old-school way.

By Barton Swaim

Wall Street Journal - Opinion

October 4, 2024

Chapel Hill, N.C.

Why American politics in the 21st century is marred by incivility and mistrust is the subject of more books and essays than any normal person would wish to read. The premise underlying most of them is that it’s a left-right problem: The right hates the left and the left hates the right, only the reasons for the hatred vary according to the author.

But what if it isn’t a left-right problem at all? What if the acrimony and loathing that animate our politics have more to do with class than ideology, more to do with educational status than any set of views on culture and policy?

The assumption that the nastiness of our politics is chiefly a matter of warring ideologies wouldn’t explain, for one thing, the mindless rage currently evident on elite campuses. These are places dominated by a confederation of left-progressive worldviews, yet the acrimony issuing from them is ferocious: occupations of quads and academic buildings, chanting mobs in the grip of antisemitic lunacy, assaults on Jewish students, flag-burning exhibitionism, dizzying varieties of “intersectional” preoccupations glomming onto the cause of anti-Zionism, and on and on.

Ordinary Americans don’t behave this way. A not insignificant number of students and faculty at the country’s finest universities do. The conclusion would seem to be unavoidable that elite higher education is failing in its duty to convey to students a sense of the world’s moral and political complexity and the necessity of humility in trying to interpret it. America’s leafy campuses are instead turning out large numbers of graduates who hold insane political views and detest anyone who doesn’t share them.

An awareness of this state of affairs recently led the trustees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—among the nation’s top public universities—to imagine a way forward. In January 2023 the board voted 12-0 to create a School of Civic Life and Leadership. Its purpose, according to an official statement, is to prepare students “for the responsibilities of citizenship and civic leadership by fostering a free-speech culture” dedicated to the “human search for meaning and developing the capacities for civil discourse and wise decision-making.”

The board’s decision predictably led some faculty, administrators and media commentators to allege the new school to be some kind of right-wing Republican fifth column. A few professors, always suspicious of ideas that don’t come from their own ranks, claimed, amazingly, that the board had no right to establish a new institution within the university.

In August I met with Jed Atkins, dean of the SCiLL, as it’s abbreviated. Until his appointment at UNC, he was a classics professor at Duke University, where he co-directed the Civil Discourse Project, a program designed to have students from widely divergent backgrounds and political commitments read classic texts, from Aristotle to Martin Luther King Jr., and analyze their meanings in light of present political circumstances.

Mr. Atkins prefers not to talk about the school’s allegedly controversial beginnings, and I don’t blame him. “Origins aren’t destiny,” he says. But he adds: “I can’t think of many things less controversial than providing a civic education that brings students from all backgrounds and viewpoints into community to be able to explore the big questions of human flourishing.”

Mr. Atkins, 42, is attuned to the reasons young people in the 2020s find it hard to engage in robust political argument. “We now carry in our pockets these little recording devices”—he holds up his smartphone—“and anything you say might be recorded and might find its way to the recruiters of the job that you’re applying for. There are a lot of disincentives to engage in the types of open and free-wheeling conversations that, for 20-, 21-, 22-year-olds, can be so transformative.”

I mention that a friend of mine, a professor of literature at an elite university, recently observed something he’s noticed about his students over the past couple of decades: They seem to think of social and political problems as simple matters of good and evil. Good people take the right view, evil people take the other. I liken it to Manichaeanism, the third-century philosophy holding that the world consists of spirit (good) and matter (evil).

“There’s something deeply human in that form of dualism,” Mr. Atkins says. “The basic Greek understanding of justice that Plato had to interrogate was that of helping your friends and harming your enemies. There’s a way of understanding the Hebraic law code that sees its judicial standards as breaking the cycle of violence and retribution.” (He’s right about the Mosaic law, incidentally. “An eye for an eye,” frequently caricatured as mere brutality, was meant to curb the retributive urge: Not a life for an eye, only an eye for an eye.)

Dualism is a constant temptation in human affairs, Mr. Atkins says, but it has been heightened in recent decades: “Social media is a great ratchet. There’s a ‘like’ button and a ‘dislike’ button, no ‘maybe’ button.”

Are there other ratchets? Young Americans are rejecting institutional religion in large numbers,” Mr. Atkins says, “but they aren’t abandoning the religious desire for personal meaning, moral belonging, transcendent experiences, rituals, community.” He cites Tara Isabella Burton’s 2020 book, “Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World.” I would also mention the books and lectures of Jordan Peterson. “Political and social movements have increasingly come to fulfill these religious longings,” Mr. Atkins continues. “The sacralization of politics inflames the urge toward dualism. They don’t see the political process as negotiating policy trade-offs but as a site of meaning and moral belonging achieved at the expense of their political out-group.”

“The civic crisis,” Mr. Atkins says, using his term for Americans’ inability to engage civilly on political subject, “is downstream from the crisis of meaning.” A properly liberal education of the sort UNC’s new school aims to foster “asks students to rise above their partial viewpoints and perspectives to consider questions that transcend their own time and place, and to do that together.”

What sort of questions? “What is the best political form? What is the best economic form? Does history have a direction and purpose? How do we reconcile liberty and our responsibilities to society? Is there a God? Maybe more particularly to the American regime: The foundational principles of the Declaration, liberty and equality—are they universal?” My thought: If a school dedicated to pondering and debating questions like these in a spirit of trust and generosity counts as a furtive right-wing insurgency, by all means let’s have more right-wing insurgencies.

Already the new school has hired 11 faculty, among them Mr. Atkins’s colleague at Duke with whom he ran the aforementioned Civil Discourse Project, John Rose. Mr. Rose’s op-ed “ How I Liberated My Classroom ,” on the pathology of self-censorship on college campuses, appeared in these pages in 2021.

Our conversation takes place in the school’s building. A 10-minute walk away is the quad where, on April 30, anti-Israel protesters, hiding their faces behind surgical masks and kaffiyehs, knocked over barricades, took down the American flag and replaced it with a Palestinian one. The university’s interim chancellor, Lee Roberts, whose office is adjacent to the quad, arrived with police to restore the Stars and Stripes. (Mr. Roberts has since been made chancellor.)

When protesters took the flag down a second time, a group of fraternity brothers—mindful of the U.S. Flag Code’s provision that “the flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground”—held it in hand at the base of the flagpole, smiling as they endured the faceless mob’s shouted insults, until, an hour later, Old Glory could be hoisted again. The scene generated a crowd-sourced effort to raise money for a party for the “triumphant Brohemians” who participated in the flag-preserving effort. A little more than half a million dollars was raised, and the party happened—flyover, patriotic rock concert, beer galore—on Sept. 2.

It is an amusing irony that frat bros—a class of student not famous for sobriety and moderation—behaved far more civilly than their allegedly conscientious and intellectually engaged peers. The episode was a reminder, as if any were needed, that elite universities are deeply confused about the ideals they are meant to protect and foster: free speech, open rational debate, principled dissent.

Mr. Atkins thinks well-meaning university administrators—people who genuinely want universities to cultivate small-l liberal values—have too often assumed that subscribing to formal statements on “free expression” would solve the problem. “It’s very much about culture,” he says. “Statements of principle are important. The Kalven Report, the Chicago Statement”—the former a 1967 recommendation that the University of Chicago adopt a position of institutional neutrality, the latter a declaration of principles on free speech—“all those are important. I support those statements. But I think over the past 20 or 30 years we’ve spent a lot of time talking about principles and statements, which can be action-guiding, but not nearly enough time creating a free-speech culture in the classroom, in the residential halls.”

In many ways Mr. Atkins sounds like a figure of the 18th-century British Enlightenment expatiating on the benefits of polite reciprocity, rational discourse and the open exchange of views. “Free speech and civil discourse,” he says, “requires humility, the capacity to listen well. It requires building up trust. It’s much harder to cultivate that kind of culture than it is, say, to protest on the quad.”

Mr. Atkins’s third book, published Tuesday by Oxford University Press, is titled “The Christian Origins of Tolerance.” It is a tightly reasoned, footnote-heavy academic treatise on four Christian North African writers of the second through fifth centuries: Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius and Augustine. The “standard liberal narrative,” as Mr. Atkins terms the common explanation for the emergence of tolerance in the West, holds that it appeared after the so-called wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries. Only when Europe’s leading lights learned to put aside their overarching theological commitments, this narrative claims, could regimes embrace tolerance as a virtue.

Mr. Atkins contends that tolerance—which he defines, variously, as “patience within plurality” and “forbearance in the face of things, people, or viewpoints one finds objectionable or wrong”—emerged much earlier from Christian theologians thinking through biblical texts.

Reading the book, I’m reminded that the word “tolerance” and its cognates were used frequently in liberal political discourse two or three decades ago, but not much anymore. The reason, I suspect, has to do with its proper definition: To tolerate a thing is to put up with it even though you disapprove. At no point was postwar liberalism notable for putting up with things liberals disapproved of. A “tolerant” attitude, according to its usage in the 1980s and ’90s, was an attitude that pretended to tolerate things upwardly mobile, socially liberal people already approved of: “alternative lifestyles,” adherents of religions other than Christianity, casual drug use and so on. That isn’t tolerance.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that students on elite campuses, having so rarely seen it properly exemplified, give so little attention to tolerance as a virtue. “They care very much about justice,” Mr. Atkins says. “If you present tolerance or forbearance to them in a way that makes it completely separate from justice, they’ll reject tolerance. They’ll say, Well, doesn’t that make me complicit in injustice?” Part of this new school’s mission, he explains, is to “present justice and forbearance as in a relationship with each other.” Putting up with “views and practices that you find wrong,” he says, “has to be in dialogue with judgments about what is good.”

Mr. Atkins speaks frequently about his students coming to appreciate the complexity and fluidity of their own social and political views, and by extension the recklessness of judging the views of others too easily. “There’s a humility that comes with recognizing how complicated the world can be,” he says. We don’t often hear about students at top-rated universities learning and exhibiting the virtue of humility. Maybe, in time, we will.

Mr. Swaim is a Journal editorial page writer.

Incubate Debate: Offering an antidote to GenZ mind poisoning

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 16:37:22 GMT

Colleges across America see the first signs of a repeat of what happened in California after 1996.

By Bill Freza

Heterodox STEM - Substack

September 8, 2024

I recently had the pleasure of serving as one of the judges for a high school debate program called Incubate Debate held at the New College of Florida. It also included an evening speaking to and with the students involved, who ranged in age from 12 to 18. They had spent an entire week in this residential program training for the big event, learning how to research and debate complex and controversial issues with vigor, clarity, and civility.

I was shocked by how outspoken, courageous, courteous, studious, poised, well-informed, attentive, and totally uninfected by the Woke Mind Virus these kids were. It gives me fresh hope for the next generation.

If you haven’t been following the news on national high school debate programs, in particular the tournaments run by the high-profile National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA) , you may not be aware of how hopelessly politicized these have become . All of the pathologies spawned by university DEI and CRT programs have filtered down into this once respected organization, leading to self-censorship pressures and effective cancellation for any students who don’t toe the progressive line.

Lest you think I exaggerate, take a look at the profile statement of one of the judges of the 2024 NSDA finals, who was herself the 2019 national debate champion.

“Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments.”

When you’re done digesting that, watch and listen to the 2024 NSDA Duo Champions give their award-winning speech. This is real, not the Babylon Bee. Pericles’ funeral oration it’s not.

Painfully aware of this deterioration, former high school debate champion James Fishback founded Incubate Debate in 2019 as a donor supported not-for-profit that enables students from all socioeconomic backgrounds to participate. He set out to Make Debate Great Again and judging by what I saw he’s delivering on his promise.

Watching these kids debate you know right away that something is different when they formally address each other as Mister and Miss. Disrespect and ad hominem attacks are out.

Facts and reason are in. A tremendous comradery was in evidence even as they went at each other hammer and tong, reminding me of those precious midnight bull sessions that were such a big part of my college experience fifty years ago.

Unlike the NSDA, which front-loads its debate questions with heaping helpings of wokeness like “How should the education system be reformed to address systemic inequities?” the last Incubate Debate finals tackled the vexing question “Should college DEI programs be abolished?”

What was perhaps most inspiring interacting with these kids is how eager they were for constructive criticism and feedback, as well as how supportive they were of each other. It’s as if they escaped the toxic identity-besotted ideological swamp into which K-12 education has devolved, seeking an oasis of open discourse where heterodoxy can thrive. What a concept.

To date Incubate Debate has only been active in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, but this fall it will be launching Incubate Leagues in New York and Los Angeles. Taking the program directly into the heart of Progressive Mordor, they plan to welcome over 10,000 students to their no-cost, in-person tournaments.

If you have school-age children in these areas, encourage them to participate. And if you have the means and are so inclined, consider supporting this worthy program.

Bill Frezza is a retired engineer, entrepreneur, and venture capital investor, now co-founder and secretary of the MIT Free Speech Alliance .

Higher Education’s Leadership Crisis

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 16:34:04 GMT

Columbia’s Minouche Shafik is the latest Ivy League resignation. Will it prove a turning point?

By Eric J. Gertler

The Wall Street Journal

August 15, 2024

Will the resignation of Columbia University President Minouche Shafik be a turning point for higher education? Her tenure, as well as those of Penn’s Liz Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay, suggests that some of these elite universities are selecting the wrong people for the top job.

Some have shown promise in dealing with the immediate challenges. Vanderbilt’s Daniel Diermeier and Dartmouth’s Sian Beilock have been proactive in understanding the need to provide students with clear guidelines balancing the need for free speech and safety.

But the job of a university president has dimensions that go far beyond dealing with this sort of crisis. Most college presidents have résumés that stand out in the academic world of scholarship, theory and ceremony. That background isn’t always suited for a role that requires one to juggle the competing interests of students, donors, alumni, faculty, trustees and community members.

Today’s universities are multibillion-dollar enterprises that are far more complex than they were a generation ago. Harvard now charges incoming students $85,000 in tuition and living expenses. It has more than 25,000 students and almost 20,000 employees, including some 2,500 faculty members. It operates more than a dozen graduate schools, manages an endowment of more than $50 billion, and has a large and growing real-estate footprint in Cambridge, Mass. It is making massive investments in world-class research facilities in emerging and complex scientific disciplines.

Columbia and New York University are two of their city’s largest landowners. Many state schools are the centers of regional development hubs, and smaller schools, even community colleges, have become engines of growth in every state.

Oversight of such complex organizations requires the skills akin to a Fortune 1000 CEO. The academic mission is crucial, but university presidents spend much of their time on nonacademic matters—fundraising, budget management, real-estate development, hiring and firing, public-relations crises, managing boards, and sensitive community relations—for which they have had little previous experience.

While some provosts and deans have the skills to excel as university presidents, others don’t. Trustees have a responsibility to expand the recruiting pool for university presidents. Successful CEOs have experience in running a playbook for different situations and are “battle tested.” When dealing with crisis, they can rely on previous experiences that many current university leaders lack.

Trustees should also consider leaders from the military, political and nonprofit worlds. When Gen. Dwight Eisenhower became president of Columbia in 1948, he lacked the academic credentials of a typical university president. But he had the foresight and skills to handle a university environment and its concomitant challenges.

More recently, former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels reenergized Purdue University with innovative thinking and confident leadership. Michael Crow, an academic innovator, has taken advantage of his unconventional experience as an adviser to government agencies and a designer of knowledge enterprises to remake Arizona State University. Shirley Jackson’s experience at Bell Labs and as a White House adviser enhanced her tenure at Rensselaer Polytechnic.

Trustees must recognize that their roles are no longer simply titular, broaden their search for leaders, and be bold enough to make tough decisions when they realize they have selected the wrong person for the job.

Mr. Gertler is executive chairman and CEO of U.S. News & World Report.

Kenny Xu ’19 Becomes the 2nd Executive Director of Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 18:13:49 GMT

Kenny Xu, a Class of 2019 Davidson alumnus and author, was named the 2 ^nd Executive Director of Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse on August 13, 2024. He brings to the role experience both chronicling and participating in vital debates on higher education. He is the author of two books (An Inconvenient Minority and School of Woke), a U.S. Congressional candidate in the NC 13 ^th District congressional primary in 2024, and most recently President of Color Us United, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that speaks out on identity politics issues. Kenny has engaged on all sides of both politics and education, while keeping his steadfast commitment to his alma mater as a founding Board member of DFTD.

Kenny says, “DFTD is a national leader on campus free speech and has been key to improving the culture of free expression at Davidson. I couldn’t be prouder to be chosen to direct this important organization. My goal is to work with and engage all of Davidson’s stakeholders in the mission of making Davidson College a national leader for free debate and intellectual inquiry.”

Regarding Kenny Xu’s appointment, DFTD Board chair John Craig ’66 said, “Kenny was present at the founding of our independent alumni organization back in 2018 and has provided thoughtful leadership as a member of the DFTD board. He is an outstanding communicator and passionate on campus freedom of expression and viewpoint diversity issues. We are extremely fortunate to have him take operational responsibility of DFTD at a time when the momentum is growing for the national higher education freedom of expression movement.”

Kenny will build on the achievements of DFTD’s first Executive Director Kevin Cook ’09. Kevin is departing DFTD to join the executive leadership team at ThriveMore, where he will serve as the Chief Development Officer. ThriveMore, a faith-based, not-for-profit organization, is one of the most respected providers of residential and healthcare living options for older adults in North Carolina.

DFTD board member James G. Martin ’57 said, “We thank Kevin Cook ’09 for his service over the last academic year. Kevin was instrumental in establishing DFTD-sponsored events on campus, forging new student and faculty relationships, and dramatically growing the donor base for the organization. We are proud of his accomplishments and wish him well in his new endeavor.”

DFTD is an independent nonprofit alumni organization not affiliated with Davidson College, but firmly committed to helping ensure its continued excellence and long-term strength.

Colleges Are Wed to the Status Quo

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 16:28:48 GMT

Ideals that were once a grounding have become an anchor.

By Clark Ross

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

August 14, 2024

In a recent Boston Globe column, correspondent Kara Miller wrote that our colleges and universities now “ embrac[e] the status quo ,” preventing them from responding to new challenges. Her article draws heavily on a 2023 book by Brian Rosenberg, former president of Macalester College, entitled Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education . Both Miller and Rosenberg write of the difficulty of fostering meaningful change in our colleges and universities. Private businesses in the United States demonstrating such inflexibility would quickly endanger their viability and existence.

In today’s world, the intransigence of our institutions of higher education is risking exactly that irrelevance. In prior years, the status quo filtered down from elite universities and helped “ground” post-secondary education with some positive moorings. Today is different. American post-secondary education confronts a bevy of challenges that threaten its stability. Adherence to the status quo has become an “anchor” preventing meaningful change.

Let’s review briefly a few of these challenges: financial, demographic, ideological, pedagogical, and political.

Labor-intensive in their financial model, higher-ed institutions are confronting financial challenges. Rising costs, for everything from health-care insurance to student services, threaten financial stability. This challenge is occurring just as families, particularly middle-income ones, are less able to respond to higher tuition and fees. Just look at the scores of small private schools that have failed in recent years, in all sections of the country. Possible remedies, such as shortened semesters and larger classes with smaller discussion sections, are promptly vetoed, with little study or discussion, by faculty groups.

A second challenge is the so-called demographic cliff , an expectation that a peak number of high-school graduates, perhaps 3.5 million, will be present in 2025, followed by annual declines of nearly 1.5 percent for the next five to 10 years. With many schools already heavily under-enrolled, how will U.S. higher education confront this challenge? There are really only two ways: Try to increase the number of domestic college students, or turn to an increased number of international students. Yet cost increases, curricular challenges, and (to an extent) xenophobia are preventing higher education from increasing its draw.

A third challenge relates to issues of equity and inclusion, still very much in the forefront of campus thought today. In an effort to make the demographics of an institution replicate those of society at large, overt as well as more disguised “affirmative-action” measures are used to recruit students and faculty of different ethnicities and socio-economic statuses. In 2023, the Supreme Court moved to limit the most obvious uses of affirmative action. Nevertheless, universities’ efforts to stray from merit and color-blindness continue to introduce controversy and divisiveness into many institutional decisions.

A fourth challenge is pedagogical. Though disciplines change constantly, tenure and a highly specialized faculty preclude a dynamic curriculum. The hiring, with a 40-year commitment, of an historian of Flemish painting imposes great risks for the underutilization of this faculty member over time. Hiring professors for recurring five-year appointments may well be a better solution, but faculty frequently and strongly resist such appointments.

Even the presumption that quality teaching should be positively correlated with tenure has been seriously challenged. Some of the most effective teachers are not the most effective researchers; the converse is also true. Given a particular school’s mission and needs, different additions to a faculty may be required. Harvard may need a research specialist in finite mathematics to train graduate students, while Davidson may need a superior instructor to direct undergraduate calculus. In other words, one may need a research specialist, and one may need a teaching specialist. Applying the same criteria to both hires may not fulfill the actual need of either institution.

An additional pedagogical challenge is to determine when lecturing is the most effective form of teaching. Small-group learning and participatory groupwork have shown themselves to be superior means for learning in many cases. Having the lecture as the status quo or the default for teaching must continue to be challenged. The lecture method must prove itself against alternatives in different course offerings.

Finally, how should important international and national political crises affect the pedagogy of the university? The recent conflict between Israel and Hamas is a major challenge that has compromised the harmony of many schools, particularly elite ones like Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Few of these challenges were paramount in 1975, half a century ago. Thus, the status quo that evolved over 200 years of higher education in the United States is no longer appropriate. That status quo once provided a grounding that led to higher education in the United States being expensive but the envy of the world. Today, however, adherence to the status quo is not a grounding but an anchor, preventing needed fundamental changes within the industry.

How can we confront this serious challenge? How do we introduce a mentality and a process for meaningful change? Certain principles are relevant—albeit, perhaps, to varying degrees at different institutions. These include the following four ideals, broadly defined.

1) A clear, understood, and accepted division of influence among the following six groups: trustees, alumni, donors, administrative staff, faculty, and students. This plethora of groups with varying roles, both presumed and statutory, contributes to inertia and difficulty fostering change. How can a clear division be promulgated?

For instance, the awarding of tenure to an individual professor generally requires action from the administration, the faculty, and the students (who provide teaching evaluations). Typically, the trustees make the final decision. All involved in this process will attest to its ambiguity.

Thus, each institution must move toward some clear balance of power, with transparent roles and responsibilities for each of these groups. The current situation is akin to a for-profit corporation granting uncertain roles to stockholders, the board of directors, management, workers, and consumers. In such a scenario, each group fights to protect its self-interest and resists change. This seriously undermines the institution.

2) A clear and accepted role for strategic planners. The principal participants are generally the faculty and the administrative staff, with students and trustees offering advice and opinions. Given the self-interest that staff and faculty have, the strategic-planning process is inherently flawed. New initiatives must always be additive, without reducing any current activities. A planning process of this nature tends only to increase costs. Moving toward some form of zero-based budgeting and planning could address this issue. Yet there is typically so little support for such a change that the process of moving in that direction is highly uncertain and challenging.

3) A willingness to commission objective experts to offer advice and knowledge on important questions. For example, in the teaching of introductory foreign languages, what methods provide the best results per dollar spent. It may well be that non-tenured, renewable faculty working with heavily involved students is the best method, compared to expensive tenure-track professors of foreign literature trying to teach basic language courses in a lecture style.

Other critical questions could concern the actual needs of the professionals hiring today’s students. Which skills best prepare a student for a career in finance or consulting, for example? Does each school truly know the answer to that question?

4) The arrival at some consensus concerning diversity and inclusion. Frank and candid discussions of the type that rarely occur at elite universities must be initiated. It takes a rare college president to gain the trust of all groups to engage in this discussion. Yet I would argue that such a discussion is vital.

In conclusion, today’s universities face two central challenges. The first is to recognize the absolute need to abandon the status quo and be willing to change. The second is to address the change process with appropriate roles for constituencies, proper planning methods, and the objective acquisition of needed knowledge. Those institutions that are early adapters and quickly follow this advice stand not only to survive but to prosper.

Clark Ross taught economics at Davidson College from 1979 to 2024. He served as dean of the faculty for nearly 15 years.

Farewell to Academe

Wed, 03 Jul 2024 17:53:34 GMT

By Eliot Cohen

The Atlantic

July 3, 2024

A fter 42 years of academic life—not counting five years spent getting a Ph.D.—I am hanging it up. A while back, I concluded that the conversation that I would most dread overhearing would be an alumna saying to a current student, “I know, I know, but you should have seen the old man in his prime.” I believe I dodged that one.

My more than four decades, interrupted by stints of public service in the Defense and State Departments, were spent at just three academic institutions. Harvard formed and launched me; the Naval War College exposed me to America’s senior officer corps and its leadership culture; and Johns Hopkins, where I spent 34 years, gave me the opportunity to teach wonderful students, build a department, and become a dean. In all three places, I was given extraordinary freedom to think, write, speak, and serve my country, alongside remarkable colleagues, superiors, and, above all, students.

And yet I leave elite academe with doubts and foreboding that I would not have anticipated when I completed my formal education in 1982. Watching the travails of Harvard—where I received my degrees and served as an assistant professor and assistant dean—has been particularly painful. Its annus horribilis did not even end with commencement, because Harvard’s dean of social science recently decided that he should publish an inane and dangerous article calling for the punishment of faculty who “excoriate University leadership, faculty, staff, or students with the intent to arouse external intervention into University business.”

Inane, because how does one define excoriate, and how does one prove intent? Dangerous, because this is an open door to the suppression of freedom of speech, plain and simple, let alone academic freedom. And the article was also both arrogant and politically obtuse, because after the abuse Harvard has rightly taken this year from outraged alumni, students, donors, and faculty, not to mention journalists and members of Congress, it most definitely did not need a dean musing publicly about how best to suppress faculty impertinence.

But Dean Lawrence Bobo’s call for the punishment of disaffected speech is symptomatic of deeper diseases in our elite universities. Job candidates being required to pledge fealty to progressive views on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are but one manifestation of a university culture that is often intolerant of free speech, unwilling or unable to protect unpopular minorities, and uninterested in viewpoint diversity. As a politically conservative young professor, I was in a minority—but a large one. More important, I never felt that my views would be held against me by my colleagues. Now I would not be so sure. Inevitably, and justly, the public immunities, including tax exemptions, on which universities have thrived are endangered by the arrogance with which they respond to criticism, and their failure to live up to their own stated principles.

According to a recent study , the problem is worst with young faculty: “Among liberal faculty 35 and under, only 23% indicated that shouting down a speaker is never acceptable, 43% said the same for blocking entry, and 64% for using violence to stop a campus speech.” Put differently, in at least some instances, 36 percent approve using violence, 57 percent approve blocking entry, and 77 percent think it’s okay to shout down some speakers. This is a part of academe’s present; what is scary is that it may portend academe’s future. At least half of faculty identify as liberal or progressive, with minorities as small as a quarter or even only a tenth identifying as conservative.

My journey through academe coincided with many changes—the staggering growth in the wealth of top-tier institutions, which now sit on endowments in the billions or tens of billions; a large and still somewhat obscure influx of foreign money; the relentless drive to treat academic disciplines as professions; hiring systems driven by quantitative scoring of publications; a reduction in teaching loads for top faculty; the shrinkage of humanities and some social-science concentrations; and an explosion of administrative staff at all levels.

To be sure, there are many positive things in today’s academe: magnificent infrastructure, thriving science and technology departments that in turn drive American economic innovation, online instruction that extends the reach of education to those who cannot or choose not to partake of more conventional full-time schooling, and institutions willing to break with past models, Arizona State University being the largest but hardly the only example. The humanities and some of the social sciences are in a different place, however, and valuable academic ways have been lost.

In 1990, when I came to my quirky division of Johns Hopkins University, the School of Advanced International Studies, our buildings (like those of Harvard in my student days) were worn and dingy, and we made decisions about hiring new faculty without the benefit of the H or i-10 citation indexes. Rather, as a senior colleague once growled at a meeting, “We read their damned books and articles. All of them. And then we make up our minds.” A four-course load for tenured full professors was standard, with a grudging reduction to three for really unusual administrative loads. Some of the faculty revolted when we learned that the school had the same number of administrators as faculty (as compared with three or four times as many in most universities today). Teaching, particularly of the introductory courses, was understood to be a responsibility of the senior faculty, who in ways by turns constructive and obstreperous felt an ownership of the institution and a lifelong commitment to it.

It is different now. Universities rely on adjunct faculty, and faculty seem to me less likely to feel like citizens and more like privileged employees. Change is inevitable, no doubt. New methods of research complement—to my mind, they do not replace—the old; some topics require collective work as opposed to individual diligence. Technology opens up new ways to mine, sort, and correlate data. And better by far to have air-conditioning that works. But something has been lost.

It may be an aging professor’s nostalgia to insist that in the old days, learned giants walked the Earth. But when I think of the men and women who taught me, I cannot help but think that they were a deeper and often wiser group than the norm today. One way or another, as children or adults, as native-born Americans or immigrants from ravaged lands, they had been touched by World War II. They were broadly read and multilingual, and they did not obsess about “the profession” of political science. They were hardly a humble lot, but by and large they knew how to say “I’ve changed my mind” or even “I was wrong about that.”

When Harvard Dean Henry Rosovsky asked my mentors Samuel P. Huntington or James Q. Wilson or Judith Shklar to do something for the good of the university, the answer was an unhesitating yes. When I became the dean of my division of Johns Hopkins, I was at first shocked and then resigned when the answer to a similar request was more often “Well, what will you give me in return?” or simply “No.” When the designers of the magnificent new Washington, D.C., Bloomberg Center of Hopkins asked a group of us what would define failure for the spectacular new building, my answer was, “If it turns into WeWork for academics.” I pray it avoids that fate.

The old ways were going to change, particularly as new faculty replaced the World War II generation. But I had the benefit of having had as role models the last of a generation of scholars and teachers who had lived experience of that furnace. I further had the good fortune to engage early on with America’s senior military officers, and quickly discovered that I enjoyed and learned more from my time with them than at the American Political Science Association conventions. To this day I find their company more interesting than that of many professors, learning from and being inspired by their life knowledge, character, and wisdom.

There are many thousands of dedicated and capable teachers and scholars out there, no doubt. But I wonder whether in academe overall, the single-minded and inflexible commitment to the value embodied in the mottoes of my two universities—“Truth” and “The truth will make you free”—still stands. The replication crisis, first detected in the discipline of academic psychology , makes one wonder. I suspect, however, that that value will flourish, together with broad intellectual culture and a genuine breadth of perspectives, but in different institutions than in the past, and I look forward to that.

Mine is, no doubt, a romanticized and possibly even a naive view of the university and its ideals. Its role as the repository and embodiment of high culture, civilized values, liberal education, and deep learning has been largely replaced by something more mechanical—the university as knowledge-producing factory and credential-providing mill. The old vision received fatal blows during the chaos of the 1960s, and succumbed to many forces—societal upheaval, the dramatic advances in science and technology, and the explosion of government funding among them.

Still, I hope that at least one ideal will remain. When the American psychologist and philosopher with the soul of a novelist, William James, received an honorary degree from Harvard, where he had already taught for years, he said:

The true Church was always the invisible Church. The true Harvard is the invisible Harvard in the souls of her more truth-seeking and intelligent and often very solitary sons. The university most worthy of imitation is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, most positively furthered, and most rightly fed.

As I leave the academic world, I feel grateful to have been a member—now an emeritus member—of that Church, and to have welcomed others to it. I hope that somehow it will continue to exist, including in new sanctuaries, and that truth seekers everywhere can, with effort, join it and thrive within its cloisters as I did.

Eliot Cohen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall .

Harvard’s Dean of Speech Sanctions

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 17:49:26 GMT

Dean Bobo wants faculty to be punished for speech he doesn’t like.

By the Editorial Board

The Wall Street Journal

June 19, 2024

Free speech “does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors—be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government—to intervene in Harvard’s affairs,” the dean wrote. Criticizing university leadership or publicizing policies that upset donors or Congressional committees, he added, is “outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct” and may “cross a line into sanctionable violations.” Thanks, dean, for this window on the Harvard administration’s mind.

Mr. Bobo was a leading ally of former Harvard President Claudine Gay, who resigned in January amid pressure over her failure to address antisemitic protests on campus. She appointed him to his current position and his work was among the sources Ms. Gay plagiarized (and later corrected) in a 2001 article for the American Political Science Review.

As an institutional matter, Mr. Bobo’s position as a Harvard dean is especially problematic. Harvard President Emeritus Larry Summers notes that the call to censure faculty members’ comments on university affairs is “an obvious intrusion on academic freedom” and worse because of his position. Mr. Bobo “has authority over salaries, setting promotions and resource allocations,” Mr. Summers notes, and until his views are repudiated by university leadership, “academic freedom at Harvard will be in jeopardy.”

The Harvard faculty hasn’t so far embraced Mr. Bobo’s speech notions, and it will be useful if the gaffe encourages them to reread the University of Chicago free-speech principles over summer vacation. But Mr. Bobo’s broadside is a reminder that censors haven’t vanished from the top rungs of America’s supposedly elite universities.

Read the original Op-Ed by Bobo Here --> https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/6/15/bobo-faculty-speech-limits/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-dean-lawrence-bobo-faculty-speech-harvard-crimson-78d7cae1?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

The Sins of the Educated Class

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 19:36:44 GMT

By David Brooks

The New York Times

June 6, 2024

When I was young, I was a man on the left. In the early 1980s, I used to go to the library and read early-20th-century issues of left-wing magazines like The Masses and The New Republic. I was energized by stories of workers fighting for their rights against the elites — at Haymarket, at the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, on the railways where the Pullman sleeping car porters struggled for decent wages a few years after that. My heroes were all on the left: John Reed, Clifford Odets, Frances Perkins and Hubert Humphrey.

But I got out of college and realized we didn’t live in the industrial age; we live in the information age. The center of progressive energy moved from the working class to the universities, and not just any universities, but the elite universities.

By now we’re used to the fact that the elite universities are places that attract and produce progressives. Working-class voters now mostly support Donald Trump, but at Harvard, America’s richest university, 65 percent of students identify as progressive or very progressive, according to a May 2023 survey of the graduating class.

Today we’re used to the fact that elite places are shifting further and further to the left. Writing for The Harvard Crimson, Julien Berman used A.I. to analyze opinion pieces in college newspapers for their ideological content. “Opinions of student writers at elite universities” in 2000, he found , “weren’t all that more progressive than those at nonelite ones.” But by 2023, opinions at The Crimson had grown about two and a half times more progressive than they were in 2001. More generally, Berman concluded, “Opinion sections at elite universities have gotten significantly more progressive, and they’ve outrun their nonelite counterparts.”

Today, we’re used to the fact that students at elite universities have different interests and concerns from students at less privileged places. Marc Novicoff and Robert Kelchen in May published an investigative report in The Washington Monthly titled “Are Gaza Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges?” They surveyed 1,421 public and private colleges and concluded, “The answer is a resounding yes.”

A few schools with a large number of lower-income students, they found, had Gaza protests, “but in the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity.” Among private schools, encampments and protests “have taken place almost exclusively at schools where poorer students are scarce and the listed tuitions and fees are exorbitantly high.”

I went to an elite university and have taught at them. I find them wonderful in most ways and deeply screwed up in a few ways. But over the decades and especially recently, I’ve found the elite, educated-class progressivism a lot less attractive than the working-class progressivism of Frances Perkins that I read about when I was young. Like a lot of people, I’ve looked on with a kind of dismay as elite university dynamics have spread across national life and politics, making America worse in all sorts of ways. Let me try to be more specific about these dynamics.

The first is false consciousness. To be progressive is to be against privilege. But today progressives dominate elite institutions like the exclusive universities, the big foundations and the top cultural institutions. American adults who identify as very progressive skew white, well educated and urban and hail from relatively advantaged backgrounds.

This is the contradiction of the educated class. Virtue is defined by being anti-elite. But today’s educated class constitutes the elite, or at least a big part of it. Many of the curiosities of our culture flow as highly educated people try to resolve the contradiction between their identity as an enemy of privilege, and the fact that, at least educationally and culturally, and often economically, they are privileged.

Imagine you’re a social justice-oriented student or a radical sociologist, but you attend or work at a university with a $50 billion endowment, immense social power and the ability to reject about 95 percent of the people who apply. For years or decades, you worked your tail off to get into the most exclusive aeries in American life, but now you’ve got to prove, to yourself and others, that you’re on the side of the oppressed.

Imagine you graduated from a prestigious liberal arts college with a degree in history and you get a job as a teacher at an elite Manhattan private school. You’re a sincere progressive down to your bones. Unfortunately, your job is to take the children of rich financiers and polish them up so they can get into Stanford. In other words, your literal job is to reinforce privilege.

This sort of cognitive dissonance often has a radicalizing effect. When your identity is based on siding with the marginalized, but you work at Horace Mann or Princeton, you have to work really hard to make yourself and others believe you are really progressive. You’re bound to drift further and further to the left to prove you are standing up to the man.

This, I think, explains the following phenomenon: Society pours hundreds of thousands of dollars into elite students, gives them the most prestigious launching pads fathomable, and they are often the ones talking most loudly about burning the system down.

This also explains, I think, the leftward drift of the haute bourgeoisie. As the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi puts it in his forthcoming book, “ We Have Never Been Woke ”: “After 2011, there were dramatic changes in how highly educated white liberals answered questions related to race and ethnicity. These shifts were not matched among non-liberal or non-Democrat whites, nor among nonwhites of any political or ideological persuasion. By 2020, highly educated white liberals tended to provide more ‘woke’ responses to racial questions than the average Black or Hispanic person.”

Progressivism has practically become an entry ticket into the elite. A few years ago, a Yale admissions officer wrote, “For those students who come to Yale, we expect them to be versed in issues of social justice.” Recently Tufts included an optional essay prompt that explicitly asked applicants what they were doing to advance social justice.

Over the years the share of progressive students and professors has steadily risen, and the share of conservatives has approached zero. Progressives have created places where they never have to encounter beliefs other than their own. At Harvard, 82 percent of progressives say that all or almost all of their close friends share their political beliefs.

A lot of us in the center left or the center right don’t want to live amid this much conformity. We don’t see history as a zero-sum war between oppressor and oppressed. We still believe in a positive-sum society where all people can see their lives improve together.

The second socially harmful dynamic is what you might call the cultural consequences of elite overproduction. Over the past few decades, elite universities have been churning out very smart graduates who are ready to use their minds and sensibilities to climb to the top of society and change the world. Unfortunately, the marketplace isn’t producing enough of the kinds of jobs these graduates think they deserve.

The elite college grads who go into finance, consulting and tech do smashingly well, but the grads who choose less commercial sectors often struggle. Social activists in Washington and other centers of influence have to cope with sky-high rents. Newspapers and other news websites are laying off journalists. Academics who had expected to hold a prestigious chair find themselves slaving away as adjunct professors.

In a series of essays culminating in his book “End Times: Elites, Counter Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration,” Peter Turchin argued that periods of elite overproduction lead to a rising tide of social decay as alienated educated-class types wage ever more ferocious power struggles with other elites. This phenomenon most likely contributed to surges in social protest during the late 1960s, the late 1980s and then around 2010. Research using Google nGrams shows that discourse mentioning “racism” spiked around each of these three periods.

Elite overproduction was especially powerful during the period after the financial crisis. In the early 2010s, highly educated white liberals increasingly experienced a disproportionate rise in depression, anxiety and negative emotions. This was accompanied by a sharp shift to the left in their political views. The spread of cancel culture and support for decriminalizing illegal immigration and “defunding the police” were among the quintessential luxury beliefs that seemed out of touch to people in less privileged parts of society. Those people often responded by making a sharp countershift in the populist direction, contributing to the election of Donald Trump and to his continued political viability today.

As a nonprogressive member of the educated class, I’d say that elite overproduction induces people on the left and the right to form their political views around their own sense of personal grievance and alienation. It launches unhappy progressives and their populist enemies into culture war battles that help them feel engaged, purposeful and good about themselves, but it seems to me that these battles are often more about performative self-validation than they are about practical policies that might serve the common good.

The third dynamic is the inflammation of the discourse. The information age has produced a vast cohort of people (including me) who live by trafficking in ideas — academics, journalists, activists, foundation employees, consultants and the various other shapers of public opinion. People in other sectors measure themselves according to whether they can build houses or care for seniors in a nursing home, but people in our crowd often measure ourselves by our beliefs — having the right beliefs, pioneering new beliefs, staying up-to-date on the latest beliefs, vanquishing the beliefs we have decided are the wrong beliefs.

Nothing is more unstable than a fashionable opinion. If your status is defined by your opinions, you’re living in a world of perpetual insecurity, perpetual mental and moral war. The man who saw all this coming was the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who started his major works with a book called “Distinction” in 1979.

Bourdieu argued that just as economic capitalists use their resource — wealth — to amass prestige and power, people who form the educated class and the cultural elite, symbolic capitalists, use our resources — beliefs, fancy degrees, linguistic abilities — to amass prestige, power and, if we can get it, money.

Symbolic capitalists, Bourdieu continued, wage daily battles of consecration, battles over what will be admired and what will be disdained, who gets to be counted among the elect and who is counted among the damned.

Bourdieu’s work is so powerful because it shows how symbolic capitalists turned political postures into power tools that enable them to achieve social, cultural and economic might. If exchanging viewpoints is turned into a struggle for social position, then of course conversation will assume the brutality of all primate dominance contests.

These sorts of battles for symbolic consecration are now the water in which many of us highly educated Americans swim. In the absence of religious beliefs, these moral wars give people a genuine sense of meaning and purpose. They give people a way of acting in the world that they hope will shift beliefs and produce a better society.

But it’s awful to live in a perpetual state of cultural war, and it’s awful to live in a continual state of social fear. The inflammation of the discourse serves the psychic and social self-interests of the combatants, but it polarizes society by rendering a lot of people in the center silent, causing them to keep their heads down in order to survive.

Will these three dynamics continue to drive American society batty?

I can tell a story in which those of us in the educated class, progressive or not, come to address the social, political and economic divides we have unwittingly created.

In this reality we would face up to the fact that all societies have been led by this or that elite group and that in the information age those who have a lot of education have immense access to political, cultural and economic power. We would be honest about our role in widening inequalities. We would abhor cultural insularity and go out of our way to engage with people across ideology and class. We would live up to our responsibilities as elites and care for the whole country, not just ourselves. Most important, we would dismantle the arrangements that enable people in our class to pass down our educational privileges to our children, generation after generation, while locking out most everyone else.

That would mean changing the current college admissions criteria, so they no longer massively favor affluent young kids whose parents invest in them from birth. That would also mean opening up many other pathways so that more people would find it easier to climb the social ladder even if they didn’t get into a selective college at age 18.

But there is another possible future. Perhaps today’s educated elite is just like any other historical elite. We gained our status by exploiting or not even seeing others down below, and we are sure as hell not going to give up any of our status without a fight.

To see how likely this second possibility is, I urge you to preorder al-Gharbi’s “We Have Never Been Woke.” It comes out this fall, and it announces him as a rising intellectual star.

I really can’t tell what al-Gharbi’s politics are — some mixture of positions from across the spectrum maybe. He does note that he is writing from the tradition of Black thinkers — stretching back to W.E.B. Du Bois — who argue that white liberals use social justice issues to build status and make themselves feel good while ultimately offering up “little more than symbolic gestures and platitudes to redress the material harms they decry (and often exacerbate).”

He observes that today’s educated-class activists are conveniently content to restrict their political action to the realm of symbols. In his telling, land acknowledgments — when people open public events by naming the Indigenous peoples who had their land stolen from them — are the quintessential progressive gesture.

It’s often non-Indigenous people signaling their virtue to other non-Indigenous people while doing little or nothing for the descendants of those who were actually displaced. Educated elites rename this or that school to erase the names of disfavored historical figures, but they don’t improve the education that goes on within them. Student activists stage messy protests on campus but don’t even see the custodial staff who will clean up afterward.

Al-Gharbi notes that Black people made most of their progress between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, before the rise of the educated class in the late 1960s, and that the educated class may have derailed that progress. He notes that gaps in wealth and homeownership between white and Black Americans have grown larger since 1968.

He suggests that educated elites practice their own form of trickle-down economics. They imagine that giving diverse college grads university administration jobs and other social justice sinecures will magically benefit the disadvantaged people who didn’t go to college.

He charges that while members of the educated class do a lot of moral preening, their lifestyles contribute to the immiserations of the people who have nearly been rendered invisible — the Amazon warehouse worker, the DoorDash driver making $1.75 an hour after taxes and expenses.

That rumbling sound you hear is the possibility of a multiracial, multiprong, right/left alliance against the educated class. Donald Trump has already created the nub of this kind of movement but is himself too polarizing to create a genuinely broad-based populist movement. After Trump is off the stage, it’s very possible to imagine such an uprising.

Ruh-roh. The lesson for those of us in the educated class is to seriously reform the system we have created or be prepared to be run over.

David Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author, most recently, of “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.” @nytdavidbrooks

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/opinion/elites-progressives-universities.html

2024 DFTD Annual Report

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 18:37:54 GMT

Challenging One-Sided Discourse and A Call for Academic Integrity

Wed, 15 May 2024 20:20:52 GMT

Annie Hirshman '24

May 15, 2024

Last year, I took a Political Science course with a certain professor. This was not uncommon for me, as I am a Political Science major. However, for students of different majors, this particular course was required in order to obtain a liberal arts degree from Davidson College. Therefore, this class serves as a lot of students' sole exposure to the political science department. I was in the classroom with a variety of individuals, ranging from the Phi Delt jocks to the studio art majors. This classroom had everything and everyone. Since this was the first time a lot of them had taken a political science course, the dialogue and discourse was somewhat quieter. Therefore, I felt encouraged to speak up in class. I participated often, sharing my opinion on daily issues and historical events that had shaped American politics. I hoped that my voice would encourage others to participate.

Sharing my opinion took a turn for the worse on a certain Wednesday morning. As the semester progressed, I noticed that the teacher was only sharing liberal skewed media sources. When they would discuss conservative matters, it had a negative connotation. They often referred to Republican politicians as a whole using derogatory terms, almost asserting that one bad apple was synonymous with the bunch. I discussed what occurred within the classroom numerous times outside, especially with my classmates that were rather conservative. They spoke of how they felt alienated in class, frightened at the outcome if they were to share their opinion. As a natural-born extrovert and rather excited by the idea of questioning the professor, I spoke up. I asked them why they chose to share only liberal-based news sources and strayed from conservative outlets in their journalistic sources. Their answer was short and sweet: because they were the only accurate sources to garner information from. I was shocked and severely taken aback by their statement.

Later that day, the professor followed up with an email ‘defending’ their position. Without their intent, they confirmed that they do not “explicitly seek to include conservative outlets”. They spoke of how there was an ongoing movement to tar outlets that were not relatively conservative. They continued that accurate news sources were under attack for liberal alignment when in reality (their opinion), they were honest and true. The professor asserted that Republican politicians were guilty of executive aggrandizement for these efforts. In addition, they asserted that sources such as the New York Times and the Washington Post have been shown to have a very limited liberal bias, if any.

As someone who seeks to challenge my own and other’s beliefs, I did some research to see if these statements were accurate or not. I checked multiple sources to see which sources were actually ideologically skewed. The Allsides Media Bias Chart, which collects its information based upon multi-partisan scientific analysis, including expert panels and surveys of thousands of everyday Americans, provided convincing material. It asserted that the New York Times, CNN, and Washington Post all skew left to the same extent that The Wall Street Journal skewed right. In addition, I analyzed the Ad Fontes Chart. In order to analyze their data and rate their sources, their methodology consists of multi-analyst ratings of news sources along seven categories of bias and eight of reliability. Each source is rated by an equal number of politically left-leaning, right-leaning, and centrist analysts. All analysts must hold a bachelor’s degree, while most hold a graduate degree and about one-third have obtained a doctoral degree. It argues that the Wall Street Journal is on the “skews right” section while the Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN are on the “skews left” section.

The fact that Davidson supports a professor that only teaches one side is sad but not shocking. This is an ongoing issue at this college. I know for a fact that I am not the sole student who feels this way. Teachers are supposed to teach us how to think, not what to think. Through supporting professors that promote a one-sided discourse, that statement is contradicted daily. Considering that the college routinely refers to the “Davidson Experience” in a positive way, I can’t believe that this is what they have in mind. At the end of the day, solely teaching one side is indoctrination. Davidson, coming from a student who admires and cherishes you, please do better so future generations of students feel both free and encouraged to speak their mind, even if it is different than the majority.

Annie Hirshman is a 2024 Graduate of Davidson College with a degree in Political Science.

Appendix:

The email below is from a Davidson College Professor of Political Science mentioned in the above article in response to questions about news sources brought by the author Annie Hirshman.

“Hi Annie,

I wanted to follow up with you about your question during class regarding why I assign a lot of content from the NYT and Washington Post (among other outlets) and don’t explicitly seek to include conservative outlets in my journalistic sources. My quick answer to you was that those two papers are the most highly regarded papers for providing factual information about American politics and have been shown to have very limited liberal bias. Since I’m all about providing evidence to back one’s claims, I wanted to send you one of the papers that confirms the non-partisan nature of these outlets http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2526461 . See, for example, the below figure, and how close the NYT and WaPo are to the center lines regarding their partisan slant (and how much more slanted some right leaning sources are – making them less appropriate to assign, in addition to – for the WSJ – much more expensive for students to access):

A broader issue is that there has been a significant effort by some politicians to tar outlets that are not explicitly right leaning (e.g., CNN, NYT, etc.) as being liberally biased. This effort has been successful, to some extent, in shifting people’s attitudes about these outlets, even though it is not actually factual. This is a pretty common technique of executives engaging in executive aggrandizement elsewhere (delegitimize media sources that might critique you so that people turn only to outlets favoring you and so that those media sources become more likely to favor you in response to your critique), and one that I think we need to be concerned about in the American case as well. It’s a real problem, because it means that students (in our case) and citizens more broadly are predisposed to see bias when presented with factual information. That undermines our ability to become accurately informed about what’s happening in American politics and government. I really really wish this was something that I could solve, but it is a much bigger problem than just our class. Nevertheless, by continuing to assign material from the two most significant papers of record in the US, I am hoping to ensure students get in the habit of reading credible, factual news and learning how to analyze the quality of what they encounter.

Happy to discuss this further.”

Why I Ended the University of Chicago Protest Encampment

Tue, 07 May 2024 17:00:57 GMT

Students demanded that we side against Israel, violating the core principle of institutional neutrality.

By Paul Alivisatos

The Wall Street Journal

May 7, 2024

As president of the University of Chicago, I ended the encampment that occupied the University’s Main Quad for more than a week. The Tuesday morning action resulted in no arrests. Recent months have seen tremendous contention over protests on campuses, including pressure campaigns from every direction. That made this a decision of enormous import for the university.

When the encampment formed on our campus, I said I would uphold the university’s principles and resist the forces tearing at the fabric of higher education. I didn’t direct immediate action against the encampment. I authorized discussions with the protesters regarding an end to the encampment in response to some of their demands. But when I concluded that the essential goals that animated those demands were incompatible with deep principles of the university, I decided to end the encampment with intervention.

Some universities have chosen to block encampments from forming at all or ended them within an hour or so. We had the means to do so. Immediate intervention is consistent with enforcing reasonable regulations on the time, place and manner of speech, and it has the advantage of minimizing disruption. Yet strict adherence to every policy—the suppression of discord to promote harmony—comes at a cost. Discord is almost required for the truth-seeking function of a university to be genuine.

Protest is a strongly protected form of speech in the University of Chicago culture, enshrined in the Chicago Principles for a reason. In times of discord, protest serves as a mechanism for democratic societies, and places of reason like universities, to find a way back toward dialogue and compromise. This has value even if protests result in disruption or violate the rules—up to a point. When a protest substantially interferes with the learning, research and operations of the university, when it meaningfully diminishes the free-expression rights of others—as happened with this encampment—then it must come to an end, through dialogue or intervention.

Therefore, it was a crucial decision whether to seek a dialogue to resolve a disruptive protest. Some will argue that the moral hazard of even holding such discussions is so severe that they should never be undertaken at all—that no agreement could possibly be legitimate if it originated from these circumstances. Others will say such dialogue should always be sought. I believe dialogue may be appropriate under certain circumstances, provided that protesters come to it openly with an understanding that the consequences of their policy violations will be reviewed evenhandedly. The same applies to discipline now that the encampment has ended.

So I authorized the opening of dialogue with the protesters, even though that extended the number of days the university was disrupted. I won’t describe the sequence or the content of those discussions, since we agreed that our exchanges would remain private unless and until we reached a favorable conclusion. During our substantive dialogue, there were some very difficult moments, but also moments of progress. The student-protester representatives offered analytical arguments and made powerful statements; their faculty representatives and liaisons also made important contributions. I believe that the administration representatives showed respect for their interlocutors and came to the discussions with genuine openness and a willingness to look for ways to make it work.

Why then didn’t we reach a resolution? Because at the core of the demands was what I believe is a deep disagreement about a principle, one that can’t be papered over with carefully crafted words, creative adjustments to programming, or any other negotiable remedy.

The disagreement revolves around institutional neutrality—a foundational value to the University of Chicago. It is a principle animated by the idea that authority can’t establish truth for an entire institution dedicated to truth-seeking; rather, it is the imperative of individuals to seek truth without being limited by authority. Institutional neutrality vests freedom of inquiry and speech directly in faculty and students, where it belongs.

Underpinning the demands was a call for the university to diminish ties with Israel and increase ties with the Palestinians in Gaza. In short, the protesters were determined that the university should take sides in the conflict in Israel and Gaza. Other demands would have led to having political goals guide core aspects of the university’s institutional approaches, from how we invest our endowment to when and how I make statements. Faculty members and students are more than free to engage in advocacy on one side or the other. But if the university did so as an institution, it would no longer be much of a university.

As the depth of this philosophical difference became clearer, I decided to end the dialogue. I yielded on some time, place and manner policies and allowed some degree of disruption in favor of protest, regardless of viewpoint; engaged in dialogue with those who were disrupting the university so long as they were prepared to face discipline. But there is no way I would ever compromise on institutional neutrality.

Mr. Alivisatos is president of the University of Chicago.

Why I Ended the University of Chicago Protest Encampment - WS J

The Adults Are Still in Charge at the University of Florida

Fri, 03 May 2024 17:05:48 GMT

Higher education isn’t daycare. Here are the rules we follow on free speech and public protests.

By Ben Sasse

The Wall Street Journal

May 3, 2024

Gainesville, Fla.

Higher education has for years faced a slow-burning crisis of public trust. Mob rule at some of America’s most prestigious universities in recent weeks has thrown gasoline on the fire. Pro-Hamas agitators have fought police, barricaded themselves in university buildings, shut down classes, forced commencement cancellations, and physically impeded Jewish students from attending lectures.

Parents are rightly furious at the asinine entitlement of these activists and the embarrassing timidity of many college administrators. One parent put it bluntly: “Why the hell should anybody spend their money to send their kid to college?” Employers watching this fiasco are asking the same question.

At the University of Florida, we tell parents and future employers: We’re not perfect, but the adults are still in charge. Our response to threats to build encampments is driven by three basic truths.

First, universities must distinguish between speech and action. Speech is central to education. We’re in the business of discovering knowledge and then passing it, both newly learned and time-tested, to the next generation. To do that, we need to foster an environment of free thought in which ideas can be picked apart and put back together, again and again. The heckler gets no veto. The best arguments deserve the best counterarguments.

To cherish the First Amendment rights of speech and assembly, we draw a hard line at unlawful action. Speech isn’t violence. Silence isn’t violence. Violence is violence. Just as we have an obligation to protect speech, we have an obligation to keep our students safe. Throwing fists, storming buildings, vandalizing property, spitting on cops and hijacking a university aren’t speech.

Second, universities must say what they mean and then do what they say. Empty threats make everything worse. Any parent who has endured a 2-year-old’s tantrum gets this. You can’t say, “Don’t make me come up there” if you aren’t willing to walk up the stairs and enforce the rules. You don’t make a threat until you’ve decided to follow through if necessary. In the same way, universities make things worse with halfhearted appeals to abide by existing policies and then immediately negotiating with 20-year-old toddlers.

Appeasing mobs emboldens agitators elsewhere. Moving classes online is a retreat that penalizes students and rewards protesters. Participating in live-streamed struggle sessions doesn’t promote honest, good-faith discussion. Universities need to be strong defenders of the entire community, including students in the library on the eve of an exam, and stewards of our fundamental educational mission.

Actions have consequences. At the University of Florida, we have repeatedly, patiently explained two things to protesters: We will always defend your rights to free speech and free assembly—but if you cross the line on clearly prohibited activities, you will be thrown off campus and suspended. In Gainesville, that means a three-year prohibition from campus. That’s serious. We said it. We meant it. We enforced it. We wish we didn’t have to, but the students weighed the costs, made their decisions, and will own the consequences as adults. We’re a university, not a daycare. We don’t coddle emotions, we wrestle with ideas.

Third, universities need to recommit themselves to real education. Rather than engage a wide range of ideas with curiosity and intellectual humility, many academic disciplines have capitulated to a dogmatic view of identity politics. Students are taught to divide the world into immutable categories of oppressors and oppressed, and to make sweeping judgements accordingly. With little regard for historical complexity, personal agency or individual dignity, much of what passes for sophisticated thought is quasireligious fanaticism.

The results are now on full display. Students steeped in this dogma chant violent slogans like “by any means necessary.” Any? Paraglider memes have replaced Che Guevara T-shirts. But which paragliders—the savages who raped teenage girls at a concert? “From the river to the sea.” Which river? Which sea?

Young men and women with little grasp of geography or history—even recent events like the Palestinians’ rejection of President Clinton’s offer of a two-state solution—wade into geopolitics with bumper-sticker slogans they don’t understand. For a lonely subset of the anxious generation, these protest camps can become a place to find a rare taste of community.

This is their stage to role-play revolution. Posting about your “allergen-free” tent on the quad is a lot easier than doing real work to uplift the downtrodden.

Universities have an obligation to combat this ignorance with rigorous teaching. Life-changing education explores alternatives, teaches the messiness of history, and questions every truth claim. Knowledge depends on healthy self-doubt and a humble willingness to question self-certainties. This is a complicated world because fallen humans are complicated.

Universities must prepare their students for the reality beyond campus, where 330 million of their fellow citizens will disagree over important and divisive subjects.

The insurrectionists who storm administration buildings, the antisemites who punch Jews, and the entitled activists who seek attention aren’t persuading anyone. Nor are they appealing to anyone’s better angels. Their tactics are naked threats to the mission of higher education.

Teachers ought to be ushering students into the world of argument and persuasion. Minds are changed by reason, not force. Progress depends on those who do the soulful, patient work of inspiring intellects. Martin Luther King Jr., America’s greatest philosopher, countered the nation’s original sin of racism by sharpening the best arguments across millennia. To win hearts, he offered hope that love could overcome injustice.

King’s approach couldn’t be more different from the abhorrent violence and destruction on display across the country’s campuses. He showed us a way protest can persuade rather than intimidate. We ought to model that for our students. We do that by recommitting to the fundamentals of free speech, consequences and genuine education. Americans get this. We want to believe in the power of education as a way to elevate human dignity. It’s time for universities to do their jobs again.

Mr. Sasse is president of the University of Florida.

The Adults Are Still in Charge at the University of Florida - WSJ

College DEI programs can be saved, but they need to change | Opinion

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 14:52:22 GMT

By Jim Martin

The Charlotte Observer

April 23, 2024

Just as DEI seems poised to die, there are promising signs that its original goals of diversity, equity and inclusion may yet be restored.

Small but influential bands of faculty at Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago object that DEI’s original appeals to conscience got distorted by zealots whose political agendas were less lofty. These professors are proposing reforms based on lifting up students and faculty from disadvantaged minority backgrounds, without harassing or despising others.

Recent years have seen a colossal failure for corporate and educational institutions where DEI was manipulated into a war against meritocracy and high standards. Corporate leaders soon saw this was counterproductive. Enthusiasts in academia reveled in it. Some saw an irresistible opportunity to exploit those who, for whatever reason, had missed key advantages of nurturing family, sound education and supportive communities of neighbors.

Instead of directing resources to help deserving individuals succeed in fields that had seemed closed to them, DEI got warped into a horrid excuse that they were victimized by others whose success was the unjustifiable result of “privilege,” twisting that word into a curse. Instead of healthy aspirations for these so-called “oppressed victims,” they were made to feel unfairly injured. Their difficulties were attributed to a system that unjustly rewarded rivals, now accused as “oppressors.”

Diversity’s contortion was reinforced with conformity at some schools, as candidates for faculty positions were required to show total allegiance to its divisiveness. Equality of opportunity was transfigured into equal outcomes, as grade inflation qualified too many students to graduate with honors. Inclusion became exclusion, with angry suspicion disrupting the vital unity of teams and the community of scholars.

DEI even provided a substitute religion with its trinitarian dogma, profession of faith and proselytizing fervor. Its priesthood badgered sinners to confess, recant and repent. Catechisms provided convenient guides for virtue signaling. Excommunication awaited dissenters at some schools where thoughts, words and gestures were monitored by young acolytes. How fitting, for the old Latin word for Roman “gods” was “dei.”

Widespread failure of DEI distortions needs a reform movement to revive its fundamental principles. Instead of inciting hatred and class warfare, let’s promote high standards and self-discipline. Instead of blaming lack of achievement on supposedly unfair privileges of others, let’s offer tutoring and encouragement. Instead of rejecting achievers as scorned oppressors, let’s insist that more study time improves subject mastery.

It will take fresh commitment to what DEI was originally proclaimed to mean. Or it can degenerate into defending the indefensible way noble ideals were transmuted into divisive insults.

My alma mater, Davidson College, should help lead this effort to restore diversity, equity and inclusion as worthy, achievable goals, based on trust and personal commitment, not on contemporary infatuation with cynical theories of identity politics. In August, Davidson will welcome its inaugural Vice President for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Fresh from a similar position at Dartmouth, Chloe Poston will find an opportunity to redirect emphasis away from the negatives of America’s recent past to positives for the future.

We haven’t met. She may not see the need for deep reform just yet. I can express hope with optimism, since her doctorate is in chemistry, a discipline guided by systematic evidence, not hostile feelings. She shouldn’t be prejudged based on missteps of others.

It won’t be easy to get it right. Experience has shown what works and what doesn’t. If she’s a reformer, willing to take on the partisans, she’ll need support and encouragement from faculty, students, administration, trustees, and yes, even old alumni like me.

Davidson earned distinction as the first private college in the Carolinas to craft its own version of the Chicago Statement, a commitment to freedom of expression. Beyond any ambitions of DEI, diversity of viewpoint is the true measure of freedom, without which no one has real academic diversity, equality of opportunity or useful inclusion. Davidson’s leadership is needed again.

Jim Martin, a Republican, was N.C. governor from 1985-93 and taught chemistry at Davidson College from 1960-72. He is a regular contributor to our pages.

Universities are figuring out that DEI has been distorted | Charlotte Observer

In Sudden Reversal, Harvard To Require Standardized Testing for Next Admissions Cycle

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 15:26:47 GMT

Universities should work with right-leaning critics who want to strengthen academia’s distinctive culture, Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey write.

By Elyse C. Goncalves and Matan H. Josephy , Crimson Staff Writers

The Harvard Crimson

April 11, 2024

Updated April 11, 2024, at 3:25 p.m.

Harvard College will reinstate its standardized testing requirement in admissions beginning with the Class of 2029, a surprise reversal that could leave some students scrambling to take SAT or ACT tests ahead of application deadlines in the fall.

The decision comes in the face of Harvard’s previous commitments to remain test-optional through the admitted Class of 2030, a policy that was first instituted during the pandemic.

Harvard had faced mounting criticism from both academics and admissions experts for continuing its test-optional policies, even as its peer institutions returned to requiring standardized tests . In recent weeks, Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown have announced returns to required testing.

All applicants to the Class of 2029 — due to apply in the fall and winter of 2024 — will be required to submit SAT or ACT scores, barring specific cases in which they may be unable to access such exams, according to the College’s announcement. In such cases, scores from exams such as Advanced Placement or the International Baccalaureate will be accepted as substitutes.

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Hopi E. Hoekstra wrote in a statement that “standardized tests are a means for all students, regardless of their background and life experience, to provide information that is predictive of success in college and beyond.”

“More information, especially such strongly predictive information, is valuable for identifying talent from across the socioeconomic range,” she added. “With this change, we hope to strengthen our ability to identify these promising students.”

The majority of undergraduates entering Harvard in the past four years have submitted standardized test scores, according to the release, which did not specify an exact percentage.

Harvard officials have recently hedged on whether the College would reinstate its testing requirement. In early March, Hoekstra told The Crimson that Harvard was “in the midst of analyzing” its policy .

Harvard College Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 said in an interview in late March that the College had “nothing new to report” on whether its testing policy through the admitted Class of 2030 would be changing.

In its press release, Harvard referenced a study from Harvard-affiliated initiative Opportunity Insights, led by Brown University economist John N. Friedman ’02 and Harvard economists Raj Chetty ’00 and David J. Deming, which found that SAT scores are a particularly strong predictor of college success – much more so than a student’s high school grade point average.

Some experts also said that a return to requiring standardized test scores could help universities like Harvard increase the racial and socioeconomic diversity of its student body.

Deming, a finalist to serve as dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, wrote in a statement that the requirement of standardized test scores provides the “fairest admissions policy for disadvantaged applicants.”

“Not everyone can hire an expensive college coach to help them craft a personal essay. But everyone has the chance to ace the SAT or the ACT,” Deming wrote.

When Yale and Dartmouth reinstated their testing policies, both institutions referenced the predictive power of standardized testing as a key incentive for its return as a mandatory component of the admissions process.

Still, the College’s announcement — made exactly two weeks after it released admissions decisions for the incoming Class of 2028 — has exposed it to criticism.

The Generational African American Students Association, a student organization at Harvard, posted a statement on Instagram Thursday afternoon blasting the College’s return to required testing.

The policy change “strikes at the very heart of the progress made toward achieving true equal opportunity within higher education institutions such as Harvard,” the group wrote.

“This decision also compounds the challenges already faced by low-income and minority students in the wake of affirmative action being overruled,” they added.

A College spokesperson declined to comment on the criticism of the policy reversal.

Harvard’s reversal of its commitment to stay test-optional through the next two admissions cycles came with little warning to applicants for the Class of 2029, who have six sittings of the ACT and the SAT left before Harvard’s regular decision application deadline on Jan. 1 — and even fewer before its early action deadline of Nov. 1.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/4/11/harvard-sat-act-admissions-requirement/

Sometimes the Right Is Right

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 18:46:24 GMT

Universities should work with right-leaning critics who want to strengthen academia’s distinctive culture, Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey write.

By Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey

Inside Higher Education

April 9, 2024

Universities today feel understandably besieged. State legislators are intervening in curricular debates, members of Congress are taking aim at university presidents, and public support for college is at historic lows . Because criticism of the university from the outside comes most intensely from the right, and professors and administrators on the inside are mostly on the left, it is natural for insiders to respond to external critics by appealing to partisan passions , summoning one another to the barricades, and attempting to repel the barbarian onslaught.

But framing the conflict in simple culture war terms misses important distinctions between the kinds of proposals the right is making for university reform. While some of those proposals would dismantle the university’s exceptional culture and are reasonable to oppose, others go with the university’s distinctive grain and deserve a more receptive hearing. University insiders should make an effort to distinguish between these two different kinds of proposals, even if they are packed into the same bill.

Those proposals coming from the right that would undermine the necessary distinctiveness of the university often pressure the university to conform to the norms of the commercial democracy beyond its gates. Efforts to abolish tenure seek to subject professors to the vicissitudes of at-will employment most others have to face. Drives to eliminate instruction in areas without immediate vocational relevance such as foreign languages and the humanities seek to regulate academic life by a narrowly construed standard of “return on investment.” Attempts to ban instruction in controversial or “ divisive concepts ” insinuate that intellectual life is political combat by other means.

Such proposals would undermine the university’s character as a community with a distinctive purpose and institutional structures to match. As Dan Edelstein has written , the university’s distinctive goal is learning, so its internal structures should advance scholarly integrity and a culture of wide-ranging debate. By supporting institutions with this exceptional purpose and the internal standards necessary to advance it, the larger society serves itself, albeit “indirectly,” as Robert Nisbet put it . It does so by creating a subculture in which learning, intellectual integrity and reasoned debate have primacy—just as profit, innovation and convenience have primacy in the business world, and power, security and justice have primacy in politics. Proposals that would make the university more closely resemble the rest of our culture would impoverish that culture by making it more homogenous.

Other proposals coming from the right, however, reflect an understanding of the university’s distinctive mission and can serve to strengthen it by giving professors and students the intellectual breathing room they need to do their work better. These proposals include rules to protect freedom of inquiry , to maintain institutional neutrality , and to protect conservative and religious student groups from undue interference . Some advance novel institutional innovations to help colleges better realize their aspirations to promote intellectual freedom and integrity, such as the creation of an independent judicial branch of the university.

But the proposals coming from the right that would most significantly assist universities in strengthening their distinctive cultures while regaining broad public trust are those that seek to help a more capacious range of ideas find a home on campus. Higher education’s trust problem is closely linked to its perceived partisanship ; even Americans who love their alma maters do not like to see them become sectarian shops . Academics themselves increasingly recognize that there are important questions that go unasked , papers that go unwritten , and courses that go untaught when the faculty and administrative ranks of the university are drawn, by margins of at least ten to one, from a single side of the political aisle.

However, the attempt to rebuild viewpoint diversity while respecting the university’s distinctive culture is especially difficult, since it necessarily touches on core structural features of academic life such as faculty oversight of hiring and the curriculum. One good strategy to do so has been pursued by the new schools and centers of civic thought recently launched in public universities . All of the currently existing schools of civic thought have been created by Republican-led state legislatures or governing boards, but are led by serious scholars with impeccable records who are building academic programs with high standards. They furthermore attend to a need that is recognized on both sides of the political aisle—to restore university-level civic education —while offering courses in subjects that are especially likely to attract right-leaning scholars, like constitutional law, diplomatic history, and moral philosophy. If the professors designing these schools succeed in showing that their programs respect the difference between scholarship and propaganda—raising questions that might otherwise go unasked on campus, but then following those questions wherever they lead—they will provide a significant example of how the university can reform itself in response to fair criticism without betraying the culture of learning that it exists to embody.

While those concerned with protecting the university’s exceptional character are rightly wary of outside political pressures that interfere with academic life, it is worth remembering that the insider/outsider distinction is not adequate grounds for determining what helps or harms the university’s pursuit of its particular purpose. Forces from inside the university can threaten its work as much as forces from outside. Such internal forces have given us the replication crisis and the rise of campus antisemitism , and have made university teaching into a politically one-sided profession . As the first president of Johns Hopkins University, Daniel Coit Gilman, put it in his inaugural address , “universities easily fall into ruts.” It is often impossible to emerge from a rut without a nudge from outside. Those inside the university should welcome the efforts of reformers pushing the university from the outside when they are pushing the university toward a more complete realization of its integral purpose.

The on-campus left and the off-campus right too often treat the struggle over the university as a zero-sum game: a contest in which heeding the concerns of one side of our deeply divided politics necessarily comes at the price of alienating the other. Wise university leaders will recognize that it is in the nature of communities dedicated to learning and wide-ranging debate to be broader-minded than that. By demonstrating their openness to constructive critique and meaningful reform when it is justified, universities can rebuild some of the legitimacy they will need to resist proposals that threaten to dismantle their essential character.

https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/04/09/colleges-should-work-right-leaning-critics-opinion

Petition to Adopt Institution-wide Policies at Davidson College

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 14:52:49 GMT

Several weeks ago, DFTD started a petition to urge Davidson College to guard students against faculty and staff who seek to inject irrelevant, controversial material into the classroom, or their program areas. Since that petition started, we have received over 300 signatures including:

Hundreds of alumni from every decade ranging from the 1950’s to the 2020’s.
Numerous former trustees of Davidson College, including a former Chair of the Board of Trustees.
Numerous alumni who are faculty at other institutions.
Dozens of current students and their parents.
Current and former members of Congress.

In addition to these signatures, we had many people including current faculty, students, and alumni privately express support for the petition, but said that they were fearful of the consequences from the college if they signed.

We believe that such a strong response rate from the small number of people that we contacted is indicative of significant support among the alumni body when they’ve been made aware of our concerns. We hope the college will take this petition to the Board of Trustees and relevant faculty committees for serious consideration.

Thank you again to all who signed, and support DFTD. Your advocacy and philanthropy ensures our organization can continue to support students who wish to make Davidson a more ideological diverse campus that welcomes and celebrates robust civil discourse.

The NIH Sacrifices Scientific Rigor for DEI

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 18:26:42 GMT

Its First program pushes institutions to hire medical researchers based on their ideological commitment.

By John Sailer

The Wall Street Journal

March 12, 2024

Thanks to a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Cornell University is able to support several professors in fields including genetics, computational biology and neurobiology. In its funding proposal, the university emphasizes a strange metric for evaluating hard scientists: Each applicant’s “statement on contribution to diversity” was to “receive significant weight in the evaluation.”

It might seem counterintuitive to prioritize “diversity statements” while hiring neurobiologists—but not at the NIH. The agency for several years has pushed this practice across the country through its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program—First for short—which funds diversity-focused faculty hiring in the biomedical sciences.

Through dozens of public-records requests, I have acquired thousands of pages of documents related to the program—grant proposals, emails, hiring rubrics and more. The information reveals how the NIH enforces an ideological agenda, prompting universities and medical schools to vet potential biomedical scientists for wrongthink regarding diversity.

The First program requires all grant recipients to use “diversity statements” for their newly funded hires. Northwestern University suggests it will adapt a diversity-statement rubric created by the University of California, Berkeley. It isn’t alone. A year ago I acquired the rubrics used by the NIH First programs at the University of South Carolina and the University of New Mexico, which I discussed in these pages . Both used Berkeley’s rubric almost verbatim.

That rubric penalizes job candidates for espousing colorblind equality and gives low scores to those who say they intend to “treat everyone the same.” It likewise docks candidates who express skepticism about the practice of dividing students and faculty into racially segregated “affinity groups.”

These responses aren’t merely administrative; the requirements carry serious weight throughout the NIH First programs, often valued on par with conventional measures of academic excellence. The University of Alabama at Birmingham and Tuskegee University jointly received an NIH grant in 2021 to hire researchers studying cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The institutions noted in their proposal that “the statement of diversity will be heavily weighted during the selection process.”

Other programs have sought to redefine excellence with an ideological gloss. As a part of its First program, San Diego State University required search committee members to attend an “equity-minded hiring” seminar. A handout for the program discusses redefining the concept of “merit” by incorporating such “equity-minded” indicators as an education in social justice and “experience acting as an equity advocate.” Another handout, an applicant screening tool, prompts hiring committees to assess whether scientists are “critically conscious,” that is, whether they have “the ability to speak with complexity” on DEI.

The records underscore that scientists simply can’t get hired in the program without an outstanding DEI score. Northwestern’s grant progress report describes an evaluation rubric that equally weighs a “commitment to diversity” and research potential—a remarkable value judgment for a program focused on cancer, cardiovascular health and neuroscience.

The priority is especially troubling given what DEI programs typically entail. The University of South Carolina promises to integrate critical race theory into its program’s design and to emulate activist public-health scholars in their “efforts to bring critical race theory to the forefront of society.”

Others, like Drexel University and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, fully embrace the language of left-wing identity politics. “Our culture and climate,” Northwestern’s proposal confesses, “was founded on values and ideas of White, Eurocentric males and perpetuated by structures that enable continued marginalization of URG”—underrepresented group—“faculty.” The program promises to create “Safe Space Ambassadors” to host discussions on topics like “navigating intersectional workplace oppressions.”

Lawmakers have begun to push back against DEI in general and diversity statements in particular. The University of North Carolina Board of Governors has effectively banned the use of such statements, as have legislators in Texas, Florida and Utah. Even liberal professors have argued that diversity statements amount to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.

Yet with the NIH’s help, the policy persists in red and blue states. The University of New Mexico’s program, which focuses on neuroscience and data science, devotes a third of the points on its applicant screening rubric to criteria such as “DEI Knowledge” and “DEI Track Record.” Florida State University’s program, which has hired faculty in psychology and nursing, devotes 28% of its rubric to DEI.

The latter example raises questions about compliance with anti-DEI laws. In June 2023, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation banning both diversity statements and DEI offices at state universities. That month the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center received NIH First grants after declaring in their joint proposal: “Our goal is to become the public face of DEI for the Dallas metro area, and as a model for the nation.”

The agency’s program wields influence even beyond the institutions it funds. Tufts University’s Provost Caroline Genco spearheaded an application for the NIH First program in 2021. Tufts evidently didn’t get the funding but has nevertheless announced a universitywide DEI-themed cluster hire , led in part by Ms. Genco. Ohio State University, the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and the University of Cincinnati likewise applied for the program, didn’t receive funding, but pursued DEI-focused cohort hires anyway.

The NIH First program matters because it supports biomedical researchers and thus biomedical science. In medical research, lives depend on putting excellence first. The NIH distorts that value, subordinating it to political ideology and endangering those it’s supposed to serve.

Mr. Sailer is a senior fellow at the National Association of Scholars.

A Bias Response Team Evades Justice at the Supreme Court

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 19:50:12 GMT

The Justices avoid issuing a judgment on a case against college speech reporting at Virginia Tech.

The Editorial Board

The Wall Street Journal

March 5, 2024 6:15PM ET

The Supreme Court said Monday it won’t hear a challenge to Virginia Tech’s old system of soliciting anonymous speech complaints via an official bias response team. Instead the Justices declared the case moot, after the college’s president told them the policy had been discontinued, while also promising—he swears—not to revive it.

Good for Hokies, but as a dissent from Justice Clarence Thomas says, failing to answer the legal question leaves the First Amendment up for grabs at other schools. Speech First, which brought the Virginia Tech case, “estimates that over 450 universities have similar bias-reporting schemes,” Justice Thomas writes , joined by Justice Samuel Alito. “Yet, because of the split among the Courts of Appeals, many of these universities face no constitutional scrutiny, simply based on geography.”

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held that Virginia Tech’s policy didn’t chill protected expression , because its Bias Intervention and Response Team, or BIRT, lacked power to punish students. Justice Thomas is skeptical.

“The university officials may call in the accused student—whom the policy pre-emptively labels as the ‘perpetrator,’” he says. The BIRT can refer students for discipline. “And, of course, every report—regardless of whether the team determines bias exists—is recorded and kept on permanent file.”

His opinion includes some examples of what happens when all of a campus is urged to submit anonymous tips about “bias.” One report was on male students who were privately “talking crap” about the women playing in a snowball fight, “calling them not ‘athletic.’” Another report concerned a room white board on which someone “observed the words Saudi Arabia.”

No context? No problem. Virginia Tech advertised the BIRT with a chirpy slogan: “If you see something, say something!” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, dissenting in the Fourth Circuit, imagined a 19-year-old student deciding whether to speak up in a class debate on a controversial topic. “She thought she had an insightful comment to add to the discussion,” he wrote, “but it might not be worth risking an encounter with the bias response team.”

Virginia Tech President Timothy Sands told the High Court that the BIRT was terminated last summer under a new dean of students. He said the decision “was not prompted by the Speech First lawsuit.” Justice Thomas says that other universities “have attempted a similar maneuver, but two Courts of Appeals have found that these policy changes did not moot Speech First’s challenges.”

Since the case won’t be heard, the Justices vacated the Fourth Circuit’s ruling, to keep it from setting precedent. Yet the frustrating outcome remains: For now, at least, overbroad college bias teams at schools not named Virginia Tech can go about their creepy business.

America’s elite universities are bloated, complacent and illiberal

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 20:09:31 GMT

To keep its competitive edge the Ivy League will have to change

The Economist

March 4, 2024

THE STRUGGLE over America’s elite universities—who controls them and how they are run–continues to rage, with lasting consequences for them and the country. Harvard faces a congressional investigation into antisemitism; Columbia has just been hit with a lawsuit alleging “endemic” hostility towards Jews. Top colleges are under mounting pressure to reintroduce rigorous test-based admissions policies, after years of backsliding on meritocracy. And it is likely that the cosy tax breaks these gilded institutions enjoy will soon attract greater scrutiny. Behind all this lies a big question. Can American universities, flabby with cash and blighted by groupthink, keep their competitive edge?

The origins of the turmoil lie in extreme campus reactions to Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th. They led to a blockbuster congressional hearing in December. In it politicians accused three college presidents of failing to curtail antisemitism. The University of Pennsylvania’s then-president, Elizabeth Magill, stepped down just days later. Claudine Gay, formerly Harvard’s president, resigned from her job in January amid twin furors over antisemitism on campus and plagiarism in her scholarship (which she contested).

Plenty of faculty—both at Harvard and at other elite universities—insist that hard-right Republicans and other rabble-rousers are fabricating controversies. Stirring up animosity towards pointy-headed elites can win them political advantage. But thoughtful insiders acknowledge that, for some years, elite universities, particularly those within the Ivy League, have grown detached from ordinary Americans, not to mention unmoored from their own academic and meritocratic values.

In theory, these difficulties could promote efforts to correct flaws that are holding back elite education in America. But they could also entrench them. “America’s great universities are losing the public’s trust,” warns Robert George, a legal scholar and philosopher at Princeton. “And it is not the public’s fault.”

To understand the mess that the Ivies and other elite colleges find themselves in, first consider how they broke away from the rest in recent decades. Despite the fact that America’s elite universities have centuries of prestigious history, much of their modern wealth flows from a bull run that began in the more recent past. Back in the 1960s, only a modest gap divided the resources that America’s most and least selective colleges could throw around, according to research by Caroline Hoxby, an economist at Stanford. By the late 2000s, that had widened to an abyss.

This happened in part because of changes that enabled elite universities to enroll ever cleverer students. The collapsing cost of airfares and phone calls made sharp school-leavers gradually more eager to apply to ritzy colleges far from their homes. Smart youngsters from around the world joined them. At about the same time, the expansion of standardized testing made it easier for colleges to identify the very brightest sparks from far and wide.

History lessons

These smarter, more ambitious entrants were more likely to value top-notch faculty and facilities, and were more willing to pay for them, according to Professor Hoxby’s analysis. And they went on to greater success, which meant the size of donations elite universities could squeeze from alumni began to increase.

Newfangled ways of managing endowments also boosted America’s super-elite colleges. For years top universities managed their nest eggs cautiously, says Brendan Cantwell of Michigan State University. But in the 1980s the wealthiest ones began ploughing into riskier assets, including commodities and property, with considerable success. The richest universities were both more willing and more able to roll the dice; they could also reinvest a larger share of their returns.

All this has opened a chasm between America’s top-ranked colleges and the rest. A mere 20 universities own half of the $800bn in endowments that American institutions have accrued. The most selective ones can afford to splash a lot more money on students than the youngsters themselves are asked to cough up in tuition, which only makes admission to them more sought-after. Acceptance rates at the top dozen universities are one-third of what they were two decades ago (at most other institutions, rates are unchanged). Lately early-career salaries for people with in-demand degrees, such as computer science, have risen faster for graduates from the most prestigious universities than for everyone else. Higher education in America “is becoming a ladder in which the steps are farther apart”, reckons Craig Calhoun of Arizona State University.

For all their success, America’s best institutions are now flying into squalls. One clutch of challenges comes from abroad. American universities still dominate the top rungs of most international league tables—but their lead is becoming somewhat less secure. Every year Times Higher Education, a British magazine, asks more than 30,000 academics to name the universities they believe produce the best work in their fields. They are growing gradually less likely to name American ones, and a bit more likely to point to Chinese ones (see chart 1).

Research in disciplines such as maths, computing, engineering and physics is becoming especially competitive. Rankings produced by Leiden University in the Netherlands, which scores universities solely on the impact of the papers they produce, now place Chinese universities in pole position for all those subjects (see chart 2). “The difference from five or ten years ago is quite astonishing,” says Simon Marginson at Oxford University. The challenge is not that American output is growing weaker, he reckons, but that the quality produced by rivals is shooting up.

Competition to snag the world’s smartest students and faculty is growing more severe, too. Twenty years ago America attracted 60% of the foreigners studying in English-speaking countries; now it gets about 40%. Starting around the time of Donald Trump’s election, high-achieving Chinese—who once had eyes only for America’s finest universities—began sending additional, “back-up” applications to institutions in places such as Singapore and Britain, says Tomer Rothschild, who runs an agency that helps them.

As challenges from abroad multiply, America’s elite universities are squandering their support at home. Two trends in particular are widening rifts between town and gown. One is a decades-long expansion in the number of managers and other non-academic staff that universities employ. America’s best 50 colleges now have three times as many administrative and professional staff as faculty, according to a report by Paul Weinstein of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank. Some of the increase responds to genuine need, such as extra work created by growing government regulation. A lot of it looks like bloat. These extra hands may be tying researchers in red tape and have doubtless inflated fees. The total published cost of attending Harvard (now nearly $80,000 annually for an undergraduate) has increased by 27% in real terms over two decades.

A second trend is the gradual evaporation of conservatives from the academy. Surveys carried out by researchers at UCLA suggest that the share of faculty who place themselves on the political left rose from 40% in 1990 to about 60% in 2017—a period during which party affiliation among the public barely changed (see chart 3). The ratios are vastly more skewed at many of America’s most elite colleges. A survey carried out last May by the Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, found that less than 3% of faculty there would describe themselves as conservative; 75% called themselves liberal.

Why has this happened? One argument is that academics’ views have not in fact changed that much; instead, Republicans have abandoned them by moving to the right. But conservatives insist that bright sparks with right-leaning views have been choosing to leave or stay out of the profession, in part because lefty colleagues have been declining to hire and promote them. This mix of bloat and groupthink helps explain why prestigious universities often find themselves at odds with the American public in battles over access and speech.

Start with access: elite colleges clung to affirmative action long after the majority of Americans had decided that it was unfair to give black, Hispanic and Native American students with slightly lower grades an advantage when deciding whom to admit. Academics who spoke against the practice—arguing, for example, that some youngsters were being catapulted onto courses they were poorly prepared for—have often been slammed as bigots by their students and peers.

Knocking on the door

In theory the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw racial preferences last year should encourage posh universities to junk admissions practices that are even more irksome—such as favouring children of alumni. Instead many have made their admissions criteria even more opaque, potentially damaging universities’ meritocratic pretensions further. At the start of the pandemic, most stopped requiring applicants to supply scores from standardised tests. Now hard-to-evaluate measures such as the quality of personal statements are having to carry more weight. For some institutions that has proved unsatisfactory: in recent weeks Dartmouth and Yale announced that they will require standardised test scores from applicants once again. They are the first Ivies to do so.

As for speech, elite colleges have done a particularly poor job of handling a generation of youngsters who are alarmingly intolerant of views they don’t like. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), an NGO, rates freedom of expression across America’s best-known campuses. Last year it placed two Ivy League outfits, Harvard and Pennsylvania, among the five worst performers; Harvard came last. More than half of students at the five colleges believe it is sometimes acceptable to stop peers attending a speech by a controversial figure. Only about 70% agree that it is “never acceptable” to use violence to stop someone talking.

Universities stand accused not just of tolerating small-mindedness among their students, but of perpetuating it. One theory holds that, if elite universities worked their students harder, they would have less time and energy to fight battles over campus speech. Between the 1960s and the early 2000s the number of hours a week that an average American student spent studying declined by around one third, notes Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank. Yet grades do not seem to have suffered. At Yale, the share of all grades marked “A” has risen from 67% in 2010 to around 80% in 2022; at Harvard it rose from 60% to 79%.

More often blamed are administrative teams dedicated to fostering “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI). They have grown in size as the number of administrators of all kinds has increased. They have an interest in ensuring that everyone on campus is polite and friendly, but little to gain from defending vigorous debate. In theory they report to academic deans, says Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard and a member of a faculty group committed to defending academic freedom; in practice they move laterally from university to university, bringing with them a culture that is entirely their own. Critics of DEI departments insist these offices have helped soak campuses with unsophisticated “woke” ideologies that depict complex problems as simplistic battles.

All these problems would be better handled if universities had more effective governance. University presidents, and the deans beneath them, have too often looked intimidated by activist students and administrators, and unwilling to stand up for academics bullied for unpopular views. FIRE, the campaigners for academic freedom, reckon that between 2014 and mid-2023 there were at least 1,000 attempts to get academics sacked or punished for things they said (one fifth of those resulted in people losing their jobs).

Enough said

Years of wishy-washiness about what speech campuses will and will not tolerate have made it more difficult for university leaders to referee the clashes that have erupted between students supportive of Palestinians and those speaking up for Israel. Presidents who have not always held firm on free expression now find themselves besieged by censors of all political stripes. College leaders who, since the start of the Gaza war, have rediscovered their commitment to vigorous debate have inevitably ended up looking partisan.

University boards appear especially weak. They have not grown much more professional or effective, even as the wealth and fame of their institutions has soared. Many are oversized. Prestigious private colleges commonly have at least 30 trustees; a few have 50 or more. It is not easy to coax a board of that size into focused strategic discussions. It also limits how far each trustee feels personally responsible for an institution’s success.

Furthermore, trusteeships are often distributed as a reward for donations, rather than to people with the time and commitment required to provide proper oversight. Universities generally manage to snag people with useful experience outside academia. But many trustees prefer not to rock the boat; some are hoping that their service will grant children or grandchildren a powerful trump card when it comes to seeking admission. Too many see their job as merely “cheerleading, cheque-writing and attendance at football games”, says Michael Poliakoff of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, an organisation that lobbies for governance reform. And at many private universities the way in which new trustees are appointed involves cosying up to current ones or to university authorities. Outsiders can struggle to be picked at all.

Where is all this going? Reports of campus antisemitism have roused lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. In December a bipartisan group in Congress added new language to a draft bill that aims to boost funding for short, non-degree courses. They proposed finding the cash for this by preventing students at very rich universities from taking federal student loans. That idea was dropped in February, amid worries that it would create new obstacles for poor students, but it has since been replaced with a new proposal: that wealthy universities be required to “share risk” with the government by covering the government’s losses in the event that federal loans are not repaid. Universities have long resisted talk of such schemes.

Elite universities’ tax advantages are another possible target. For years politicians have accused them of “hoarding” huge endowments while raising prices for students and snaffling government money for research. Ten top colleges got about $33bn in federal research grants and contracts between 2018 and 2022, reckons Open the Book, an NGO. Over the same period, the endowments swelled by about $65bn. Until 2017 universities paid no tax on income from these nest-eggs; then Mr Trump hit the very richest with a recurring annual levy of 1.4%. He has implied that, if re-elected, he will take another bite.

At a minimum a Republican administration would make much sharper use of regulators, such as the civil-rights monitors employed in the federal education department. They might be encouraged to launch more investigations, for example into admissions rules or the work of DEI teams. Republicans have already meddled energetically in the running of public universities, over which they have far greater control. The University of Florida announced on March 1st that it had got rid of all its DEI positions in order to comply with a newish state rule. Signed into law a year ago by the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, it prevents state money from being spent on such things.

Better for universities to heal themselves. Smaller, more democratically selected boards would provide better oversight. More meritocratic admissions would improve universities’ standing. Greg Lukianoff of FIRE wants to see campuses stripped of bureaucrats “whose main job is to police speech”. Instead universities should invest in programmes teaching the importance of free and open debate, argues Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago, who runs a forum designed to do just that: “If your ideas aren’t subjected to rigorous scrutiny, they’re not going to be as good,” he explains.

Reformers would also like more people in the political centre, and on the right, to make careers in academia. No one thinks this will happen quickly. But college bosses could start by making it clear that they will defend the unorthodox thinkers they already have on their payrolls, reckons Jim Applegate, who runs a faculty group at Columbia University that aims to promote academic freedom. They could discourage departments from forcing job applicants to submit statements outlining their DEI approach (one study a few years ago suggested this was a condition for a fifth of all university jobs, and more than 30% at elite colleges). Lately these have looked less like honest ways of spotting capable candidates and more like tests of ideology.

The ongoing furore over antisemitism could bring the impetus universities need to reform. But a less optimistic scenario exists, too. Seeking to escape heat over hate speech, college leaders could choose to become all the more watchful of what their students and faculty say. Tighter rules about speech on campus might deflect brickbats in the short term; but in the long term they would only degrade the quality of both teaching and research at American universities. “We are at an inflection point,” believes Professor George of Princeton. “It could go either way.”

America’s elite universities are bloated, complacent and illiberal (economist.com)

No More DEI at the University of Florida

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 18:12:30 GMT

The school closes up the diversity and equity bureaucracy.

By The Editorial Board

The Wall Street Journal

March 1, 2024

A handful of states have been trying to extricate their public universities from the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) quagmire. Florida demonstrated on Friday how to do it the easy way by shutting down the DEI bureaucracy.

The University of Florida said it is dismissing all DEI staff, closing its DEI office and halting DEI contracts with outside vendors. The school also announced the laid-off staff would get 12 weeks of severance, and that the $5 million saved from the cost of DEI would go to a “faculty recruitment fund.” That’s a wrap, folks.

The dismissals are intended to bring the university into compliance with a 2023 Florida Board of Governors regulation that says state universities can’t “expend any state or federal funds” to “advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The University of Florida’s approach is notable because it comes without the backdoor attempts to continue DEI programs under other names.

In an administrative memo, the school said those whose jobs are eliminated are “allowed and encouraged to apply . . . for expedited consideration for different positions currently posted with the university.” That’s a good message: The university takes care of its people as long as they are ready to do the work the school needs for academic success.

It’s encouraging to see a major university get back to its core mission of educating young people in math, physics, engineering, literature and the arts. A special cheer for the end of diversity contractors, the recently growing army of consultants-for-hire who have created an industry instructing universities and companies in the politicized language of identity politics, racial affinity groups, and how to impose hiring quotas without calling them quotas.

In a Weekend Interview with James Taranto in these pages in January, University of Florida President Ben Sasse said he supports “the aspirational best parts of diversity and inclusion.” The problem, he said, “is the E,” meaning the substitution of “equity” for “equality,” which supplants the American idea that equal opportunity is the key to a just society.

The era of DEI arose rapidly in recent years, and it has burrowed itself into institutions across American life. It will take leadership to remove it. Kudos to Florida’s government and now its namesake university for ending what has become a divisive political power grab using race, gender and pronouns as cudgels. Who wants to step up next?

No More DEI at the University of Florida - WSJ

Two Significant Concerns About Student Rights at Davidson College

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 15:36:31 GMT

Thanks to your respect and/or support for DFTD, you know that we are the one independent alumni group devoted totally to freedom of speech and thought at Davidson College. Because of this, we have come across startling examples of two practices on campus that may concern you as it does us. You need to know about this and how we are now trying to bring attention to it in a positive manner. But first, a bit of background.

As you know, we took a stand as early as 2018 for establishing “Davidson’s Commitment to Freedom of Expression.” We applaud the leadership of President Doug Hicks and faculty members for patiently building a near unanimous vote in 2022 to affirm its principles for our alma mater. Since that achievement, our central focus has been to support students’ rights under the “Freedom of Expression” statement and bring attention to their concerns.

We had the results from surveys of Davidson students commissioned separately by DFTD, Davidson Journalism Professor Issac Bailey, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Each found a high degree of reluctance among students to express their personal views on controversial topics --- widespread patterns of self-censorship.

We began helping students and faculty hold events to promote a robust exchange of ideas and civil discourse. We publish and encourage the views and concerns of students. We monitor the state of freedom of expression on campus. We advocate for changes to policies and practices that have a negative impact on the student experience, but otherwise could go unnoticed. That final point – the advocacy work – is our topic today. Our initial efforts built a sense among a growing number of students that DFTD is the “go-to” resource when they feel attempts by anyone to compel them to accept controversial political views with which they disagree. They look to us to help them get relief.

In recent weeks, two significant issues have been brought to our attention by students and their parents. So far as we know, we were the only entity to report these instances to President Hicks. The first issue is the incidence of statements in the syllabi of courses in some departments that expect students to regard themselves as either “oppressors” or “oppressed.” In some classes, it appears to be required for enrollment and evaluation. The second significant issue involved all scholar-athletes being mandated to view and discuss a provocative documentary film entitled, “I’m Not Racist…Am I?” Many were insulted.

Anti-Oppression Statements in Syllabi

These syllabi were provided to us by the parent of a student, and you can read them in full in the attached image. It is our understanding from students that these types of statements are used in other departments, and not just limited to the examples that we were provided. From a wider sample, we estimate that something on the order of 10-15 percent of Davidson courses have something similar. In some cases, the message is more coercive. In others, it is merely suggested or invited. See what you think.

Our opinion is that statements like these, and others, contribute to the recent FIRE survey finding that roughly 66% of Davidson students don’t feel comfortable disagreeing with a professor in class. The incidence of compulsion of thought and self-debasing may be a small minority at this time. If neglected, it could become a standard method for pressuring students on what to believe.

Some of these anti-oppression statements make sweeping demands that students “actively identify and confront oppressive behaviors.” They go on to say that “We can only identify how power and privilege play out when we are conscious and committed to understanding how white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, heterosexism, cisgenderism, ableism, and all other systems of oppression affect each of us.” That’s inclusive shaming.

These statements in classes such as Spanish 101, and Cell Biology go on to state that students are “expected” to

“understand and embrace that you will feel discomfort and pain as you face your part in oppression, and
realize that this is a necessary part of the process of liberation and growth”,” and
that students should “set anti-oppression goals and continually evaluate whether or not you are meeting them, and reevaluate these goals as needed.”

We recognize that such questions, especially in relevant class assignments, deserve to be discussed by any academic community. Our concern is that they appear to be coerced even where irrelevant to a course, and they impose only one extreme interpretation of highly controversial themes---with no hint of balance or allowance for dissenting views.

We anticipated arguments that these types of statements or lessons in classes are somehow protected by the American Association of University Professor’s statement on Academic Freedom . However, we found that the AAUP clearly calls for protecting students from extraneous indoctrination, stating:

“Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.”

In a subsequent clarification that became AAUP policy in 1970, this was added:

“Second 1970 comment: The intent of this statement is not to discourage what is ‘controversial.’ Controversy is at the heart of the free academic inquiry which the entire statement is designed to foster. The passage serves to underscore the need for teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject.”

This does seem to show mercy for an occasional lapse, provided some correction is learned from it. We believe these anti-oppression directives obviously run counter to the spirit of “Davidson’s Commitment to Freedom of Expression.” We will get to the constructive approach we have chosen after reviewing the second example.

Mandatory Viewing of “I’m Not Racist…Am I?”

The second issue we believe needs attention was the recent compulsory viewing of the film called “I’m not Racist…Am I?” by all scholar-athletes – roughly 20% of the student body, since many seniors ignored it. The directive to view this film came from the Athletic Department (see communications).

Students were told that viewing and discussing this film was “mandatory” - emphasis theirs. This exercise occurred over three hours on a recent Sunday afternoon. Students were given little context about this film other than a link to the film’s website and trailer.

What students were ordered to view was a film that pushed a radical world view as if it were endorsed by the athletic department. For example, in one clip of the film that we uncovered, is the unequivocal repetition that all white people are racist, and people of color cannot be racist. This is based not on genetic science, but on feelings.

The students with whom we have spoken about this film found it offensive, divisive, and personally insulting. They were disappointed that the Athletic Department would compel them to participate in this event for over three hours on a Sunday afternoon.

Again, DFTD does not object to discussions among teammates or anyone on any topic, including weaponized definitions of racism. Compelling them to do so, guided only by the extremist views of the film producer, is a hazardous way to go about it. Will those teammates classified as “the oppressed” and “the oppressor” continue to trust and respect each other?

We were concerned that the endorsement of such a film by the Athletic Department could signal to the scholar-athletes what views the institution does, and does not require, and thus have has a silencing effect on them. This self-silencing is evident in the recent FIRE survey that found that over half of students regularly avoid informed dissent in the classroom.

Our Advocacy Work and How You Can Help

We immediately reached out to President Hicks and his administration about the syllabi concerns over a month ago. The response we received stated this is essentially an accepted, protected practice at Davidson. We were told:

“In accordance with our commitment to the principles of academic freedom as formulated by the American Association of University Professors, the college respects and does not restrain the right of faculty members to establish and enforce their own standards of professional judgment, which includes the right to frame each course through its syllabus.”

We get that. Yet, as we noted above, the AAUP statement on academic freedom goes further and instructs faculty members to avoid inserting into their courses controversial material that is unrelated to the subject matter. We fail to see how requiring students to accept personal “anti-oppression goals” has anything to do with learning cell biology, multivariable calculus, or learning the Spanish language.

Finding ourselves at an impasse, we wondered if anything would be done to remedy this --- and, if so, whether we would ever hear about it, in light of personnel privacy protections. We were encouraged by President Hicks to take time to speak with two seasoned veterans on campus who could help us understand what could and could not be done: former Dean of the Faculty and Economics Professor Clark Ross and Head Football Coach Scott Abell. We agreed to have a delegation of our Board do that. It proved to be highly beneficial.

During an hour and a half with Dr. Ross, it emerged that the more accepted approach would be to not target individual faculty members or departments or even have someone counsel them. Such an intrusion would likely be met with resentment or worse, especially if they felt they were following accepted practice. His advice took a more deliberative approach, to which we will return after an account of our second meeting.

Coach Abell was equally generous with his time and candor. Befitting his legendary courage to “go for it on fourth and long,” he did not punt the ball at us. We are not aware of any other coach who attended the offensive film and its troublesome message that “racist” and “white” are synonymous.

He saw the potential risk and benefit in the film’s theme, that which divided students according to the color of their skin without regard for their personal beliefs, feelings, or actions. He had sensed that it could disrupt the essential unity of his team.

He gathered all of his football team, which is undoubtedly the most exemplary unified, multi-racial assemblage anywhere on campus, to talk about it. He addressed the film and what impact it held. He had them talk about how it made them feel. Some resented being ordered to see it. Some felt insulted by a message that they were either helpless victims or racists, respectively. While disagreeing with much of the content of the documentary, Coach Abell concluded that the discussion he had with them was beneficial, perhaps therapeutic. This increased our pride in these young men and left us wishing other coaches had also questioned departmental orders.

Coach Abell shared his strong belief that mandatory requirements are appropriate for certain disciplines. Every member of the team is absolutely mandated to get in condition, lift weights, run laps, be prepared and on time, drill their assignments, and trust their teammates. This was in contrast to mandated compulsion about what to believe, which could threaten the unity of teamwork and we believe should never have been inflicted.

He emphasized that the Davidson campus is in the best health he has seen in his six years here, especially with regard to a spirit of mutual respect and open communication with one another in the last two years. We can take note of such a tribute to the new administration.

Dr. Ross had explained that the more accepted procedure for dealing with any issue like this might be for the President and Dean to refer the concerns to faculty for formal deliberation – first to a standing committee and then to the Faculty Executive Committee. Their findings and recommendations on policies for student rights could then be reported to the full Faculty for thorough debate. We earnestly endorse this recommendation and will ask President Hicks that it be initiated without delay.

We believe this deliberative approach offers every academic department the benefit of proper guidance without targeting anyone for embarrassment. The Athletic Department and other offices would naturally receive the message that emerges. All could learn the best ways to introduce particular political views to students while respecting their rights against coercion. It would suffice to show students how to think without telling them what to think. It would be the information we all can use to build confidence in alma our alma mater.

We hope you see how important and unique DFTD is to the student experience today. Unattended, these examples could become trendy and systemic, causing many students to feel they are disrespected and don’t belong. If the purpose is noble, there should be little objection to our publicizing them. Early disclosure would have been better than discovery.

We will continue to work with students, faculty, and administration to ensure that Davidson supports a healthy, robust civil discourse environment that is tolerant of diverse ideologies.

We encourage you to join us in voicing any concerns you may have around these issues by signing this petition . Only you can show the depth and width of support for freedom of thought and conscience. We hope you’ll continue to support DFTD both philanthropically, and by sharing the work that we do with others. Thank you.

Sincerely,

John Craig ‘66 Connie Buehler ‘82 Richard Hendrix ‘74

Emily Koons Jae ‘09 Ross Manire ’74 Jim Martin ‘57

Jim McNab ’66 Steve Smith ‘66 Kenny Xu ‘19

The Board of Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse

An Open Letter to College and University Trustees and Regents: It’s Time to Adopt Institutional Neutrality

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 20:05:56 GMT

The Academic Freedom Alliance, Heterodox Academy, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression are nonpartisan organizations dedicated to defending and advancing freedom of speech and open inquiry in higher education.

We stand together in sending this entreaty to college and university trustees and regents across the country during this time of growing national concern about the fate and security of free thought on campuses.

In recent years, colleges and universities have increasingly weighed in on social and political issues. This has led our institutions of higher education to become politicized and has created an untenable situation whereby they are expected to weigh in on all social and political issues.

Most critically, these stances risk establishing an orthodox view on campus, threatening the pursuit of knowledge for which higher education exists.

As the University of Chicago’s famous Kalven Report of 1967 states, a policy of institutional neutrality is premised on the defining mission of the university: to pursue truth through “the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.” And to accomplish this mission, “a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.”

Furthermore, the report recognizes, “There is no mechanism by which [the university] can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives.” In short, individual faculty members and students are the “instrument of dissent and criticism.” The university, on the other hand, “is the home and sponsor of critics.”

Where to draw the line between institutional neutrality and position-taking is a matter of careful prudential judgment. But, as the Kalven Report notes, there should be “a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day.” Smart observers will recognize good faith efforts to apply this principle.

A useful maxim to guide decision makers is “if an academic institution is not required to adopt a position in order to fulfill its mission of intellectual freedom or operational capacity, it is required not to adopt a position.” (See, e.g., Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry .)

For a neutrality principle to work, it must be publicly announced and adhered to on a consistent and faithful basis. Making an exception inexorably leads to pressure to make others and to allegations of bias.

Critically, institutional neutrality applies only to leaders and units of the institution. This is true not only for the central administration, but also for the units of the university, such as schools, departments, centers, and programs. It does not apply to faculty members and students (i.e., the “critics”), either individually or as members of voluntary, non-institutional associations.

Given the need to prepare for the execution of an institutional neutrality policy, we call on you, the trustees and regents of America’s colleges and universities, to publicly adopt such a policy by the beginning of the 2024-25 academic year.

We and the nation are watching campus events with keen interest and would applaud this fulfillment of your fiduciary duty.

Davidson’s Ukraine Flag and The Question of Responsible College Reactions To Politics

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 16:50:30 GMT

By Stephen Walker '26

February 9, 2024

The war in Ukraine had become a permanent story by the time I arrived at Davidson. Everyone knew about it and saw the same viral stories from time to time. There was an expert on the situation who came to campus to speak last semester, but that was an academic event and the issue as a whole has largely failed to deeply penetrate campus culture these last two years. Over this period, right beneath the American flag on Davidson’s flag pole flew the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag, an unwavering symbol of support for the far-away country. As I returned this semester I found the flag had vanished. No statement had been put out. No reason for the disappearance was made apparent to anybody. The stars and stripes fly alone again.

The problem I see with an institution like Davidson making statements as clear as flying another country's flag with our own is twofold. Davidson is a place dedicated to courageous intellectual inquiry meant to prepare students for lives of substance. But when the school leaves this symbol of clear support for a faraway war waged in an environment much different from our homeland, it sends a message to students about what types of opinions are acceptable and what types are not. Rather than allowing students to engage in research and dialogue with one another to uncover the truth about the matter, they are told by this symbolic gesture to conform to the whims of those favoring war. Whims that many believe don’t seem to benefit either us or this faraway nation at all and which don’t reflect the conflicted public opinion of the voters who grant our leaders their power. There is also the question of respect. It is standard for flags of different nations to be flown on different poles. Clumping these nations together demonstrates a blatant disregard for the tradition of respecting the sanctity of our flag and the sovereignty of the flag of another nation whose flag flies below ours. This message of disrespect for our own traditions and disregard for the complexity of international conflict is not one which allows students to better prepare for lives of “leadership and service.” This stunt set the tone for blind acceptance of authority and an embodiment of the values of the hive mind rather than encouragement for students to form unique, nuanced opinions.

Could this flag have come down sooner should students have questioned the motives of the institution? Should they defy a clear symbol of authority in their lives? No one wanted to find out what that would lead to and all resorted to the silence which has become a standard response in times of political uncertainty. When Davidson takes clear political stances it makes students uncomfortable with asking tough questions and having uncomfortable but important conversations. No one knows why the flag came down, and the problem the stunt posed will likely never be addressed and the message it implanted in the minds of those it affected will never be undone.

Going forward, will other flags be put up? Last semester, students raised flags and other symbols of support for Palestine. They were all taken down almost immediately. What about a Trump, Biden, or Kennedy flag? I doubt any of those would make it that long. When the college makes political statements with its flagpole it's acceptable. When students make political statements meant to stimulate conversation it’s not. In the future instances of students following the school’s example, will Davidson invoke its vague exceptions clause to allowed speech and expression which outlaws all things deemed to be “otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the College ''? It would be a clear double standard should the college be allowed to make and retract extremely public and symbolically significant political statements while students get silenced for following its lead. I was disappointed they put the flag up in the first place, but even more so when it went down in the quiet of December break without a hint of acknowledgement from anybody.

Stephen Walker is a class of 2026 Political Science and English Double Major at Davidson College.

Should We Teach to Empower Students or to Keep Them as “Sacred Victims”?

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 20:07:50 GMT

A black professor argues that “anti-racist” instruction is counterproductive.

By George Leef

The James G. Martin Center

February 2, 2024

Among the many destructive ideas that “progressive” thinking has unleashed on education in America is that it’s unfair to hold students from “underrepresented groups” to the same standards as others. Schools and colleges should “help” minority students succeed by lowering expectations for them—somehow atoning for wrongs done to their ancestors in the distant past. That is how Claudine Gay wound up as president of Harvard.

The notion that academic standards should be lower for minority students has swept through our educational institutions, but there are some dissenters who argue that this doesn’t help but hurts. One of them is Professor Erec Smith of York College. He teaches rhetoric and composition and has written a book challenging the belief that minority (especially black) students are somehow harmed by teaching them to use standard English. Smith argues in his book, A Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition , that standard English empowers those students by giving them another tool to accomplish their objectives.

Much as woke professors want to stamp out racism, they’re going about it the wrong way.

As Smith sees things, professors in his field, eager to display their “anti-racist” zeal, have adopted the trendy idea that “whiteness” is the enemy of progress for blacks. They’re passionate and sincere, but they have allowed their emotions to trample over reason in evaluating the pros and cons of their pedagogy. Smith writes that “feelings and opinions have replaced critical thinking in attempts to decenter whiteness and challenge hegemonic forces in academia.” Much as those professors want to stamp out racism, they’re going about it the wrong way.

That way entails an exclusive focus on the racial identity of students. Black students are assumed to be victims of white, racist social forces against which they are helpless. Therefore, they must band together in group solidarity to be empowered against “whiteness.” The trouble with that, Smith shows, is that it actually disempowers them. It leads to fallacious interpretations of texts and situations (seeing racism everywhere) and an inability to communicate and persuade. Instead of enabling black students to succeed, it infantilizes them. They’re trapped in an identity of victimhood, always looking for excuses and villains.

As an example of a black intellectual who did not play the victim/identity game, Smith points to a surprising case—W.E.B. DuBois. DuBois is regarded as a great, early opponent of America’s power structure in the 19th century. Nevertheless, as a student at Harvard he sensibly avoided falling into the identity trap and feeling sorry for himself after receiving a bad grade on an English assignment. He was initially upset but then realized that the bad grade was not aimed at him (poor writing was widespread among the overwhelmingly white student body) and that if he wanted to be able to communicate with maximum effectiveness in the future, he should take the criticism to heart. He did so and later signed up to take the most demanding English courses he could.

Smith extols the “Duboisian Attitude” for all students. It welcomes intellectual inquiry, debate, and counterclaims; it never allows them to retreat into the victim narrative.

Contrast the attitude of DuBois with that of contemporary black scholar Vershawn Young, who claims that black students suffer “tyranny and oppression” if they are taught standard English. Smith argues that learning to master a new but closely related language is not at all oppressive. In refusing to see that such mastery is beneficial, academics like Young show an “allergy” to the real world.

Many academics would rather have their minority students wallow in victimhood.

Smith supports his case by citing the similar linguistic division in Spain. Do students from Catalonia, which has a dialect quite distinct from standard Spanish, feel that they are “losing their identity” when they learn Spanish? Studies indicate that they don’t suffer at all but understand that being able to speak and write standard Spanish gives them a useful tool they wouldn’t have otherwise had.

In Smith’s opinion, professors need to meet black students (and others) “where they are” with regard to their command of English, then proceed to expand their knowledge. That’s how to empower them. Unfortunately, many academics would rather have their minority students wallow in victimhood, which has become, Smith observes, “a kind of social capital.” That won’t benefit the students, although it does seem to benefit the faculty who promote this view. Having low standards for student writing can make them popular, and writing articles on how they are working to dismantle white hegemony gets them attention.

What are “anti-racist” courses like? One academic who has written about his approach is Professor Asao Inoue, who claims that individualism is an undesirable aspect of “whiteness.” In his courses, students are not graded down for failing to write in standard English. Instead, he has implemented a “labor based” grading system in which students are graded on the basis of the amount of effort they claim to have put in on an assignment. No more red ink for “errors” since students are entitled to “their own language.”

But what does that accomplish? Smith suggests that “labor based” grading means “nothing exists to master, nothing exists to be taught.” Students will probably be happy with their high grades (unless they’re like W.E.B. Dubois), and Professor Inoue will be happy in the thought that he has struck a blow against that horror called “whiteness,” but he is really just pushing his own agenda at the expense of student achievement.

If composition should be graded on “labor,” why not treat other subjects the same way? And if it’s “white hegemony” to teach standard English in composition, how about other fields where “white” standards hold? Consider classical music and opera, where performers, no matter their race or ethnicity, need to learn how to play and sing in certain ways if they are to advance in their careers. It was not giving in to “whiteness” for, say, Andre Watts and Jessye Norman to learn their art so they could reach the heights. Fortunately, they didn’t have instructors who told them to focus on their identities instead of acquiring the skills needed to succeed.

Black progress lies in abandoning interventionist governmental policies rather than in making classrooms “anti-racist.”

Throughout the book, Smith shows his understanding of the mindset of professors who want to put “anti-racism” before having students master the subject. They see themselves as “sacred victims” of an unjust society. As such, they cannot be questioned or criticized. When they write about their “lived experiences,” those writings must be taken as incontestable evidence of social problems. Any expressions of doubt must be rooted in racism.

That outlook will not help to overcome real problems. In fact, Smith observes, it might be the case that the professors who revel in their “anti-racism” would rather have “white hegemony” and similar constructs to complain about than to take constructive steps to improve conditions for minority Americans. Although Smith doesn’t make this point, I’ll suggest that this is the reason why freedom-minded black scholars like Thomas Sowell and Glenn Loury are treated as pariahs by leftist intellectuals. They won’t entertain the idea that the key to black progress lies in abandoning interventionist governmental policies rather than in making classrooms “anti-racist.”

What all the “anti-racist” academic initiatives do is to entrench the victim mentality and distract attention away from changes that would actually lead to progress. They make “academia less academic” Smith says—and that is not only true in composition and rhetoric but across a growing swath of higher education.

Smith concludes by saying that he hopes to start dialogue in his field. I would like to see that happen but doubt that it will. The opponents of high standards in composition (and other fields) have too much invested in their supposedly “anti-racist” approaches to listen to a critic like Erec Smith. He’s already been labeled a race traitor, which doesn’t bode well.

George Leef is director of external relations at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

Should We Teach to Empower Students or to Keep Them as “Sacred Victims”? — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (jamesgmartin.cen ter)

Follow the Left’s Example to Reform Higher Ed

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 19:46:50 GMT

Identify areas, like civics, that are inadequately studied and create new programs around them.

By Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Store

The Wall Street Journal

January 26, 2024

Conservatives have an extraordinary opportunity to reform higher education. Universities face a perfect storm of falling enrollments, souring public opinion and political scrutiny. They need friends. Prudent administrators should be eager to work with those whose opinions they might have previously ignored.

Yet conservatives should be sober-minded about their prospects. Efforts to reform higher education have been underway since William F. Buckley sounded the alarm in his 1951 book “God and Man at Yale,” yet conservatives have continued to lose ground on campuses. While considering their next moves, they should ask: Why has the left been so successful at moving the academy in their direction?

The left’s most enduring victories on campus have been led by academics who think academically. The right should learn from their playbook.

When the academic left seeks to innovate, they do what scholars have always done: They create new disciplines. Academics who thought women’s lives and perspectives were neglected created women’s studies. Those who saw that scholars overlooked the literature, history, and art of black Americans created African-American studies.

This is a legitimate tactic. It’s how universities work. Academics perceive that some phenomenon is overlooked by existing modes of inquiry. They write studies about it; they describe ways of examining it. They attract scholars in related subjects, who become the initial faculty of the new programs. They develop ways of thinking that cohere as a discipline, in which students can be trained. They create associations; journals spring up; grants get funded; students get degrees. One generation of faculty acts as mentors to the next.

To make enduring change in the academy, conservatives must identify important areas that aren’t getting attention and create programs to study them.

The most promising academic innovations today are Republican-led efforts at public universities to remedy the deficit in university-level civic education. Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, or SCETL, is the model. The Arizona Legislature launched it in 2016, and political scientist Paul Carrese developed the program. SCETL now employs 20 faculty, teaches more than 1,000 students annually, and has bipartisan support. Its success has encouraged similar efforts in Florida, Texas, Tennessee,

Mississippi, Utah, North Carolina and Ohio.

Such schools have significant latitude to hire their own faculty and set curricula. The first-rate faculty who lead them therefore can develop a research and teaching program with its own purpose, practices and standards.

Each such school is distinctive. What links them is the mission of creating a new model of university-level civic education. We call this model Civic Thought . The elements of Civic Thought are derived from the intellectual demands of American citizenship, which requires the ability to deliberate about everything from war to education. Equipping the mind for such responsibility is an ambitious intellectual project, fully worthy of the university. Many courses already exist on topics important to Civic Thought. That is quite common in university life.

The periodic table isn’t the exclusive property of the chemistry department. You can study religious questions in anthropology or English or history. Academic fields of study aren’t mutually exclusive domains; they are distinct but interrelated. Developing new centers of gravity can shift the dynamics of the academic universe.

Civic Thought is but one example of how reformers might alter the academy’s landscape. There are plenty of other opportunities to create new fields of study. The contemporary university is notoriously fragmented, and many things worth studying slip through the cracks. This is particularly so in academic areas where conservative scholars tend to cluster, such as in political and military history, classics, theology, political theory and certain subfields of philosophy. With a little ingenuity, scholars could devise new programs.

To do this work well, trustees, donors and policymakers need to form partnerships with scholars who have the knowledge and imagination to foresee what intellectual projects might breathe new life into the university. They also need to understand that building new disciplines is long-term work. Such projects aren’t instantly “scalable,” because they depend on professors. It takes at least five years to mold a promising college graduate into a Ph.D. Most scholars in the academic areas most in need of reform—the humanities and social sciences—do their best work in their 50s and 60s.

Reformers should take this opportunity to make the crucial first moves in what will be a long game. They need to seek out scholars with impressive academic competence and energetic vision, put hiring and curricular power into their hands, and support them in launching intergenerational projects of study.

Some projects will prove unviable; others will be subsumed by the academic status quo. But the ones that succeed make a profound mark on campus.

At the top of the classic list of conservative strategies for reforming higher education are policies to ensure free speech and institutional neutrality on campus. Such policies are useful but indicate only the guardrails of academic life. The disciplines and the professors who staff them drive the conversation. To play the academic game, you need to get on that field.

Mr. Storey and Mrs. Storey are senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute and research fellows at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.

Follow the Left’s Example to Reform Higher Ed - WSJ

Why Americans Have Lost Faith in the Value of College

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 20:55:06 GMT

Three generations of ‘college for all’ in the U.S. has left most families looking for alternatives.

By Douglas Belkin

The Wall Street Journal

January 19, 2024

The political turmoil that rocked universities over the past three months and sparked the resignations of two Ivy League presidents has landed like an unwelcome thud on institutions already struggling to maintain the trust of the American public. For three generations, the national aspiration to “college for all” shaped America’s economy and culture, as most high-school graduates took it for granted that they would earn a degree. That consensus is now collapsing in the face of massive student debt, underemployed degree-holders and political intolerance on campus.

In the past decade, the percentage of Americans who expressed a lot of confidence in higher education fell from 57% to 36%, according to Gallup . A decline in undergraduate enrollment since 2011 has translated into 3 million fewer students on campus. Nearly half of parents say they would prefer not to send their children to a four-year college after high school, even if there were no obstacles, financial or otherwise. Two-thirds of high-school students think they will be just fine without a college degree.

The pandemic drove home a sobering realization for a lot of middle-class American families: “College for all” is broken for most.

Arthur Levine, president emeritus of Columbia Teachers College and author of “The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present and Uncertain Future,” compares this moment in post-secondary education to the seismic change that followed the Industrial Revolution. That 19th-century wave of disruption washed over schools designed to meet the needs of a sectarian, agricultural society and transformed higher education into a sprawling system of community colleges, land-grant universities and graduate schools.

The dilemma faced by today’s high-school students is that while a similarly massive economic disruption has arrived, new educational alternatives have not. “Whatever comes next,” Levine says of Generation Z, “It’s not going to come soon enough for them.”

So how did one of the crown jewels of American society squander so much confidence so quickly?

If the pandemic marked the moment the “college for all” model finally cracked, 1965 marked its birth. As the baby boomers came of age, the federal government made loans available to any college-bound 18-year-old with a high-school diploma, in order to maintain the most educated workforce in the world. High schools scrapped vocational education programs in favor of college preparatory classes.

Cash and prestige saturated college campuses while alternatives like vocational and technical schools withered. Between 1965 and 2011, university enrollment increased nearly fourfold to 21 million as the earning differential between high school and college graduates expanded. But embedded in the infrastructure of universities were hairline fractures and misaligned incentives that have led the system to buckle.

University governance was designed for an analog era. Decisions are sifted through a slow, deliberative process until faculty, administrators and trustees reach consensus. The genius of the system is that it avoids the strictures of top-down control and protects academic freedom against political interference. The weakness is that it’s a recipe for stagnation.

The digital revolution demanded a nimble realignment of the academy so that students could learn a quickly emerging set of skills to meet changing labor-market demands. Instead of adapting, campus interest groups protected their turf. Decisions reached by consensus usually meant the adoption of modest reforms that were the least objectionable to the greatest number of people, said Brian Rosenberg, former president of Macalester College and author of “‘Whatever It Is, I’m Against It’: Resistance to Change in Higher Education.”

As students abandoned the humanities and flooded fields like computer science, big data and engineering, schools failed to respond. The result was undersubscribed history and English departments and waiting lists for classes that led to well-paying jobs. New programs in emerging fields did not start because schools could not free up the resources.

College enrollment rate of recent high-school graduates, 16 to 24 years old

Source: Labor Department

Many university presidents who pushed for new programs, the faster adoption of technology or the removal of undersubscribed majors faced no-confidence votes from their faculty. “Presidents come in and run smack into the culture and the structures of an institution, and they realize that if I want to keep my job, I’m not going to push for transformational change,” said Rosenberg.

In 2021, when Chuck Ambrose became chancellor at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Ark., the school was in financial peril. The music department had more faculty than graduating students, and none of the 60 academic programs was generating enough revenue to cover its costs, Ambrose said. When he announced that the school was going broke, the faculty rejected his data.

Ambrose declared a fiscal “exigency”—the academic equivalent of bankruptcy—and recommended that the school’s board eliminate a third of its teaching positions and nearly half of its degree programs. The faculty asked for his termination, and Ambrose left the next year.

“Systems don’t want to change,” Ambrose said. “Problems accumulate and so does culture.”

The misalignment between universities and the labor market is compounded by the failure of many schools to teach students to think critically. Many students arrive poorly prepared for college-level work, and the universities themselves are ill-equipped to provide intensive classroom instruction.

Professors compete for tenure on the basis of the quality of their research and publishing track record. Teaching is mostly an afterthought. Professors who earn tenure negotiate lighter teaching loads. To fill the gap, schools hire less expensive adjuncts with little job security. Non-tenure track professors now make up three-quarters of college faculty, up from a quarter in 1975.

These precariously employed adjuncts depend on strong student performance reviews for job security, a system that incentivizes them to make few demands in exchange for high ratings. Students spend about half as much time studying and attending class as their counterparts did in 1961, but they are three times more likely to earn an A—now the most common grade in colleges across the country.

A quarter of college graduates do not have basic skills in numeracy and one in five does not have basic skills in literacy, says Irwin Kirsch, who oversees large-scale assessments for ETS, the company that administers the SAT.

Quality control for college degrees falls to accreditors, but they approve programs at hundreds of schools that fail to produce financial value for graduates, and have kept many schools in business with a single-digit graduation rate. About one in 40 U.S. workers draws a paycheck from a college or university, and in recent decades the powerful higher-education lobby in Washington has quashed dozens of proposals to measure the sector’s successes and failures.

Meanwhile, through a combination of state budget cuts, administrative bloat and runaway spending on campus amenities, the real cost of a four-year college degree climbed 180% between 1980 and 2020. The high cost increased pressure on universities to treat students as consumers purchasing a credential, instead of scholars receiving an education.

One result of this transactional attitude has been a sharp increase in cheating. College is one of the few products whose consumers try to get as little out of it as possible, because its market value is tied to the credential, not to the education that it is meant to represent, says Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University and author of “The Case Against Education.”

Cheating is a rational choice on the part of students when credentials are decoupled from learning, Caplan says. He believes that 80% of the value of graduating college today is the signal it sends to employers, and that few students outside of the hard sciences learn much of real value.

The combination of more college graduates and weaker learning outcomes has diluted the signal provided by a degree from less prestigious colleges. That has led to a host of knock-on effects, including credential inflation, in which employers ask for college degrees for jobs that don’t need one and previously did not require one.

For middle-class Americans, college made sense as long as a degree generated a large enough wage premium to make the rising cost of the investment worthwhile. As that premium became less consistent, the risks of going to college grew and confidence in college as an institution declined.

Of 100 random freshmen enrolling in college today, 40 will not graduate. Of the remaining 60 that earn a degree in six years, 20 will end up chronically underemployed. In other words, for every five students who enroll in a four-year college, only two will graduate and find a job based on their degree.

A college education is among the largest investments most Americans will make. The total cost of attending a public college is about $36,000 a year, and the average length of time to a degree is nearly five years. Tack on debt service for student loans and the opportunity cost of not working while in school, and the real cost of college can easily pass $300,000—more than the median net worth of most families.

That math doesn’t work for a growing number of families. The percentage of students who enrolled in college after graduating high school fell from 70% in 2016 to 62% in 2022.

Adalyn Arnstrom, a high-school senior in Dandridge, Tenn., is considering taking a job in construction, with the eventual goal of becoming an electrician, or heading to community college to study ultrasound technology. Despite a 3.0 grade-point average, she’s not very interested in a four-year degree. “I think I can do just fine without it,” she said.

Ben Likens, a high-school senior in Indiana, plans to attend Indiana University next year, mainly because he didn’t see any better options and wanted to avoid the stigma of not going to college. His father, Eric, said that he marched off to college in 1988 because that’s what everyone did. He earned a degree from Ball State University in biology while he worked summers paving roads. After he graduated he continued with road construction because the money was better than anything he could earn with his degree.

Now when Eric hires new employees he considers a college degree a marker of persistence and discipline, but not knowledge or skill. He is unsure if the college path is the wisest choice for his son: “I worry for him that it will be worth it,” he said.

The challenge faced by students willing to buck the gravitational pull of college is to find an alternative. In an economy becoming ever more specialized, most jobs and careers demand skills beyond high school. The question becomes how to get them.

A poll published in 2022 asked parents if they would rather their child attended a four-year college or a three-year apprenticeship that would train them for a job and pay them while they learned. Nearly half of parents whose child had graduated from college chose the apprenticeship.

But unlike the European model of higher education, where students enter a vocational track and apprentice with an employer with the assistance of government support, the U.S. invests almost exclusively in students heading to college. Government financial support for universities outstrips apprenticeships by about 1,000 to one, writes Ryan Craig, author of the book “Apprentice Nation” and managing director of a firm that invests in new educational models.

The pressure to place less emphasis on four-year degrees is growing, however. In what has been called the “degree reset,” the federal government and several states eliminated the degree requirements for many government jobs. Companies like IBM and the giant professional services firm Deloitte have too. Last year, a survey of 800 companies by Intelligent.com found that 45% intended to eliminate bachelor degree requirements for some positions in 2024. The Ad Council recently ran a campaign encouraging employers to get rid of the “paper ceiling.”

In place of a degree, some employers are adopting skills-based hiring, looking at what students know as opposed to what credential they hold. The problem is that the signal sent by a college degree still matters more, in most cases, than the demonstration of skills. The result is something of a stand-off between old and new ideas of job readiness. A LinkedIn study published last August found that between 2019 and 2022 there was a 36% increase in job postings that omitted degree requirements—but the actual number of jobs filled with candidates who did not have a degree was much smaller.

New initiatives may start to change that balance. New York Mayor Eric Adams has called for 30,000 new apprenticeships in the city by 2030. California Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to create 500,000 in the state by 2029.

Deloitte is one of dozens of big companies championing the idea that skills matter more than degrees. “This is a decade-long journey,” said Kwasi Mitchell, Deloitte’s chief purpose and DEI officer. “It’s going to be a little bit of time before we really open the floodgates with respect to skills-first hiring.”

Douglas Belkin covers higher education and national news out of the Chicago bureau of The Wall Street Journal.

Why Americans Have Lost Faith in the Value of College - WSJ

An Honest Diversity Statement

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 19:14:47 GMT

Three generations of ‘college for all’ in the U.S. has left most families looking for alternatives.

By James Hankins

Law and Liberty

January 18, 2024

For a number of years now pleasant young women (or persons identifying as women, or with female-sounding names) have been contacting me from the university’s diversity office, inviting me to attend sessions to discuss our DEI policies. Harvard has to be different, so we use the acronym EDIB, for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (our previous president Drew Faust, as her contribution to the collective wisdom, added the “Belonging”). These sessions are never described as compulsory, but the pleasant young women don’t take “no” for an answer. In former times, I was able to avoid these sessions by pleading that I had a subsequent engagement. During the pandemic, however, there was no escape. There was no obvious way to evade a Zoom EDIB “training” session that one could take at one’s leisure. So I took the “training.” I was afraid that the interactive videos would demand that I agree with the policies, in which case I would not be able to check the appropriate boxes, with what tedious and time-consuming consequences I knew not. But fortunately, that didn’t happen. Professors, then, were still exempt from taking loyalty oaths.

Recently, however, volcanic activity has broken out further down Olympus, reportedly arising from the graduate students, who want to step up the pressure on us. They ask why, if they have to write diversity statements, shouldn’t we senior professors be subjected to the same requirements? (Let’s smoke out those white supremacists!) In past times I would have been confident that Olympus could easily withstand attack from any and all inferior cults. Now I’m not so sure. I thought maybe I should get a statement ready, just in case.

I consulted AI, asking it to compose a 500-word statement that would, following the usual format, explain “my thinking about diversity, equity, and inclusion; the efforts I have taken to promote these values; and the steps I hope to take in the future to spread them.” Under the first rubric, AI offered the following:

In the ever-evolving landscape of education, I firmly believe that the cornerstones of excellence are diversity, equity, and inclusion. These principles are not just theoretical concepts but essential ingredients in the creation of a vibrant and effective learning environment. As an educator in [Your College], I am committed to fostering these values in my teaching, research, and service.

Well, that was easy (it took less than 30 seconds to generate the required 500 words), but the suggested language had some drawbacks. It would be embarrassing to put my name to such drivel, but more to the point, I didn’t believe a word of it—at least if the usual meanings were attached to the cult terms “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” I would just have to write my own statement.

So here goes.

Dear Members of Harvard’s Faceless Bureaucracy:

You ask me to explain my thinking about DEI. The fact is that I don’t think about it (or them?) at all if I can help it. Sherlock Holmes once told Watson that he couldn’t be bothered to know about Copernicus’ theory of heliocentrism because it took up valuable space in his brain which he needed for his work as a detective. “But the Solar System!” I protested. —”What of the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently. “You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.” I’m a working historian and don’t want to waste my brain space on inessentials.

Since, however, you require me, as a condition of further employment, to state my attitude to these “values” that the university is said to share (though I don’t remember a faculty vote endorsing them), let me say that, in general, the statement of EDIB beliefs offered on your website is too vapid to offer any purchase for serious ethical analysis. The university, according to you, espouses an absolute commitment to a set of words that seems to generate positive feelings in your office, and perhaps among administrators generally, but it is not my practice to make judgments based on feelings. In fact, my training as a historian leads me to distrust such feelings as a potential obstacle to clear thinking. I don’t think it’s useful to describe the feelings I experience when particular words and slogans are invoked and how they affect my professional motivations. It might be useful on a psychoanalyst’s couch or in a religious cult, but not in a university.

Let me take, as an example, the popular DEI slogan “Diversity is our strength.” This states as an absolute truth a belief that, at best, can only be conditional. When George Washington decided not to require, as part of the military oath of the Continental Army, a disavowal of transubstantiation (as had been previous practice), he was able to enlist Catholic soldiers from Maryland to fight the British. Diversity was our strength. On the other hand, when the combined forces of Islam, under the command of Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik, besieged Constantinople in 717, diversity was not their strength. At the crisis of the siege, the Christian sailors rowing in the Muslim navy rose in revolt and the amphibious assault broke down.

Since most societies have usually been at war or under the threat of war for most of history, public sentiment has ordinarily preferred unity to diversity. Prudent and humane governments have usually tolerated a degree of pluralism in order to reduce social discord, but pluralism as such has not been celebrated as a positive feature of society until quite recently. In fact, diversity is a luxury good that can be enjoyed only in secure, peaceful societies. Even in such societies, it has to be weighed against other goods (like meritocracy) that will have to be sacrificed if it is pursued as an absolute good. An indiscriminate commitment to “diversity,” bereft of any loyalty to unifying principles, is the mark of a weak or collapsing society.

It’s not just governments and armies that prefer unity to diversity. Most religions in the last millennium have placed a premium on preserving the original vision of their founders. They have had to resist pressures to undermine (or diversify) that vision and conform to the values of the world around them. They have had to fight against spiritual entrepreneurs, whom they disobligingly label heretics, who have been eager to diversify their doctrines. For those religions, which include orthodox Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, diversity has not only not been a strength, it has been dangerous, even damnable. When religions cease to care about their unifying beliefs, they cease to exist.

On the other hand, when one of Alexander the Great’s generals, King Ptolemy I, took over control of Egypt in the third century BC, he decided not to repeat the mistake the Persians had made when they pillaged traditional Egyptian temples, alienating the locals. Instead, Ptolemy lavishly promoted a new syncretic deity, Serapis, who could be worshipped by both the Greek conquest elite and by its Egyptian subjects. Diversity was their strength.

Many people who have come to this country in the last four hundred years came precisely because in America they could escape racist or class prejudice and be treated as equal.

All this should be blindingly obvious to anyone with a cursory knowledge of the past. It may be less obvious why Equity is not a value that all can willingly embrace. The word has a legitimate meaning in Roman law, referring to the need to correct strict justice in light of a wider sense of fairness. Summum ius, summa iniuria. The law cannot be strictly applied in cases where a greater injury might result.

This is not, however, the way your office likes to understand the term Equity. In EDIB-speak, it means “equality of outcomes.” Any policies that produce unequal outcomes—for example, an admissions policy that produces a student body that does not mirror the exact proportions of some (not all) minorities in the country—lack Equity. In this sense, an absolute commitment to Equity can’t help but undermine the university’s commitment to its primary purpose, which is the pursuit of truth. In Latin, that’s veritas, the motto on the Harvard coat of arms that adorns your wall. Living up to that motto is no easy matter. We’re not talking here about telling the truth or being sincere. At a research university, we are in the business of finding out new truths. That can be anything from discovering new galaxies to digging up the remains of hitherto unknown civilizations. The number of people in the world who are really capable of expanding the body of known truths is quite small. I’ve been on many search committees at Harvard in the last 38 years and can vouch for just how small the number is of truly exceptional candidates. If a research university really wants the best, if it really wants to discover new truths, it can’t allow non-expert administrators to overrule search committees and throw out candidates just because they don’t help the EDIB office reach its diversity targets.

Inclusion and belonging (I’m not clear on the difference) are ideals I can get behind so long as they apply to everybody, even to people we don’t agree with. Many people who have come to this country in the last four hundred years came precisely because in America they could escape racist or class prejudice and be treated as equals. It might take a while, but they or their children would eventually fit in. In the meantime, they could start a business, practice their religion, and educate their children without anyone requiring them to hold particular political beliefs. I think our university should imitate America’s best traditions in this respect and make everybody welcome too. But we fail when we impose smelly little orthodoxies on our students—in the form, for example, of diversity statements that call for a certain kind of response.

I realize I am not giving you the kind of statement you wished to get from me, and that I have not even answered all your queries about how I expect to implement EDIB values in my future teaching and research. But I think you can read between the lines.

James Hankins is a professor of History at Harvard University and a Senior Writer at Law & Liberty. His most recent books are Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy and Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy.

An Honest Diversity Statement – James Hankins (lawliberty.org)

Harvard Couldn’t Save Both Claudine Gay and Itself

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 17:26:03 GMT

The New York Times

By Ross Douthat

January 4, 2024

Throughout the weeks that Harvard spent resisting, unsuccessfully, the calls for Claudine Gay’s resignation, a common line of defense of the embattled Ivy League president was that it’s essential not to hand any kind of victory, under any circumstances, to conservative critics of higher education.

For instance, a Harvard Law professor, Charles Fried, said that he might give “credence” to the evidence that Gay was a serial plagiarist “if it came from some other quarter.” But not, he averred, when it’s being put forward as “part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions.”

Such right-wing attacks, argued Issac Bailey, an assistant professor of communications at Davidson College, ultimately have nothing to do with the particulars of any given academic scandal: “Right-wingers believe awful things about liberals and colleges because they want to believe awful things about liberals and colleges, and they will always refuse to believe anything else, no matter what liberals and colleges say or do.”

Now that Gay has departed, now that the work of conservative activists and journalists has overcome institutional resistance, it’s worth examining right-of-center beliefs about higher education a bit more closely. The right’s writers and activists have indeed spent generations, from Christopher Rufo in the present day going back to William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1950s, critiquing the liberal tilt of academia. And the consistency of that critique could understandably persuade academics that it doesn’t really matter where they stand, what they teach or, for that matter, how tough they are on plagiarism. The right will always be against them — and bent on destruction, not reform.

But until quite recently, the right’s critique of academic bias coexisted with a surprisingly strong respect for American universities among Republicans. As late as Barack Obama’s second term — hardly a high point for right-wing institutionalism and respect for credentialed authority — Gallup polling showed a majority of Republicans reporting either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in American higher education. Pew Research Center polling around the same period found that 53 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning respondents thought that colleges and universities had a positive effect on “the way things are going” in the United States, as against just 35 percent who dismissed their effect as primarily negative.

Across just a few short years, however, that support rapidly collapsed. By 2019, 59 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning respondents told Pew that higher education had a negative effect on the country; by 2023, Gallup’s polling found that just 19 percent of Republicans were favorably disposed toward higher education.

There are a couple of ways that one could interpret this profound shift. Maybe the internet and social media changed everything; maybe Donald Trump, Rufo and a constellation of right-wing influencers have simply succeeded in deceiving and inflaming the public (including nonconservatives, since academia’s reputation also took a major hit among independents) against universities on a scale that far exceeds anything that Buckley, Ronald Reagan or Rush Limbaugh ever achieved.

On the other hand, the sudden Republican alienation from the American university could also be seen as an entirely reasonable response to academia’s own internal transformation in the past 10 years or so: the ideological ferment of the Great Awokening, the swift expansion of the diversity-equity-inclusion complex, the spread of progressive loyalty oaths in faculty recruitment and hiring, the attempts at political activism and statement-making by university administrators — plus the dwindling ranks of that always endangered species, the conservative professor.

The truth is that these differing explanations aren’t mutually exclusive. The internet has certainly encouraged alienation from every public institution; it would be strange if universities were exempt. And there’s clearly a dynamic process whereby intensifying populism on the right encourages a leftward lurch within the intelligentsia, and that leftward lurch then gives additional fuel to academia’s right-wing critics.

So Trumpism and social media probably do matter to changing Republican attitudes. But it would be absurd to pretend that the overt and much-celebrated ideological revolution within universities hasn’t also played a role in squandering the sympathy that many conservative-leaning Americans felt for academia — again, less than a decade ago, not in some misty Rockefeller Republican past.

If universities simply accept or even court that alienation, as Princeton’s Greg Conti wrote for Compact Magazine last week, they’ll complete their transformation from national institutions into “sectarian” ones. As sectarian schools, they can still be rich, powerful and important. But they’ll be influential within “an increasingly inward-looking portion of our privileged classes” rather than being respected by the nation as a whole.

From watching the debate over Gay’s resignation, it’s clear that many academics would much prefer to be members of a sectarian institution than a national one — at least if the price of national standing is regarding conservative Americans in any way as critics worth engaging, let alone as stakeholders in their institutions. A sect can hold firmly to uncompromised and unsullied truths, after all, whereas a nation can be wrong or racist or corrupt.

The sectarian model cannot work, however, for public universities that depend on conservative taxpayers and conservative politicians for their very existence. For them, as I have argued before, the future (in an era of aging populations and declining enrollments, especially) depends on negotiating across the political divide, finding common ground especially with those conservatives who believe strongly in the liberal arts and figuring out how to cultivate intellectual and ideological diversity notwithstanding their own liberal tilt.

The position of schools like Harvard is different. They have immense resources and political independence, and they can thrive in the form that Conti describes, as schools that both serve and dominate the liberal meritocracy, even if conservative America disdains them and their remaining Republican donors depart.

For the Ivies and their imitators, the great danger is a fracture within the liberal meritocracy. In this scenario, some important portion of the credentialed upper class — Silicon Valley money, pro-Israel Democrats, Wall Street moderates or just affluent professionals migrating to the South and West — becomes so alienated by contemporary progressivism, by D.E.I. and all its works, that it ceases to regard the famous schools of a declining Northeast as the natural destination for its sons and daughters or the natural repository for its generous donations.

It’s to forestall that potential future, not to reward the muckraking of conservatives, that Harvard presumably decided to sacrifice its plagiarist president. The Ivy League believes in its progressive doctrines, but not as much as it believes in its own indispensability, its permanent role as an incubator of privilege and influence. And Harvard’s critics can probably force more change the more that centuries-old power seems to be at risk.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/03/opinion/claudine-gay-harvard.html

Bill Ackman X post (tweet) on the state of Harvard

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 17:38:32 GMT

X Post

January 3 ,2024

By Bill Ackman, billionaire hedge fund manager, and major Harvard donor

@BillAckman

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 first became concerned about @Harvard

when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel ‘solely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.

How could this be? I wondered.

When I saw President Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly, thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students.

A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge.

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.

Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.

I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.

Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”

Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist.

As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.

In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one.

After the death of George Floyd, the already burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little pushback? The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question which challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label which could severely impact one’s employment, social status, reputation and more. Being called a racist got people cancelled, so those concerned about DEI and its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in this new climate of fear.

The techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, “justice” will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, cancelled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk.

The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech. “Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly-acquired world views. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and cancelled.

These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression.

When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values. Our country since its founding has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society.

The E for “equity” in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.

DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out). Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism. While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country.

You can say things about white people today in universities, in business or otherwise, that if you switched the word ‘white’ to ‘black,’ the consequences to you would be costly and severe.

To state what should otherwise be self-evident, whether or not a statement is racist should not depend upon whether the target of the racism is a group who currently represents a majority or minority of the country or those who have a lighter or darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible as it is against groups with darker skin colors.

Martin Luther King’s most famous words are instructive:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

But here we are in 2024, being asked and in some cases required to use skin color to effect outcomes in admissions (recently deemed illegal by the Supreme Court), in business (likely illegal yet it happens nonetheless) and in government (also I believe in most cases to be illegal, except apparently in government contracting), rather than the content of one’s character. As such, a meritocracy is an anathema to the DEI movement. DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed.

And DEI’s definition of oppressed is fundamentally flawed.

I have always believed that the most fortunate should help the least fortunate, and that our system should be designed in such a way as to maximize the size of the overall pie so that it will enable us to provide an economic system which can offer quality of life, education, housing, and healthcare for all.

America is a rich country and we have made massive progress over the decades toward achieving this goal, but we obviously have much more work to do. Steps taken on the path to socialism – another word for an equality of outcome system – will reverse this progress and ultimately impoverish us all. We have seen this movie many times.

Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged. While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history – a fact which is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors – it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people generations after the abolishment of slavery should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists.

An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less. A system where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the un-advantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups.

The country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness. Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism. And it is the lack of equity, i.e, fairness, in how DEI operates, that contributes to this resentment.

I was accused of being a racist from the President of the NAACP among others when I posted on @X

that I had learned that the Harvard President search process excluded candidates that did not meet the DEI criteria. I didn’t say that former President Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said that I had heard that the search process by its design excluded a large percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations. My statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth about the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring.

When former President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community. Every minority community likes to see their representatives recognized in important leadership positions, and it is therefore an important moment for celebration. I too celebrated this achievement. I am inspired and moved by others’ success, and I thought of Gay’s hiring at the pinnacle leadership position at perhaps our most important and iconic university as an important and significant milestone for the black community.

I have spent the majority of my life advocating on behalf of and supporting members of disadvantaged communities including by investing several hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic assets to help communities in need with economic development, sensible criminal justice reform, poverty reduction, healthcare, education, workforce housing, charter schools, and more.

I have done the same at Pershing Square Capital Management when, for example, we completed one of the largest IPOs ever with the substantive assistance of a number of minority-owned, women-owned, and Veteran-owned investment banks. Prior to the Pershing Square Tontine, Ltd. IPO, it was standard practice for big corporations occasionally to name a few minority-owned banks in their equity and bond offerings, have these banks do no work and sell only a de minimis amount of stock or bonds, and allocate to them only 1% or less of the underwriting fees so that the issuers could virtue signal that they were helping minority communities.

In our IPO, we invited the smaller banks into the deal from the beginning of the process so they could add real value. As a result, the Tontine IPO was one of the largest and most successful IPOs in history with $12 billion of demand for a $4 billion deal by the second day of the IPO, when we closed the books. The small banks earned their 20% share of the fees for delivering real and substantive value and for selling their share of the stock.

Compare this approach to the traditional one where the small banks do effectively nothing to earn their fees – they aren’t given that opportunity – yet, they get a cut of the deal, albeit a tiny one. The traditional approach does not create value for anyone. It only creates resentment, and an uncomfortable feeling from the small banks who get a tiny piece of the deal in a particularly bad form of affirmative action.

While I don’t think our approach to working with the smaller banks has yet achieved the significant traction it deserves, it will hopefully happen eventually as the smaller banks build their competencies and continue to earn their fees, and other issuers see the merit of this approach. We are going to need assistance with a large IPO soon so we are looking forward to working with our favored smaller banks.

I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand. I signed the Giving Pledge for this reason. My life plan by the time I was 18 was to be successful and then return the favor to those less fortunate. This always seemed to the right thing to do, in particular, for someone as fortunate as I am.

All of the above said, it is one thing to give disadvantaged people the opportunities and resources so that they can help themselves. It is another to select a candidate for admission or for a leadership role when they are not qualified to serve in that role.

This appears to have been the case with former President Gay’s selection. She did not possess the leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting aside any questions about her academic credentials. This became apparent shortly after October 7th, but there were many signs before then when she was Dean of the faculty.

The result was a disaster for Harvard and for Claudine Gay.

The Harvard board should not have run a search process which had a predetermined objective of only hiring a DEI-approved candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay?

One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of the DEI ideology into the Corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate. The search was also done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the increased competition for talent.

Unrelated to the DEI issue, as a side note, I would suggest that universities should broaden their searches to include capable business people for the role of president, as a university president requires more business skills than can be gleaned from even the most successful academic career with its hundreds of peer reviewed papers and many books. Universities have a Dean of the Faculty and a bureaucracy to oversee the faculty and academic environment of the university. It therefore does not make sense that the university president has to come through the ranks of academia, with a skill set unprepared for university management.

The president’s job – managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50 billion endowment, raising money, managing expenses, capital allocation, real estate acquisition, disposition, and construction, and reputation management – are responsibilities that few career academics are capable of executing. Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business executives would also create more opportunities for diverse talent for the office of the university president.

Furthermore, Harvard is a massive business that has been mismanaged for a long time. The cost structure of the University is out of control due in large part to the fact that the administration has grown without bounds. Revenues are below what they should be because the endowment has generated a 4.5% annualized return for the last decade in one of the greatest bull markets in history, and that low return is not due to the endowment taking lower risks as the substantial majority of its assets are invested in illiquid and other high-risk assets.

The price of the product, a Harvard education, has risen at a rate well in excess of inflation for decades, (I believe it has grown about 7-8% per annum) and it is now about $320,000 for four years of a liberal arts education at Harvard College. As a result, the only students who can now afford Harvard come from rich families and poor ones. The middle class can’t get enough financial aid other than by borrowing a lot of money, and it is hard to make the economics work in life after college when you graduate with large loan balances, particularly if you also attend graduate school.

The best companies in the world grow at high rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a de minimis rate. Since I graduated 35 years ago, the number of students in the Harvard class has grown by less than 20%. What other successful business do you know that has grown the number of customers it serves by less than 20% in 35 years, and where nearly all revenue growth has come from raising prices?

In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president. That said, the selection of Harvard’s next president is a critically important task, and the individuals principally responsible for that decision do not have a good track record for doing so based on their recent history, nor have they done a good job managing the other problems which I have identified above.

The Corporation board led by Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the University since 2015 when she became dean of the Social Studies department.

The Board failed to create a discrimination-free environment on campus exposing the University to tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss of Federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for all students.

And when concerns were raised about plagiarism in Gay’s research, the Board said these claims were “demonstrably false” and it threatened the NY Post with “immense” liability if it published a story raising these issues.

It was only after getting the story cancelled that the Board secretly launched a cursory, short-form investigation outside of the proper process for evaluating a member of the faculty’s potential plagiarism. When the Board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism as “unintentional” and invented new euphemisms, i.e., “duplicative language” to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and credibility.

The Board’s three-person panel of “political scientist experts” that to this day remain unnamed who evaluated Gay’s work failed to identify many examples of her plagiarism, leading to even greater reputational damage to the University and its reputation for academic integrity as the whistleblower and the media continued to identify additional problems with Gay’s work in the days and weeks thereafter.

According to the NY Post, the Board also apparently sought to identify the whistleblower and seek retribution against him or her in contravention to the University’s whistleblower protection policies.

Despite all of the above, the Board “unanimously” gave its full support for Gay during this nearly four-month crisis, until eventually being forced to accept her resignation earlier today, a grave and continuing reputational disaster to Harvard and to the Board.

In a normal corporate context with the above set of facts, the full board would resign immediately to be replaced by a group nominated by shareholders. In the case of Harvard, however, the Board nominates itself and its new members. There is no shareholder vote mechanism to replace them.

So what should happen?

The Corporation Board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats.

The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done. Then new Corporation board members should be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the board.

The Board should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI. The new board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be comprised of the most impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically diverse members of our country and globe. We have plenty of remarkable people to choose from, and the job of being a director just got much more interesting and important. It is no longer, nor should it ever have been, an honorary and highly political sinecure.

The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who it does and does not represent. Taking down portions of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy.

Why would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when an alum questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing something fundamentally wrong or indefensible?

Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment which welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus.

Harvard should become an environment where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views and being themselves. In the business world, we call this creating a great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership and the right tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a massive administrative bureaucracy.

These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done.

A number of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new constitution which can be found at http://pennforward.com , which has been signed by more than 1,200 faculty from Penn, Harvard, and other universities. Harvard would do well to adopt Penn’s proposed new constitution or a similar one before seeking to hire its next president.

A condition of employment of the new Harvard president should be the requirement that the new president agrees to strictly abide by the new constitution. He or she should take an oath to that effect.

Today was an important step forward for the University. It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves.

We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it.

https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1742441534627184760

Five ways colleges could course correct in 2024

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 16:29:02 GMT

End grade inflation, obey the law, freeze hiring of critical studies professors, and more

Maggie Kelly - Assistant Editor

January 2, 2024

American colleges and universities are among the world’s richest and most powerful institutions. They can afford to do what they want, even if it violates common sense, standards of excellence, or even sometimes the law.

But legislators, donors, and alumni can still make a difference, and students and their families can vote with their wallets and feet — they could support schools that have made common-sense reforms toward restoring their status as centers of learning and scholarship.

Here are five improvements higher education institutions should make in 2024:

Put a freeze on hiring critical ‘studies’ professors

Race, class and gender are important but often reductive ways of understanding the world. Academia’s emphasis on politicized views of these topics isn’t doing much good for their students or the general public.

More than 400 colleges in the United States offer a major in ethnic, cultural minority, gender, or group studies, according to U.S. News and World Report.

According to a 2017 academic journal article by Boston University religion Professor Anthony Petro, the identity politics of the 1960s and later “informed” the new “studies” departments like “ethnic studies” and “gender studies.”

This prompted a boom in hiring professors devoted to those topics, as John Ellis, professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, wrote in his 2020 book, “The Breakdown of Higher Education.”

Due to these departments’ roots in political activism, their students are encouraged to think of race, class, gender and related topics in political terms as a clash between the oppressors and the oppressed.

For example, ethnic and Middle Eastern studies departments taught students to think of Israel as a colonial oppressor, Steven Hayward wrote in October in The New York Post.

The academic institutionalization of identity politics is linked to its tendency to see sexism and racism everywhere. On Dec. 26, The College Fix collected 72 things higher ed declared racist in 2023, and there were no doubt many more.

Ellis wrote that identity politics has a “habitual focus on grievance rather than knowledge.”

Schools should hire scholars, not activists.

Stop preaching on public affairs

Universities are not churches; they do not need to pontificate on affairs that don’t directly concern them.

Colleges faced widespread criticism for their initial non-response to the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, and rightly so. Yet they wouldn’t be hypocrites if they hadn’t issued so many self-righteous pronouncements on topics such as Donald Trump’s election or Black Lives Matter .

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression wrote , “When colleges adopt official institutional positions on issues outside their mission, they risk establishing a campus orthodoxy that chills speech and undermines the knowledge-generating process.”

Universities should follow the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven committee report on the university’s role in politics, which states that “the university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”

Princeton political science Professor Greg Conti wrote correctly Dec. 28 in Compact that “university leaders must recognize that an organization that pontificates about everything can be trusted about nothing.”

Give students the grades they deserve

Nearly 80 percent of grades given at Yale University in 2022-23 were an A or an A-, according to a faculty report publicized Nov. 30 in the Yale Daily News.

Yale is not unique. The Harvard Crimson reported in 2023 that most universities have inflated grades since the 1980s, according to retired Duke Professor Stuart Rojstaczer’s research at gradeinflation.com .

Ending grade inflation would require students to spend more time studying and less on uninformed activism. It also might require faculty to focus more on scholarship and less on politics.

It would also produce graduates more prepared for the demands of the workplace and the rest of adult life.

Giving students grades they deserve requires teaching them serious content. Colleges must return to basic subjects like English composition, science, math, and American history in their introductory and required courses. They should teach these classes as comprehensively as possible with minimal bias.

A good start would be mandating a course for college students on American institutions and ideals and requiring students to pass a civics literacy test as a graduation requirement, as recommended by a policy report from the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Colleges can make students pass the test required to become a citizen of the United States.

Setting high standards would also require colleges to uphold integrity throughout their institutions and especially at its highest levels, which Harvard for one has failed to do in the case of President Claudine Gay, now under fire for dozens of instances of plagiarism.

Talk less about diversity and more about excellence

Ellis wrote, “If you were to examine any speech made by a university president fifty years ago, you would find that the word ‘excellence’ occurs with great frequency.”

“If you made the same examination now, you’d find that ‘diversity’ had taken its place,” he wrote.

In the past several decades, administrative offices focused on “diversity, equity and inclusion” have proliferated, as The Fix has extensively documented. For example, in 2023, Oklahoma public universities were scrutinized for spending $83.4 million on DEI, The Fix reported .

In her 2018 book “The Diversity Delusion,” Heather Mac Donald lists all the diversity offices on the University of San Diego campus alone; the list takes up half a page.

However, excellence is the proper goal of the university. No other institutions have the same power to educate young adults without strong pressure to serve a cause or meet a bottom line. Higher education should cherish this opportunity, not exchange it for dubious political objectives.

Maintain order and obey the law

Colleges say they want to help students from difficult backgrounds, whose families may have sacrificed most for their education. Those students, as well as others, deserve to learn without frequent distractions by protesters and riots. They need a study space, not a battlefield.

Students have the right to protest in public forums, but colleges have the prerogative to prevent trespassing and enforce decorum rules for spaces like libraries and dorms.

The Fix reported in November that eight Harvard undergraduates face university-enforced consequences for occupying a campus building during a pro-Palestinian protest – even after a top administrator gave them Twizzlers and burritos while they camped inside. Disciplinary measures like these are a good start.

Universities also must follow this year’s Supreme Court rulings banning affirmative action, not least because violating the law destroys credibility.

In October, The Fix reported that Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine explored ways to “work around the [Supreme Court] ruling on affirmative action” while creating a scholarship program, according to public records documents obtained by anti-woke medical nonprofit Do No Harm.

Even more, universities in Florida and Texas must obey laws passed in 2023 to rein in DEI on public campuses and enact post-tenure review.

Universities’ wealth and power should not put them above the law.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/five-ways-colleges-could-course-correct-in-2024/

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The DEI Rollback of 2023

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 16:33:38 GMT

States start to limit programs that sow racial and political division.

The Wall Street Journal

Editorial Board

December 26, 2023

The diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy on campus has proliferated in recent years, but there are signs it’s finally meeting resistance. The latest good news is from Wisconsin, where public universities will pare back some DEI programs and freeze them going forward.

Under a deal shaped by Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, the state approved $800 million in pay raises for university staff and for plans to build a new engineering building at the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison. In exchange, the university will freeze all DEI hiring, eliminate a third of DEI positions on campus, and create an endowed chair to teach “conservative political thought, classical economic theory or classical liberalism” at UW Madison. At least now there will be one conservative.

That’s a step forward at a school that has as many DEI staffers as history professors, according to Jay Greene at the Heritage Foundation. The DEI infrastructure is entrenched, but after an initial negative vote and negotiations, the UW Board of Regents approved the deal 11-6.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers called the deal “obnoxious” and “B.S.,” according to WISN-TV. But lawmakers have an obligation to taxpayers not to fund policies that practice racial favoritism or promote hostility to equal opportunity.

Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt recently signed an executive order to stop funding many of the DEI programs in that state’s government. The order instructs universities to “review” DEI positions and programs and “restructure” or “eliminate” those not necessary for compliance or accreditation. The order specifies that executive state agencies cannot use state “funds, property or resources” for programs that “grant preferential treatment based on one person’s particular race.”

The order also prohibits the use of state money for DEI mandates or loyalty oaths that discriminate on the basis of racial identity or ideological viewpoint. Those litmus tests have been used to toxic effect in hiring at universities as well as state agencies. But the order protects “the academic freedom of any particular faculty member to direct the instruction within his or her own course.” So no censorship complaints, please.

The ideology of DEI was sold in the name of opportunity for all, but in practice it has become a cudgel for political conformity and racial grievance. It feeds the progressive narrative on campus that America is a land of oppressor and oppressed, as the explosion of antisemitism on campus has illustrated. Let’s hope more state legislatures follow the lead of Wisconsin and Oklahoma.

T he DEI Rollback of 2023 - WSJ

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How to Really Fix American Higher Education

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 18:19:06 GMT

Our universities must return to their original purpose: to seek the truth and give youths the knowledge they need to flourish. Here are four ways to do that.

By Bari Weiss

The Free Press

December 11, 2023

On Saturday, less than a week after the most sordid congressional testimony in recent memory, University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and chairman of the board of trustees Scott Bok resigned. Already, many are making the case that their resignations aren’t a moment of victory, but rather another sorry example of cancellation.

That’s the debate some editors at The Free Press are having right now in Slack.

Our own Peter Savodnik believes that Magill’s resignation is lamentable: “Her resignation is a blow to academic freedom. It amounts to little more than a cave—yet another prominent American institution succumbing to the angry mob.” For Jewish students, he argues, “it will make it worse by making an already illiberal academic environment even more illiberal.” (Read Peter’s essay here.)

I agree with Peter that being a good steward of the university’s brand and mission—and furthering that brand and mission through fundraising—is the main job of a university president. But Magill didn’t lose her job because she was canceled; she lost her job because she revealed in front of the country that she was not up to the task. She embarrassed Penn. And in the process of that hearing she exposed the grotesque hypocrisy not just at her university, but inside modern American higher education.

A quick thought experiment: imagine if large numbers of students and professors had marched through the campus of Penn over the past two months saying that all black people should go back to Africa and whoever remains should be subjected to genocide. Should the president of Penn defend those people merely as exercising their rights to free speech?

I think that it would be monstrous to do so.

It doesn’t mean that students wouldn’t have the legal right to scream for a violent uprising against Jews or anyone else. Indeed, as the good lawyers at white-shoe law firm WilmerHale clearly pointed out to Magill and the other presidents who appeared before Congress, legally, of course they do. But the job of a university president is not merely to highlight basic constitutional rights. It’s also to form and lead a community with a singular aim: the pursuit of truth.

My main point here is that Magill’s resignation, by itself, doesn’t solve anything. But it—along with the turmoil at Harvard—marks an important moment. Now everyone can see how deeply academia is broken. And you can’t fix something until you look, carefully and realistically, at the thing itself.

Today we are publishing two pieces that go a long way toward doing so.

The first, a searing essay by Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner , argues that “all parents in the world who want to see their children grow up in a free society marked by tolerance and humanity should recommend their children not study at these places of shame.”

The second, by historian Niall Ferguson , looks back at how Germany’s universities became the handmaidens to Hitler. “Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill morality,” he writes, “has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich.”

These are both must-read pieces.

When you read those essays you will wonder: What can be done? How can we fix this enormous problem?

My view is that, above all else, we must focus on returning American higher education to its original purposes: to seek the truth; to teach young adults the things they need to flourish; and to pass on the knowledge that is the basis of our exceptional civilization.

To do that, four things must be done.

End DEI

The right response to pervasive antisemitism on campus isn’t to assign Jews protected status alongside other minorities—or to limit anti-Jewish speech beyond what current law already prohibits.

The solution to present discrimination isn’t more discrimination. And it is certainly not for the Jews who have been discriminated against inside the current DEI regime to beg for better placement inside its corrupt hierarchy.

I repeat—because it bears repeating—attempts to expand the DEI bureaucracy to encompass Jews are bound to fail because Jewish identity undermines the whole woke progressive framework . Is Judaism a race? If so, what color, since that’s of course very important? Or is it a religion? Or an ethnicity? Or a culture?

Jews are, by their very existence, an affront to this crude ideology.

So the only meaningful response starts with dismantling the DEI regime that has enforced an illiberal (and antisemitic) worldview at nearly every American university. That means stopping the hiring of DEI administrators and reallocating the budgets of DEI offices. It means banning the loyalty oaths professors must pledge to earn a job or tenure. It means dismantling the entire DEI bureaucracy, as some states have started doing.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are important virtues. But the DEI bureaucracy is none of those things. For more on this, please read my essay, “ End DEI .”

End Double Standards on Speech

As Maya Sulkin powerfully explained for The Free Press late last week, there is a glaring double standard when it comes to speech on campus.

In 2021, MIT canceled a major lecture about climate change by scientist Dorian Abbot because a group of graduate students disagreed with his belief that hiring should be based on a person’s merit rather than their identity. That was too far for MIT. But chants of “long live the Intifada”? Kosher.

At Harvard just last year, students were told in a mandatory training session that using the wrong pronouns for a person constitutes “abuse” and that “any words used to lower a person’s self-worth” are “verbal abuse.” More: “sizeism and fatphobia,” students were told, are attitudes that “contribute to an environment that perpetuates violence.” Take a bet on whether the school has said similar things about openly antisemitic speech.

The point is that university administrators selectively and unevenly enforce codes of conduct depending entirely on the viewpoint being expressed and the identity of the person expressing it. It’s a nasty business and the congressional testimony the other day went a long way toward exposing it. We shouldn’t stop there.

Hire Professors Committed to the Pursuit of Truth (and Allergic to Illiberal Ideologies)

To return academia to its mission, professors themselves must be committed to the pursuit of truth. Specifically, universities should hire without prejudice toward political affiliation. It’s not incidental that only 1.46 percent of Harvard’s faculty identifies as “conservative,” while 82.46 percent of faculty describes themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal.”

In 2014, NYU professor Jonathan Haidt co-authored an extraordinary study which found that decreasing political diversity in the field of psychology led to less reliable research. In other words, more political viewpoint diversity means better truth-seeking even in seemingly apolitical fields.

The reality today is that many professors use their platform to preach illiberal dogma rather than to instruct on the actual subject matter of their discipline. As friend of The Free Press Caitlin Flanagan said a couple years back: “Another good cause that schools might take up is the teaching of reading and math.” Exactly right.

Eliminate the Ideology That Replaced Truth as Higher Education’s North Star

What is that ideology? And how did it come to supplant truth—the very mission of higher education? Don’t ask me. Ask current Harvard president Claudine Gay, who laid out her vision for institutional transformation , now on full display, when she was dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

In a memo to faculty on August 20, 2020, she wrote: “The calls for racial justice heard on our streets also echo on our campus, as we reckon with our individual and institutional shortcomings and with our Faculty’s shared responsibility to bring truth to bear on the pernicious effects of structural inequality.” Gay continued: “This moment offers a profound opportunity for institutional change that should not and cannot be squandered.” More: “I write today to share my personal commitment to this transformational project and the first steps the FAS will take to advance this important agenda in the coming year.”

It’s really worth reading the whole thing to understand how things like the pursuit of “antiracism” and the study of “indigeneity” and “migration” and other fringe topics became core to Harvard’s mission. If you wonder how it is that Harvard gave 79% of students As (at least as of 2021) consider that grades at such institutions are no longer a measure of excellence or learning, but a measure of political adherence.

The point here is that even if Claudine Gay follows Liz Magill’s lead and resigns, it won’t make a difference if the person who replaces her upholds the same ideology so powerfully captured in Gay’s own memo.

Fixing what’s broken is one solution. The other solution is to build new things .

Two years ago, Pano Kanelos, then president of St. John’s College, picked up and moved his family to Austin to build a new university. He announced the audacious project in our pages:

“At some future point, historians will study how we arrived at this tragic pass. And perhaps by then we will have reformed our colleges and universities, restoring them as bastions of open inquiry and civil discourse,” Kanelos wrote. “But we are done waiting. We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves. And so we are building anew.”

Last week I toured UATX’s building in downtown Austin. From an idea to breaking ground in under two years. That is what a small group of very determined people can do.

In 2024, the school will welcome its first class of undergraduates. Some of the most impressive young people I know are applying . More than 6,000 academics have inquired about jobs.

So there is some light in these dark days. Let those astonishing congressional testimonies be an opportunity not for bemoaning what’s been lost, but for resolute commitment to fixing what’s broken and building anew.

Student Spotlight: Emily Brestle '27

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 15:48:58 GMT

Student Spotlight

Growing up in a suburb of Seattle, Emily has been accustomed to listening to a number of differing political opinions, which has laid the foundation for her robust support of free speech and civil discourse. As Emily puts it, “I am passionate about free speech because I grew up in an area where most people’s political beliefs differed from mine. It is important to me that everyone respects each other’s opinions even if they go against the accepted norm.”

Given her passionate support of discussion and debate, it is no surprise that she has found a deep appreciation for the Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse. “I am thankful that DFTD helps fund a variety of different speakers on campus. It is important to listen to people who do not share the same beliefs as you to help broaden your perspectives. They are very supportive of the Free Speech Alliance and just want to help students feel like they have a place where they can share their opinions without fear of judgment,” she said. Emily dreams of a society where all viewpoints are equally respected, regardless of political affiliation.

Emily's infectious enthusiasm for open dialogue and civil discourse makes her a driving force for positive change on campus, at home, and everywhere she goes.

A Free-Speech Fix for Our Divided Campuses

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 19:09:46 GMT

Clashes over the Israel-Hamas war show that, for the sake of American democracy, college students need to be taught how to disagree without fear or hatred.

By Suzanne Nossel

The Wall Street Journal

November 17, 2023

The Israel-Hamas war has created a crisis of protest and confrontation on American campuses. At Cooper Union in New York, pro-Palestinian student demonstrators pounded on the door of a library as fearful Jewish classmates sheltered inside. A Cornell undergraduate used a campus website to post threats to attack the school’s center for Jewish life. At Harvard, students who signed letters blaming Israel for Hamas’s attack saw their names emblazoned on a truck in Harvard Square and posted on websites in an effort to hurt their chances with potential employers. Both Brandeis and Columbia have taken steps to penalize pro-Palestinian student groups for activity they argue violates university policies, prompting charges that they are selectively suppressing activism.

As the conflict continues in the Middle East, college students are alternately emboldened and alarmed, faculty are at loggerheads, donors are irate, and college presidents are embattled. But the crisis presents an opportunity. Amid the turmoil, there is a chance to ask how our campuses reached this point and, more important, what they can do to become places where differences of background and viewpoint serve as catalysts for understanding and growth rather than for tribalism and conflict.

The American university has been the envy of the world not just because of its excellence in research and scholarship but as an incubator of democratic citizenship—a place where students learn to live with peers from vastly different settings, to forge friendships and professional networks that transcend social, economic and ideological divides, and to open their minds to new ideas and disciplines.

Grappling with the current crisis on campus demands more than open letters to alumni or action plans to combat antisemitism or Islamophobia. It requires a comprehensive rethinking of how American universities can fulfill their role as a free market of ideas and a factory of pluralism, teaching students the values and skills they need to resist polarization and ensure the survival of our teetering democracy.

Genuine pluralism is a relative latecomer to American universities. For most of their history, they were organized and operated as they were originally founded, as training grounds for generations of elite, white men. Women and Blacks were often kept out entirely, Jews subject to quotas. Discriminatory laws and practices and high tuition long conspired to exclude racial and ethnic minorities and the poor. Since the 1960s, thanks to civil-rights laws, affirmative action, financial aid and other policies, the gates gradually opened, producing student bodies that are much more racially, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse.

Universities adapted to this new student population by hiring more diverse faculty, broadening curricular offerings and creating academic programs and social centers that give Jewish, Black, Asian-American, Latino, international and other students a home on campus and the opportunity to celebrate and build on their identities. They created diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices, focused on sensitizing campuses to differences, supporting minorities and dealing with incidents of bias.

But new barriers have emerged that keep students from having meaningful encounters with people unlike themselves. Some of this is accidental. More stringent rules about drinking alcohol have pushed social activities out of the dorms and to off-campus venues. One result is that groups based on racial, ethnic and gender identity, on sports teams or on other niche interests have become more central to student life, often at the expense of more broadly inclusive gatherings.

As campuses have become more heterogeneous, many students also have chosen to sort themselves more assertively into cohorts based on wealth, social status and educational background. At Harvard, elite clubs that once catered to a small fraction of well-heeled male students now serve a more diverse but no less privileged group of students, intensifying the social hierarchies of campus life. Yale has seen the rise of fraternities and sororities, and the Yale Political Union, a student group long famous for wide-ranging debates, has fragmented to the point where much of the debating occurs within rather than between the different parties.

At the same time, certain conceptions of diversity and equity have hardened into orthodoxy. Students who question the ideas of identity groups or the aims of social-justice movements can be stigmatized, and debates over topics like abortion, immigration and affirmative action may be effectively shut down because students fear offending someone or being publicly accused of racism or bias. A team at Stanford University was ridiculed earlier this year for promulgating a list of terms, like “chief” and “manpower,” that it considered potentially harmful because they might reinforce stereotypes.

Like trigger warnings, the withdrawal of invitations for controversial speakers, and calls to discipline faculty for what they say on social media, Stanford’s list of verboten terms was based on the misconception that accommodating diversity requires restrictions on potentially offensive speech. Such strictures, in turn, fuel the grievances of students and faculty who believe that political correctness muzzles the full range of viewpoints necessary for open debate. The result has been a counterproductive cycle, in which the more a campus embraces diversity, the more Balkanized it may become.

While these challenges are not new to university leaders, the current crisis offers an opening to break the cycle. Assembling diverse student bodies is necessary but not sufficient when it comes to cultivating an interconnected citizenry. To help repair our ruptured society, universities require a new vision of how to encourage students to know and respect one another, to neither tiptoe around their differences nor use them to bigfoot or sidestep others. Campuses need to foster encounters among diverse students that do not simply underscore their differences but generate empathy—an essential bond for a pluralistic society.

A crucial element in this effort has to be educating students, faculty and staff in the principles of free speech and academic freedom. These precepts are enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution, and they have been adopted as policies by virtually every major private university. But on campus they largely receive lip service, not sustained instruction. A survey this fall revealed that two-thirds of college students believe it is sometimes acceptable to shout down a controversial campus speaker and that a quarter think it is sometimes OK to use violence to stop someone from speaking on campus.

Basic education on sexual harassment, assault and consent is now universal on college campuses, partly to protect the university from legal liability. So is education about academic offenses like plagiarism. The fundamentals of free speech demand no less attention, not just to avoid damaging controversies and lawsuits but to safeguard the university’s basic mission.

Students and faculty alike need to understand what kinds of speech are and are not protected and why. But more than that, they need to see that free speech is most valuable not as a weapon to wield against ideological opponents but as a tool in the search for common truths. Among top universities, the University of Chicago has taken a lead on these issues, making free-speech awareness a key part of orientation programs for undergraduates and law students and recently launching a new campus center to reinforce those efforts.

But free-speech education must not end there. Today’s students have come of age in the era of social media, where speech too often consists of short, angry ideological salvos. The speech promoted by engagement-driven algorithms is long on outrage and virtue-signaling, short on nuance, balance and basic politeness. It teaches young people a discourse of absolutes—the antithesis of the pluralistic give-and-take that our society so desperately needs.

Universities must provide an alternative. During the short years that students share meals, dorm life and classes with those unlike themselves, they need to be taught how to use the power of speech, how to listen and how to grasp and hold the complexities of a pluralistic society. They need to be prompted to use words conscientiously, in ways that won’t inadvertently cause offense or shut down conversation.

Universities also need to reinforce the idea that hateful speech, though protected by the First Amendment, is still contemptible and thwarts reasoned discourse. Classroom discussions should probe how intent and context shape the meaning of speech and how the same speech can land very differently depending on the listener.

Rather than shying away from uncomfortable subjects, professors should encourage students to hear out ideas that may be upsetting and learn how to regulate their own feelings and reactions. Written assignments should give students practice in using measured, persuasive terms to voice controversial ideas and challenge orthodoxies. Faculty advisers should help student organizations to plan and practice protests in ways that may be boisterous but do not impinge on the speech rights of others.

Students also need to learn more about one another outside the classroom—the experiences, ideologies, traditions, traumas and histories of those with backgrounds unlike their own. Historically, this side of college education has happened at campus cultural events, meals in the dining hall and late-night gab sessions in dorm rooms, but universities should not just assume that such encounters are occurring. They need to take an active role in creating lively, engaging spaces where students can cross boundaries, open up, tell their stories and be heard.

Turning universities into thriving free-speech communities is not a matter of a one-time freshman orientation or, worse, click-thru online training. What is required is a whole-of-university approach, supported by donors and alumni. Presidents and provosts, student affairs offices, residential staff, faculty, administrators and even facilities and security personnel need to understand and embrace the norms and habits of democratic discourse. They need tools and techniques to help guide students toward more constructive, elucidating exchanges.

They also need to demonstrate the behaviors they seek to inculcate by ensuring that heterodox views are represented in academic departments, hosting debates between speakers who sharply disagree and facilitating meetings where contentious subjects are discussed. In recent days, some campuses and scholars have modeled this approach. The Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies departments at Dartmouth hosted joint events about the Israel-Hamas war, and the deans of the policy schools at Columbia and Princeton—one of them Israeli, the other Palestinian—wrote an essay together on how to keep dialogue going.

Such practices are important, but they only go so far. Students need to be invested in the very idea of living peaceably with others in a diverse society. They need to understand that their lives will be richer, more rewarding and more successful if they can form relationships with those unlike themselves and work together to bridge differences.

Anyone in the American workforce recognizes that the ability to work effectively with those from different backgrounds is a core skill in today’s economy. When selective colleges are assembling their incoming classes, they should seek out students with a track record of reaching across boundaries and an avowed readiness to do so on campus. Admissions essays and interview questions should test whether students evince open-mindedness and the capacity to persuade others and to be persuaded in turn. Universities should incentivize and reward unlikely collaborations among students and faculty willing to cross divides. They should find ways to foster a social life that does not depend solely on identity affiliations or membership in exclusive clubs.

It is not beyond hope that, if sound leadership can emerge and persevere, the devastation of the present moment on American campuses may usher in a new era of reconciliation. U.S. higher education has faced serious challenges before, but none is more important just now than creating a campus culture that can help to knit together our diverse and sharply divided society.

A Free-Speech Fix for Our Divided Campuses - WSJ

America’s Universities Need Serious Regulation

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 18:20:51 GMT

If you want real change in large organizations, focus on governance and personal accountability.

By Arthur Levitt

The Wall Street Journal

November 12, 2023

Americans who are rightfully appalled by the pusillanimous response to anti-Semitism on college campuses have been pulling their donations and calling for restrictions on anti-Israel student groups. Maybe those tactics will work. But in my experience, if you want real change in large and unwieldy organizations, you need to focus on fixing governance and assigning personal accountability. You need to regulate.

After the accounting scandals of the dot-com and Enron era, Congress passed laws requiring auditors to tighten their operations, establish clear boundaries between their consulting and audit businesses, and assume far more accountability than they had before.

Directors, too, were informed that they bore a personal interest in preventing fraud. One rule made it clear that if a company passed fraudulent numbers off to investors, the person who signed the filing—usually the chairman—would be personally liable.

Lawmakers have also tightened anti-money-laundering statutes, requiring banks to review their customers closely and to ensure they aren’t unwittingly providing services to organized crime, terror entities, tax evaders or other bad actors. The rules are difficult to enforce and require a lot of work. But they come with real penalties for failure: Bank officers can go to prison if they fail to prevent money laundering, and several have.

Think of the difference this makes. When Russia invaded Ukraine, America’s banks and other multinational corporations quickly had to implement sanctions—including anti-money-laundering rules—on Russia’s government, politicians, financial institutions, oligarchs and others who make up the country’s elite. This happened effectively because people had real skin in the game: their own.

Which brings us back to campus. Clearly, America’s universities are in need of similar encouragement.

Universities have lately seen a raft of scandals related to their fundamental mission of scholarship and teaching. Students are graduating unprepared for basic work and deeply in debt. Prominent scholars are found to be fudging their own research. Admissions officers and other officials are found to be engaging in pay-for-admission schemes. Athletic programs are regularly found breaking rules and laws. Universities have taken charitable gifts from questionable sources such as Jeffrey Epstein and Chinese military and Communist Party fronts.

Add the explosion of anti-Semitism. America’s campuses are the source of some of the vilest Jew-hatred America has seen since 1939, when the German American Bund held a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. Not only do some faculty and students call for Israel’s destruction; they celebrated Hamas’s brutal massacre as an act of “resistance.”

If public companies featured such systematic failures, they would be visited by regulators and called before Congress. Universities, by comparison, are lightly regulated. There are accrediting agencies, and the Education Department focuses on enforcement of civil-rights laws. In the case of professional education, some membership organizations set curricular standards.

But these don’t constitute regulation in a comprehensive sense. Universities can pretty much set their own rules, and they answer to no one. They face no meaningful external pressure to tell the truth or honor their promises to students and others. They don’t need to report or punish fraud or corruption. They don’t set consistent standards for contributions or spending.

None of this is acceptable. Not to students and parents. Not to alumni and donors. And not to taxpayers, who subsidize universities to the tune of $1 trillion a year. The public has a clear interest in how these institutions operate and deserve to know how they became hotbeds of anti-Semitism.

Imagine what a difference it would make if universities were subject to the same kind of regulatory oversight the Securities and Exchange Commission provides to public companies. Administrators would have to meet basic standards of truthfulness and governance or face stiff financial penalties and sanctions, including permanent bans from working in higher education. If criminal acts were discovered, the Justice Department would step in.

When I led the SEC, I often spoke about my duty to the investing public. I said every public corporation needs to be trusted, and all should treat their investors with respect. Someone who breaks that trust should pay the price—including with time in prison.

Given what we are seeing on college campuses, it is time to impose the same standard on universities, their managers and their directors and trustees. It may be the only way to save them.

America’s Universities Need Serious Regulation - WSJ

Student Spotlight: Yusuf Ahmed '25

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 18:16:55 GMT

Student Spotlight:

Your gift supports students like Yusuf

Yusuf's passion for fostering open dialogue is rooted in his commitment to making every student feel comfortable expressing their beliefs. As he puts it, “I am someone who rarely self-censors…however, I recognize that not many other students have this same mindset. I feel like a lot of times when I say something controversial in a classroom, I am not the only student who has that belief, but I’m one of the only students willing to voice it. I know that if I can help make other students feel comfortable voicing their opinions, it will make for a better, more comfortable class setting for many students, including myself.” Yusuf serves as the Vice President of the Davidson Free Speech Alliance and Secretary of the Muslim Students Association and uses these leadership positions to encourage his fellow students to speak more freely in hopes of creating a better, more inclusive learning environment.

The Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse (DFTD) have played a crucial role in supporting students like Yusuf who champion ideological diversity. Reflecting on the ways DFTD supports the FSA, Yusuf says, “I am extremely grateful knowing that there is a large alumni group behind us providing support in many ways. I'm grateful for their generous gifts that allow us to bring speakers like Dr. John Rose to campus. I'm also extremely grateful for their attendance at our events and hope to see even more members at our next event so that they can see firsthand the amazing things we have been able to do with their help.”

Your support for DFTD can empower students like Yusuf to promote free speech and ideological diversity on campus. Please consider making your gift today and help students like Yusuf continue to have an impact inside, and outside, the classroom.

Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse Input for Davidson College Strategic Plan

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 17:08:27 GMT

on October 5, 2023, President Doug Hicks communicated to all Davidson College alumni information on the Strategic Plan process for Davidson that is now underway. The following letter includes recommendations made by Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse and was sent to the Strategic Plan Committees on October 30, 2023. We are hopeful that such recommendations will be taken into consideration as the plan is created and enacted.

Dear Davidson College Strategic Planning Committee Members:

We hope this letter finds you well, and that your strategic planning work is off to a good start. We, the Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse (DFTD), would like to take you up on your invitation to provide feedback on the strategic planning process currently underway. For those who don’t know, DFTD is an independent, 501(c)(3) association of Davidson alumni not affiliated with Davidson College, which partners directly with students and faculty to support a learning environment at Davidson College that is ideologically balanced and promotes a lively and constructive freedom of debate and deliberation.

We believe that the current challenges regarding free expression facing institutions of higher learning nationally are also manifest at Davidson. This core issue ought to be addressed head on. Our beliefs are grounded in data from Davidson students reported by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which routinely surveys college students nationally. This data can be found on our website dftdunite.org. Our aim is to improve and enhance the state of free expression on campus and support ideological diversity at the same time. We believe that these aims are compatible with and supportive of the stronger, healthier Davidson College that you are called to seek.

Considerations that we hope each Committee will include in its deliberations follow.

Learning for the Future

“The primary purpose of Davidson College is to assist students in developing humane instincts and disciplined and creative minds for lives of leadership and service.” We fully embrace this purpose and believe it should continue to be the guiding principle for the college. From our perspective, there are many struggles right now that students face as they develop their talented minds for leadership . According to the most recent FIRE survey data, 2/3 of Davidson College students feel uncomfortable publicly disagreeing with a professor on a controversial political topic . Like all things in life, good leadership requires practice. If most students feel uncomfortable taking a lead in the classroom and challenging a position that they disagree with, it stands to reason that they will struggle to lead in the board room, the hospital, the courthouse, or government in the future.

We believe that students learn from the behavior that is modeled for them. If students don’t see faculty engaging in regular, healthy, civil debates, they will have trouble engaging in that behavior themselves. Thus, we call upon this sub-committee to focus on hiring faculty whose dissident scholarship challenges the present-day consensus on topical issues, and to find individuals who will bring perspectives to the classroom that do not align with the apparent current majority of faculty.

Within the context of generative artificial intelligence, we believe that this focus on hiring more heterodox faculty will allow the Davidson College community to both maximally leverage new technology such as AI, while simultaneously insulating the college better from its possible threats. Heterodox faculty allow for use of tools such as this that operate outside of the current methods of analysis employed by most faculty members. These fresh, new perspectives would be beneficial to Davidson College.

We believe Davidson would benefit from having a first-class center—such as Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and UNC-Chapel Hill’s Program for Public Discourse—to promote solid research and dispassionate discourse unbounded by ideological blinkers. Such a center would help achieve the goal we propose for a more heterodox faculty, and funding for it could almost certainly be obtained from donors who have ceased giving to Davidson, out of disenchantment with the direction the College has taken in recent years.

Discover Passions, Developing Purpose

We agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment that “graduates must build the capacities to think critically and creatively, to express themselves in written, verbal, analog and digital ways, to collaborate in diverse groups, and to continue learn ing throughout their lives and careers.” Given that focus on expression, we are troubled by FIRE’s most recent (2023) finding that over half of Davidson students are uncomfortable engaging in a conversation about any controversial topic with their peers in a common space on campus . We believe that this fear of engagement will have spillover effects on the ways that students express themselves in written, verbal, analog, and digital ways.

We encourage the college to focus efforts on engaging external speakers and alumni of all backgrounds who have modeled exemplary leadership in expression. By intentionally focusing on, and including, external speakers and alumni of all political affiliations, ideologies, and worldviews, we believe that Davidson College students will be encouraged to speak their minds with their peers, and thereby develop and discover their passion and purpose. Without such modeling from speakers and alumni, students may feel isolated, lonely, and unsupported.

This type of engagement work can also provide a material financial benefit to the college. Connecting and engaging distinguished alumni of all affiliations directly with students, and showcasing their good work and success, could likely lead to increased philanthropic support, which then in turn further supports and enhances the overall student experience.

Building Public Good

The charge of making the world a more “compassionate, sustainable, and just” place is indeed a tall order for any graduate of any institution. With that said, we believe Davidson College can and should continue its record of leadership for improving the world we all inhabit. We would encourage this Committee to consider ways that the college can foster and support contrarian thinkers, while cultivating new scholarship that will solve pressing issues.

According to the most recent FIRE survey, roughly 2/3 of Davidson College students are worried about damaging their reputation because someone misunderstood something they said. This type of fear is unlikely to lead to prodctive conversations that generate new knowledge and insights. We believe that the college should focus on developing a culture where civil debate and discourse is not only welcome but celebrated. The recent development of the Davidson College Commitment to Freedom of Expression Statement, affirmed this year by both the faculty and Board of Trustees, is a strong step towards such a culture. A challenge for this strategic planning committee, we believe, is to map out, concretely, how the ideals of the Statement can be inculcated in practice throughout campus life. We suggest emphasis in New Student Orientation on the Commitment to Freedom of Expression, development of a robust ideologically balanced external speakers program, and balanced debates by experts on controversial issues.

Human civilization has advanced to where it is today because of risk-taking. A student body unwilling to speak or take those risks will likely not generate the advances we all so desperately need. We participate in and encourage growing commitment to Davidson’s Deliberative Citizenship Initiative (DCI).

Engaging Davidson and Greater Charlotte

We agree that Davidson’s geography and proximity to Charlotte give it an incredible comparative advantage relative to peer institutions. We hope to see the college engage with all manner of businesses, non-profits, and government entities. Doing so not only provides new opportunities for students to learn, and work, but also presents new development opportunities for the college itself.

As the College engages with the community, and the world, we hope that it will be cautious about positioning the institution with one-sided official stances on hot-button issues of the day. We note that the 2021 survey of Davidson’s major donors by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that 66% of all donors believe that the College should not take public positions on controversial social and political issues in messaging to faculty, staff, and students.

Engaging in official influencing may potentially limit relationships with community partners, and possibly have a silencing effect on the student body and faculty. We believe that a policy of not advocating on issues that do not directly affect the institution itself (as opposed to students) would best serve the college. Commenting on political issues that affect only a subset of students could give the appearance of the institution playing favorites with some individuals over others. In this context, we believe the recent statement from President Hicks regarding the inflammatory violence in Jerusalem and Gaza was appropriately limited for now, with most of its emphasis devoted to the needs of Davidson students. His call for a subsequent open forum on problems of the region appears to anticipate providing a balance of speakers so that opposing views can be respectfully presented and heard.

Individual faculty and student groups should be free, of course, to take advocacy positions that do not speak for the College.

We appreciate and respect the time and work that each Committee is putting into the Strategic Plan endeavor. We have no doubt that writing the strategic planning document is a significant task. If you have any questions about what we’ve written or would like to engage in a direct conversation, please call on us. You have been commissioned with a unique and vital opportunity to shape the future of the College and its programs for the lasting benefit of its entire community. You go forward with our best wishes.

Thank you sincerely,

From the Board and Staff of Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse (DFTD)

Reviving the Spirit of Inquiry

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 16:42:13 GMT

From the 2023 Keynote Address at the MIT Free Speech Alliance Conference

Glenn Loury

Last month, I had the honor of delivering the keynote address at the MIT Free Speech Alliance’s first conference. I received my doctorate in economics from MIT back in the 1970s. At the time, it was probably the best economics department on the planet. An atmosphere of unfettered inquiry was key to MIT economics’ success in those days, just as it is key to the survival and thriving of any ambitious intellectual enterprise. There were no questions you couldn’t ask, and the legitimacy of your answers to those questions depended solely on their ability to withstand the scrutiny of your teachers and peers.

That is as it should be. But as we’ve seen, the spirit of free inquiry is now too often hampered by the censorious impulses of campus culture warriors in the student body, faculty, and administration. The search for knowledge about the world cannot proceed under that condition. When the people pursuing new ways of understanding the world must constantly worry that their legitimate research will uncover information that will get them canceled, the big questions don’t get asked.

This state of affairs cannot continue, and most people know it, even if they won’t say so. As I say in my address, our job is to call ‘em like we see ‘em. I encourage you to listen to that address, but I wanted to bring particular attention to the Q&A session that followed the speech. I think it’s a particularly rich example of the kind of exchanges that are possible when no one is looking over their shoulder and worrying that their good faith questions will land them in hot water. I think it’s still possible for the academy to move back toward that ideal, but we’re going to need more folks like the Free Speech Alliance to get it going.

What Conservatives Misunderstand About Radicalism at Universities

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 15:39:32 GMT

Elite schools are floundering in their attempts to navigate the Israel-Palestine conflict because they have passed the better part of a decade making themselves political.

By Tyler Austin Harper

The Atlantic

October 18, 2023

Since William f. Buckley published God and Man at Yale—a best-selling book that criticized the “collectivist” sympathies of professors at Buckley’s alma mater—in 1951, conservatives have argued that prestigious American universities are hotbeds of dangerous Marxist brainwashing. Whether espoused by Buckley in the ’50s or by conservative firebrands today, the assertion that elite universities are sites of far-left indoctrination is and has always been a fantasy. The most popular major at Harvard, Yale, and many other supposedly leftist universities is economics—not exactly the subject of choice for aspiring anti-capitalists. At the University of Pennsylvania, 50 percent of graduating students take jobs in finance or consulting . The figures at other Ivies aren’t much lower. If these institutions are trying to produce Marxists, they are failing spectacularly.

Yet conservatives are right when they say that the Ivory Tower is a breeding ground for ideological extremism. The politics on offer at elite universities are not leftist in any substantive sense—at least if by “leftist” you mean redistributive—but they are radical. We might call it “corporate radicalism”: a political sensibility that blends what the late writer Mark Fisher derisively referred to as “capitalist realism”—the conviction that free-market neoliberalism is broken but that there is no better alternative so we might as well embrace it—with performative social justice that is as loud as it is toothless. Although academia has always been a haven for leftists, freethinkers, and creatives as well as crackpots, there used to be a kind of separation of church and state: Universities were refuges for radicals, but they were not themselves radical. (Consider the tensions between faculty and administrations during the campus protest movements of the 1960s.)

In recent years, however, college presidents, deans, and HR professionals have cribbed the language of edgy politics, openly framing their institutions and initiatives as aspirationally “anti-racist” and “decolonial” enterprises while welcoming “scholar-activists” : professors who see their research, political militancy, and pedagogy as mutually constitutive. You can see the fruit of this shift in a number of faculty members’ responses to Hamas’s attack on Israel earlier this month. Zareena Grewal, an American-studies professor at Yale, tweeted, “Settlers are not civilians,” implying that massacred Israelis couldn’t be considered innocent. She also asserted that a young Israeli engineering student who had been kidnapped during a massacre at a rave shouldn’t count as a noncombatant because she was “an IDF soldier/Israeli police officer.” (Grewal has since locked her Twitter account.) Tenured and tenure-track professors at prestigious research institutions hastened to remind their Twitter followers that “decolonization is not a metaphor.” The posts—dated the same day as Hamas’s attack—quite plainly implied that decolonization necessarily entails terroristic violence.

The situation has proved to be a fiasco for elite colleges and universities, opening a new front in the ongoing culture war in higher education. The tension bursting into view right now—between a majority of scholars, for whom “decolonization” means putting fewer white Europeans on their syllabi , and a small minority who believe it entails anything-goes violent revolution—is the unwelcome and unsurprising result of universities wanting to cosplay rebellion while still churning out Wall Street–executive alumni who will one day pad endowments that are larger than Israel’s annual defense budget.

In short, elite universities are in a bind, floundering in their attempts to navigate the Israel-Palestine conflict, because they have passed the better part of a decade making themselves political. If college presidents had not spent the past few years issuing watery, say-nothing statements about every crisis in current affairs, they would not now be expected to register their opinion on the conflagration in the Middle East. If they had not slapped the words decolonization and anti-racism on so many campus initiatives, they would not now be implicated as ideological co-conspirators every time one of their faculty members labels a terrorist attack “decolonization,” or whenever an “anti-racist” research institute is hit with a major scandal. And above all, if they had not indulged the preposterous notion that unpopular or even offensive ideas are a form of “violence” that their students must be protected from, they would not now look so hypocritical when members of their campus community voice enthusiasm for actual violence. If universities had been more circumspect in the past, they could credibly say that they believe in academic freedom—regardless of whatever administrators themselves may think of the ideas that their students and faculty champion—and leave it at that.

Instead, deluded into believing that the Ivory Tower could be both a site of social justice and a factory for finance bros, elite universities bit the poison apple of politics. Enter corporate radicalism.

I often describe myself as a “soft Marxist.” I say that because my politics slouch toward reformist social democracy, not revolutionary overhaul. But I am nonetheless a Marxist, because I hold the traditionally Marxist view that the ideas that dominate at a given place and time tend not to be the ideas of the working classes—the humble majority—but rather of the elites. “The class which is the ruling material force of society,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels declared, “is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” Though the conservative accusation that prestigious universities are “culturally Marxist” is little more than a conspiracy theory, ironically, Marxism can help us understand the ideologies that prevail at these institutions.

From a Marxist perspective, there are only two possible explanations for the radical politics emerging out of Harvard and company: Either, against all odds, a genuinely revolutionary political project—decolonization, anti-racism, etc.—has been secreted out of the inner sanctum of the American elite to destabilize it from within, or these “radical” political ideologies are in fact little more than wallpaper serving the interests of the ruling class by morally laundering an education system that doles out advantages to the mediocre rich and then calls this process a “meritocracy.” Although miracles are certainly possible, history—and common sense—militates in favor of the latter.

This brings us back to that suddenly troublesome slogan—“decolonization is not a metaphor”—tweeted out by American academics only hours after Hamas militants gunned down men, women, and children in what we now know was the greatest loss of Jewish life on a single day since the Holocaust. That phrase is a reference to the title of a landmark work in decolonial theory, a celebrated 2012 article by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, who skewered the way mainstream progressives had co-opted the term decolonization and started using it as a catchall synonym for social justice. “The absorption of decolonization by settler social justice frameworks,” the pair observed, “is one way the settler, disturbed by her own settler status, tries to escape or contain the unbearable searchlight of complicity.”

Tuck and Yang argued that the impulse to turn decolonization into a metaphor for “things we want to do to improve our society and schools”—such as providing better mental-health care or adding Native authors to the English curriculum—allows good white liberals to alleviate their guilt. By making decolonization about everything except the actual repatriation of stolen land, “settlers” can rhetorically align themselves with Indigenous rights while retaining the spoils won by their colonizing ancestors. The stolen land, constantly acknowledged, never actually has to be given back. The problem for some in the decolonial-theory crowd is that decolonization is necessarily about repatriation.

And it is this fact that brings us to the ugly truth that we must reckon with if we are to fully understand the performative bloodlust currently issuing from a small cadre of American academics and activists. That truth is this: Few serious people in the United States actually advocate giving the land back to its own native tribes. The idea is both politically intractable and logistically tortuous to the point that the very notion is patently absurd.

Yet, rather than have a serious conversation about what can be done to improve the lives of Native Americans, who have been systematically mistreated by federal neglect , enforced poverty , and drug addiction —and whose murders and disappearances typically fail to elicit even the barest theater of police investigation or journalistic curiosity—American academics and administrators at elite universities have instead taken to playacting metaphorical “decolonization” exercises. Of course, these exercises possess little political utility but great institutional utility: They serve to distract from the new science centers and gleaming football stadiums being built right on top of that stolen, un-decolonized land with all of that management-consultant-alumni money. Meanwhile, our more “radical” colleagues huff and puff and write articles filled with jargon that continue to indulge, implicitly or explicitly, the fantasy of a literal decolonization that will never come to pass in the U.S.

It is in light of the obvious impotence of American decolonization that we should interpret the enthusiasm of a handful of elite academics for Hamas’s recent attempt at “decolonization” via terrorism. Unlike the settling of the United States, the settling of Israel is both much more recent and—so the thinking goes—more susceptible to actual land-repatriation attempts, whether political or military. Decolonization can only be a metaphor in the United States, but perhaps it remains a literal possibility abroad—and from this darkling plain issues all the excitement. If tweedy Ph.D.s have to cheer the death of innocents to keep the rush of political possibility flowing, it must seem a small price—or at least one they don’t have to pay.

Meanwhile, conservatives are handed yet another win: Chris Rufo is already telling his followers, “Conservatives need to create a strong association between Hamas, BLM, DSA, and academic ‘decolonization’ in the public mind.” The inconvenient truth that the majority of academic “decolonization” discourse is either sober scholarship or toothless corporate university pablum—not a threat to anyone in either case—will not prevent the Rufo crowd from steering the narrative . Universities and academics, having spent the past decade branding themselves as radical agents of social change, will be taken by segments of the public at their word. The fact that the most “radical” thing such institutions have accomplished in the 21st century is hiking their tuition rates and plunging millions of Americans further into debt won’t prevent conservatives from leveraging the Israel-Palestine war to add fuel to the “cultural Marxism” fire. More grist for their defund-the-humanities mill.

So here we are. An American-studies professor at Yale gets to play armchair revolutionary for a weekend, tweeting “Settlers are not civilians” from the comfort and safety of New Haven, Connecticut, while a world away Jewish children are torn apart by terrorists and Muslim children are buried under rubble once more, in recompense. Now the future of Gaza , with a population of 2 million, hangs in the balance while Israel’s defense minister— in language far more dehumanizing than anything issued from the Ivy League—asserts, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

“History repeats itself,” Marx famously observed, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” Yet in the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, it appears that history repeats itself simply as tragedy, a tale of two peoples locked in a spiral from which there would seem to be no exit, as a minority composed of religious extremists on either side of a smart fence call for genocide , and as war, possessed as always of its own inertia, eats away at the horizon. Israeli eye for Palestinian eye. Israeli tooth for Palestinian tooth. And who would now say that decolonization is a metaphor? Certainly not the professor who will show up to class on Monday and teach decolonial theory to bored economics majors in need of one last humanities credit before they head off to McKinsey & Company, where they will manage, as the American elite always has, the class war at home and real wars abroad.

The Israel-Hamas War and Academia's Activist Problem - The Atlantic

From “Inclusion” to “Belonging” Reformers must oppose DEI’s latest existential standard.

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 15:11:14 GMT

By Adam Ellwanger

The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

October 18, 2023

The manipulation of language is an ongoing strategy for disrupting the traditional values and beliefs of American society. Across the broader Western world, cultural revolutionaries wage a relentless campaign to change the vocabulary of everyday citizens, claiming for themselves a sovereign right to police violations of the new nomenclature. “Prostitution” has become “sex work.” “Illegal immigrants” have become “migrant workers.” Sex differences have been eclipsed by talk of “gender identity.” These changes are often spearheaded by activists in our universities.

Such constant changes ensure that regular Americans are often uncertain about which words are acceptable in polite society and which have been deemed crimethink . This uncertainty makes everyday people more reticent to participate in public discourse, fearful that they might give offense or come off as uninformed. Fearfulness, in turn, incentivizes silence among those who might otherwise be effective critics of the agenda of radicals on the political left. That’s part of the plan.

Although it’s almost impossible to keep track of all the new terminology, one recent linguistic manipulation poses a particularly serious threat to our institutions. To what example of Newspeak do I refer? “Belonging.”

In higher education, the concept of belonging is the most recent addition to the hodge-podge of aspirational ideals—“diversity,” “equity,” “access,” and “inclusion”—that displace the true mission of our colleges and universities. But employers in the corporate world are also increasingly concerned with belonging. Before explaining why belonging is a rhetorical Trojan Horse, it is helpful to provide some instances of how the term is used in the wild.

The “Diversity and Inclusion” portion of Cornell University’s website offers a handy definition of “belonging”: Belonging is the feeling of security and support when there is a sense of acceptance, inclusion, and identity for a member of a certain group. It is when an individual can bring their authentic self to work. When employees feel like they don’t belong at work, their performance and their personal lives suffer. Creating genuine feelings of belonging for all is a critical factor in improving engagement and performance. It also helps support business goals.

A few things in this definition bear closer attention. First, notice that belonging seems to be a wholly internal, subjective, individual experience. Cornell’s account admits that belonging amounts to a “feeling” and a “sense of acceptance.”

Secondly, note that Cornell isn’t concerned with feelings of belonging (or lack thereof) for just anyone. That is, they aren’t concerned with whether a random individual feels like she “belongs” among the university athletes, or whether one feels as though one belongs among one’s fellow suitemates in the residence hall. Rather, Cornell is interested in belonging only when it comes to acceptance based on one’s “identity” and “member[ship] [in] a certain group.” This is vague language, but make no mistake: Cornell is referring to the categories of individual identity that are presently fetishized on campus: race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and (non-Judeo-Christian) religious faith. In short, the university is concerned with belonging only when it comes to some students—the ones who are members of minority cultures of political import for the left.

Finally, notice that Cornell takes an interior phenomenon (belonging) and saddles others with the responsibility for making some individuals feel it. In other words, if someone doesn’t feel like he or she belongs, the school assumes this is due to some failing of the institution or the people who inhabit it.

It is true that Cornell’s definition focuses on the importance of belonging in the workplace. This is a surprise, perhaps, since it seems more likely that the university’s concern would be with student well-being. Rest assured, the text that follows clarifies that the sense of belonging among students is a critical factor for retention and academic performance. The “Belonging at Cornell” grant program , originally limited to faculty and staff, has recently been expanded to include students from “diverse backgrounds and life experiences.”

But college campuses aren’t the only places to encounter a concern with belonging: It is rapidly moving into the world of work in general. The Harvard Business Review has stressed the importance of belonging when it comes to maximizing individual performance and institutional efficiency. Forbes magazine has also noted belonging’s role in professional life, emphasizing that a precondition for a sense of personal belonging is an individual commitment to “be[ing] authentic.” This connection to personal authenticity is a common insight mentioned by Cornell and others, as well. CNN explains that “belonging” is a critical measure of personal well-being.

Psychology Today regularly reminds readers of the existential stakes of belonging, in articles that are almost always penned by a female holder of a Ph.D. This underscores the feminine sensitivity—a therapeutic sentimentalism—that has come to define human interaction in institutional spaces (especially academia). What’s wrong with the therapeutic outlook? Not only does it excuse the shortcomings of individual performance, it does so by encouraging people to see themselves as victims of spiritual abuse at the hands of the larger community. This suggests that not feeling a sense of belonging is a social injustice—one that can be resolved only through rituals of institutional penance that come in the form of more DEI training, aggressive affirmative action, and the celebration and promotion of minoritarian identities that are purportedly “otherized.” In short, the efforts that institutions take to remediate a lack of belonging merely enable the victim mentality that is so useful when it comes to advancing radical social reforms.

But an important question remains: Why did we need to add belonging to the litany of other therapeutic aspirations? Isn’t belonging implied by the terms diversity, access, and inclusion? Yes and no. Another Forbes article warns that belonging is “key” to the success of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives. That insight is correct, but not for the reasons mentioned by Forbes.

For a long time, belonging was the unstated aim of DEI initiatives. But recently, “belonging” had to be separated and emphasized for political reasons. This happened because leftist ideologues slowly realized that diversity, inclusion, and access—conceptually vague as they are—are all things that can be measured. When “diversity” is merely taken to mean the satisfaction of arbitrary numerical standards for the representation of certain identity groups (e.g., blacks, Hispanics, gays, women, etc.), it is easy to show when it has been achieved. “Inclusion” is similarly measurable, as is “access.” The demonstrability of these qualities created a problem when it became clear that even a diverse, inclusive, and accessible institution might not result in perfect equity (in the narrow, dogmatic sense that is embraced by true believers in wokeism).

“Belonging” serves as an elegant, ingenious solution to this problem. How can one measure belonging? You can ask individuals to assign a numerical value to how much they feel like they belong, but those numbers won’t tell us anything. What one person means by reporting his sense of belonging as a “7” may not be what another means by the same number. As illustrated above, there are psychological and institutional incentives for individuals to say they don’t feel as if they belong.

More than that, though, belonging is a metaphysical experience that cannot be quantified. It’s a transcendent, abstract quality—one that is often more dependent on one’s personal outlook and habits of thought than it is on any structural shortcomings of the communities to which the individual is joined.

In the very recent past, it was enough for an institution to be accessible, diverse, and inclusive. Belonging represents an even higher standard. Students might not feel as if they belong—even in a diverse, inclusive setting. By taking an immeasurable mental feeling and setting it up as the measure of institutional justice and effectiveness, and by placing the responsibility for securing a sense of belonging with the community rather than the individual, the Left establishes a political ideal that can never be met: total belonging felt by every member of the community. As long as that impossible goal remains unmet (and undemonstrated), our cultural revolutionaries have a readymade justification for fundamentally transforming the campus, the workplace, the family, the church, and national identity writ large, forever.

Ultimately, the best way to feel like you belong in any community is to assimilate to its values, beliefs, traditions, and expectations. When people see you as “one of them,” they will treat you as someone who belongs to the group. That—and only that—is the way to secure an authentic sense of belonging. But the Left sees the expectation of assimilation as injustice or even bigotry. To assimilate to any standard that comes from the community at large is to betray the self—and thus to live “inauthentically.”

Thus have the priests of wokeness decided that the true cost of belonging is too high a price to pay. Instead, they work to invert the dynamics of belonging, such that institutional norms and long-held community values must be adapted or annihilated to ensure that the individual feels at home without any effort to show himself as one of the group. In this way, the responsibility for personal well-being is transferred from the individual to the collective, effectively giving countless minorities of one carte blanche to remake society in their own image. Such accommodations and concessions made to individuals who will not conform to long-standing expectations for group membership create resentment and disenfranchisement among legacy members of the community. The resulting divisions and conflict create the ideal atmosphere for the institutional Left to continue its attacks on history, tradition, and national identity.

Repelling the assault will depend in part upon our willingness to protect our communities and their traditional values from the antagonisms that are stealthily smuggled in under the auspice of “belonging.”

Adam Ellwanger is a full professor who studies rhetoric, writing, and politics at the University of Houston-Downtown.

From “Inclusion” to “Belonging” — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (jamesgmartin.center)

Student Spotlight: Barclay Briggs '24

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 18:52:50 GMT

Student Spotlight:

Your gift supports students like Barclay

Hailing from Houston, Texas, Barclay’s love for nature mirrors his commitment to the open exchange of ideas, where different perspectives can flourish just like the diverse landscapes he enjoys. Over the course of his Davidson career, Barclay has felt strongly about improving the state of intellectual diversity, and civil discourse on campus. He explained that these feelings compelled him to launch DFSA this year: “It is a terrible feeling to sit in a class and not feel comfortable voicing an opinion that may be controversial, and that can’t be the standard. The standard must be free inquiry, free expression, and free discourse.” Barclay quickly discovered that he was far from alone on campus, as almost overnight, the DFSA ranks swelled to over fifty members.

Barclay and the DFSA have partnered with the Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse to launch a variety of programs this year, aimed at enhancing and supporting a positive free speech culture on Davidson’s campus. “DFTD supports me and DFSA by providing resources, funding, knowledge, and experience in free-speech advocacy. Without them, DFSA leadership would have a very tough time bringing qualified speakers to campus, and we would severely lack the funding to put on the events we have planned. I am thankful for DFTD’s guidance, and I look forward to their continued support of free speech on Davidson’s campus,” Barclay explains.

As Barclay approaches his post-Davidson plans, he will return to Texas to work for a petrochemical trading and marketing firm. But his dedication to free speech and ideological diversity will continue to inspire positive change on his college campus and beyond.

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‘The 1619 Project’ Tells a False Story About Capitalism, Too

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 20:22:01 GMT

The following article is being shared in response to Matthew Desmond's speaking engagement at Davidson College as this year's Vann lecturer on Racial Justice. The numerous critiques of his work by historians and economists--like the following one by Allen Guelzo--indicates the importance of having divergent views on controversial issues equally represented in Davidson's program of external speakers.

By Allen C. Guelzo

Wall Street Journal

May 8, 2020

The awarding of a Pulitzer Prize for commentary to the New York Times magazine’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of “The 1619 Project” will serve as an additional selling point as the Times and the Pulitzer Center (unaffiliated with the prize) seek to market their 1619 Project Curriculum. It’s hard not to see the prize as an attempt to deflect the criticisms the paper has taken from historians across the country.

Jake Silverstein, the magazine’s editor, waved away those objections as differences of “interpretation and intention, not fact” in a letter responding to a dozen concerned historians, including me. Historians do argue over interpretations, but parts of the 1619 Project are sloppy, at best, with the facts. Consider the essay on capitalism by sociologist Matthew Desmond.

Mr. Desmond asserts that Americans live in an environment of “low-road capitalism,” a “peculiarly brutal economy” where “inequality reigns and poverty spreads.” The fountain from which a “uniquely severe and unbridled” capitalism springs is not Adam Smith or even the Robber Barons, but the cotton plantation, Mr. Desmond claims. There, in the American South, enslaved laborers produced “the nation’s most valuable export.” Their productivity created “a capitalist economy.”

Slaves were whipped and tortured into clearing fields, planting and harvesting crops whose yields increased, Mr. Desmond writes, by 400% over the 60 years before the Civil War. But Mr. Desmond also contends that every aspect of the plantation was ruthlessly rationalized to enhance profits, “via vertical reporting systems, double-entry record-keeping and precise quantification.” Those “management techniques” became a model for “a union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs and normalized insecurity.” Slavery’s “violence was neither arbitrary nor gratuitous,” but instead “rational, capitalistic.”

Yet the numbers do not substantiate this thesis. Mr. Desmond asserts that “New Orleans boasted a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City.” But New York alone had more banks in 1858—294—than the entire future Confederacy, home to 208. The entire region’s “banking capital” in 1858 amounted to less than 80% of that held by the New York banks.

Cotton was the single biggest export commodity of pre-Civil War America—but only as a percentage of production that was exported. New York, in 1856-57, overshadowed every other state in the Union in the value of total exports and accounted for almost twice as much as all slave states combined except Louisiana, whose major port also exported goods produced in free states.

Mr. Desmond’s essay dwells at length on the plantation record-books of Thomas Affleck—“a one-stop-shop accounting manual, complete with rows and columns that tracked per-worker productivity”—as extended evidence of slavery’s capitalist rationality. But Affleck was unrepresentative of Southern plantation owners.

As historian Erin Mauldin has written, Southern agriculture before the Civil War was a sloppy, chaotic affair. Acidic soils discouraged intensive cultivation and pushed landowners toward wasteful land usage and constant movement westward to new territory. Much of what looks like capitalist innovation was a use-and-abandon process of land expansion only a few levels above hunting and gathering. Even Southern railroads were, as John Majewski has shown, built largely with public funding, not private investment, and mostly with a view of moving Southern militias to suppress slave revolts.

Nor was the uptick in cotton production necessarily driven by the lash. Economists Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode analyzed 150 plantations between 1800 and 1860. They attribute the increases in the volume of cotton production not to beatings and torture but to the “introduction and perfection of superior cotton varieties.” The quality of Southern cotton also drove up cotton profitability, as producers in Brazil, India and Egypt were unable to match it.

None of this is to deny the obvious fact that slavery was inhumane or brutal. But brutality has never been an effective incentive for productivity, much less improvements in quality.

The clinching refutation of the slavery-is-capitalism theory comes from the mouths of the slave owners themselves. They would have been aghast at the idea they were presiding over Yankee capitalism. Capitalism, complained slavery’s paladin, John C. Calhoun, “operated as one among the efficient causes of that great inequality of property which prevails in most European countries. No system can be more efficient to rear up a moneyed aristocracy. Its tendency is, to make the poor poorer, and the rich richer.”

The 1619 Project imagines Southern slaveholders were practicing “capitalism” simply because they made money. But slavery had been around since antiquity—long before anything resembling capitalism existed. And what the South saw in its plantations wasn’t capitalism but the opposite. Writing in 1854, the pro-slavery propagandist George Fitzhugh described slavery as “a beautiful example of communism, where each one receives not according to his labor, but according to his wants.”

“Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written,” reads the headline of Ms. Jones’s prize-winning essay. “Black Americans have fought to make them true.” The latter part is true, but the former isn’t, and attempting to replace the nation’s ideals with a false and destructive story is no way to do history. The 1619 Project can wave its Pulitzer as credibility insurance, but credibility isn’t the same as truth. Pulitzers have been handed out before—to the Times’s Walter Duranty and the Washington Post’s Janet Cooke—only to collapse under the weight of falsehood.

Mr. Guelzo is a senior research scholar at Princeton University and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1619-project-tells-a-false-story-about-capitalism-too-11588956387

The Case for Retracting Matthew Desmond’s 1619 Project Essay

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 19:48:15 GMT

By Phillip W. Magness

American Institute for Economic Research

February 11, 2020

Since the outset of the 1619 Project controversy , I have consistently argued that the overwhelming majority of the project’s problems derive from a single featured essay: Matthew Desmond’s piece on capitalism and slavery.

This essay advances an explicit anti-capitalist political message that’s rooted in a fundamental misreading of economic history. Although he repurposes the concept with an antislavery message, Desmond essentially attempts to rehabilitate King Cotton ideology , a long-discredited piece of proslavery propaganda from the Confederate era. He also ignores the intellectual history of capitalism , including the strong historical association between laissez-faire theorists and abolitionism.

Today I’d like to take a look at another dimension of the problems in Desmond’s essay: its errors of historical fact and its misuse of historical sources.

In doing so, it is important to recognize that there are still other faults with other contributions to the 1619 Project. Its lead essay still exaggerates British antislavery elements during the American Revolution , repurposing independence as a proslavery movement. But these faults are not irremediable. They could be addressed by relaxing the claim or injecting greater nuance into the discussion, should the Times exhibit an inclination to place historical accuracy above politics.

Desmond’s argument, however, is riddled with factual error and dubious scholarly interpretations that warrant severely discounting the piece as a whole.

Let’s consider those problems.

A Faulty Genealogy

Desmond begins his argument by asserting a direct lineal descent from the violent and coercive operations of the plantation system to the business practices of the modern economy. As he contends, “Recently, historians have pointed persuasively to the gnatty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks, as the birthplace of America’s low-road approach to capitalism.” The historians he refers to here are almost exclusively drawn from the highly contested “ New History of Capitalism ” (NHC) school, and many of its leading contributors are featured in his essay.

Desmond’s reliance on such a narrow historiographical echo chamber is itself problematic, given how many scholars outside of the NHC reject its claims and given the documentation of errors affecting its core claims. We may nonetheless follow his claimed genealogical progression from the plantation to the modern economy. The effect of this alleged infusion, Desmond therefore contends, is to instill modern capitalism with a foundational “brutality” that can only be rectified by adopting a litany of economic policy interventions that bear striking resemblance to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party today.

The stated genealogy is presented as a matter of fact. Desmond invokes the imagery of a modern corporation where “everything is tracked, recorded and analyzed, via vertical reporting systems, double-entry record-keeping and precise quantification,” then asserts that “many of these techniques that we now take for granted were developed by and for large plantations.”

“When an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes or when a midlevel manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet,” he continues, “they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps.” By direct implication, modern capitalism carries that same moral stain with it.

There are immediate problems with Desmond’s historical narrative. The history of double-entry bookkeeping and business measurement predates plantation slavery by several centuries, with origins that are directly traceable to the banking families of late medieval Italy. Desmond seems not to understand the accounting function of depreciation, which arose mainly in the railroad industry as a mechanism for distributing the distortive effects of large replacement purchases on machinery that underwent constant wear and tear.

Nor are the tools of measurement and finance distinctly capitalistic, as their attempted adaptation to the centralized planning of the Soviet Union and other 20th-century communist states attests. Most attempts to operationalize socialist economic planning depend by necessity on the complex quantification of resource allocation , or attempts at input-output modeling of inter-industry relationships, usually adopted as an alternative to the obviated role of the price mechanism in decentralized allocation .

But even more problematically, Desmond’s claim does not match his own stated source, Caitlin Rosenthal’s 2018 book Accounting for Slavery . While Rosenthal does investigate the historical use of accounting practices on the plantation with informative insights into how slave owners made their institution profitable, she attaches a substantial caveat at the outset of her book:

This is not an origins story. I did not find a simple path where slaveholders’ paper spreadsheets evolved into Microsoft Excel. (p. xii)

The plain language of this caveat expressly disavows the genealogical interpretation that Desmond assigns to her work, even using the very same example of Microsoft Excel to convey her rejection. In short, the 1619 Project inverts its source’s claimed purpose.

When I recently pointed this contradiction out to the Times, the newspaper’s editors indicated that they were standing by Desmond’s claim nonetheless and suggested that doing so now meets with Rosenthal’s own post hoc concurrence. Given that her publisher is also now touting Desmond’s passage as an endorsement of this book, one is left to wonder why this caveat was included if it is going to be abandoned with such nonchalance.

The alteration carries substantial implications for Rosenthal’s thesis. As presented in its original form, Accounting for Slavery documents the unsurprising but historically interesting fact that slave owners managed their plantations by adapting then-modern accounting and financial practices found elsewhere in the business community to their own horrid institution.

When repurposed as a genealogy, however, this thesis falls apart for want of evidence. Rosenthal’s work does not show that the specific accounting practices of the plantations were transmitted to modern Wall Street, or that later businessmen learned their trades specifically from slavery’s financial innovations, as opposed to common financial and accounting practices that long predate the American plantation system. If accepted, Desmond’s rendering of Accounting for Slavery would damage its own scholarly contribution as a work of history by stretching its evidence far beyond what the book’s contents and documentation either claim or support. Yet that’s the reading the Times appears to be sticking with.

Even in this simple presentation, Desmond’s spin on Rosenthal’s work exhibits the telltale characteristics of the genetic fallacy , wherein an unsavory origin is said to be a discrediting of a position in the present. But Desmond’s origin story is also wrong.

Illustrative of this fallacy, he quotes NHC historians Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman to assert that “American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism.” Beckert and Rockman’s genetic claim would have come as a great surprise, if not a source of outrage, to the slaveholders of the late antebellum period. Leading proslavery theorist George Fitzhugh wrote in 1854 that the tenets of free market capitalism were “at war with all kinds of slavery, for they in fact assert that individuals and peoples prosper most when governed least.” The depiction of slavery as capitalistic also chafes with the most developed ideological justifications that Southern radicals made for their economic system — a system built upon a coerced hierarchy of laborers forced to do menial tasks under the paternalistic direction of quasi-feudal plantation owners.

This leaves his historical account fraught through with factual and interpretive errors. Desmond’s attempt to tie slavery to modern accounting misses the latter’s known and separate origins , misrepresents accounting and measurement as uniquely capitalistic, and directly inverts the disavowal of an origin story in its own cited source. It’s safe to say that his thesis is off to a poor start.

A Misrepresented Statistical Claim

Taking his own false genealogy of modern accounting as a given, Desmond next turns to its claimed economic implications for the plantation system. To illustrate the effect, he points to a stunning statistic:

During the 60 years leading up to the Civil War, the daily amount of cotton picked per enslaved worker increased 2.3 percent a year. That means that in 1862, the average enslaved fieldworker picked not 25 percent or 50 percent as much but 400 percent as much cotton than his or her counterpart did in 1801.

The implication is clear. Desmond seeks to convey that “capitalist” business practices allowed plantation masters to forcibly extract the maximum amount of productivity from their enslaved workforce to such a degree that it causally drove the rapid expansion of the American cotton industry in the early 19th century. Cotton output, he contends, arose directly from a symbiotic convergence of capitalism and the whip.

The underlying statistic is nominally accurate insofar as American cotton production grew almost fourfold between 1800 and the Civil War. But Desmond has also repeated a severe misrepresentation of this statistic’s source.

The 400 percent increase estimate comes from a 2008 article by economists Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, and reflects their calculation of yearly cotton picking rates from almost 150 sets of plantation records. Yet Olmstead and Rhode do not attribute this production increase to a devil’s bargain between double-entry bookkeeping and systematized beatings of the slaves. Instead, they present clear evidence of a very different explanation. American planters improved their crop through biological innovation, such as creating hybrid seed strains that yielded more cotton, were easier to pick, and were more resistant to disease. As Olmstead and Rhode conclude:

Technological changes revolutionized southern cotton production in the 60 years preceding the Civil War. The amount of cotton a typical slave picked per day increased about 2.3 percent per year due, primarily, to the introduction and perfection of superior cotton varieties.

Although the two economists support this technological explanation with extensive statistical evidence, Desmond and the NHC scholars he relies on ignore it and append their own alternative spin to Olmstead and Rhode’s data. Instead of seed improvements, they contend that the 400 percent increase arose from a systematized and quantified process of whipping meant to extract greater labor from the slaves.

Desmond gets this alternative interpretation directly from NHC historian Ed Baptist. According to Baptist, the Olmstead and Rhode statistics attest to “an economy whose bottom gear was torture.” By tracking individual slave production, he contends, slave drivers were essentially able to calibrate their torture to maximize and increase cotton picking rates over time. As Desmond describes it, “The violence [of slavery] was neither arbitrary nor gratuitous. It was rational, capitalistic, all part of the plantation’s design.”

The “calibrated torture” thesis is a central claim of Baptist’s 2015 book The Half Has Never Been Told , itself one of the foundational texts of the NHC genre. Turning to Baptist’s book, we find clearly that he too enlisted Olmstead and Rhode’s 2008 paper for his evidence of the fourfold increase in cotton output before the Civil War, even reprinting one of their main graphs on page 127 of his book and another of their tables on page 129.

Baptist’s book is an unscholarly mess of misinterpreted data , misrepresented sources , and empirical incompetence . In proclaiming the novelty of its own “never told” story, he also constructs a bizarre strawman of the scholarly literature on the economics of slavery before his own work. As Baptist writes on page 129 of his book, the claim that slavery was less efficient than free labor is “a point of dogma that most historians and economists have accepted.”

In reality, most economic historians have associated economic efficiency as well as profitability with slavery since a landmark article by Alfred Conrad and John R. Meyer argued this position in 1958. The relationship between slavery, efficiency, and profitability is the subject of a vast subsequent literature that Baptist almost entirely ignores . As we can already see, his book is essentially arguing against a phantasm of his own imagination.

The problems similarly extend to Baptist’s treatment of the Olmstead and Rhode data. Although Baptist uses the economists’ statistics, he conveniently omits their evidence that cotton production growth arose from biological innovation in seed strains. Instead he supplants it with his own explanation, the “calibrated torture” thesis that Desmond then repeats. In the NHC telling, the 400 percent growth in cotton output arose from “ratcheting” production rates upward through tracked and mathematized beatings of the slaves who picked the crop.

Baptist’s sleight of hand was not lost upon the economists. In 2018 Olmstead and Rhode published a withering rebuttal of Baptist’s book , using additional records from plantations to empirically debunk his “calibrated torture” argument. Rather than corresponding to mathematized whipping — a claim that Baptist also makes by altering and distorting the text of historical slave narratives to make them fit his thesis — actual cotton picking rates from the Olmstead and Rhode data clearly follow a seasonal pattern corresponding to the annual crop cycle. As the economists write:

Recall that Baptist has embraced our data showing a roughly four fold increase in average cotton picking rates over the antebellum years. These data only reported plantation yearly averages. If we turn up the power of our microscope and look at the daily data for individual slaves that we used to construct the plantation averages, a whole new world appears that allows us to investigate empirically the effect of current picking on future picking. There is no evidence of ratcheting. Over the course of a year picking rates formed an inverted “U” going up to a peak period and then falling significantly.

In short, Baptist’s thesis not only misrepresents the evidence from Olmstead and Rhode, his own cited data source — it also misunderstands the numbers behind that source.

Baptist, much to the discredit of his professionalism, has subsequently adopted a strategy of refusing to engage with Olmstead and Rhode’s rebuttal. Instead he brushes it aside and persists as if his own thesis is uninterrupted and unaltered in the face of clear contradictory evidence.

Although the 1619 Project’s editors have been circumspect about revealing the scholars they consulted on the project, it is becoming increasingly clear that Baptist heavily influenced and likely advised Desmond’s essay. Desmond essentially adopts The Half Has Never Been Told as the basis of his economic interpretation, and of the aforementioned statistic. It therefore casually repeats Baptist’s errors and misrepresentations of Olmstead and Rhode’s work.

Olmstead and Rhode’s critique of Baptist falls squarely among the highest-profile academic debates of the last decade. In 2016 it broke away from the confines of academic journals and into mainstream journalism, with even the Washington Post running an essay on the dispute.

Curiously, the 1619 Project’s editors appear to have completely missed this dispute. When I asked her about Desmond’s overreliance on Ed Baptist’s debunked claims, project editor Nikole Hannah-Jones responded , “Economists dispute a few of Baptist’s calculations but not the book itself nor its thesis.”

Olmstead offers a very different assessment : “Edward Baptist’s study of capitalism and slavery is flawed beyond repair.” And as we’ve now seen, Desmond’s 1619 Project essay lifted its main empirical argument from Baptist and grafted it onto a false genealogy that purports to derive modern accounting practices from lineal “roots” in the plantation system.

It would seem, too, that Desmond’s essay is flawed beyond repair.

As the New York Times often presents itself as a stickler for corrections in the name of ensuring factual and interpretive accuracy, substantial portions of Desmond’s essay warrant retraction — including its main thesis linking modern capitalism to slavery.

Phillip W. Magness

Phillip W. Magness is Senior Research Faculty and F.A. Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is also a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He holds a PhD and MPP from George Mason University’s School of Public Policy, and a BA from the University of St. Thomas (Houston). Prior to joining AIER, Dr. Magness spent over a decade teaching public policy, economics, and international trade at institutions including American University, George Mason University, and Berry College. Magness’s work encompasses the economic history of the United States and Atlantic world, with specializations in the economic dimensions of slavery and racial discrimination, the history of taxation, and measurements of economic inequality over time. He also maintains an active research interest in higher education policy and the history of economic thought. His work has appeared in scholarly outlets including the Journal of Political Economy, the Economic Journal, Economic Inquiry, and the Journal of Business Ethics. In addition to his scholarship, Magness’s popular writings have appeared in numerous venues including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, Reason, National Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

https://www.aier.org/article/the-case-for-retracting-matthew-desmonds-1619-project-essay/

The Supreme Court Could Weigh In On Whether Colleges’ Speech Police Are Legal

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 18:13:03 GMT

By Brandon Poulter

Daily Caller

October 1, 2023

The Supreme Court could weigh in on the constitutionality of so-called bias response teams at colleges in the U.S., which free speech organizations say are used to discriminate against political viewpoints and to chill free speech.

Bias response teams are systems created to monitor alleged biased speech on college campuses, which often end up with students reporting other students for politically disfavored speech, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Students are then brought before administrators in what can be a long-drawn-out process that discourages students from speaking their minds and expressing disfavored viewpoints, which free speech advocates argue violates the First Amendment.

The Alumni Free Speech Alliance, a group of over a dozen free speech alumni organizations, alleges that bias response teams are used to target individuals and often cause students to self-censor, resulting in less intellectual freedom on campuses. The groups filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of advocate group Speech First, which is suing Virginia Tech over its bias-response team.

“In history, it’s always repressive regimes that pick a scapegoat and sometimes not even with aforethought. It just happens they rile up the crowds against them. And that’s what these bias systems are used for,” Chuck Davis, president of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, told the DCNF.

The number of bias response teams at public and private American colleges and universities was 232, according to FIRE. That number nearly doubled to 456 by 2022, according to Free Speech Alliance.

“The goal of these teams is censorship,” FIRE Program Officer Zach Greenberg, told the DCNF.

“These bias response teams have been used to report on group chats and even by third parties walking by on campus,” Greenberg continued.

By policing the expression of bias, these bias response teams are violating the First Amendment, Greenberg explained. Speech which might be perceived as discriminatory or as an expression of bias, such as political speech or offensive jokes, is protected by the First Amendment.

For example, Gonzaga University, which has a bias response team, defines a bias incident as “non-criminal conduct, speech, or expression” that is motivated by “prejudice” because of “real or perceived characteristics,” according to their website. This then triggers a review of the incident, which may or may not result in an “educational conversation” or referral to another office.

“Being investigated is the punishment,” Eric Rasmusen, former economics professor at UCLA and member of the MIT Free Speech Alliance, told the DCNF.

At one incident at the University of Northern Colorado, a professor challenged his students to read a controversial book with the intent of discussing difficult topics and discussing why they were difficult to talk about, only to be reported to the bias response team for alleged offensive behavior, according to National Review.

“It’s well within the professor’s right to recommend controversial classroom materials,” Greenberg told the DCNF.

In the case of Virginia Tech, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals said the bias response team was not unconstitutional since it does not directly punish students. Virginia Tech’s bias response team accepts anonymous tips about other students, and once had a website up which said students could report on things from “jokes that are demeaning to a particular group of people” to “hosting a culturally themed party.”

In a separate case regarding Michigan University’s bias response team, Speech First challenged the team’s definitions as being overly broad, according to court documents. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the university’s bias response team was likely to chill speech.

Universities sometimes acknowledge that their bias response system may conflict with the freedom of speech.

“The expression of an idea or point of view some may find offensive or inflammatory is not necessarily a bias-related incident. While this value of openness protects controversial ideas, it does not protect harassment or expressions of bias,” reads Wake Forest University’s bias response system’s website.

“Free speech absolutely protects the expression of bias,” Greenberg told the DCNF.

“In the real world, they’ll encounter hateful speech, and students need to be able to handle that,” Greenberg continued.

The Supreme Court Could Weigh In On Whether Colleges’ Speech Police Are Legal | The Daily Caller

College alumni are stepping up to defend free speech

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 18:42:36 GMT

By Bryan Paul

Washington Examiner

September 29, 2023

When thinking of college alumni, one generally imagines boosters donning their alma mater’s signature colors and cheering proudly for their team at homecoming games, or a multimillionaire being courted at campus events and donating substantial sums to fund an institution’s new building, sports complex, or scholarship program.

In fact, higher education institutions have tended to view alumni solely as cheerleaders and walking checkbooks who can be entertained and solicited for financial support while their ideas and concerns can be managed or ignored. By treating alumni as branded cash cows, colleges and universities are snubbing the most enduring stakeholder group in the higher education ecosystem.

Alumni consistently report that their college education was not just crucial to their professional lives but to their personal development. And alumni are no small constituency. As of 2021, about 38% of people ages 25 and older hold a bachelor’s degree. Alumni, who retain their academic affiliation for a lifetime upon graduation, are also uniquely positioned to hold their alma maters accountable to their core missions. From skyrocketing costs to burgeoning free speech violations, it is clear the higher education system is in serious need of course correction.

That’s why a growing number of alumni are no longer content to write blank checks and cheer from the sidelines. They have become alarmed by the erosion of civil discourse and the abysmal state of free expression on campus and are organizing to revive those essential values in a number of important ways.

Alumni are working to bring accountability back to college campuses in several ways. First, alumni have realized that they can show their gratitude to and exert positive influence on their alma maters through targeted intentional giving. While it might seem logical simply to withhold donations from a university when it falls short of its core mission, the potential of a targeted major gift often opens the door to a conversation about the direction of the university and forces the institution to answer tough questions and even change behavior to be worthy of the gift. Donors can, and should, restrict gifts to specific purposes. That does not mean infringing on the very academic freedom they seek to protect: It means setting up the guardrails that protect values the institution ought to cherish.

The savvy donor is informed about the reality on campus, has a clear vision for what the gift should accomplish, and has the patience to take time to fund projects that align with the needs of the institution while reinforcing the vision of a vibrant and intellectually diverse education. Even nonmajor gifts to programs such as the Civil Discourse Project at Duke University indicate to the administration that alumni actively care about free speech. Big money can start a conversation, but donors at any level can make a significant difference by giving wisely.

Secondly, engaged alumni, such as those affiliated with the Alumni Free Speech Alliance , are collaborating to promote and defend free expression policies , host debates and events on campus, mentor students, and invite speakers who represent a variety of viewpoints and who otherwise might be ignored or deplatformed. Having benefited from education grounded in the free exchange of ideas, alumni are living, breathing testaments to the importance of free and open inquiry in higher education and democratic society. Their positive experiences on campus now motivate them to ensure that future generations of students receive a solid grounding in the same values and develop the intellectual fortitude to grapple with ideas that challenge even their most closely held beliefs.

“I think the future of the country depends on the educational system,” said Stuart Taylor, Jr., co-founder of AFSA and president of Princetonians for Free Speech , in a recent video highlighting the national alumni movement. “You would hope that [students] would have a sense of our national heritage and they would have learned some history, but it’s college where they should really learn how free speech works in practice, how it helps you figure out what you think, how it helps you communicate with your fellow students and your professors and the people you go to work for after college.”

Alumni such as Taylor (Princeton ’70, Harvard Law ’77) exemplify the type of citizenship that is at the heart of a liberal democracy.

Now fully awakened to the threats facing free expression on campuses, alumni have mobilized to help their alma maters be better and ready for the future. The esteem in which alumni hold higher education is why administrators would be wise not to take alumni volunteerism for granted and to listen to their concerns about academic freedom.

Bryan Paul is the director of alumni advocacy for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

College alumni are stepping up to defend free speech (msn.com)

Alumni groups ask Supreme Court to take up case challenging bias response teams

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 15:01:32 GMT

By Jennifer Kabanny

The College Fix

September 25, 2023

Free speech alumni groups have asked the Supreme Court to take up a case that seeks to render campus bias response teams unconstitutional.

Several members of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance recently filed a petition for a writ of certiorari on behalf of Speech First, which sued Virginia Tech over its bias response team but lost the case at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in May.

Attorneys for the Alumni Free Speech Alliance argued the case is too important to let the Fourth’s ruling stand — especially given that other circuits have ruled against bias response teams, creating the need to resolve the splits and “set one common standard for First Amendment rights across the country.”

“The situation at Virginia Tech is not unique. Over the past decade, under a variety of names, bias response systems have exploded onto campuses across the country,” the petition states. “This is neither a passing fad nor an example of a single, outlier university. Thus, whether bias response systems chill constitutionally protected speech is of significant national importance and justifies a claim on the Court’s time.”

The petition cites reporting done by The College Fix in the spring regarding Maxient, a company that manages more than 1,300 higher education institutions’ student behavior records, including bias reports.

“When it comes to bias response systems, it does not matter that the people administering such systems cannot directly sanction students; the process is the punishment,” the petition states. “This is particularly true where, as in many cases, bias response systems create secret or semi-secret records that students reasonably fear could impact their ability to obtain letters of recommendation, get jobs or promotions at their university, or get them labeled as troublemakers.”

“…Students may reasonably fear that bias response reports may have an adverse impact on all manner of future university activities, from obtaining letters of recommendation or jobs to increasing the risk and severity of collateral disciplinary proceedings.”

In the Fourth Circuit’s ruling , the majority argued that because Virginia Tech’s bias response system does not directly punish students, who are only asked to participate in the re-education process, they are not unconstitutional.

But the petition frequently cites the dissent in the Fourth Circuit’s 2-1 ruling by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who pointed out that when “the stated goal of the bias response team is to ‘eliminate’ bias, we are faced not with a gentle effort to convince students to be unbiased but with a systemic effort to coercively drive out views that strike administrators the wrong way.”

The petition argues the case “presents important and urgent questions that should be addressed now. Bias response systems serve as de facto speech codes that permit administrators to chill free speech based on their own biases and subjective interpretations of what constitutes ‘bias.'”

The members of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance that have petitioned the Supreme Court are: the University of California Free Speech Alliance, the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse, the Generals Redoubt, Harvard Alumni for Free Speech, the Jefferson Council for the University of Virginia, the MIT Free Speech Alliance, Princetonians for Free Speech, and the UNC Alumni Free Speech Alliance.

Alumni groups ask Supreme Court to take up case challenging bias response teams | The College Fix

D.E.I. Statements Stir Debate on College Campuses

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 18:06:26 GMT

By Michael Powell

New York Times

Published Sept. 8, 2023 - Updated Sept. 12, 2023

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.

Dr. Inbar figured all had gone well, that his work and liberal politics fit well with the university. Some faculty members, he said, had even advised him on house hunting.

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.

Not long after, the chair told Dr. Inbar that, with regret, U.C.L.A. could not offer him a job.

Diversity statements are a new flashpoint on campus, just as the Supreme Court has driven a stake through race-conscious admissions. Nearly half the large universities in America require that job applicants write such statements, part of the rapid growth in D.E.I. programs. Many University of California departments now require that faculty members seeking promotions and tenure also write such statements.

Diversity statements tend to run about a page or so long and ask candidates to describe how they would contribute to campus diversity, often seeking examples of how the faculty member has fostered an inclusive or antiracist learning environment.

To supporters, such statements are both skill assessment and business strategy. Given the ban on race-conscious admissions, and the need to attract applicants from a shrinking pool of potential students, many colleges are looking to create a more welcoming environment.

But critics say these statements are thinly veiled attempts at enforcing ideological orthodoxy. Politically savvy applicants, they say, learn to touch on the right ideological buzzwords. And the championing of diversity can overshadow strengths seen as central to academia, not least professional expertise.

“Professions of fealty to D.E.I. ideology are so ubiquitous as to be meaningless,” said Daniel Sargent, a professor of history and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “We are institutionalizing a performative dishonesty.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley’s law school and a free-speech scholar, describes much of the criticism as an attack on diversity, even as he acknowledges that the requirement could be misused.

The point of the statements, he said, is to push applicants to think through how they can reach students. “I’ll tell you, the professors who don’t recognize the diversity in their classrooms are going to struggle,” he said. “Some of the best teachers are quite politically conservative, but they’re still aware of who’s in the classroom.”

The debate occurs as D.E.I. officials and programs of all kinds have become a powerful presence on campuses. Universities have hired hundreds of administrators, who monitor compliance with hiring goals and curricular changes, and many departments write a variation on a D.E.I. policy.

The faculty senate at the University of California, San Francisco, urged professors to apply “anti-oppression and antiracism” lenses to courses. The public affairs school at the University of California, Los Angeles, pledged on its website to “ decolonize the curriculum and pedagogy,” and the medical school vowed to dismantle systematic racism in its coursework.

The faculty senate of the California Community Colleges, the largest higher-education system in the country, has instructed its teachers on their obligation “to lift the veil of white supremacy” and “colonialism.”

Conservative Republican politicians demonstrated their disdain, and brought the power of the state to bear. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signed bills shuttering campus D.E.I. offices. Florida barred curriculums that teach “identity politics” and theories of systematic racism, sexism and privilege.

Seven states, including North Dakota and Florida, have made requiring diversity statements illegal, according to a tracker by The Chronicle of Higher Education. And dissenting faculty members have filed several lawsuits. With the help of the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation, John D. Haltigan, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, filed a lawsuit in May against the University of California that said such a statement is a “functional loyalty oath” and would make his job application futile, violating his rights under the First Amendment.

How It Started

A decade ago, California university officials faced a conundrum.

A majority of its students were nonwhite, and officials wanted to recruit more Black and Latino professors. But California’s voters had banned affirmative action in 1996. So in 2016, at least five campuses — Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Riverside and Santa Cruz — decided their hiring committees could perform an initial screening of candidates based only on diversity statements.

Candidates who did not “look outstanding” on diversity, the vice provost at U.C. Davis instructed search committees, could not advance, no matter the quality of their academic research. Credentials and experience would be examined in a later round.

The championing of diversity at the University of California resulted in many campuses rejecting disproportionate numbers of white and Asian and Asian American applicants. In this way, the battle over diversity statements and faculty hiring carries echoes of the battle over affirmative action in admissions, which opponents said discriminated against Asians.

At Berkeley, a faculty committee rejected 75 percent of applicants in life sciences and environmental sciences and management purely on diversity statements, according to a new academic paper by Steven Brint, a professor of public policy at U.C. Riverside, and Komi Frey, a researcher for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which has opposed diversity statements.

Candidates who made the first cut were repeatedly asked about diversity in later rounds. “At every stage,” the study noted, “candidates were evaluated on their commitments to D.E.I.”

According to a report by Berkeley, Latino candidates constituted 13 percent of applicants and 59 percent of finalists. Asian and Asian American applicants constituted 26 percent of applicants and 19 percent of finalists. Fifty-four percent of applicants were white and 14 percent made it to the final stage. Black candidates made up 3 percent of applicants and 9 percent of finalists.

Brian Soucek, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, and a leading academic defender of D.E.I. policies, sat on a hiring committee during this time and described the searches as “a partially successful experiment.”

“People realized that the traditional order of reading applications need not be set in stone,” he said in an interview.

By 2020, however, top officials at Berkeley concluded the hiring experiment had gone too far. That February, a vice provost sent a carefully worded letter to search committee chairs. Diversity statements, he wrote, should not be treated as a political litmus test or as the sole factor.

“The university is to evaluate candidates on multiple dimensions” including research, he wrote.

Many departments now twin diversity and research statements and often include teaching statements. But the diversity statement, professors and administrators say, remains a critical piece.

The New D.E.I. Standards

These new expectations upended Dr. Inbar.

He favored affirmative action. But five years ago, he questioned diversity statements in a podcast — “Two Psychologists, Four Beers,” that he hosted with another academic. He described the statements as “value signaling” that required applicants to demonstrate allegiance to a particular set of liberal beliefs.

“It’s not clear that they lead to better results for underrepresented groups,” he said.

On another episode in 2022, he noted that a professional society of psychologists officially opposed a Georgia law banning abortion. He favors abortion rights but argued that professional associations represent members of many ideological shades and should avoid taking political stances.

All of this angered the graduate students. “His hiring would threaten ongoing efforts to protect and uplift individuals of marginalized backgrounds,” the students wrote . They argued he was not committed to a “safe, welcoming and inclusive environment.” The students sent the letter to the entire psychology faculty and posted it online.

Dr. Inbar’s research in moral intuition and judgment, the students added, lacked proper grounding in the progressive politics of identity. The faculty was split; at least one member of the search committee argued the views expressed on the podcast were unacceptable.

But a professor in social psychology at U.C.L.A., Matthew Lieberman, noted in a Substack essay that Dr. Inbar’s credentials were easily “above threshold” for a hire.

Dr. Inbar was not offered a faculty position, he wrote, “because he publicly questioned” diversity statements. Dr. Lieberman acknowledged that he wrote the essay with some hesitancy. He did not personally have a problem with the statements, and he worried that his students might question his support of diversity.

In an email to Dr. Inbar, Annette L. Stanton, chair of U.C.L.A.’s psychology department, expressed disappointment she could not offer him a job. “There is no doubt that unusual events occurred surrounding your visit,” she wrote.

“I felt as if I had been ambushed,” Dr. Inbar said in an interview. “It felt a lot like an ideological screening to weed out people with beliefs seen as objectionable.”

Professor Stanton did not reply to an interview request, and university officials declined to discuss Professor Inbar’s case.

The U.C.L.A. press office stated only that “faculty hiring at U.C.L.A. follows a rigorous process.”

The A-Plus Diversity Statement

No objections were raised by Dr. Inbar’s diversity statement in his job application. But according to the scoring rubrics used by the University of California, Dr. Inbar’s spoken reservations about diversity statements would not have passed muster.

Many University of California campuses post their scoring methods online. These are widely used but not mandatory, and make clear which answers by an applicant are likely to find disfavor with faculty diversity committees.

An applicant who discusses diversity in vague terms, such as “diversity is important for science,” or saying that an applicant wants to “treat everyone the same” will get a low score.

Likewise, an applicant should not oppose affinity groups divided by race, ethnicity and gender, as that would demonstrate that the candidate “seems not to be aware of, or understand the personal challenges that underrepresented individuals face in academia.”

To argue that diversity statements politicize academia and impose a point of view is also a mistake, according to the faculty diversity work group at Santa Cruz. “Social justice activism in academia seeks to identify how systemic racism and implicit bias influence the topics we pursue, the research methods we use, the outlets in which we publish and the outcomes we observe.”

A cottage industry has sprouted nationally and in California to guide applicants in writing these statements. Some U.C. campuses post online reading lists of antiracist books and examples of successful diversity statements with names redacted.

The entire process has long troubled a number of senior faculty members at Berkeley. “If you write: ‘I believe that everyone should be treated equally,’ you will be branded as a right winger,” Vinod Aggarwal, a political science professor at the university, said in an interview. “This is compelled speech, plain and simple.”

Professor Soucek, at Davis law school, said ideological diversity is not the point.

“It’s our job to make sure people of all identities flourish here,” he said. “It’s not our job to make sure that all viewpoints flourish.”

To Dr. Inbar, that is a hazy distinction. He said that he appears to have been denied a job at U.C.L.A. not because he was insensitive to campus diversity but because he expressed qualms about diversity statements. He remains at the University of Toronto. His girlfriend has delayed her decision for another year.

“Your ability to mentor students from a diverse background is absolutely a relevant question,” he said. “But this felt like they used it as an ideological filtering mechanism and that should be a red flag.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/us/ucla-dei-statement.html

2022-2023 College Free Speech Rankings

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 19:03:23 GMT

On September 7, 2022, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and College Pulse released the third annual College Free Speech Rankings. The 2022 rankings are based on the voices of 45,000 currently enrolled students at over 200 colleges.

Full Results: https://www.thefire.org/sites/default/files/2022/12/CFSR_2022_web.pdf

The Racial Achievement Gap and the War on Meritocracy

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 19:14:23 GMT

By Jason L. Riley

Wall Street Journal

Published Sept. 8, 2023 - Updated Sept. 12, 2023

Yes, this is another September “back to school” column. My apologies. But someone needs to keep pointing out that our national debate over which books to allow in classrooms, or how to teach slavery to middle-schoolers, is far less consequential than the continuing inability of most youngsters to read or do math at grade level.

In Florida, where GOP governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has taken lumps for a couple sentences in a 200-page black-history curriculum, only 39% of Miami-Dade County fourth-graders are proficient in reading, according to a Miami Herald report last year on standardized test results. By eighth grade the number drops to 31%, and math scores are just as bad. Who cares if kids have access to books by Toni Morrison or Jodi Picoult if most of them can’t comprehend the contents?

These dismal outcomes have persisted nationwide for decades, and the racial achievement gap is even more disturbing. The U.S. Education Department reported last year that in 2022 the average reading score for black fourth-graders in New York on the National Assessment of Educational Progress trailed that of white fourth graders by 29 points. This “performance gap was not significantly different from that in 1998,” the report added.

The progressive left’s response to these outcomes has been to wage war on meritocracy rather than focus on improving instruction. The goal is to eliminate gifted-and-talented middle-school programs, high-school entrance exams and the use of the SAT in college admissions. One defense of racial preferences in education for black students is that recipients, including those who go into teaching, are more likely to work in low-income minority communities after graduation. That’s true, but is it what economically disadvantaged students really need, more second-rate teachers?

In his lively autobiography, “Up From the Projects,” the late economist Walter Williams related an incident from his teaching days at California State University, Los Angeles in the late 1960s. A black student approached him at the end of the course and said he needed a B to graduate. The student told Williams that he wanted to teach school in Watts, a predominantly black section of Los Angeles. Williams replied that Watts didn’t need any more mediocre educators. He added, jokingly, “If you’d said San Fernando Valley”—a predominantly white area back then—“I’d have given you the B.”

Williams was appalled that many of his academic colleagues were holding their black students to lower standards. “There was no more effective way to mislead black students and discredit whatever legitimate achievements they might make than giving them phony grades and ultimately fraudulent diplomas,” he wrote. Sadly, the downstream effects of lax standards for black students that concerned him more than 50 years ago have only gotten worse.

Medical students in all 50 states must pass a licensure exam before they can practice. The exam has three parts, and Step 1 is administered at the end of the second year of medical school. It measures your grasp of basic science topics—anatomy, biology, biochemistry, pharmacology—and is highly predictive of how you will perform in medical school going forward.

A student’s numerical score on the Step 1 exam has long been the most important tool in evaluating candidates for the most competitive medical disciplines and residency programs. Three years ago, representatives of the nation’s leading medical groups voted to scrap numerical scores and report the results of the Step 1 exam as pass/fail.

The reason is simple, according to Stanley Goldfarb, an academic physician and former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. In a recent book on how social-justice activism has affected medical training, “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns,” Dr. Goldfarb explained that black students underperform on the Step 1 exam. “The solution to the fact that white students score better on the exam was to eliminate reporting scores,” he wrote, which “makes about as much sense as Major League Baseball eliminating batting averages to assure that no ethnic cohort outperforms the others.”

Dr. Goldfarb’s book has an amusing title—which comes from an op-ed he wrote for this paper in 2019—but what it describes is nothing to laugh at. Those who complain about racial disparities in medical outcomes might consider how racial double standards contribute to them. Medical schools have been pressured to relax admission standards for diversity purposes, which has led to the relaxation of grading standards and licensure requirements.

Black doctors are more likely than white doctors to practice in medically underserved areas, but low-income blacks need second-rate doctors even less than they need second-rate teachers. For whatever reason, it seems lost on progressives that addressing the racial achievement gap in K-12 education would go a long way toward addressing the one in medical school.

The Racial Achievement Gap and the War on Meritocracy - WSJ

Colleges Spend Like There’s No Tomorrow. ‘These Places Are Just Devouring Money.’

Thu, 10 Aug 2023 15:56:28 GMT

By Jenna A. Robinson

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

March 16, 2023

Last week, faculty at Davidson College affirmed their commitment to free expression on campus by a pproving their own version of the Chicago Principles . It’s a step that the pro-free-speech organization Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse (DFTD) has been promoting for five years and a major free-speech milestone for the college.

In an email to the Martin Center, DFTD founder John Craig described the statement as “a landmark document for Davidson.”

The statement affirms:

True free speech, free expression, and academic freedom are not generational or preferential. In pledging to honor these ideals, we must recognize that this task can be arduous and precarious. Davidson has a professed commitment to free inquiry and to the inclusion of diverse persons and communities. We admit that these obligations have historically been more aspirational than actual. Acknowledging the intentional and unintentional exclusion of ideas and identities is both honest and constructive. Individuals and groups have been marginalized and their voices muted based on race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, disability, class, ideology, citizenship, and religious or political affiliation.

Craig said, “DFTD is very pleased with the Commitment to Freedom of Expression statement just affirmed by Davidson’s faculty. [We] look forward to helping ensure activation of the stated principles throughout the Davidson College community. We greatly appreciate the work that the drafters and faculty put into developing and gaining affirmation of this statement.”

Davidson’s progress demonstrates the importance of engaged alumni.

The campaign began when DFTD sent a letter to then-president Carol Quillen urging policy changes including the “adoption and vigorous implementation at Davidson of the Chicago Principles of Free Expression—the ‘gold standard’ of free speech in academia.”Then, in October 2021, President Quillen appointed a working group to draft and submit a statement on freedom of expression that would be distinctive to Davidson in relating free speech to the school’s ideal of inclusiveness.

The new commitment was drafted by a working group consisting of two faculty members (Issac Bailey and Susan Roberts), two students, one current Davidson trustee, and Martin Center namesake former governor Jim Martin. Martin praised Davidson’s efforts in a college press release, saying,

Our nation needs more of what Davidson can provide—a place where debate runs civilly and freely, in a residence hall or a lecture hall. The college has produced doers and thinkers who made our society and our world better because their ideas and arguments were challenged every day on campus. This commitment was crafted by a group who came from different backgrounds, experiences and ideologies, and those differences brought a lasting result.

There is still work to be done at Davidson. DFTD’s wishlist for reforms includes policy changes that would raise the college’s FIRE rating to a “Green Light” score and new guidelines for on-campus political activism by the college’s leadership.

DFTD also wants the college to make “a concerted effort to diversify ideologically invited external speakers,” an issue on which there has been some progress, and to administer “biennial independently conducted confidential surveys of students and faculty to assess the state of free expression, open discourse, and ideological balance on campus.” DFTD provided a baseline for such a survey when it commissioned its own surveys of Davidson students and major donors in the fall of 2021.

With these steps, Davidson is moving in the right direction. This progress demonstrates the importance of engaged alumni and groups like Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse.

Davidson College Affirms Free Speech — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (jamesgmartin.center)

Harvard Has a Free Speech Moment

duda@neonone.com — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 11:37:25 GMT

By The Editorial Board

The Wall Street Journal

Wed, 04/12/2023 - 12:00 pm

Fifty professors form an alliance on academic freedom.

Conservatives are so few at American universities that the battle to restore respect for free and open debate will have to be led by what used to be known as traditional liberals. Well, maybe there’s hope. On Wednesday Harvard University said it’s forming a new faculty-led Council on Academic Freedom dedicated to the free exchange of ideas as a cornerstone of “reason and rational discourse.”

In an op-ed for the Boston Globe, Harvard professors Steven Pinker and Bertha Madras write that “an academic establishment that stifles debate betrays the privileges that the nation grants it.” Free speech, they write, is also essential to human progress. Intellectual orthodoxy “is bound to provide erroneous guidance on vital issues like pandemics, violence, gender, and inequality.”

The professors note that although they are comfortable with expressing controversial or unorthodox views, others on campus are not. Tenure no doubt helps. But the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy is powerful at Harvard and the school ranks 170 out of 203 in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s free speech list. Mr. Pinker and Ms. Madras acknowledge the school has had “cases of disinvitation, sanctioning, harassment, public shaming, and threats of firing and boycotts for the expression of disfavored opinions.”

The academic freedom group includes former Harvard president and Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, former dean of the Harvard Faculty of Medicine Jeffrey Flier, law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, economist Gregory Mankiw, social ethics professor Mahzarin R. Banaji and Islamic intellectual history professor Khaled El-Rouayheb, among others across the ideological spectrum.

This is progress, but the message will have to spread across the school’s administration and especially the student body. Students at many colleges these days operate like Red Guards in China’s Cultural Revolution. Being unwoke is socially punished. Breaking that culture of conformity will take reinforcement across the institution.

There’s ample reason to be skeptical, and we’ll believe it when we see it. But if Harvard’s faculty is recommitting the school to the bedrock principles of university life, hear, hear.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-council-on-academic-freedom-professors-fre…

How I Liberated My College Classroom

duda@neonone.com — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 12:41:17 GMT

By John Rose

Wall Street Journal

Mon, 06/21/2021 - 12:00 pm

How I Liberated My College Classroom

I created a special seminar to discuss controversial issues freely, and the results were eye-opening.

The conservative critique of American higher education is well known to Journal readers: The universities are run by intolerant progressives. The left counters with an insult: The lack of intellectually respectable conservative arguments is responsible for campus political uniformity. Perhaps a better starting point in this debate is the students, most of whom actually want freer discourse on campus. They want to be challenged by views they don’t hold.

This, at least, has been my recurring experience with undergraduates at Duke University, where I teach classes called “Political Polarization” and “Conservatism” that require my students to engage with all sides of today’s hottest political issues.

True engagement, though, requires honesty. In an anonymous survey of my 110 students this spring, 68% told me they self-censor on certain political topics even around good friends. That includes self-described conservative students, but also half of the liberals. “As a Duke student, it is difficult to be both a liberal and a Zionist,” one wrote. Another remarked, “Although I support most BLM ideas, I do not feel that I can have any conversation that even slightly criticizes the movement.”

To get students to stop self-censoring, a few agreed-on classroom principles are necessary. On the first day, I tell students that no one will be canceled, meaning no social or professional penalties for students resulting from things they say inside the class. If you believe in policing your fellow students, I say, you’re in the wrong room. I insist that goodwill should always be assumed, and that all opinions can be voiced, provided they are offered in the spirit of humility and charity. I give students a chance to talk about the fact that they can no longer talk. I let them share their anxieties about being socially or professionally penalized for dissenting. What students discover is that they are not alone in their misgivings.

Having now run the experiment with 300 undergraduates, I no longer wonder what would happen if students felt safe enough to come out of their shells. They flourish. In one class, my students had a serious but respectful discussion of critical race theory. Some thought it harmfully implied that blacks can’t get ahead on their own. Others pushed back.

My students had an honest conversation about race, but only because they had earned each other’s trust by making themselves vulnerable. On a different day, they spoke up for all positions on abortion. When a liberal student mentioned this to a friend outside class, she was met with disbelief: “Let me get this straight, real Duke students in an actual class were discussing abortion and some of them actually admitted to being pro-life?” For my student’s part, she was no longer shocked the conversation had taken place, nor scandalized at the views of her classmates.

Not long after Jan. 6, I asked my students how many of them had a family member or friend who voted for Donald Trump . In a class of 56, 50 hands went up. I then asked them to keep their hands up if they thought this person’s vote was motivated by anything unsavory—say, sexism or racism. Every hand but two went down.

Despite our masks, I could see that students were surprised. Turns out, their Trump-supporting cousin wasn’t the exception. When you actually know others, they aren’t an abstraction onto which you can project your own political narratives. The same is true in the classroom.

On the last day of class this term, several of my students thanked their counterparts for the gift of civil disagreement. Students told me of unlikely new friendships made. Some existing friendships, previously strained by political differences, were mended. All of this should give hope to those worried that polarization has made dialogue impossible in the classroom. Not only is it possible, it’s what students pine for.

Progressives, the power to make this a widespread reality on campus is in your hands; in so doing, you’ll remain true to your own tradition of liberalism. Conservatives, don’t write off the modern university; in continuing to support it, you’ll uphold your own tradition’s commitment to passing down wisdom.

Both sides should support efforts within universities that promote civil discourse. We’ll all be happier about the state of the country if we do. After all, as they say, what starts on campus doesn’t stay on campus.

Mr. Rose is associate director of the Arete Initiative at Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics.

Ohio May Start a Free Speech School

duda@neonone.com — Sun, 07 May 2023 12:40:28 GMT

By The Editorial Board

Wall Street Journal

Sun, 05/07/2023 - 12:00 pm

Ohio State could soon have a redoubt for free academic inquiry.

Free speech on campus has been making a modest comeback of late, as more schools look for ways to reintroduce classical liberal principles of civic debate and expression. The latest step forward is in Ohio, where the Legislature is planning a new school for free expression and academic inquiry in Columbus.

Lawmakers on Wednesday introduced a bill to create the Salmon P. Chase center for civics, culture and society at Ohio State University. Named for the former Ohio Governor who was also a Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the school would be an independent academic unit on campus that would focus on the “historical ideas, traditions and texts that have shaped the American Constitutional order and society.”

The school is intended to encourage greater academic diversity. It will “create a community dedicated to an ethic of civil and free inquiry, which respects the intellectual freedom of each member,” according to the legislation. Classes will include lessons on the “books and major debates which form the intellectual foundation of free societies.” A school with a similar writ will be created at the University of Toledo College of Law.

Ohio State’s plan, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Robert McColley and Sen. Jerry Cirino, follows a similar effort at the University of North Carolina, where the trustees this year announced a new School of Civic Life and Leadership. That plan enraged many in the school’s left-leaning faculty who are trying to block the project.

Mr. McColley tells us that Ohio’s effort is aimed at “recentering the topics and experience of higher education.” College was “once known as a place to explore the viewpoints of others around you,” without being subjected to a heckler’s veto, he adds.

The best development would be for school presidents to reclaim instruction and debate from campus censors. But too few are willing to risk their careers or endure harassment to do it. The rise of the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy has also institutionalized the use of race and gender as weapons to claim offense and censor speech that upsets progressive sensibilities.

That leaves the school-within-a-school idea as one way to establish a redoubt for open intellectual inquiry. There’s always the risk that these schools can also be captured, but give Ohio lawmakers credit for trying.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ohio-legislature-salmon-p-chase-school-ohio-state-…

These universities are pushing back on censorious students. Finally.

sldamon97@gmail.com ( Savannah Damon) — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 15:02:06 GMT

By the Editorial Board

Washington Post

Sat, 04/29/2023 - 12:00 pm

In March, a Cornell University sophomore and member of the undergraduate student assembly saw a friend become visibly disturbed while reading “The Surrendered,” a Chang-rae Lee novel with a graphic rape scene. So she spearheaded a resolution that “implores all instructors to provide content warnings on the syllabus for any traumatic content that may be discussed.”

On the surface, this story has all the trappings of a wider phenomenon increasingly prevalent on American university campuses: the curtailing of academic inquiry , and sometimes even free speech, for the protection of perceived student “sensitivities” — invisible boundaries whose contours are never quite clear but almost always couched as barriers against “harm.” What happened next is cause for celebration: The Cornell administration immediately struck down this resolution, a welcome reminder that academic institutions have the power to defend their fundamental values — and are willing to use it.

“We cannot accept this resolution as the actions it recommends would infringe on our core commitment to academic freedom and freedom of inquiry, and are at odds with the goals of a Cornell education,” wrote Cornell’s president, Martha E. Pollack, and its provost, Michael I. Kotlikoff, in a letter rejecting the student assembly’s plea for trigger warnings. Although they did note, understandably, that “in some cases faculty may wish to provide notice,” an outright trigger warning requirement, they noted, “would have a chilling effect on faculty, who would naturally fear censure lest they bring a discussion spontaneously into new and challenging territory, or fail to accurately anticipate students’ reaction to a topic or idea.”

Across the country, a growing number of administrations and faculties at universities both private and public alike are beginning to do the same, waking up to the realization that academic freedom needs to be protected, and that student outrage on social media should not dictate university policy.

Earlier this month, Neeli Bendapudi, the president of Penn State, released a recorded statement defending her university’s embrace of controversial speakers. The Supreme Court, she reminded her viewers, has long held that public universities such as Penn State are bound by the First Amendment. But she also reiterated a moral reason to continue welcoming diverse, and even offensive, opinions: “For centuries, higher education has fought against censorship and for the principle that the best way to combat speech is with more speech.”

A similar defense is being waged at private institutions. At Harvard University, a group of more than 50 faculty members last month established the Council on Academic Freedom , a group “devoted to free inquiry , intellectual diversity, and civil discourse.” Vanderbilt University, likewise, announced last month that it would become the U.S. foothold for the Future of Free Speech project, an initiative of the Danish think tank Justitia. “For a university to do its work, faculty and students must have maximum freedom to share their ideas, assert their opinions, and challenge conventional wisdom — and one another,” said Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier in a statement .

It’s true, of course, that the social justice movement in general, spurred in part by the brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020, has brought a much-needed change in perspective to the American academy, inspiring faculties to expand course offerings and hiring committees to seek out scholars from diverse backgrounds. But those changes, all necessary efforts to make more students feel welcome on campuses, have sometimes gone hand in hand with tacit limits on what can be said, questioned or even written in university settings.

According to “The Academic Mind in 2022: What Faculty Think About Free Expression and Academic Freedom on Campus,” a national survey of approximately 1,500 faculty members at four-year colleges and universities conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression , a free speech advocacy group, one third of those polled feel they cannot express their opinions based on potential reaction from other members of their university communities — while more than half expressed concern about being fired because of someone misunderstanding a comment.

A turning point of sorts seems to have come in March, when Jenny Martinez, the dean of Stanford Law School, courageously doubled down on defending her decision to apologize to Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan , a Trump appointee with an admittedly abysmal record who had come to Palo Alto only to be heckled nonstop by law students.

“Some students might feel that some points should not be up for argument and therefore that they should not bear the responsibility of arguing them,” she wrote in a 10-page letter . But saying that certain points are somehow beyond the pale of acceptable argumentation “is incompatible with the training that must be delivered in a law school.”

Thankfully, trigger warnings and other such measures are not always successful in taking root. But, at least in certain universities, they’ve triggered long-overdue defenses of unimpeded academic inquiry. For far too long, administrators and professors have been silent. Not anymore.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/29/university-campus-free-speec…

Opinion | The Moral Center Is Fighting Back on Elite College Campuses

sldamon97@gmail.com (Savannah Damon) — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 15:05:05 GMT

David French

The New York Times

Mon, 04/17/2023 - 12:00 pm

William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” has been called the most plundered poem in the English language, and it’s easy to see why. The poem, written in the immediate aftermath of World War I and during the height of the Russian Civil War, vividly captures the feeling that events are sliding out of control. Three lines in particular resonate in troubled times. “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” writes Yeats. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

When I read these words, dramatic, violent events come first to mind. The Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6 is a prime example of the “passionate intensity” of one of the worst movements in American life. With each mass shooting, I think, “Things fall apart.”

But there are other ways in which the center finds itself under siege. The extremist attack on free speech (from right and left) degrades American democracy, and that attack is especially acute on college campuses, whether it comes from angry left-wing students who shout down conservative speakers, vengeful right-wing legislators who pass laws restricting free expression in the academy or the online activism that often demands that universities discipline scholars for engaging in provocative (but constitutionally protected) speech.

I’ve never interpreted the center in Yeats’s poem to mean something like a politically moderate middle but rather a moral foundation, the ideological core of a nation and its people. The United States is certainly a nation built through raw power, as so many nations are, but at its best, it’s also built around a series of ideas, a declaration that its center requires, at a bare minimum, the promises of the Bill of Rights, including freedom of speech.

This isn’t a column about doom, however, but rather about hope. There is no question that the worst are still “full of passionate intensity,” and we do live in a precarious place in our national life. But there are also some signs that the center is fighting back on some of the most elite campuses in the country, that some of the “best” still do, in fact, possess the necessary convictions. I litigated free speech issues on college campuses for almost 20 years, and I’ve never seen such widespread, institutional academic support for free expression.

Let’s take Stanford University, for example. In the days and weeks since law students shouted down and disrupted a speech by a federal judge, the center has taken a stand. The dean of Stanford Law School, Jenny Martinez, penned a powerful, 10-page memorandum that mandated a half-day of instruction on free speech and legal norms, reaffirmed the school’s dedication to the Stanford Statement on Academic Freedom and declared: “Unless we recognize that student members of the Federalist Society and other conservatives have the same right to express their views free of coercion, we cannot live up to this commitment nor can we claim that we are fostering an inclusive environment for all students.”

Then there’s Cornell University. In March, the school’s undergraduate student assembly unanimously approved a resolution calling for trigger warnings in syllabuses to warn students of “graphic traumatic content” in course content. Cornell’s president, Martha E. Pollack, promptly vetoed it.

In a joint letter with Cornell’s provost, Michael I. Kotlikoff, she explained that the trigger warning policy “would violate our faculty’s fundamental right to determine what and how to teach, preventing them from adding, throughout the semester, any content that any student might find upsetting.” Moreover, the letter said, the policy would “have a chilling effect on faculty, who would naturally fear censure lest they bring a discussion spontaneously into new and challenging territory, or fail to accurately anticipate students’ reaction to a topic or idea.”

The faculty at Harvard University is also stepping up. In an opinion essay in The Boston Globe, Harvard’s Steven Pinker and Bertha Madras announced the creation of the Council on Academic Freedom, a coalition of 50 faculty members and several other Harvard employees “devoted to free inquiry, intellectual diversity and civil discourse.”

On Monday, Vanderbilt University will announce the expansion of its Future of Free Speech Project, run with Denmark’s Aarhus University and the think tank Justitia, which will include an international focus on free expression. I spoke to the project’s executive director, Jacob Mchangama, and he emphasized that American support for free speech can have a global impact in combating tyranny. He pointed to a piece he wrote in Foreign Policy noting that American legal standards have influenced foreign courts, specifically by enhancing press freedom. In our conversation, he made a point that’s critical in contemporary debates. “Free speech and equality,” he said, “are mutually reinforcing, not mutually exclusive.”

That’s four elite American academic institutions that have doubled down on free speech in just one month.

And we cannot forget the University of Chicago. Since 2014, it’s arguably been the single most influential academic institution in the United States supporting academic freedom. Its statement on free speech declares the “university’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the university community to be offensive, unwise, immoral or wrongheaded.” A version of the Chicago statement has been adopted by almost 100 colleges, universities and state university systems, including Princeton University, Johns Hopkins University and the North Carolina and Wisconsin state university systems.

I share this not to declare that the battle for free speech on campus is won. Far from it. The Stanford statement was in response to a student disruption. This month, the former N.C.A.A. swimmer Riley Gaines alleged she was assaulted after speaking at San Francisco State University in opposition to transgender women competing in women’s sports. There’s video evidence that Gaines was chased through the halls by angry protesters and that her event was disrupted by chanting, foot-stomping protests.

And disruptions like those we witnessed at Stanford and San Francisco State have occurred alongside hundreds of recent attempts to fire or punish scholars for speech that’s protected by the First Amendment or basic principles of academic freedom.

It’s important to emphasize that the fight over free speech on campus is not left versus right. Attempts to suppress ideas and stifle speech come from both ends of the political spectrum. The faculty and administrators at Stanford, Cornell, Harvard and Chicago who are making their stands aren’t a collection of conservatives taking on woke college students. Instead, they represent the moral and legal center of the American academy taking on the extremes.

Left and right tend to challenge free speech on campus in different ways. Left-leaning students have led shout-downs and disrupted events, while right-leaning legislators have passed or considered laws stifling the expression of controversial ideas about race and gender. Both sides have proved capable of mobilizing online outrage to punish professors who offend their constituencies.

The First Amendment cannot be tied to one side of our partisan divide. It’s not a Republican value or a Democratic value but rather an American value, and it’s a value that’s particularly important in the academy.

In 1957, during a previous wave of censorship aimed at eliminating “subversive” people from public employment, the Supreme Court issued its most ringing declaration of support for academic freedom: “Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die.”

This language might seem dramatic, but it’s true. Free speech is indispensable to the American idea. It protects us from tyranny more thoroughly and effectively than any other constitutional right. As Frederick Douglass proclaimed after his own brush with mob censorship, “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.”

America’s most elite academic institutions can, in fact, demonstrate conviction. The “passionate intensity” of the extremes remains, but the center can hold. Douglass was correct. Free speech is the “dread of tyrants,” and sustaining that freedom — against left-wing protests and right-wing lawmakers — will preserve America’s democratic experiment. There is no path to American equality or justice absent the freedom of speech.

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https://silk-news.com/2023/04/17/opinion/opinion-the-moral-center-is-fighting-b…

DEI Meets East Germany: U.S. Universities Urge Students to Report One Another for ‘Bias’

Thu, 06 Apr 2023 16:37:35 GMT

Iván Marinovic and John Ellis

Wall Street Journal

04/6/2023 - 1:10 pm

Anonymous informers have always been a hallmark of totalitarian regimes. Friends, neighbors and even family members are encouraged to inform on those who speak against the regime. This is effective social control: Nowhere is safe to discuss politics, and everyday life is subdued. To this day, when Cubans want to discuss something sensitive, they go into their bathrooms, let the water flow and whisper.

Who would want to live under such conditions? Apparently, America’s colleges and universities do. They have been setting up their own systems of anonymous informers.\

According to a recent study by the free-speech watchdog organization Speech First, 56% of American universities have adopted schemes that encourage students to report on one another anonymously for “bias” or “protected identity harm.” This means that anyone who falls short of campus orthodoxy on “pronouns,” transgenderism, microaggressions and proscribed language might soon be denounced and deprived of basic due process, including the right to face an accuser. Zealots at Stanford recently denounced a fellow student who was photographed holding a copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

The number of universities that have institutionalized snitching has doubled since 2017. The damage this will do to campus life is easy to imagine: It will chill free expression via self-censorship both in and out of the classroom; it will infantilize protected classes of students even more than they already have been; it will reinforce the campus culture of victimhood; it will further strengthen the radical orthodoxy; and it will divert yet more energy from learning to ideological activism.

Anonymous reporting has a self-selection component: Decent people won’t do it because they consider it morally repugnant. A system that rewards spying on friends and neighbors will disproportionately attract cowardly people motivated by the worst of human nature—resentment, jealousy, grudges and dogmatic intolerance. The snitches will be people who don’t understand the damage Stasi-like behavior will do to our universities.

Anonymous reporting will also contribute to the bureaucratic bloat of universities. Administrative staff will be needed to investigate and resolve the complaints, making a college education even costlier. By most estimates, the size of college administrations has doubled in the last 30 years, and tuition costs have risen at many times the rate of inflation. The solution is to reduce the number of administrative staff, not increase it further.

It’s predictable that many of these anonymous complaints will be trivial, but the investigating staff will be motivated to take everything seriously, no matter how absurd. They have an incentive to increase their case loads, creating a need for even more bureaucracy, which wastes time and money and interferers with academic work.

But perhaps the worst aspect of this scheme is that the most destructive of campus bureaucracies—the diversity, equity and inclusion brigade—will grow, for most of the campus bias-reporting systems are housed in DEI offices. Yes, the same group that polices language, forces ideological training down the throats of faculty and students, and mandates loyalty oaths from faculty candidates will be in charge of administering the system of informers. Woke ideologues will obstruct the work of those who still believe that the mission of a university is to foster the free exchange of ideas.

Broadly educated people will be shocked to learn that colleges and universities are encouraging behavior straight out of East Germany. Sadly, such people are rare on campus these days. The ones that remain are learning to keep silent.

Mr. Marinovic is an associate professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a co-founder of the Stanford Classical Liberalism Initiative. Mr. Ellis is a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of “The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done.”

DEI Meets East Germany: U.S. Universities Urge Students to Report One Another for ‘Bias’ - WSJ

At MIT debate, DEI defenders concede diversity policies can make ‘things worse’

Thu, 06 Apr 2023 14:53:44 GMT

By Maggie Kelly

The College Fix

Aug 6, 2023

‘DEI is derailed when activists say men who want to be women are equal to women and allow those men access to women’s hard-earned rights,’ pro-DEI scholar says

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — The resolution “Academic DEI programs should be abolished” drew a large crowd to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Tuesday evening as four scholars debated the hot-button issue in front of nearly 300 people.

Despite disagreement on the fundamental value of DEI, both sides agreed on the flawed or misguided nature of many diversity programs.

Pamela “Denise” Long, CEO of DEI consulting organization YouthCentrix, defended preferential treatment for American descendants of slaves but said DEI has in some ways been hijacked by activists representing other interests. “[American] Negros should forever have a special relationship with our nation that enslaved us since 1776,” Long ( pictured, right ) said.

“We are those folk who endured a hundred years of abhorrent, unimaginable, unconstitutional discrimination until 1960, and those of us who have continuously experienced disproportionate negative impact of social policy even until today,” she said. However, “DEI makes things worse when advocates attempt to shoehorn the ambitions of all people onto the backs of U.S. slaves and our legacy,” Long said.

“DEI is derailed when activists say men who want to be women are equal to women and allow those men access to women’s hard-earned rights,” Long continued. “DEI is derailed when they say that ‘minor-attracted people’ is just a sexual preference. … To hook that to our legacy as slaves is wrong and egregious.”

Karith Foster, diversity consultant with INVERSITY solutions, also spoke on the importance of DEI, but had strong words about many of its existing programs. “DEI is necessary,” said Foster (left, in purple). “When done well, lives can be transformed and transported to an infinitely better place. When DEI is done poorly — and let’s be blatantly honest, it’s taken a left turn — it creates insurmountable barriers of fear, mistrust, vengeance and indifference.”

However, “looking to eradicate an effort, as badly as it’s been done, is not an answer either,” Foster continued. “We need to reform DEI and all our conversations and programs around it.”

DEI ideas are ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing,’ McGill professor countered

“Diversity, equity and inclusion sound wonderful,” chemist and McGill University Professor Pat Kambhampati, who argued for the abolition of academic DEI programs, said at the opening of the debate. “But these ideas are a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

“Let’s begin with equity,” said Kambhampati (below left). “Equity involves redistribution of resources from me to you.”

“We had economic Marxism a century ago,” he said. “Now in Cambridge in [the 2020s], we have cultural Marxism.”

Heather Mac Donald, author and Manhattan Institute fellow, spoke up forcefully in favor of DEI program abolition. Mac Donald serves on the College Fix Advisory Board . “A university’s task is the pursuit of truth,” Mac Donald said. “The DEI bureaucracy is founded on a lie. A lie which teaches students to think of themselves as victims and to see racism where none exists. It [creates] through racial preferences the very divisions and discomforts that it purports to solve in an endless vicious cycle.”

“Campus diversity bureaucrats … suck up vast sums of money, narrow the acceptable range of discourse, and force the adoption of double standards of achievement. Universities should embrace a single, colorblind version of academic excellence. It will only do so however by eliminating DEI fiefdoms and by replacing identity with merit as the touchstone of academic accomplishment.”

Nonetheless, “it is the academic skills gap which gives rise to the entire academic diversity apparatus,” Mac Donald later elaborated in an email to The Fix.

The purpose of that apparatus is to re-cast the inevitable academic struggles of students admitted with large racial preferences into struggles with racism,” Mac Donald said. “Nothing a DEI administrator does can possibly solve the academic skills gap problem, which begins to manifest itself in the earliest years of a child’s life. Even were DEI administrators remotely competent to solve that problem, which they manifestly are not, they enter the picture 14 years too late.”

The debate was uploaded to YouTube on Tuesday night and has been viewed approximately 4,200 times as of Wednesday.

The auditorium, which seats almost 300 people, was nearly full. A quiet and attentive crowd allowed the event to proceed undisturbed. Nadine Strossen, professor emerita at New York Law School and past president of the ACLU, moderated the debate.

Organizers said they were “delighted” at how the event proceeded, economist and co-organizer Eric Rasmusen wrote in an April 5 email to The Fix .

“No police were present, no threats were made, and the debate and audience questioning proceeded respectfully— though not because the debaters didn’t stake out their positions in very strong and opposing terms,” he said.

Approximately 100 MIT scholars, include several DEI deans, were asked to participate in the debate, but all declined or did not respond except for one professor, The College Fix reported last month. None of the panelists, pro or anti-DEI, were formally affiliated with the university.

The event was hosted by the university’s Adam Smith Society and MIT Free Speech Alliance. Fifteen other organizations also co-sponsored the debate, including American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism and the Alumni Free Speech Alliance.

At MIT debate, DEI defenders concede diversity policies can make ‘things worse’ | The College Fix

Cornell’s Academic Freedom Test

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 16:44:00 GMT

By The Editorial Board

Wall Street Journal

04/04/2023 - 06:47 pm

Diversity enforcers have become speech enforcers on many college campuses, but a few schools are starting to articulate some limits. The latest is Cornell University, which has refused to adopt a student resolution that would have required “trigger warnings” anytime an upsetting subject is mentioned in the classroom.

Under the proposal, professors would have been required to warn students in advance about “traumatic” content that touched on topics like self-harm, domestic, racial or transphobic violence and homophobic harassment. Professors would have been even more nervous than they already are that any open-format classroom discussion or debate might wander into trigger territory.

The entire idea of a trigger warning for speech is antithetical to the idea of a university, and in a previous age no one would have taken it seriously. But this is the era of woke censorship, so it’s news when campus leaders push back, as they have at Cornell.

“Learning to engage with difficult and challenging ideas is a core part of a university education: essential to our students’ intellectual growth, and to their future ability to lead and thrive in a diverse society,” Cornell President Martha Pollack and Provost Michael Kotlikoff wrote in rejecting the resolution. Academic freedom, they note, means that professors get to choose their course content as well as how they present it to their students.

In recent weeks, Stanford University and Columbia University have had to tangle with students who felt triggered by exposure to conservative judges. Stanford law students shouted down federal Judge Kyle Duncan while Columbia students have called on the university to take down a social media post that includes members of the school’s Federalist Society meeting with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In both instances, the universities stood by policies protecting free expression on campus.

Cornell’s policy on free speech notes Cornell values “free and open inquiry and expression—tenets that underlie academic freedom—even of ideas some may consider wrong or offensive.” Research has shown that trigger warnings aren’t effective at helping people manage their anxiety, and including such warnings in an academic environment encourages emotional fragility and intellectual cowardice. It also teaches students and faculty to self-censor.

Cornell’s position is good news, but these bad ideas will recur as long as the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy governs academia, pushing the notion that honest speech and debate are traumatic. If universities want to reclaim real intellectual openness on campus, they have to help students get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Cornell’s Academic Freedom Test - WSJ

DEI at Law Schools Could Bring Down America

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 15:27:02 GMT

By Tunku Varadarajan

Wall Street Journal

March 28, 2023 6:50 pm ET

After the Stanford episode, Ilya Shapiro sounds a warning: The threat to ‘dismantle existing structures’ is an idle one in English class. But in legal education it targets individual rights and equal treatment under the Constitution.

Falls Church, Va.

Wokeness, or what used to be called political correctness, once seemed merely harebrained, the product of shallow ideas and immature passion. The common view was that undergraduates would outgrow it once they left campus and faced the rigors of the real world.

You seldom hear that anymore, as those ideas have run amok in culture- and economy-defining institutions ranging from news organizations and local governments to professional societies and corporate boardrooms. But Ilya Shapiro thinks we’re not alarmed enough about their influence in one important corner of academia: law schools. The professional ideologues who wield administrative authority on American college campuses want nothing less than to “change the American constitutional system,” Mr. Shapiro says. They pose a grave long-term threat to “the rule of law and inalienable rights, and even concepts like equal treatment under the law.”

Mr. Shapiro, 45, is director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Hunkered down in the study of his Virginia home, he’s working on a book, “Canceling Justice: The Illiberal Takeover of Legal Education,” that seeks to lay bare the process by which bureaucrats appointed to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” on campus have “perverted our system of legal education.”

A prime example was in the news as we spoke. Stanford’s Federalist Society chapter had invited Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to speak on campus. Confronted by a vicious leftist student mob, he asked administrators to intervene. Tirien Steinbach, the law school’s associate dean for DEI, arose to deliver prepared remarks, which concluded: “I look out and I don’t ask, ‘What’s going on here?’ I look out and I say, ‘I’m glad this is going on here.’ ”

Mr. Shapiro experienced a different kind of DEI humiliation in January 2022. He was concluding his tenure as a vice president of the Cato Institute and due to start a new job as executive director of the Center for the Constitution at Georgetown’s law school. Then Justice Stephen Breyer announced he would retire. Mr. Shapiro tweeted that Judge Sri Srinivasan was the “objectively best pick” for the vacancy but President Biden had already disqualified him on the basis of race and sex. Mr. Shapiro opined that Judge Srinivasan “alas doesn’t fit into the intersectional hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.”

The tweet, which Mr. Shapiro describes as “inartfully phrased,” prompted an inquisition at Georgetown. The university suspended him with pay while its Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action conducted a four-month investigation into his fitness for the job. In June the office issued a report exonerating him—but on a technicality with an unsubtle chilling effect.

Since Mr. Shapiro wasn’t yet on Georgetown’s payroll, the report found, the university lacked jurisdiction over his speech. But if he “were to make another, similar or more serious remark as a Georgetown employee, a hostile environment based on race, gender, and sex likely would be created.” In fact, Mr. Shapiro wrote in these pages, “it is the Georgetown administrators who have created a hostile work environment for me.” He quit and returned to the think-tank world.

If Mr. Shapiro were an English professor, one might put this down as a workplace dispute of marginal importance. But he has a point when he says law schools are different. They train “future lawyers and politicians and judges, and the gatekeepers to our institutions, to the rules of the game.” That game has the highest of stakes: “the rule of law, upon which American prosperity and liberty and equality sit.”

An illiberal takeover of medical schools, Mr. Shapiro quips, might be more “immediately dangerous, in the sense that you don’t have the best doctors treating people.” But some of the students who raged against Judge Duncan “are people who, in 20 years, are going to be joining the federal bench.” Sooner than that, “they’ll be occupying influential positions in state and federal government, bringing legal cases, becoming state legislators in some cases, or occupying the general counsel’s offices of Fortune 500 companies and the partnership ranks of big firms.”

Already, Mr. Shapiro says, partners at law firms “cower in fear of their associates, who question their firm’s representation of certain types of client and demand that statements be made by law firms after Supreme Court decisions and other developments in the political world.” A friend of his was a partner in the Houston office of a large global law firm. “She’s pro-life,” he says, declining to name the lawyer or the firm. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, various firm leaders asked her to handle some pro bono clients advancing pro-choice arguments. “She said she was too busy and didn’t make a stink over it,” Mr. Shapiro says. “Eventually, the managing partner of the Houston office said, ‘Well, I guess you’re pro-life. What’s the point of having a female partner who’s pro-life?’ ” She now practices independently.

Similar cases have been recounted in these pages. Former Solicitor General Paul Clement and Erin Murphy, then partners at Kirkland & Ellis, won a landmark Second Amendment victory last year at the Supreme Court. The firm responded by ordering them to drop the clients or resign; they walked. Hogan Lovells fired Robin Keller for saying that she agreed with the justices’ decision overturning Roe during an online conference call advertised as a “safe space” for female employees.

Much of this seems self-defeating. Would you hire an attorney who is made to feel “unsafe” by a Supreme Court decision? Wouldn’t a lawyer who heckled a judge in court go to jail for contempt? Maybe there’s still something to the idea that woke students are in for a shock after graduation.

“Professors are shying away from entire topics, not just a given perspective on a topic,” Mr. Shapiro says. They’re “just skipping over anything to do with rape or hate crimes, because they’re too sensitive. You try to write an exam question and there are too many red flags, too many tripwires.” These professors do “their students a disservice by not training them in how to advocate in the real world of courts. There, it’s not a conversation between the left and the far left.”

Mr. Shapiro says “nonprogressive” law professors were rare even 20 years ago, when he studied law at the University of Chicago. Critical legal studies, fashionable in the late 1980s and early ’90s, was “passé, a very small niche thing.” Since then, “what’s really changed is the bureaucratic explosion. And most of that bureaucracy is in this DEI space, which actively subverts the traditional educational mission of truth-seeking” with its “ideas of power dynamics and intersectionality, dividing people into oppressive and oppressed classes, and things like that.”

Pressure comes from without as well: In February 2022 the American Bar Association, which has sole authority to accredit U.S. law schools, passed a resolution demanding that they “provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism.” At the same time, the Biden administration’s drive for racial equity “seems to be sprinkling political commissars throughout the government.” With a mordant optimism, he observes that those may be “the only kinds of jobs that law school graduates who refuse to engage ideas they don’t like and spew epithets at federal judges may be qualified for.”

But those jobs also have real-world power, the exercise of which could eventually cumulate into “regime change,” Mr. Shapiro warns. “I’m not trying to be hyperbolic or bombastic. If you read critical legal studies, of which critical race theory is a subset, you’ll read about the need to ‘fundamentally dismantle existing structures,’ to ‘change the way social hierarchies operate.’ . . . The goal is to fundamentally change the way that American society operates.”

These ideas are particularly fashionable on elite campuses, although Mr. Shapiro notes recent hostile incidents at lower-rated schools such as Texas A&M, the University of Kansas and UC Hastings (the last involving Mr. Shapiro himself). “There’s a higher quotient of activist types who would engage in disruptions and contribute to an illiberal atmosphere at a Yale than at a University of Iowa.” At top schools, “more people are getting that law degree to change the world, whereas at lower-ranked schools, they want to be lawyers. They want to make money and get a job and join the upper middle class.”

Is there any hope for elite schools? After Judge Duncan’s mobbing, Jenny Martinez, dean of Stanford Law School, issued a 10-page memo that strongly defended free speech and academic freedom, apologized to the judge and announced that Ms. Steinbach, the DEI associate dean, had been placed on administrative leave.

Mr. Shapiro would like to see more. He thinks universities need to enforce their policies against hecklers’ vetoes by disciplining those who violate them. Law schools can suspend students, even expel them in serious cases, and impose career consequences. “They can also report to a bar association,” Mr. Shapiro says. “All law schools have to sign off on a character and fitness assessment before a graduate can take the bar exam.” If a student has been “completely disruptive, and has demonstrated that he doesn’t have the character and fitness to be a lawyer, they can be adjudged not fit to sit for the bar exam”—with due process, including the right of appeal, of course.

Ms. Martinez did none of that. Her memo promised to institute “mandatory educational programming for our student body rather than referring specific students for disciplinary sanction” and to blur students’ faces when the university releases video of the event.

Mr. Shapiro says there have to be “exogenous shocks to really change things.” One approach might be to target the elite schools’ status. Judges James Ho and Elizabeth Branch of the Fifth and 11th Circuits, respectively, announced in October that they won’t hire clerks from Yale until the school reforms its policies on free speech. “If any Supreme Court justice said that,” Mr. Shapiro says, “it would be a game-changer.” In an article for National Review, Judges Ho and Branch also called on Stanford to “identify the disrupters so that future employers know who they are hiring.”

Mr. Shapiro takes heart that “people who are not cultural warriors of the left or the right are starting to notice this stuff, and they don’t like what they see.” Lawmakers in 15 states have introduced bills to slash or abolish DEI offices and staff at public colleges, although none have passed so far. The backlash is still inchoate, and Mr. Shapiro believes the only solution is to purge “DEI bureaucracies that undermine the liberal values of academic speech and due process.”

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.

DEI at Law Schools Could Bring Down America - WSJ

You Can’t Cancel Me, I Quit

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 15:18:37 GMT

By Mary Eberstadt

Wall Street Journal

March 26, 2023

I was supposed to speak at Furman University. I decided to beg off rather than indulge an angry mob.

I was scheduled to give a speech on Monday at Furman University about my recent book, “Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics.” I canceled it. Here’s why.

In the spring of 2014—in retrospect, the dress rehearsal for cancel culture—some commencement speakers around the country were disinvited or withdrew themselves from consideration owing to left-wing protests. I wasn’t among them. A few faculty members at Seton Hall University tried to have my invitation rescinded on the grounds that I wasn’t what they meant by “Catholic”—progressive. They failed. I delivered my address as scheduled at New Jersey’s Meadowlands Arena to some 6,000 graduates, families and friends, and was awarded an honorary doctorate in humane letters.

It was a thrilling event. I enjoy talking to students. I teach graduate students and young professionals, and I founded an organization that helps mentor hundreds of women involved in journalism and media, many of them right out of college. Those experiences probably explain why I had never been the object of protest by students.

But 2023 is light years from 2014. Some months ago, the head of Furman’s Tocqueville Program invited me to give a public lecture about “Primal Screams.” Not knowing a soul there, I googled. Nestled in scenic Greenville, S.C., the university was founded in 1826 by the Southern Baptist Convention. Furman’s website features young people said to be “innovative in their thinking, and compassionate in their approach to career, community, and life.” The Tocqueville Program has hosted impressive speakers. This seemed a promising opportunity to visit an attractive campus, befriend some students and faculty, and talk over ideas. What could go wrong?

Well, consider what happened to the speaker who preceded me last month in the same series: Scott Yenor, a professor of political science at Boise State University.

Mr. Yenor had been invited to speak on “Dostoevsky and Conscience.” An inhospitality committee sprang into action, “triggered” not by his speech topic but by opinions that he had expressed elsewhere, including his critique of feminism and support for “sex-role realism.” Scores of faculty and student protesters “silently” objected inside and outside as he spoke. Three armed policemen were assigned to his protection. Within the auditorium, protesters lined the walls the professor had to pass, holding posters with ad hominem slogans and quotations of his taken out of context, staring balefully at him throughout.

I called Mr. Yenor to ask for his take. “Never in my life have I experienced a crowd so uninterested in learning, and so unwilling to hear,” he said. “They were simply filled with malice.” No one in the administration commented on his treatment, much less apologized for it.

Soon after, something called the Cultural Life Program at Furman, which requires students to attend a certain number of public speeches, mysteriously decided to deny credit for mine unless the program inserted a different faculty interlocuter rather than the one who had invited me—presumably because the latter would have been too supportive. An article was posted by the independent online student newspaper, the Paladin, attacking the Tocqueville Program, applauding the public abomination of Scott Yenor, darkly noting that Catholics had been invited as speakers, and taking potshots at me. There’s no evidence that the indignant writer had read my books or even knew their titles. The piece accused me of perpetuating “dangerous” (dog whistle) myths, adding that students “demand to interrogate” (another whistle) the Tocqueville Program.

Posters advertising my speech disappeared en masse around campus the week before the event. They were replaced and disappeared again. Furman community members following social media and conversations on campus relayed independently that the protest was expected to be “substantial,” as two put it. They also informed me about a letter that was sent by some students to the Cultural Life Program’s committee, caricaturing my work and calling me names in an effort to revoke credit for attending my speech.

As I mulled what to do about such unexpected hostility, different calculations came to mind. What might be the odds of an ugly Yenor-style experience? Likely high.

What about the odds of physical injury? Low, but not nonexistent. In 2017 students at Vermont’s Middlebury College attacked Prof. Allison Stanger, sending her to the hospital, after she hosted a talk by Charles Murray. Bystanders have been injured during other recent campus brawls, like the March 14 protest of a Charlie Kirk speech at the University of California, Davis that left an officer injured. In 2021 the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education polled 37,000 students at 159 campuses ; 23% said they believe violence is justified against unwanted speech. Not all students think sending campus guests to the emergency room is good form—but 1 in 4?

In the end, it was a different thought that led me to pull the plug. As Liel Leibovitz put it recently in First Things, “The terrible power our pursuers hold over us, the power of intimidation and of setting the terms of the debate, dissolves the moment you realize you’re free to disengage.” To which I add: Bullies have a right to protest, but that right doesn’t extend to dragooning others into untruths—including the untruth that people who join a hateful mob have any intention of listening to a speaker in the first place. They don’t, and the rest of us are under no obligation to help them live that lie by playing along.

To the students who did want to hear my speech: I’m sorry to miss you. On a positive note, it’s better to read than to watch. Copies of “Primal Screams” have been sent to every student in Furman’s Tocqueville Program, and two dozen more will be available this week for whoever wants them—delivered care of the university president’s office, since social-media mobs lack mailing addresses.

The book makes the case that social upheavals since the 1960s have led to compounded fractures on generations and that the implosion of family, real-life community and religion has weakened many people’s sense of identity. It further argues that the rise in mental and emotional problems, increasingly visible on campuses and on the streets, is a result. The students revulsed by free speech these days aren’t victims of that analysis but poster children for it.

Ms. Eberstadt is author of “Primal Screams” and “Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited.”

You Can’t Cancel Me, I Quit - WSJ

Stanford Law Rediscovers Free Speech

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 15:51:27 GMT

By the Editorial Board

Wall Street Journal Opinion

March 23, 2023 6:42 pm ET

The dean instructs student hecklers on the First Amendment.

Stanford Law School disgraced itself two weeks ago when its diversity administrator let students heckle and shout down federal Judge Kyle Duncan. The school is now trying to salvage its reputation, and it’s making some progress.

In a letter to the university community on Wednesday, Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez issued a defense of free speech on campus and laid out the school’s expectations for civil discourse and legal professionalism.

“Our commitment to diversity and inclusion means we must protect the expression of all views,” Dean Martinez writes. “The First Amendment bars regulation of speech on the grounds that listeners might find its content disturbing.” You’d think this would be self-evident to students of Stanford caliber, but the support for the Bill of Rights isn’t what it used to be on progressive campuses.

Ms. Martinez offered students a Constitution 101 tutorial. While protests are protected by the First Amendment, she writes, “the First Amendment does not give protestors a ‘heckler’s veto.’” She cites state and federal jurisprudence on First Amendment law and counsels students that “learning to channel the passion of one’s principles into reasoned, persuasive argument is an essential part of learning to be an effective advocate.”

Part of Stanford’s disgrace is that an associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, joined the protesters in denouncing Judge Duncan and questioning whether he should be allowed to speak. Ms. Steinbach, whom Ms. Martinez says is “on leave” from the school, explains herself nearby .

In her letter, Ms. Martinez says administrators should “avoid exercising their authority in ways that can chill speech.” She adds that the university’s “inclusive” policy covers groups like the Federalist Society that some students might not like. Those who want Stanford to restrict the group or its speakers “are demanding action inconsistent not only with freedom of speech but with rights to freedom of association that civil rights lawyers fought hard in the twentieth century to secure.”

No students who harassed Judge Duncan will be punished, but Ms. Martinez says students will be required to attend a half-day session in the spring to discuss “freedom of speech and the norms of the legal profession.” That should be fun.

It’s also a shame that in her letter Ms. Martinez felt she had to defend her earlier apology to Judge Duncan. In a better world, the students would be expected to apologize to the judge. But at least Stanford Law is trying to teach its charges, and uphold as a standard, some rudiments of the American Constitution.

Stanford Law Rediscovers Free Speech - WSJ

Davidson College Affirms Free Speech

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 18:50:51 GMT

By Jenna A. Robinson

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

March 16, 2023

In an email to the Martin Center, DFTD founder John Craig described the statement as “a landmark document for Davidson.”

The statement affirms:

Davidson’s progress demonstrates the importance of engaged alumni.

With these steps, Davidson is moving in the right direction. This progress demonstrates the importance of engaged alumni and groups like Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse.

Davidson College Affirms Free Speech — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (jamesgmartin.center)

Alumni, faculty, and students bring free speech commitment to Davidson College

Thu, 16 Mar 2023 14:58:36 GMT

By Jessica Wills

FIRE

March 16, 2023

Davidson College just took a big step toward building a more speech-friendly campus. Through its new “ Commitment to Freedom of Expression ,” Davidson promises its whole campus community will have the ability to work and learn without the risk of censorship.

The commitment was formally adopted on March 6, 2023 and decisively states , “The role of the college is to sustain an environment in which all students can freely learn.” Furthermore, “It is not the proper role of the College to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find uncomforting, disagreeable, or offensive.”

FIRE commends Davidson for clearly articulating that it’s always better to battle offensive speech with more speech rather than with censorship — stating that the potential discomfort free speech can cause is far outweighed by its benefits.

According to the college’s press release , “The statement also confronts head-on the idea that the principles of diversity and free expression are at odds. Instead, the commitment declares, they are essential to each other.”

Davidson argues that diversity and freedom of speech are complementary, not incompatible, as some would make them out to be. Guaranteeing free expression is the best way to ensure diverse people and ideas can flourish in the college environment.

“Our nation needs more of what Davidson can provide—a place where debate runs civilly and freely, in a residence hall or a lecture hall,” said former North Carolina governor James G. Martin, a Davidson alumnus and former faculty member who helped craft the free speech statement and who fervently believes in the value of a Davidson education. The commitment, Martin noted, was created by talking across differences between students, faculty, and alumni. “This commitment was crafted by a group who came from different backgrounds, experiences and ideologies, and those differences brought a lasting result.”

Martin is also a member of Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse , an alumni group whose advocacy work was instrumental in the statement’s adoption. The DFTD has petitioned the college for a free expression statement since 2018 , when it sent a letter to then-college President Carol Quillen, asking her administration to adopt the “Chicago Statement,” like almost 100 other United States colleges and universities . The principles outlined in the statement are meant to encourage discussion across differences, protect civil liberties, and guarantee that students will leave college ready to participate in our democracy.

In 2021, President Quillen appointed a taskforce to develop a free expression statement specifically for Davidson College. Among the appointed task force members was Martin. In a couple of months, the task force returned with a statement that mirrored the Chicago Statement’s free speech protections.

While waiting for the statement’s adoption, the alumni group collected 172 signatures , including 19 from former trustees of the college. In 2022, they submitted these signatures to the board of trustees, to encourage it to adopt the free expression statement drafted by the taskforce.

Finally, on March 6, 2023, under the leadership of new college President Douglas A. Hicks, Davidson announced its formal adoption of a free expression statement entitled “ Davidson’s Commitment to Freedom of Expression .” Watching this years-long struggle to bring a free expression statement to Davidson reminds us at FIRE that the work we’re doing with alumni activists is worthwhile.

John E. Craig, chairman of the DFTD Board of Directors, said, DFTD “is delighted that Davidson's faculty has affirmed a strong Freedom of Expression Statement. Our DFTD alumni group has been urging for this since 2018, and we are grateful for the careful thought and hard work that went into the creation and now affirmation of the Statement.”

Alumni often reach out to FIRE because they are frustrated with their college’s tendency to censor students and faculty. They reminisce about the great debates they had during undergrad and shake their heads at the thought that their children and grandchildren might not have the same opportunity. Some become convinced that there is nothing they can do to help their alma maters. But the success of alumni groups like Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse prove alumni, especially together, have the power to create real change for their alma maters.

Alumni, faculty, and students bring free speech commitment to Davidson College | The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (thefire.org)

Professors continue push for ‘Merit, Fairness and Equality’ to combat DEI regime

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 15:26:37 GMT

By Jacob Shields - University of Maryland

The College Fix

Aug 12, 2022

Professors aimed to ‘come up with something positive as a goal … rather than to just criticize’

Six professors continue to promote an alternative system to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, called Merit, Fairness and Equality . “In order to protect the integrity of universities it is necessary to offer an alternative to the DEI agenda,” professors Dorian Abbot ( pictured ), Iván Marinovic, Richard Lowery and Carlos Carvalho wrote in an August 5 post on their Substack blog Heterodox STEM.

The blog post notes that two additional authors contributed to the post, but couldn’t reveal their identities “due to potential retaliation.” Abbot is a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, Marinovic is an accounting professor at Stanford, and Lowery and Carvalho are business professors at the University of Texas at Austin. Abbot and Marinovic created the MFE alternative framework together in October 2021, shortly following a canceled speech to be given by Abbot at MIT. Activists had criticized his past comments on diversity initiatives.

“In MFE all academic decisions are based on academic merit, with no other considerations taken into account,” which “promotes the mission of universities: the production of knowledge,” the authors wrote.

The authors argued that their proposal would promote free speech and viewpoint diversity, writing that “ideas generated need to be judged by the academic community based on their merits, not whether some authority deems them to be ‘disinformation’ or even dangerous.”

“The idea was to try to come up with something positive as a goal that those of us concerned about the academy can work toward,” instead of just criticizing DEI, Abbot told The Fix on August 8.

Later that year, Abbot launched the “Heterodox STEM” Substack, which describes itself as “a forum for open-minded and respectful conversations about issues relevant to the STEM community.” It is now part of one of the communities associated with the Heterodox Academy, an organization dedicated to increasing viewpoint diversity and freedom of thought within universities.

However, educational institutions do not seem primed to make the switch. Richard Lowery told The College Fix via email August 11 that he “can’t comment on whether anyone has expressed interest.”

“Certainly there is zero interest in anything relating to merit, fairness, or equality at UT-Austin, and every single administrator and the vast majority of the faculty are hell-bent on going in the opposite direction,” Lowery said.

Although this new framework has received some traction online, “no one has officially adopted MFE yet,” Abbot told The Fix in an August 11 email. “Many people are concerned about potential biases in evaluations. MFE gives a productive framework to try to deal with those biases that is not fundamentally antagonistic to the pursuit of truth,” Abbot wrote in his email.

“The key point … is that the metric for success is always academic excellence, and the resulting distribution of immutable characteristics among those selected is never taken into account,” the academics wrote in the blog post.

DEI is a ‘utopian ideology,’ authors state. The August 6 post criticized DEI, calling it a “utopian ideology” that violates “the moral principles of treating all human beings equally and not using them as mere instruments to achieve socio-political ends.”

Merit, Fairness and Equality is a more “morally justified approach” than DEI, the authors argue, saying that, “in deference to their individual dignity, each person is treated equally and given an equal shot.”

The professors encouraged widespread adoption of their new framework, writing, “the MFE concept does not belong to us, and we hope that others will adopt it as their own and build on it.”

Professors continue push for ‘Merit, Fairness and Equality’ to combat DEI regime | The College Fix

davidsonians-for-freedom-of-thought-and-discourse-80376

When One Viewpoint Dominates, Everyone Loses

At Davidson College, just 3% of faculty fall into a political minority, highlighting a clear imbalance.

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