Your Cart is Empty
Opinion by From the Community
Standford Daily
Excerpt: The Trump administration’s new “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” is a trap.
Presented last week to a group of nine universities that doesn’t yet include Stanford, the compact proposes a list of policy changes the administration hopes universities will agree to in exchange for preferential access to federal grants. Several of the proposed reforms respond to legitimate concerns about higher education and identify real challenges that elite universities have faced in recent years. As White House advisor May Mailman put it, “Our hope is that a lot of schools see that this is highly reasonable.”
Comments will be approved before showing up.
I recently listened to Ross Douthat’s interview with the philosopher Jennifer Frey. She is a serious thinker and an unusually courageous academic entrepreneur. What she built at the University of Tulsa before it was dismantled is exactly the sort of thing more universities should be attempting. Yet almost every argument she offered for the humanities is, I think, completely unpersuasive to anyone not already on our side of the table.
This report presents findings from a national survey of 1,959 law school faculty at 192 American Bar Association (ABA) approved law schools in the United States, conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). As one of the largest surveys of law faculty on free expression and professional norms, the data reveal a profession that strongly endorses free speech principles while struggling to live them out in practice.
I just returned from the University of Wyoming, where I debated the President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Todd Wolfson over the need for colleges and universities to maintain institutional neutrality. The debate was organized by the Steamboat Institute and was live-streamed.
The formal question presented for debate was: “Is institutional neutrality necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry rather than an actor in political disputes?” I spoke in favor of institutional neutrality while Wolfson argued against it as a necessary component to higher education.
