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Michelle Goldberg
New York Times
Excerpt: In 2021, JD Vance gave a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, a gathering of Trumpist thinkers and politicians, titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” It contained the usual complaints about critical race theory and gender ideology, but it went much further, arguing for a frontal attack on the power and prestige of higher education writ large.
Put aside, for a moment, the hypocrisy of this message coming from a man catapulted into the highest strata of American society by Yale Law School. The striking thing about Vance’s speech was its deep hostility to the entire academic enterprise, not just the so-called woke parts. He wasn’t talking about making more room for right-wing ideas in universities or even dreaming of taking them over. He wanted to destroy it all.
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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.
