The public university launched the Office of Campus Resources and Support on Jan. 1, one day after shuttering its Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in response to the DEI ban.

At the time, UT Dallas said the new office was created to comply with the law, and it was not just a rebrand, web archives show.

But now, the new office is gone, too.

It closed April 30 “as a result” of continued efforts to comply with Senate Bill 17, university President Richard Benson said in a statement shared with The College Fix.

The law, which has led to similar closures at other Texas universities, prohibits DEI programs at public higher education institutions and the use of “race, sex, color, or ethnicity” as factors in hiring practices.

However, some universities have appeared to comply with the state law by simply renaming their DEI offices.

Brittany Magelssen, university communications director, declined to answer The Fix’s questions about the school’s efforts to ensure there are no DEI offices or staff, its hiring practices, and the reaction to the closure from students on campus. She pointed to The Fix to Benson’s statement.

Magelssen also did not respond to two follow-up requests for comment this week asking for more information about the closure and the university’s response to those who say it looks as if the newly closed office was just the DEI office renamed.

In his statement, Benson said administrators decided to close the four-month-old office as they continue to “evaluate our SB 17 response and how to realign many of the programs impacted by the legislation.”

Benson said about 20 jobs will be eliminated. He also said the decision “will not be welcomed by many in our campus community” and he will continue to ensure that UT Dallas is a “supportive community.”

On its website, the university said it created the Office of Campus Resources and Support “to ensure UT Dallas can continue to meet the needs of our campus community in a manner that is fully compliant with SB 17,” according to web archives. The webpage recently was removed.

The office “is entirely separate and new” and “will lead activities that are SB 17 compliant,” it stated, adding it is not just the DEI office “renamed.”

According to web archives, the university stated it was still working to determine “the entire scope” of the new office, but its “mission will include enhancing student community-building and supporting employees and employee resource groups.”

One of the office’s projects was to help “facilitate opportunities to foster a welcoming university climate through professional development, employee engagement, and student and employee success initiatives,” according to web archives.

Steve McGuire, a fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, said the closure means the university administration finally “rightly recognized” how they must comply with the law.

“The Texas law does not simply call for a superficial reshuffling of offices and employees but a real commitment to ending programs that discriminate or give preferential treatment on the basis of identity characteristics,” he told The Fix in an email Monday.

He pointed The Fix to a series of statements Benson made last year about the DEI ban.

Along with promising no one would lose their job, Benson told the Dallas Morning News at the time: “We’re going to continue doing those things. And so it’ll go under a different name. But I don’t think anyone would have a problem with the actual actions of what we do.”

The University of Texas at Dallas just closed a new office to comply with a state ban on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programming after opening it a few months ago to adhere to the law.

The public university launched the Office of Campus Resources and Support on Jan. 1, one day after shuttering its Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in response to the DEI ban.

At the time, UT Dallas said the new office was created to comply with the law, and it was not just a rebrand, web archives show.

But now, the new office is gone, too.

It closed April 30 “as a result” of continued efforts to comply with Senate Bill 17, university President Richard Benson said in a statement shared with The College Fix.

The law, which has led to similar closures at other Texas universities, prohibits DEI programs at public higher education institutions and the use of “race, sex, color, or ethnicity” as factors in hiring practices.

However, some universities have appeared to comply with the state law by simply renaming their DEI offices.

Brittany Magelssen, university communications director, declined to answer The Fix’s questions about the school’s efforts to ensure there are no DEI offices or staff, its hiring practices, and the reaction to the closure from students on campus. She pointed to The Fix to Benson’s statement.

Magelssen also did not respond to two follow-up requests for comment this week asking for more information about the closure and the university’s response to those who say it looks as if the newly closed office was just the DEI office renamed.

In his statement, Benson said administrators decided to close the four-month-old office as they continue to “evaluate our SB 17 response and how to realign many of the programs impacted by the legislation.”

Benson said about 20 jobs will be eliminated. He also said the decision “will not be welcomed by many in our campus community” and he will continue to ensure that UT Dallas is a “supportive community.”

On its website, the university said it created the Office of Campus Resources and Support “to ensure UT Dallas can continue to meet the needs of our campus community in a manner that is fully compliant with SB 17,” according to web archives. The webpage recently was removed.

The office “is entirely separate and new” and “will lead activities that are SB 17 compliant,” it stated, adding it is not just the DEI office “renamed.”

According to web archives, the university stated it was still working to determine “the entire scope” of the new office, but its “mission will include enhancing student community-building and supporting employees and employee resource groups.”

One of the office’s projects was to help “facilitate opportunities to foster a welcoming university climate through professional development, employee engagement, and student and employee success initiatives,” according to web archives.

Steve McGuire, a fellow at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, said the closure means the university administration finally “rightly recognized” how they must comply with the law.

“The Texas law does not simply call for a superficial reshuffling of offices and employees but a real commitment to ending programs that discriminate or give preferential treatment on the basis of identity characteristics,” he told The Fix in an email Monday.

He pointed The Fix to a series of statements Benson made last year about the DEI ban.

Along with promising no one would lose their job, Benson told the Dallas Morning News at the time: “We’re going to continue doing those things. And so it’ll go under a different name. But I don’t think anyone would have a problem with the actual actions of what we do.”

McGuire also outlined a series of problems with university DEI programs.

He said, “DEI offices are not classrooms,” they are administrative offices that “cannot claim the privilege of academic freedom.”

McGuire, whose organization promotes academic freedom, said DEI offices “often violate these principles” by “advancing viewpoint discrimination with institutional support and sponsoring trainings and programs that expect participants to accept that individuals are inherently oppressed or oppressors based on group membership.”

While public universities need to welcome all students, he said “DEI offices and programs often work against this standard.” He pointed to the use of DEI in hiring, which leads to the exclusion of certain views.

He said the money saved by closing DEI offices could be redirected to better purposes, such as need-based scholarships for students who otherwise could not afford to go to college.

McGuire said nondiscrimination also should extend to “intellectual and ideological nondiscrimination.” He said “if universities cannot guarantee free expression and intellectual diversity on their own, then others, including legislators, need to make that happen.”

Other Texas universities also have eliminated their DEI programs as a result of the law, The Fix previously reported. The University of Texas at Austin recently canceled its special graduation celebrations for black, Latinx, Asian, and LGBTQIA+ students as well.

This post appeared on The College Fix on May 8, 2024.

The post UT Dallas closes new ‘support’ office to comply with DEI ban appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin made the right decision when he vetoed Senate Bill 506. However, both the title and text of Inside Higher Ed’s April 16, 2024, article, “Youngkin Vetoes Bill, Prohibiting Independent Legal Counsel,” fail to recognize the damage that this bill would have done to Virginia.

Had it become law, this legislation would have shifted the primary duty of loyalty of governing board members toward the university and only secondarily to the taxpayers of the Commonwealth. Accordingly, if the governor had approved Senate Bill 506, the legislation would have had a severe and negative impact on the accountability structure of Virginia’s public institutions of higher education.

Trustees of public universities serve the public by looking to the common good rather than the immediate interests of their institutions. For example, when a college administration proposes a tuition increase, it is the responsibility of the board of visitors to determine whether it is appropriate and reasonable for the citizens of Virginia. Removing the duty of trustees to serve the citizens of the Commonwealth first eliminates the only internal check against the narrow interest of each college or university. That weakens the ability of these institutions to self-regulate. Had it been signed into law, Senate Bill 506 could have set a precedent for other states with similar public higher education systems to follow suit. 

There is a long-held belief that college and university governing boards around the country exist only to raise money for the institution or to rubber stamp the decisions of the president and administration. This belief is dangerous and misguided. The role of a trustee, first and foremost, is oversight and stewardship of the institution’s mission. The organizational chart of any institution of higher education will show that the governing board sits above the president and the administration, not below them. In other words, presidents serve at the pleasure of the boards of trustees. In the case of colleges and universities that are publicly funded, as in Virginia, these institutions have an extra layer of accountability: the citizens of the state.

—Nick Down
Senior Program Officer for Trustee and Government Affairs
American Council of Trustees and Alumni 

This letter appeared on Inside Higher Ed on April 24, 2024.

The post Public University Trustees Should Serve the Public Good appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) first raised the alarm about the bill in January, and we have been communicating with lawmakers in the General Assembly throughout every step of the legislation’s journey to Governor Youngkin’s desk. Most recently, ACTA Senior Program Officer for Trustee & Government Affairs Nick Down testified against the measure and published an article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch arguing against the bill’s passage.  

In response to the governor’s veto, ACTA President Michael Poliakoff, a Virginia resident, stated, “Bravo, Governor Youngkin! The first duty of the boards of visitors of our public universities is to serve the citizens of this state. They do this by prudent oversight of their schools and by creating policies directed at the public good, not at narrow parochial desires that an institutional constituency might demand. When the Commonwealth is the priority of the board of visitors, our universities will fulfill their mission of teaching, learning, and research and enjoy the esteem and support of Virginia’s citizens.”

ACTA is dedicated to holding public college and university leaders accountable to the constituents they serve. We thank Governor Youngkin for his prudent decision to veto Senate Bill 506.

The post Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin Vetoes Senate Bill 506 appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

He aimed squarely at University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts & Sciences, the home of 27 departments including a few that last September sponsored sessions of the Palestine Writes literary festival, which critics attacked for including speakers with a history of making antisemitic comments but supporters defended as a celebration of Palestinian art.

During an interview at the Economic Club of Washington on Feb. 27, Rowan said faculty members in Wharton — Penn’s business school from which Rowan graduated — as well as the engineering and medical schools, care about academic excellence and research.

“If you are in our arts and sciences school,” said Rowan, “not so much.”

He echoed almost the same sentiment about the school, which includes everything from physics and chemistry to economics and mathematics, during a talk at the Anti-Defamation League’s national conference on Wednesday.

The remark — as well as others he made including an assertion that students rallying for Palestinians is more a reflection of “anti-Americanism” and “anti-merit” than antisemitism — continued to stir concern on the Ivy League campus about Rowan, who chairs Wharton’s advisory board. It also raised questions about the propriety of the leader of one of Penn’s boards publicly criticizing another school at the university.

“This is not the first time Rowan has demonstrated that he does not respect and may not comprehend the principle of academic freedom, the purpose of a university to advance knowledge and educate students in all areas of study, or the quality of research and teaching at Penn,” said Penn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “We question whether someone so poorly informed and apparently committed to undermining our university’s mission should serve on Wharton’s Board of Advisors.”

The group in a statement Thursday noted that the AAUP defined the concept of academic freedom more than a century ago to guard against “wealthy donors with no academic qualifications … attempting to suppress research and teaching that they found inconvenient to their business interests and political agendas.” It should be faculty members who “make academic decisions and evaluate the quality of scholarship within their areas of expertise,” the group said.

A spokesperson for Rowan declined comment. Rowan during his comments said support for his efforts has grown, asserting that 27,000 have indicated their support of his ideas.

“The vast majority of reaction has been incredibly positive,” he said.

Michael Poliakoff, president and chief executive officer of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, said it’s “well within the framework of a free society and open university for Mr. Rowan to criticize anybody.

“The sad fact is that the humanities have really suffered from the intrusion of a great big dollop of theory, things like intersectionality, post-colonial theory, oppressor-oppressed frameworks,” he said. “These are things that should be subject to much more rigorous review. …It is a very valid criticism that Mr. Rowan is making.”

Poliakoff pointed to surveys that have shown the vast majority of arts and sciences faculty at Harvard identify as liberal.

“It’s hard to have viewpoint diversity,” Rowan said at the ADL conference.

Steven J. Fluharty, dean of Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, did not respond to an email for comment.

A Penn spokesperson said: “Penn embodies academic excellence across all aspects of our teaching, research, and scholarship, which is why we continue to attract the best and brightest students and faculty, who make a meaningful impact on the world.”

Scott L. Bok, former chair of Penn’s board of trustees, disputed Rowan’s claim.

“The school of arts and sciences is the core of the university, with a large and diverse faculty teaching everything from biology to history,” he said. “The notion that those people aren’t absolutely committed to academic excellence is simply wrong.”

Dagmawi Woubshet, an associate professor of English, who is part of Penn Faculty for Justice in Palestine and participated in a “die-in” vigil on campus in January in recognition of the lives lost in Gaza, also took exception to Rowan’s statement.

“To say that only the pre-professional schools are intellectually rigorous and merit-driven is at best a glib and self-serving characterization,” Woubshet said. “It discounts the extraordinary value of an arts and humanities education, which is the lifeblood of any university of note.”

Rowan made clear during the interview at the economic club that he intended to continue paying attention to Penn. “100%,” he responded when asked.

That raised concern in the Penn community over how much influence Rowan would try to wield. Penn already is facing a congressional committee probe over its handling of antisemitism.

Rowan, CEO of New York-based Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm, began his public campaign to get donors to withhold their money in October, a couple weeks after Palestine Writes and just a few days after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Rowan already had a high profile at Wharton, having given a $50 million gift to Wharton in 2018, the largest single gift in its history,

He urged donors “to close their checkbooks” until then-President Liz Magill and Bok resigned, faulting their handling of the festival. And he continued the efforts for months in daily emails to the board of trustees. Both Magill and Bok resigned in December after Magill’s congressional testimony on the campus’ response to antisemitism set off a backlash.

In the aftermath of their resignations, Rowan sent what was characterized as his final email to the trustees, questioning the university’s instruction, faculty hiring and political orientation. Among the questions, he asked whether the school should look at eliminating some academic departments — though he didn’t identify which — and examine “criteria for qualification for membership in the faculty,” citing a provision in the charter that allows trustees to set general policies around admission to the faculty.

The email, titled “Moving Forward,” included 18 questions, some with as many as five parts. That raised fear among faculty leaders that Rowan was attempting to set the agenda for the university, in the style of a “hostile takeover.”

Rowan’s spokesperson said at the time that the questions Rowan raises are areas that trustees have jurisdiction over in the school’s charter.

“He’s saying these are questions,” the spokesperson said. “He’s not trying to provide answers.”

During his recent appearances, Rowan also asserted that students protesting Israel by chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” don’t even understand the geography they are talking about.

“If you ask these kids what river and what sea, they don’t know,” he said. “Who lives between the river and the sea, they don’t know. How did they get there? They don’t know.”

Poliakoff pointed to a December op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Ron Hassner, a political science professor at Berkeley, that said in a survey he commissioned, fewer than half of the students who supported the slogan were able to name the river and the sea in question.

That phrase refers to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It a rallying cry some have used to call for the destruction of Israel, but others use as a call for the liberation of Palestinian people from Gaza to the West Bank and within Israel.

Rowan said an “accepted narrative” on the campus that started to encourage social justice “metastasized into post-colonial education, into oppressed and oppressors, into powerful and powerless, facts be damned.

“Jews and Israelis are seen as white. That’s bad. They’re seen as powerful. That’s bad. They’re seen as oppressing Palestinians. That’s bad. So by any means necessary according to the narrative of these universities, facts be damned.”

He said the fight on campuses is less about antisemitism and more about “anti-Americanism.”

“We are fighting anti-merit,” he said. “We’re fighting anti-power. We’re fighting really for the soul of these institutions.”

At the ADL conference, he said colleges have been taken over by “a progressive narrative” that “evaluates everything in the context of victimhood.”

Woubshet, however, said the critique of power is not new and is “essential to knowledge production and moreover to fostering a just and democratic society. What we now have is a concerted conservative and right-wing agenda — an anti-intellectual agenda — to deliberately misconstrue the terms of critique so much so that teaching anything that challenges a romantic view of American civilization is deemed anti-American.”

Jonathan Zimmerman, a Penn professor of the history of education who has ardently defended free speech, said Rowan has every right to express his opinion and said some of the questions he raised in his final email to trustees were worth asking.

“But I don’t believe Marc Rowan’s opinion should have any more weight than anyone else’s,” he said. “I don’t think the role of the trustees is to make academic policy. That’s the role of the administration and mainly the faculty.”

This post appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer on March 10, 2024.

The post Donor and Wharton board chair Marc Rowan criticizes Penn’s arts and sciences school, drawing backlash appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Senate Bill 506, introduced by Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, dictates to boards of visitors that their loyalty of duty lies primarily with the college or university and secondarily with the commonwealth of Virginia.

Senate Bill 506 would set a dangerous precedent and should not be signed by Gov. Youngkin. Those who are appointed to serve on a governing board of a public college or university should always be accountable to the taxpayers of the state first, and the institution second. He or she serves the people of the commonwealth through the institution. The institution is the means to an end, not the end itself of the board member’s service.

There is a long-held belief that college and university governing boards around the country exist only to raise money for the institution, or to rubber stamp the decisions of the president and administration. This belief is dangerous and misguided. The role of a trustee, first and foremost, is oversight and stewardship of the institution’s mission. The organizational chart of any institution of higher education will show that the governing board sits above the president and the administration, not below it. In other words, presidents serve at the pleasure of the boards of trustees. In the case of colleges and universities that are publicly funded, as in Virginia, these institutions have an extra layer of accountability in the form of the state taxpayer.

Keeping the loyalties of university boards to the commonwealth first, and the institution second, ensures that boards of visitors or trustees are not beholden to any one constituency over another.

Boards of visitors serve the public by considering the common good rather than merely the narrow interests of their institutions. For example, when a college administration proposes a tuition increase, it is the responsibility of the board of visitors to consider whether the citizens of Virginia can afford such an increase. By changing the duty of trustees to serve their institutions first, the only internal check against the narrow interest of each college or university is removed, which weakens the ability of these institutions to self-regulate. This point is reinforced in Governance for a New Era, a 2014 publication produced by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni that brought together 22 of the nation’s leading scholars, university presidents, trustees and business leaders dedicated to strengthening higher education governance. “Trustees indeed, at their best, can provide a ‘reality check’ on the often self-directed focus of colleges and universities,” the report stated.

Sen. Surovell’s testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Higher Education on Jan. 29 was all one needed to hear to understand the origins of this legislation. According to the distinguished senator, the need for this legislation came as a response to confusion from several visitors after an official opinion was released last October by Attorney General Jason Miyares, in which he stated, “In fulfilling the responsibilities to the specific institution it serves, the primary duty of the board of visitors of each Virginia institution of higher education is to the Commonwealth.”

Should Virginia Senate Bill 506 become law, it will cause even more confusion among members of university governing bodies in the commonwealth, as well as imply that these governing boards are beholden to the president of the institution. In reality, university boards of visitors should be receptive to all campus constituencies, but beholden to only the great, general interest and common good of Virginia.

This post appeared on the Richmond Times-Dispatch on March, 5 2024.

The post Colleges and universities must be held accountable to citizens appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Armand Alacbay, senior vice president of strategy for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which advocates for university boards to exert stronger oversight, found it “hard to ascribe fault here.” On the one hand, with many colleges struggling with enrollment and finances, all board members should examine their institutions more closely. On the other hand, “there’s a huge information asymmetry with boards.” Boards depend on colleges to give them good data.

As for Hobbs’s sharp and public criticism of DuVal and Arnold, Alacbay pointed out that it’s unusual for a governor to have the power to remove public-university board members, even though they are frequently responsible for appointing them. Board members often have terms that span different governors’ administrations; Duval is an appointee of Doug Ducey, the Republican governor who preceded Hobbs. The point is to protect board members from political interference and allow them to focus on the good of the university, Alacbay said. But also: “It’s normal for a governor to be concerned about the higher-education policy in her state,” he said. “It’s the governor’s prerogative to make public statements.”

To read the full article, visit the Chronicle of Higher Education here. (Registration may be required.)

The post Arizona Board of Regents’ Chair and Executive Director Leave Their Positions After Governor’s Criticism appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Thank you, Chairwoman Sewell, and distinguished members of the Subcommittee. My name is Nick Down, and I am a senior program officer with the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, or ACTA for short. I am here before you today to urge you to vote against moving Senate Bill 506 forward to the full committee.

By way of background, ACTA is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization committed to preserving academic freedom, academic excellence, and accountability at four-year public and private colleges and universities across the U.S. Since 1995, ACTA has worked with over 23,000 higher education trustees across the country to ensure that students receive an intellectually rich, high- quality college education at an affordable price. We believe that governing boards are key to maintaining these core values, and thus we work with trustees to help them fulfill their fiduciary duties.

Senate Bill 506 seeks to alter fundamentally the nature of Virginia’s boards of visitors by calling on their members to “act at all times in accordance with the duty of loyalty owed primarily to such institution,” while removing existing references to board members’ “primary duty to the citizens of the Commonwealth.” For those on the boards of public institutions this includes a responsibility to serve the citizens of their state. Passage of SB 506 in its current form would significantly erode the capacity of Virginia’s boards of visitors to fulfill this primary duty.

ACTA understands the desire to protect Virginia’s boards of visitors from undue political interference, and we agree that for trustees to fulfill their fiduciary duties they MUST be independent actors. However, I urge you to consider an alternative way to secure trustees’ independence, as their duty to serve the Commonwealth should not be misconstrued as a duty to obey any political actor.

Visitors serve the public by looking to the common good rather than merely the immediate interests of their institutions. For example, when a college administration proposes a tuition increase, it is the responsibility of visitors to determine whether it’s appropriate for the citizens of Virginia. By removing the duty of visitors to serve the citizens of the Commonwealth first, you are removing the only internal check against the narrow interest of each college or university, which weakens the ability of these institutions to self-regulate. Given that our surveys of public higher education show that Virginia’s institutions rate in the bottom third of the nation on several measures of access and cost, this legislation is something that the people of Virginia can ill afford.

Again, I urge the Subcommittee to vote against SB 506 and I thank you for your time and the opportunity to appear before you today. I am happy to answer any questions.

The post ACTA Senior Program Officer Nick Down Testifies On Virginia Senate Bill 506 appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

SB 506 was reported favorably out of the Senate Subcommittee on Higher Education on January 30, 2024, and awaits further consideration by the full Senate Education and Health Committee, which will take up the legislation on February 1, 2024. These back-to-back committee hearings suggest that the legislature is attempting to force the legislation through the general assembly with little-to-no-time for proper consideration of the unintended consequences of the bill. The American Council of Trustees & Alumni (ACTA) asks, why the rush?

If signed into law, SB 506 would reinforce the widely held belief that college governing boards are ineffective and only exist to rubber stamp presidents and administrators. And it would deprive Virginians of any meaningful voice on issues of consequence to them, including tuition increases. If Boards of Visitors’ primary duty is not to the Commonwealth, these institutions will inevitably fail to carry out the public interest.

The well-being of America’s colleges and universities—public and private—depend on visitors, trustees, and regents who exercise their independent judgment as fiduciaries. They cannot be beholden to the institutions they are tasked to govern.

For more information, or to request an interview, please contact ACTA at (202) 467-6787.

The post ALERT! The Virginia General Assembly is attempting to pull a fast one on Virginia taxpayers. appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

William Lee, a partner at WilmerHale, was, until June 2022, the Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation.

Despite stepping down from the Harvard Corporation in 2022, Lee, who is also a law professor at the school, “has continued to exert significant influence among Harvard’s top leadership, including senior administrators, members of the Corporation and his successor Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker,” according to the Harvard Crimson.

A prominent law professor, who declined to be named, criticized Harvard’s choice to retain Lee’s firm, telling The Post that “it does not satisfy the appearance of justice,” because Lee’s role at the university gave his firm “a tremendous advantage. He’s a major figure in the law firm and was a major figure in the corporation.”

“There was no conflict,” Lee told The Post.

But that doesn’t satisfy New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik.

“The Harvard Corporation actively worked to cover up the negligence and failures of Harvard University, doubling down in defense of its corrupt leadership,” Stefanik told The Post in a statement. “In fact, instead of protecting Jewish students and removing Claudine Gay, former Harvard Corporation Board senior fellow William Lee lined the pockets of his law firm WilmerHale, [hired] to defend the former Harvard President’s history of serial plagiarism and antisemitism. A reckoning is occurring; our robust congressional investigation will continue to expose the institutional problems plaguing our most ‘elite colleges and universities and deliver needed accountability to the American people.”

Neither Lee nor a spokesperson for WilmerHale responded to a question from The Post about whether or not the firm was paid when, as the report said, “retained … in connection with these [plagiarism] allegations.”

According to an April 2022 article on his firm’s web site, Lee was “instrumental in the university’s past two presidential searches.” He clarified to The Post that it was a reference to past Harvard presidents “Drew Faust and Larry Bacow. I was not involved in the most recent search.”

Lee, 74, was personally involved, along with another lawyer from his firm, in preparing Gay before her disastrous testimony — led by Stefanik —about campus antisemitism to Congress last month. Earlier this month, the embattled president, who faced multiple allegations of plagiarism, resigned.

“Harvard is playing games with everyone,” said Carol Swain, a former political science professor at Vanderbilt University and acclaimed African American scholar who has accused Gay of plagiarizing her work. “This is how they responded every step of the way.”

Swain said her attorney sent the Harvard Corporation a letter on Jan. 3, requesting to know what “remedies” the Ivy League institution seeks to make for the unauthorized use of her work. Swain told The Post Wednesday that she has not heard back from the school’s governing body.

“I don’t intend to abandon this issue,” she said. “It’s deeply disturbing that Harvard University can ignore its own academic guidelines — rules that the rest of us are expected to follow.”

In its six-page report to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce made public last week, the Harvard Corporation admitted that “we understand and acknowledge that many viewed our efforts as insufficiently transparent, raising questions regarding our process and standard of review.”

The Corporation appointed a subcommittee of four fellows, who then named a review panel of “three of the country’s most prominent political scientists” to conduct the review of Gay’s work, the letter said. The corporation refused to name the three scholars, citing their own desire to remain anonymous.

“They’re anonymous because they knew what they were doing was bogus,” said Swain. “They should have been willing to put their name on it. It’s clearly someone who wants something from Harvard and is afraid.”

The Corporation made all of these moves following questions from The Post in October over more than two dozen alleged instances of plagiarism by Gay. Three days after The Post submitted questions to the school’s public relations office on Oct. 24, we received a threatening 15-page letter that said in part that the allegations against Gay were “demonstrably false” even before the Corporation had embarked on its own investigation.

Now a watchdog group is demanding that an accreditation institution probe Harvard University over its handling of the plagiarism allegations against Gay — a move that could determine if the Ivy League school continues to receive hundreds of millions in federal funding, The Post has learned.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a Washington, DC-based non-profit, sent a formal complaint earlier this month to the New England Commission of Higher Education, a group that has been accrediting universities for the Department of Education since its founding in 1885.

A spokesman for the Harvard Corporation declined comment.

This post appeared on New York Post on January 26, 2024.

The post Elise Stefanik rips Harvard after school hired ex-board leader and professor’s law firm to probe ousted prez Claudine Gay appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Gay resigned as president on Jan. 2 after facing multiple plagiarism allegations and pushback from failing to say whether calls for genocide violated the school’s code of conduct at a Dec. 5 congressional hearing on campus antisemitism. She was involved in a series of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives on campus during her time as a dean and as president, including creating new DEI positions and creating a task force that recommended portraits of white men be taken down. 

Gay joined Harvard’s faculty in 2006 as a professor and became a part of the Harvard administration in 2015, serving as the dean of the social sciences at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at Harvard, according to the Harvard Gazette. She then served as the Edgerley Family Dean of FAS starting in 2018 before ascending to the university presidency in July 2023.

Gay announced a slew of “racial-justice” initiatives as FAS dean in August 2020 following the George Floyd riots, according to Harvard Magazine. She created a “visiting professorship in ethnicity, indigeneity and migration” to “recruit leading scholars of race and ethnicity to spend a year at Harvard engaged in teaching our undergraduates.”

She also announced a “study of the hiring, professional development, and promotion practices that may contribute to the low representation of minority staff in managerial and executive roles,” according to Harvard Magazine. The study was designed to “identify concrete steps” Harvard can take “to increase racial diversity of senior staff.”

Gay also announced the addition of an associate dean of diversity, inclusion, and belonging, according to Harvard Magazine.

“Instead of enhancing polarization by subscribing to the far left of the political spectrum, academia should heal societal tension and represent the diverse set of views within American society. The students should witness dialogues where opposing ideas are debated on campus, so they can make their own choice. Faculty should not be afraid to speak their mind,” Avi Loeb, theoretical physicist at Harvard, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Gay also formed the “Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage” in 2020, a group designed to assess the imagery around campus for its effects on students, to “advance racial justice,” according to The Harvard Crimson. The task force recommended changing “spaces whose visual culture is dominated by homogenous portraiture of white men,” according to its report.

It called for the redecoration of the walls of Annenberg Hall, which in December 2021 contained 23 portraits, of which 20 were white men, according to the Crimson.

“While it’s unclear how much the DEI bureaucracy has contributed to this hostile environment for free speech, the rise of DEI on campus has certainly coincided with a devaluing of free speech principles at Harvard. Additionally, much of the censorship at Harvard is directed at those opposed to liberal and progressive ideas, which suggests that the DEI bureaucracy has influenced the culture of free speech on campus,” Zachary Greenberg, senior program officer for campus rights advocacy at Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told the DCNF.

Harvard is ranked last on FIRE’s 2024 free speech report of universities in the U.S.

“The components of DEI are often defined in ways that bring them into conflict with free speech. For example, many proponents of DEI believe ‘inclusion’ requires others to refrain from saying certain things that are deemed ‘harmful,’” Steve McGuire, Paul & Karen Levy fellow in Campus Freedom at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, told the DCNF.

Harvard Psychology Professor Steven Pinker, alongside 70 other professors at the university, announced the creation of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard in April 2023, which advocates for more free speech on campus, according to the Crimson.

“Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them,” Pinker wrote in a December op-ed for the Boston Globe.

Harvard Law Professor Mark Ramseyer said that DEI was partially to blame for the fall of free speech on Harvard’s campus in an email shared on X, formerly Twitter, by former Harvard Lecturer Carole Hooven.

“Better alignment of campuses with the diverse set of values within American society would have helped avoid the recent turmoil. It could also help universities recruit the very best scholars and students from all parts of the political spectrum and develop good relationships with both Democrats and Republicans,” Loeb told the DCNF.

Gay came under fire after staying silent after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, after which over 30 student organizations signed a letter blaming the “Israeli colonial occupations” for the attacks. The university created an antisemitism task force in November, however one of the members of the group, Rabbi David Wolpe, quit on Dec. 7 and argued that it was infected by Marxist ideology.

“The system at Harvard, along with the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil,” Wolpe said.

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce opened an investigation into several universities following its hearing in December. After the resignation of Gay, the committee said they would not be halting their investigation and expanded it to include DEI on campuses.

Harvard University and Pinker did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comments. Gay could be reached for comment.

This post appeared on Daily Caller on January 11, 2024.

The post Claudine Gay Had A History Of Adding To Harvard’s Diversity Bureaucracy Before Stepping Up To The Presidency appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.