Instead of requiring a DEI statement for a tenure-track at Harvard, applicants will be asked to send a “service statement,” as flagged by Steven McGuire, a fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. 

Aspiring tenure-track professors at Harvard can use that statement to explain their “efforts to strengthen academic communities, e.g. department, institution, and/or professional societies.” 

The original diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) statement required a statement “describing efforts to encourage [DEI] and belonging.” 

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences told Fox News Digital that it has “expanded its approach to learning about candidates being considered for academic appointments by requesting broader and more robust service statements as part of the hiring process.” 

“In making this decision, the FAS is realigning the hiring process with long-standing criteria for tenured and tenure-track faculty positions,” the statement continued. “These criteria include excellence in research, teaching/advising, and service, which are the three pillars of professorial appointments.”

Harvard Kennedy School historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad attacked the decision, arguing that the removal of DEI statements from the application process “may discourage applicants who are the strongest supporters of DEI to not apply for a job at Harvard given the broader context for this change,” The Boston Globe reported. 

Former Harvard Dean Lawrence Summers celebrated the news on Monday. 

“I am glad to see that Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Science has ended the practice of requiring diversity statements and replaced them with statements on university service,” Summers wrote. 

“This should represent a major pivot towards emphasis on academic values and away from identity in appointment decisions,” he continued, adding that “Harvard is finding its way back towards the right core values.” 

Anti-DEI activist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo called the decision a “small victory” in a post on X Monday.

“This is a small victory, but a signal that our campaign is gaining momentum,” he wrote. “We will not stop until the entire DEI apparatus is dismantled and salted over.”

Harvard’s decision follows closely after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) became the first elite school to remove DEI statements from its faculty hiring process.

A university spokesperson told Fox News Digital at the time that “requests for a statement on diversity will no longer be part of applications for any faculty positions at MIT” and added that the decision was made by the school’s president, Sally Kornbluth, with the support of the Provost, Chancellor, and all six academic deans.

“My goals are to tap into the full scope of human talent, to bring the very best to MIT, and to make sure they thrive once here,” Kornbluth said. “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”

This post appeared on Fox News on June 4, 2024.

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The programs, which also are being tried at some private schools, would require 90 credits instead of the traditional 120 for a bachelor’s degree, and wouldn’t require summer classes or studying over breaks. In some cases, the degrees would be designed to fit industry needs.

Indiana recently enacted legislation calling for all state universities there to offer by next year at least one bachelor’s degree program that could be completed in three years, and to look into whether more could be implemented. The Utah System of Higher Education has tasked state universities with developing three-year programs under a new Bachelor of Applied Studies degree, which would still need approval by accreditation boards.

More than a dozen public and private universities are participating in a pilot collaboration called the College-in-3 Exchange, to begin considering how they could offer three-year programs. The public universities include the College of New Jersey, Portland State University, Southern Utah University, the Universities of Minnesota at Rochester and at Morris, the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and Utah Tech University.

Proponents of the three-year degree programs say they save students money and set them on a faster track to their working life. But detractors, including some faculty, say they shortchange students, particularly if they later change their minds on what career path they want to follow.

The Utah Board of Higher Education in March approved the new three-year degree category. Various areas of study would be tied to specific industry needs, with fewer electives required. These degrees are broader than two-year associate degrees, but narrower than a full four-year bachelor’s.

“We told the institutions to start working on them now and developing the curriculum,” Geoff Landward, commissioner of the Utah System of Higher Education, said in an interview. “Also, we want them to find industry partners that would be willing to hire people with bachelor’s degrees of this type.”

He added: “We created a sandbox for our institutions to play in.”

Once created, individual programs would need both national accreditation and state Board of Higher Education approval.

Landward said he has taken note of criticism that the three-year programs might “cheapen” the bachelor’s degree by shortchanging students who wouldn’t receive a broad college education. But he said students could save on tuition, get a head start in the workforce and meet the needs of industries that are looking for certain skilled workers to address shortages in the state.

That includes nursing, he said, where requiring a four-year degree means taking lots of electives that have nothing to do with the career.

Utah State University’s current four-year nursing program, for example, suggests several electives along with the required anatomy, math and biology courses as prerequisites during freshman and sophomore years.

“We think if we are partnering with industry and they help us develop it, I don’t think it cheapens the degree,” Landward said. “I think it creates a very specific degree.”

Robert Zemsky, a University of Pennsylvania professor and founding director of the university’s Institute for Research on Higher Education, began proselytizing for the three-year college movement about a dozen years ago.

He said the idea has gotten traction recently because “we are wading in the deep waters of righteous anger” at colleges and universities because of the perception that four-year degrees are not worth their high costs.

A Pew Research Center survey released last week found only 1 in 4 American adults said it is extremely or very important to have a four-year college degree as a means to getting a good-paying job. Only 22% of the respondents said the cost is worth getting a four-year degree even if the student or their family has to take out loans.

Zemsky suggested that a shorter time span also would lead to higher college completion rates. More than a third of students who began seeking a bachelor’s degree in fall 2014 at a four-year school failed to complete their education at the same institution in six years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Zemsky said 27 colleges and universities have embarked on creating three-year pilot programs and predicted 100 would be doing so in another year.

Over the past 10 years, Zemsky said, schools have been ignoring the desires of students and instead creating their curricula around the preferences of faculty — which is where most of the opposition is coming from.

Last year, at a conference of the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties, a bargaining unit for professors, President Kenneth Mash said the overwhelming number of college faculty nationwide “have a visceral disdain for the idea.”

In an interview with Stateline, he said three-year programs would hurt students too, creating a “two-tiered” system under which wealthy students would get a full four-year education and lower-income students a cheapened three-year degree.

“If it’s going to be a four-year degree, they should name it something that indicates it’s not a B.A.,” said Mash, who also is a political science professor at East Stroudsburg University. “We don’t know that employers will treat them the same.

“I’m on board, as most faculty are, with the notion that people want to increase their job opportunities. But that’s not all there is to a college degree,” he said. “Degrees prepare you to be a better citizen, a better parent, and on and on.”

And he said a broad education is what makes it possible for students to change jobs and careers many times during their working lives. “It’s really that baking in liberal arts … that makes it possible for people to do different things in their lifetimes.”

Indiana’s new law

Indiana enacted a law in March that requires each public institution that offers bachelor’s degrees to review all the four-year degrees with an eye toward making some of them three years. And the law requires that by July 1, 2025, each state university offer at least one bachelor’s degree that can be completed in three years.

Indiana state Sen. Jean Leising, a Republican who sponsored the measure, pointed out that every extra year of college costs the students, their parents and the state.

But she noted that not all degrees lend themselves to compressed curricula. “If you’ve got a kid in pharmacy [studies], they are not going to able to get through it in three years. Engineers aren’t going to be able to do it in three years. But some of the other kids will.”

Chris Lowery, Indiana’s commissioner for higher education, said the law will encourage schools to think about how to create 90-credit-hour bachelor’s degrees: “How feasible is this, would you still have the quality, would you still have the agency?”

Three-year degrees allow for choice, he added. His daughter, for example, had enough AP credits after high school to make a college degree feasible in three years, but opted to go to school for four, because she wanted to have enough time to study so that she could get “straight As” as well as to have time for extracurricular activities.

“But for a lot of students, the finances are tighter,” he acknowledged.

Credentialing requirements

At both public and private universities, the new three-year degree programs that require fewer credits would need national accreditation.

The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, a regional credentialing agency, accredited several three-year bachelor’s degrees at two private schools, Brigham Young University-Idaho and Ensign College, last year. The degrees are in applied business management, family and human services, software development, applied health and professional studies.

Sonny Ramaswamy, the commission’s president, said in an interview that the three-year programs underwent two years of evaluation before being awarded accreditation.

He said the evaluation showed that competency in many professions could be attained in three years instead of four, and that graduate schools were willing to accept three-year bachelor’s as a credential for the pursuit of higher degrees. He noted that European college degrees often are completed in three years.

“We said, ‘We will approve you, but this is a pilot,’” Ramaswamy said. The schools will provide data to show their students have earned a good education, he added.

“My intuition is that it will head in the right direction,” he said. “The public is calling for innovation.”

Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a nonprofit organization that says its mission is promoting academic freedom, excellence and accountability at colleges and universities, said “fluff” courses strengthen the case against a 120-credit hour bachelor’s degree.

“Let people get a good foundation with a strong general education core, strong skills and some electives,” Poliakoff said in an interview. “That’s what a responsible university should be doing.”

The council does an annual survey of higher education institutions and grades them A through F on what the group calls “core curricula” — the proportion of courses dedicated to mathematics, literature, composition, economics, laboratory science, American history and government, and foreign languages.

Poliakoff said the amount of debt students are accumulating over four years is “sinful” and unnecessary. Colleges and universities must meet the concerns of students and their families, he said.

“A 90-credit baccalaureate degree is a pretty good way to tighten up the bolts,” he said.

This article originally appeared on Stateline on May 30, 2024.

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Seven colleges received a perfect score for their core curriculum, according to a higher education reform group.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni added an “A+” score to its “What Will They Learn” grades for the first time in the nearly 30-year history of its report card. Of the seven colleges, four are Catholic, one is Orthodox Christian, one is Protestant, and another is a public university in Virginia.

Those seven schools are: “Christopher Newport University, Patrick Henry College, Thomas Aquinas College in California, Thomas Aquinas College in Massachusetts, Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, the University of Dallas, and the University of Saint Katherine,” according to the latest rating.

Patrick Henry College is Protestant, while the University of Saint Katherine is Orthodox.

The group’s vice president of policy commented on why Catholic and Protestant schools were most of the highly rated colleges.

“There are likely two reasons that Catholic and Christian schools receive high What Will They Learn? grades,” Bradley Jackson told The College Fix via a media statement.

“Liberal arts education has long been a hallmark of Catholic and Christian education in the United States and abroad, and the What Will They Learn? system evaluates universities on their requirements in the liberal arts,” Jackson stated. “We also find that institutions with a clear sense of mission, which religious institutions often have, perform quite well in our rating system.”

ACTA grades colleges on “seven essential subject areas” which are, according to Jackson, “Composition, Literature, intermediate-level Foreign Language, U.S. Government or History, Economics, Mathematics, and Natural Science. ‘A+’ institutions require all B.A. and B.S.-seeking students to take all seven of these subject areas at the college level.”

Public institutions, on the whole, perform better than private colleges, according to Jackson.

He said 35 percent of public universities “receive grades of ‘B’ or higher,” whereas only 27 percent of private universities do.

“Although only one of our ‘A+’ schools is public, we find that many public schools reviewed do prioritize robust liberal arts requirements for undergraduate students,” Jackson stated.

Christopher Newport University in Virginia is one of the public schools that prioritizes the liberal arts.

It deferred to a news release when asked by The Fix for further comment.

“Christopher Newport’s innovative core curriculum and rigorous academic standards have once again earned the highest grade possible,” the university stated in a news release.

“Christopher Newport’s Liberal Learning Core Curriculum comprises a minimum of 40 semester hours of coursework, and includes Liberal Learning Foundations and Areas of Inquiry,” the university stated. “This comprehensive program of study develops students’ capacities of empowerment, knowledge and responsibility.”

Thomas Aquinas College, which received an A+ for both its California and Massachusetts campuses, said the grade is “a much-appreciated acknowledgment of the depth and rigor of the College’s program of Catholic liberal education.”

Spokesman Chris Weinkopf told The Fix the school is “grateful for this recognition of the hard work that our faculty and students joyfully undertake, inspired by their shared love for learning and the truth.”

Editor’s note: The article has been updated to clarify the University of Saint Katherine is Orthodox, not Catholic.

This post appeared on The College Fix on May 29, 2024.

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Americans already knew higher education leaned to the left. What many did not know is how many faculty, staff, and students are so committed to corrosive, anti-civilizational ideologies that they could not even pause to acknowledge victims of terror or condemn their attackers.

As some unleashed their hatred of Israel, Jews, or both in the wake of October 7, large numbers of others applied the simplistic oppressor-oppressed, post-colonialist narrative they have imbibed during their time in our educational institutions and turned out to protest and disrupt their campuses.

Meanwhile, most college and university presidents were dumbfounded. Perhaps they, like many Americans, did not know what some of their employees and students really thought. More likely, they knew but did not expect so many of them to say the quiet part out loud.

Either way, they had to contend with a problem they had not faced when responding to past social and political events. They could denounce Hamas and stand with Israel but alienate a large contingent on their campuses, or they could appeal to principles of neutrality and freedom they had historically violated and incur the wrath of donors, alumni, politicians, and many others who would rightly smell the rank hypocrisy.

As they fumbled their responses, they allowed disorder to spread across their campuses, mostly without consequence, even as Jewish students filed lawsuits and Title VI complaints reporting alleged incidents of anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination.

Jews and others who believe laws have been broken should absolutely pursue legal action, but authorities can and should have readily dispersed many of the disruptions, including the current encampments, for violating content-neutral policies regarding time, place, and manner.

Some administrators have acted and should be applauded for doing so. When students rushed into Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr’s office building a few weeks ago, she gave them 10 minutes to leave and then suspended the students and had them arrested.

At Vanderbilt University, 27 protesters who forced their way into a building housing the chancellor’s office lasted less than 24 hours before the administration had them marched out by police, some in handcuffs. In the end, four students were arrested, three expelled, one suspended, and over 20 placed on probation. Chancellor Daniel Diermeier explained the school’s approach: “We clearly state the principles and rules that support our mission as a university. Then we enforce them.”

This is precisely what campus leaders must do. Allowing students to break the rules with impunity or applying rules inconsistently leads them to push the limits further while opening leadership up to charges of hypocrisy when they discipline some offenders but not others.

Even after the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania lost their jobs, too many others have failed to respond consistently and effectively to policy violations on their campuses.

This can partly be explained by administrators’ historic antipathy toward disciplining their students. Unlike what happened at Pomona, when Princeton University students occupied President Christopher Eisgruber’s office for 33 hours in 2015, he responded by agreeing to address their demands and punishing no one. Is it any surprise that the students planning the encampment there told recruits not to expect serious consequences even though they knew they were breaking the rules?

This cannot all be explained by an imprudent or soft commitment to leniency. Matters have clearly gotten out of hand. But these institutions are what they want to be. They screen for professors who are committed to the right causes using devices such as mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion statements, and they admit students who focus on activism instead of learning.

A few years ago, Stanford University admitted a student whose application essay simply repeated #BlackLivesMatter 100 times. At Vanderbilt, one of the ringleaders was a known activist who was admitted on a “merit scholarship for activists and organizers,” according to the Associated Press.

Now campus administrators across the country are faced with a monster of their own creation in the form of unruly encampments that violate university policies and create a hostile environment not only for Jews, but also for students who simply want to attend class and learn. Some university presidents have shown leadership, calling in the police when they could not disband the encampments on their own, but too many others have failed to stand up for the rights of others at their institutions.

At Columbia University, President Minouche Shafik called in the police, only to allow the students to set up camp again. Then she waffled and pleaded as the protesters held the university’s commencement hostage, and they repaid her by smashing windows and occupying Hamilton Hall.

Shafik has finally done the right thing, calling in the police again and this time asking them to stay through graduation. But she should have nipped the whole thing in the bud at the start. She was lucky that the NYPD cleared out the protesters so flawlessly. At UCLA, administrators were slow to stop their campus from descending into violent chaos.

Free expression includes the right to protest, but these encampments have gone beyond free speech and violated campus rules and the rights of others. It should have been an easy decision to shut them down and to make an example out of the disruptive students with suspension or expulsion. Instead, too many administrators have tolerated them and made things worse.

This article appeared on Blaze Media on May 2, 2024

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Speakers came from a diverse set of departments, spanning the humanities, sciences, law, music, informatics, education and public health. While several urged lenience for Carrie Docherty, vice provost for faculty and academic affairs, as some faculty believed she was merely carrying out directives from those above her, few spoke in defense of Whitten. Faculty ultimately voted no confidence in Docherty, though it was a smaller margin than the motions against Whitten and Shrivastav.

Multiple speakers alluded to budget cuts and an overall dissatisfaction with administrative decisions. 

Maria Bucur, a history professor, read a statement on behalf of faculty who felt they were in too vulnerable of a position to speak publicly. The statement lamented a pattern of committees being created to provide faculty and staff input, only to have their recommendations ignored. It also criticized an overall lack of communication and transparency from the administration. 

Kenneth Dau-Schmidt, a law professor on the Faculty Board of Review who helped write the opinion that IU had violated policy in suspending Abdulkader Sinno, said the administration does not listen to faculty opinions — a sentiment shared by multiple other speakers. 

He also said that the administration’s attempt to provide a “confidential dossier” on Sinno during the board’s review process was unlike any proceeding he’s seen in his life. The dossier contained bias incidents reported by students and alumni against Sinno, as well as emails and letters illustrating conflicts between Sinno and some faculty members and administrators since 2022, according to the FBR opinion document. 

“I can tell you as a lawyer that that violates his due process rights, and I can just tell you as a human being – that offended me that they thought that somehow we would go along and use information when he was not given the information and a chance to respond,” he said. 

A few faculty voices provided potential explanations for faculty abstentions and “no” votes. 

Richard Shiffrin, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, said during the meeting that the administration deserved a chance to learn from mistakes they may have made. He said administrators should be judged in the context of the challenges they face and mentioned Whitten’s status as the first female president. The comment was rebuked later in the meeting by Stephanie Sanders, chair of the Department of Gender Studies, who called the statement sexist because it implied women should be graded on a curve. 

Bob Eno, a retired professor from the Department of East Asian Languages and Culture, said he planned to abstain from the votes. While he believed the university had committed egregious violations of shared governance between faculty and administration, he said some of the statements included in the case for no confidence were unfair and even untrue.   

In interviews with the IDS, other faculty present at the meeting expressed disappointment in Whitten’s statement and the quick affirmation and support the Board of Trustees expressed following the vote. 

In a statement, Whitten emphasized the challenges faced by higher education and pledged to weigh faculty guidance when making decisions. Her full statement can be read here.  

Provost Shrivastav also addressed the no confidence vote in a column on April 17. Shrivastav acknowledged many of the specific concerns of faculty, including a “culture of unwitting competition” that makes those in the humanities feel like priorities are shifting to STEM fields, efforts to “combine operations” across schools, departments and campuses and decisions related to “geopolitical conflicts or campus procedures.” 

“And so, to deepen confidence and shared understanding, to ensure a united path to a brighter future, we must do a better job of listening to each other and coming together collaboratively,” he wrote. 

Michael Hamburger, a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, said Whitten’s statement didn’t show much engagement with the issues brought up by the vote.  

“Definitely there have been sudden, unexpected and very destructive decisions made on the part of the central administration about budgeting, finance and priorities,” he said. 

But Hamburger said the way it’s been handled — which he described as “haphazard” and with limited communication — makes it worse. This harms departments’ ability to make long-term plans and contributes to a climate of distrust, he said. 

One good decision from the provost was mandating increased salaries for graduate workers, Hamburger said. But departments were left to find the money within their own budgets instead of receiving increased funding from higher ups, he said.  

Hamburger, who has been at IU for 38 years, said the tensions between administration and faculty have created a dark cloud over campus. 

“There are many times where faculty have been unhappy or disgruntled, but I have never seen this kind of pervasive unhappiness with the way this university is being administered,” he said. 

Shane Green, an anthropology professor at the meeting, said he thought Whitten’s statement was upsetting in light of no confidence votes from multiple sectors of campus.  

“It seems a little disingenuous to pretend that we’re all just a big happy family,” he said. 

He said the issue was more than just Whitten’s administration, pointing toward a deeper, structural change in the role of public education. While public education was designed to produce educated, informed citizens with knowledge and skills from a variety of disciplines, he said, they now appear to focus on producing a certain type of person with more specialized skills. Declining appropriations from state legislatures and reduced enrollments while colleges provide an increasing number of amenities create a precarious financial environment, he said, which a raise in tuition rates have accompanied.  

For example, Green referenced that his undergraduate tuition at UNC Chapel Hill in 1989 was around $500 per semester, or $1,265 in 2024 dollars. UNC Chapel Hill’s current in-state tuition is $7,020 per year.  

The financial constraints on public education have accompanied a shift to a less faculty-centric university, contributing to a belief among faculty that shared governance is in jeopardy. More recent theories of higher education, supported by organizations like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, outline a university model where trustees take a more active role in reviewing and directing the work of administrators and faculty.  

“We’ve become employees,” Green said. “We’re supposed to shut up and do our jobs.” 

In “Governance for a New Era,” a report released by ACTA in 2014, a group of trustees and administrators wrote that “trustees must regularly assess the cost/value proposition of academic and nonacademic programs in setting their goals” and encouraged a balanced approach to academic freedom, which the report said is being expanded by the American Association of University Professors, at the detriment of faculty “accountability and responsibility.” 

Green said the vote of no confidence represents the opinion of most faculty, even though only 948 of the 3,276 total voting eligible faculty attended the meeting.  

“If there was a lot of opposition for it, why didn’t they show up?” he said. 

Jack Bielasiak, a political science professor who’s been at the university for fifty years, implied when he spoke at the meeting that many faculty didn’t show up for fear of retribution.  

“Look around you. There is no junior faculty that I can spot among the 800 — because they are scared,” he said at the meeting. 

It was a concern echoed by other speakers, who claimed they had heard from many faculty who also had no confidence in the administration but didn’t want to show up for the vote.  

“And I fear for this university that I’ve devoted my life to,” Bielasiak said. “I fear that it will disintegrate to something that is invisible and incomprehensible.”

This post appeared in the Indiana State Student on April 21, 2024.

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Provost Kotlikoff, in a statement explaining his actions, preemptively distanced himself from the always-controversial Ms. Coulter, but the rest of his explanation for inviting her back admirably sums up the reasons why Cornell needed to invite Ms. Coulter back.

“Having been deeply troubled by an invited speaker at Cornell (any speaker) being shouted down and unable to present their views, I agreed that there could be few more powerful demonstrations of Cornell’s commitment to free expression than to have Ms. Coulter return to campus and present her views,” the provost wrote in a letter to the editor of the Cornell Daily Sun. “This is certainly not because I agree with what she has to say, or because I feel that the content of her presentation is important for our community to hear, but because I believe that Cornell must be a place where the presentation of ideas is protected and inviolable. Shielding students or others in our community from viewpoints with which they disagree, or filtering campus speakers based on the content of their presentation, undermines the fundamental role of a university.”

Carve that statement into bronze and hang it in the faculty lounges and administrative offices of every college in America. Freedom of speech should be a defining value of American higher education, and we applaud Provost Kotlikoff for taking a stand for it. Good on Ms. Coulter for accepting the invitation, too.

Our inner optimist wonders whether this attempt at détente between Ms. Coulter and Cornell could set a lasting precedent with wider implications for higher education. Too often on American campuses, speakers are disinvited or shouted down, never to return. The proper response should be to invite them back and ensure they have their say without interruption. Do any other administrators have the courage to follow Cornell’s lead?

We are thinking here about University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot, whose October 21, 2021, John Carlson Lecture at MIT on the topic of the habitability of planets outside our solar system was canceled. This was precipitated by online Twitter outrage, ginned up by a sorry rump group of academics worked up over positions he had taken on matters unrelated to his lecture topic.

Then there was U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, who was shouted down on March 9, 2023, by Stanford Law School students, egged on by the school’s associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion. The now-former dean lectured Judge Duncan about why he had it coming and infamously asked him, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

Legal expert Ilya Shapiro ought to be invited back to the University of California–Hastings to give the talk he was scheduled to deliver on March 1, 2022. Yale Law School should reinvite its guests to finish the moderated debate they began on January 24, 2023.

If this commonsense trend gathers enough momentum, perhaps even the campuses that crossed the line into violence could try to make amends. Middlebury College could reinvite Charles Murray, while San Francisco State University could beg Riley Gaines to come back. Of course, they would have to guarantee the safety of their guests.

In each of these cases, top university officials should be the ones to extend the invitations, and they should offer to introduce their guests and participate in the full event. It is often students and sometimes faculty and staff who demand cancelations, shout down speakers, and, in some cases, assault guests. But it is school administrators who disgrace themselves and abdicate their duties to stand athwart the mobs and stop the violence, who refuse to impose appropriate sanctions on the perpetrators, and who bloviate about the institutions’ values, rather than showing the moral courage to model those values themselves.

Only when the re-invitations have been issued and the disrespected speakers have delivered their remarks and been allowed to leave the campuses unharmed will we have a sense that university administrators have, at long last, decided to reject the dark, illiberal forces on their campuses and defend the fundamental purpose of the institutions they supposedly lead: the free pursuit of truth.

This post appeared in Real Clear Education on March 19, 2024.

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