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John D. Sailer, Forest Romm
City Journal
Last fall, the University of California announced that it would sunset a key diversity-hiring initiative tied to its President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP). Less than two weeks later, the UC system reversed course, cowed by a backlash led by the very “scholar-activists” whom the program had spent four decades and more than $162 million cultivating. The episode offers a sobering lesson for reformers: when a university sustains an agenda long enough, that agenda becomes self-sustaining.
The PPFP functions as a social-justice career accelerator—and a kind of side-door to the faculty lounge. Through the program, UC hires postdoctoral fellows with a heavy emphasis on DEI, and the postdocs then get special favor for tenure-track faculty jobs.
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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.
