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Abigail Saguy, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles, was a little bit nervous to teach a course called “Sociology of Gender” again. She’d last done so in 2019, and found the atmosphere increasingly combative, saying student activists in her course had attempted to “police” her readings and word choice. So in 2024 she tried something new: She got students to debate each other virtually.
Sitting in my office, I began searching for some cause for hope, some reason to believe that higher ed could stanch the damage for the next generation of students. It occurred to me that I’d been hearing less despair from colleagues at certain smaller schools that offer undergraduate study in the “liberal-arts tradition,” a broad and flexible approach to education that values developing the person over professional training. I wondered if these schools—especially the wealthy ones that cluster near the top of national rankings—might enjoy some natural insulation from the fires raging through the nation’s research universities.
Current and former heads of both research universities and liberal-arts colleges confirmed my intuition: Well-resourced and prestigious small colleges are less exposed in almost every way to the crises that higher ed faces.
A new national coalition, the Alliance for Higher Education, announced its launch Tuesday, promising to defend higher education from government interference.
The nonprofit’s mission is to protect higher ed’s role in fostering democracy by ensuring that colleges and universities have academic freedom, autonomy and opportunity for all students to learn and succeed, said Mike Gavin, the organization’s inaugural president and CEO. “Our goal—the joke I’ve been making—is to make things less bad,” Gavin told Inside Higher Ed. “But in the long run, what we want to see is” higher ed making good on its “democratic promises.”
The recent news about plummeting math preparation among University of California, San Diego, students was startling: Over five years, the number of incoming students deemed to need remedial math courses before taking calculus had risen from 32 in 2020 to more than 900 last fall.
Math achievement declines across the country are real, but data from a single campus is not representative, even if it makes national news. In fact, UCSD offers a poor reference point for policy discussions in California and most other states, given how unique its approach to math proficiency has been.
A UNC System Board of Governors committee on Wednesday advanced a proposal to define “academic freedom” across the state’s public universities, despite pushback from a faculty group and their lawyers. The policy, which heads to the full board for consideration next month, includes the definition that the system’s Faculty Assembly approved in October.
In part, the explanation reads that “academic freedom is the foundational principle that protects the rights of all faculty to engage in teaching, research/creative activities, service, and scholarly inquiry without undue influence.” But the system added sections that would set the “parameters” of academic freedom for faculty and its “protections” for students, such as the freedom to “take reasoned exception” to ideas presented in their classes.
Pity Chris Summerlin, the dean of students at the University of Florida. He’s being sued by an anti-Semite, and that’s not the worst of his predicament. So far, judges who have ruled on the case have given mixed verdicts on whether he is likely to win or lose at trial.
College deans and administrators keep confronting the same dilemma: They face intense pressure to punish speech that elicits fear or moral disgust on campus. They also have legal obligations—and face countervailing pressure—to refrain from violating the free-speech rights of students. They cannot always do both. The result is cases such as Damsky v. Summerlin—cases that might be avoided under a better approach to fighting anti-Semitism and other hateful ideas.
