Inside An Elite University’s Campaign To Bring Conservatives to Campus

By Vince Bielski
RealClearInvestigations

If Johns Hopkins University wanted to signal its seriousness about creating an alternative to the left-leaning orthodoxy that permeates higher education, it couldn’t have done better than the recent hire of economist Peter Arcidiacono. Arcidiacono, a devout Roman Catholic, faced campus protests and sleepless nights after publication of his empirical findings that affirmative action can be harmful to minority students who aren’t academically prepared. He was in the spotlight again for providing the evidence in the landmark 2023 Supreme Court ruling against Harvard that effectively killed affirmative action in higher education.

Yet few realize that Arcidiacono supports affirmative action if it’s targeted properly, making him the kind of unpredictable conservative thinker, eager to engage contrary views, that appealed to William Howell. The dean of the new School of Government and Policy, Howell was so smitten with the economist that he also made Arcidiacono vice dean over the faculty.

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