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Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Before James Ryan stepped down as president of the University of Virginia last month, the Department of Justice accused him and other leaders of actively attempting to “defy and evade federal antidiscrimination laws.” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s civil rights division, said that needed to change.
In a series of seven letters obtained by Inside Higher Ed via an open records request, Dhillon and other Department of Justice officials laid out their increasingly aggressive case that the university was at risk of losing federal funding, just as Ivy League institutions like Harvard and Columbia Universities had in the months prior for allegations of antisemitism.
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The Department of Defense has directed a group of 30 research-focused universities to conduct an “immediate and comprehensive” audit of their partnerships with foreign institutions that it says could be a threat to national security.
Each university has until the end of the month to submit its findings and terminate any relationships found to be “problematic,” the department said in a news release last Monday. Any university that does not comply could lose federal research funding.
At many American universities, progressive assumptions seem embedded in the machinery of campus life. Left-wing speakers and views are applauded, while conservative views (on abortion, for example) are often treated as beyond the pale.
Yet mission statements and promotional materials tend to describe the university’s purpose in nonpartisan terms. When studies show the dearth of right-leaning faculty, administrations typically insist this is just the result of neutral search processes. A gap has opened between the impartial, truth-seeking role universities claim for themselves and the policies they pursue.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon recently released a “National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards,” a less openly threatening version of the earlier “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that had been broadly rejected. More than a month prior to the release of McMahon’s letter, Vanderbilt University published “The University and Its Purpose: A Declaration of First Principles,” signed by its chancellor and board chair and adopted by its board.
Whether this alignment is the result of happenstance or collaboration is impossible to know, but what is clear is the extent to which Vanderbilt is positioning itself as a model of the sort of elite higher education of which the Trump administration approves. This does not, prima facie, make the Vanderbilt model wrong, but, given the stakes, it does suggest that the model should be examined with great care.
