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Ryan Quinn
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Viewpoint diversity. Civics. Western civilization. Republicans and conservative-leaning groups across the country have been using these terms prolifically, and at times interchangeably, to explain what’s lacking in higher education today and why the overhauls they’re pushing are necessary to save the sector from domination by the left.
Now the White House is fueling their push, demanding viewpoint diversity under threat of huge funding cuts. Some say universities need to reform themselves to regain public and governmental support. But even academics and higher ed observers who may agree that universities have become too one-dimensional now find themselves defending the academy against a conservative campaign to force change under the banner of terms that sometimes sound like euphemisms.
Len Gutkin
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Princeton’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, has fiercely defended DEI initiatives in the face of pressure to disavow them from the Trump administration. But in his forthcoming book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, he recommends that colleges jettison at least one such initiative, namely “politically loaded practices like mandatory diversity statements for job candidates.”
Given that Eisgruber has accused other college leaders, as The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch put it, “of carrying water for the Trump administration,” his concession on diversity statements matters. If even the Ivy League’s biggest defender of the status quo ante Trump has turned against diversity statements, it seems likely that they’re on the way out.
E. Thomas Finan
The Atlantic
Excerpt: The Trump administration and its allies are upending American higher education: freezing funding, launching investigations, ratcheting up taxes, and threatening to do much more. Not so long ago this would have been political poison. But in the last decade, Americans’ faith in colleges and universities has plummeted. In 2015, 57 percent had either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to Gallup. As of last year, that group had shrunk to 36 percent, only a few points larger than the share who have “very little” confidence or none at all.
Cam N. Srivastava
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: Harvard College Dean David J. Deming told students that the College can no longer host programming targeted at specific races or identity groups during a presentation to Peer Advising Fellows last week — telling attendees he assumed they already understood why the change was necessary.
Charlie Sykes and Sarah McLaughlin
To the Contrary Podcast, Substack
Excerpt: On today’s “To the Contrary” Podcast, I’m joined by Sarah McLaughlin, senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, about her new book Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech.
Rose Horowitch
The Atlantic
Excerpt: Even before the Ivy League upheavals of the past two years, Jewish students had been slowly drifting away from the elite campuses of the Northeast. Now, as some seek respite from the protest movement that erupted after the Israeli response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of southern Israel, the drift has become more like—sorry—an exodus. And selective colleges outside the Northeast, sensing an intensifying disdain for Ivy League schools among Jewish teens and their parents, are tripping over one another to recruit these students.
