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Neetu Arnold
City Journal
Excerpt: Universities have let progressive dogma degrade their academic missions, eviscerating public faith in higher education. College leaders willing to admit this truth are rare. Vanderbilt University chancellor Daniel Diermeier is one. He has long been a champion of political neutrality and has called out the politicization of scholarly associations—approaches other university leaders are only now catching up on.
Adopting these policies and principles can be challenging for university leaders, partly because they fear how their own faculty or academic departments might respond. Yet Diermeier’s love of universities emboldens him. In a recent interview, transcribed below, he told me that education and research are “noble work,” but only if they are grounded in core principles. And he emphasized how politicization in some departments overshadows the good work conducted in others.
Tyler Coward, Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression
Excerpt: Freedom thrives when the people, not bureaucrats, decide which ideas are worthy of discussion, debate, or support. As FIRE has long argued, campus reform is necessary. But overreaching government coercion that tries to end-run around the First Amendment to impose an official orthodoxy is unacceptable. And the White House’s new Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education raises red flags.
The compact includes troubling language, such as calling on institutions to eliminate departments deemed to “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” Let’s be clear: Speech that offends or criticizes political views is not violence. Conflating words with violence undermines both free speech and efforts to combat real threats.
Brendan Cantwell
Ungated, Substack
Excerpt: The Trump administration on Wednesday evening released a memo inviting University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia to enter into a “compact” (henceforth The Compact) with the federal government.
I will say that if the provisions outlined in The Compact were required by law, it sure seems like the administration would not need a special deal that offers preferred client status as an incentive to get what it wants. Read The Compact for yourself. It’s about 10 pages long. In the meantime, here is my assessments for why this is a rotten deal.
Gabe Levin
The Nation
Excerpt: Dr. Eric Cheyfitz, a professor of American studies at Cornell, said the university has canceled the two classes he was set to teach this semester. It comes as the provost is recommending that he be suspended for two semesters without pay on the grounds that he violated federal antidiscrimination laws, The Nation has learned.
Cheyfitz’s lawyer, Luna Droubi, said it’s the latest turn in months of investigations—carried out by different university bodies—into whether Cheyfitz, 84, told a graduate student last semester to drop a class he was teaching about Gaza because the student is Israeli. Cheyfitz, who is Jewish and whose daughter and grandchildren live in Israel, denies the allegation.
Sabrina Tavernise
New York Times
Excerpt: Two days after Charlie Kirk was killed, Suzanne Swierc, an employee at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., woke up to a cascade of missed calls, texts and voice mail messages from numbers she did not know.
Ms. Swierc (pronounced swirtz) discovered that the barrage stemmed from something she had posted on Facebook the day before: “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.” Her Facebook settings were private, but one of her followers must have taken a screen shot and sent it on without her knowledge.
Henry F. Haidar
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: Out of all the faculty The Crimson recently surveyed, only one percent described their political beliefs as very conservative. Think about that: someone is three times more likely to get into Harvard than to encounter a conservative faculty member here.
Much can be — and has been — said in favor of viewpoint diversity in higher education. Yet those decrying the relative lack of conservative faculty overlooks a basic point: The structure of universities themselves lends itself to a professoriate whose politics do not perfectly map on to that of the public writ large. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
