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Thomas B. Edsall
New York Times
Excerpt: Gregory Conti, a political scientist at Princeton, is not a left-wing academic. He is a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute and the editor at large of Compact, a heterodox online magazine that leans to the right. In the case of Trump v. Harvard, Conti wrote in Compact, the university “is close to being an appendage of the Democratic Party.”
Despite Conti’s indisputably conservative credentials, he has come to believe that the Trump administration’s approach to higher education — and toward Harvard in particular — not only violates due process but also threatens to destroy the reputation of the United States as an international center of learning.
Michael S. Schmidt and Michael C. Bender
New York Times
Excerpt: The Justice Department quietly approached Harvard University last month with startling claims, even by the extraordinary standards of the Trump administration’s monthslong assault on the elite college.
The department signaled that it was reviewing claims of discrimination against white men at The Harvard Law Review, and accused the renowned publication of destroying evidence in an open investigation. The administration demanded that Harvard “cease and desist” from interfering.
James Bacon
The Jefferson Council
Excerpt: “Conservative students at the University of Virginia,” a fourth-year student once confided to me, “know who all the conservative professors are. … All seven of them.”
That was only a slight exaggeration. Through my work with the Jefferson Council I have identified a dozen faculty members openly identifying as conservative and/or libertarian out of roughly 1,700 faculty members. I have met three or four more not yet willing to come out of hiding.
Greg Lukianoff
The Atlantic
Excerpt: On May 22, the Department of Homeland Security stripped Harvard University of its Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, instantly jeopardizing the visas of nearly 6,800 international students—27 percent of the student body.
Sarah McLaughlin
FIRE
Excerpt: American universities have long feared that the Chinese government will restrict its country’s students from attending institutions that cross Beijing’s sensitive political lines.
Universities still fear that consequence today, but the most immediate threat is no longer posed by the Chinese government. Now, as the latest punishment meted out to the Trump administration’s preeminent academic scapegoat shows, it’s our own government posing the threat.
Erin Shaw
Heterodox Academy
Excerpt: A win for open inquiry has appeared amidst relentless uncertainty in higher education. The Western Association of Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC), the accreditor of most universities in California and Hawaii, is reconsidering the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) requirements for accreditation in light of the Trump Administration’s executive order on accreditation.
Though the total banning of all things “DEI” represents another political intrusion on academic freedom, dropping DEI as an accreditation requirement allows more space for freedom of thought in higher education as institutions are no longer bound to a particular partisan orthodoxy.
