Your Cart is Empty
Bill Frezza
Heterodox STEM, Substack
Excerpt: 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.
Comments will be approved before showing up.
The early nineteenth century was a formative era for American higher education, a time when colleges were fragile, small-scale institutions, often caught between their colonial legacies and populist hostility to privileged elites studying the liberal arts.
These tensions came to a head in the case Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, which helped to establish the independence of American higher education from governmental control. At issue was the very nature of a college. Is it a public utility, subject to the demands of the state? Or is it a self-governing institution whose autonomy deserves constitutional protection?
Daniel Diermeier has become one of the most visible college leaders. The chancellor of Vanderbilt University joined a panel Thursday in Washington, D.C., to make his case for rebuilding public trust — by taking politics out of research and the classroom, and restraining institutions from issuing statements on matters not directly related to their mission or operations.
After Thursday’s discussion at the Reagan Institute Summit on Education — an event that provided largely supportive views of his positions — Diermeier talked with The Chronicle about politicization in higher education, attempts to limit academic freedom, and why he’s publicly pushing so hard for reforms to higher education while working quietly behind the scenes with federal officials.
Being at Yale over the past two years gives me an interesting perch. From here I can watch the capitulation of a once-great institution in real time. It gives me an inside view of what must have gone down at the law firms, tech companies and the other universities that have bent the knee to the orange menace.
And things are doubleplusgood at Yale these days. Earlier this month, Yale College scheduled a mandatory lecture (officially, a “conversation”) for all first-year students, on the university and democracy. Let’s set aside the curious nature of insisting that all who have just arrived on Yale’s campus must get the “official” story about this place and its role in the world as it is in 2026, even before they’ve set foot in a classroom.
