The rebellious response of Harvard President Alan Garber to the attack from the Trump administration has triggered a wave of unequivocal support across the academic community — and thereby once again exposed that its allegiance to Truth has been abandoned in favor of Values.
Turn their own reasoning (such as it is) against them. The presence of merely token conservatives in the faculty is ipso facto evidence of discrimination. They should be ashamed.
And nothing to say about the Title IX "Dear Colleague" letter that threatened to stop federal funding (sounds familiar?) unless the college instituted $10M/yr Title IX offices to find males on campus guilty of "misconduct". The gender bias in the investigations and punishments was imposed by the Department of Education.
All good points. but does Alexander really beliefs that any change could come without that ``ugly prompt'' of the Trump administration? If he truly believes that, he has to explain why this did not happen before? He appears to think that now that the administration asked for systematic changes the universities are right to reject these ``unreasonable, undemocratic, and unconstitutional demands of the authoritarian bureaucracy''. Really?
What is missing from this and numerous other discussions, is that the Administration's letter explicitly said that they required an agreement on principles with the specifics to be worked out in later discussions and negotiations. THERE WERE NO DEMANDS.
These calm discussions about academia seem out of touch with the scale of the problem, represented by the most prestigious university, Harvard. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Harvard's race-conscious admissions program violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Further, Harvard's president, Dr. Gay, was unable to state that calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s code of conduct. When Dr. Gay's plagiarism was exposed, the Harvard Board of Directors gave her unanimous support. Meanwhile, Harvard's DEI and Title IX programs routinely investigate hundreds of students, mostly male, for "misconduct". Then, on October 8, 2023, 34 Harvard student organizations blamed Israel as “entirely responsible for the violence” the day before. Meanwhile, DEI and Title IX operate as unchecked enforcers, while male enrollment in U.S. universities has dropped to just 42%, and universities puff their feathers about secretly admitting more "students of color" and hiring faculty based on gender and race. Yes, Berkeley, UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, and UC campuses, with DEI and Title IX programs costing $20M/yr, pursue the same policies as Harvard. Behind closed doors, the racism and sexism happens.
It has been claimed by faculty that they are the university. As such, they are responsible for what the university does...and fails to do. Universities have gone far off the rails and the faculty are entirely to blame. Like abusive parents who neglect and abuse their children, it is not the state to blame when outside intervention which strips away privileges of the "parents" is required to correct the problem. The universities created their problem. Resisting correction merely demonstrates that they should be left to their own devices to fix the problem.
But decades ago, the faculty abdicated this responsibility at most schools. So...they are really not in control of things at many places, not any longer. This might have been cowardice or it might have been complacency or laziness. But, it happened.
Not buying it. Faculty control hiring committees and the university conduct system. They are fully complicit in the failures of their universities. Judgement Day is here...and the faculty have no where to hide.
I have heard of terrible counterexamples, unfortunately.
Of course, the faculty ALLOWED this to happen. So they are NOT blameless. Not even close.
However, at Harvard and many other places, these institutions at this point are runaway trains with incompetents controlling the system, that is, in charge. For the most part, these are either not faculty, or they are faculty in name only, just appointed for appearances or DEI purposes or whatever. These characters would NEVER have been appointed to the faculty under the systems and rules prevalent a few decades ago. Stanford and Yale are effectively dictatorships by nonfaculty now. Is the UC system much different?
And this same thing is going on in many other domains besides hiring, including admissions and curricula and grading and standards and all kinds of other stuff.
Things have become SO bad at Stanford, that neighboring high tech companies in Silicon Valley privately say that they would rather hire community college graduates and train them, rather than Stanford graduates (who they also have to retrain since they are so awful currently). This is not a great sign, even if it is only partially correct and these accounts are somewhat exaggerated (as I suspect might be true).
Obviously there is nuance in different institutions but if we are speaking of academic generally, it is the faculty that have embraced DEI, antisemitism and cancel culture, either enthusiastically or by remaining silent when they could/should have spoken out. We see the same thing in the professional societies which demonstrates that the problem is not driven by academic administrators, but by the membership of these societies...a.k.a. the faculty. Academics need to start taking responsibility for the state of their industry and stop trying to pass the buck to others.
Allowing ambiguity, or letting universities make "good faith efforts", just means it will be more of the same and it won't be stopped. These people can't be trusted; they live for their ideology. We just have to react to Harvard's refusal by stopping the funding.
Let Harvard exist in the free market. If people want that stuff and are willing to pay a full market price, so be it. If not, so be it.
Trump's solution may be absurd but this is no time to nitpick or slow him down. Harvard has to say yes, and try, and if it results in some new abuses, at least they'll be in the other direction. To use the words of the left, a restorative solution (discriminating in the opposite direction), beyond mere fixing of bad policies, wouldn't be out of place. "But then the left will tear it all down!" They'll do that anyway.
"even if it were popular, virtuous, and novel, institutionalizing any ideology is corrupting"
The idea of an Enlightenment university that we inherited in North America mandates a disinterested intellectual engagement with reality and a free intellectual exchange over findings and ways of understanding the findings. Our universities have abandoned this mandate and betrayed this tradition in favor of political activism fueled by extreme ideologies held as religious truths. Recruitment and reward in those institutions are based on the "holy truths" of those ideologies, just as heretics are punished and removed. What is no longer seen, and is in fact forbidden, is intellectual diversity. From Berkeley to Harvard and everywhere in between, our "universities" no longer deserve that label. At this point, what they deserve is to be bulldozed.
Philip Carl Salzman, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, McGill University
I do not expect the proportion of atheists among faculty to mirror that of the general population, provided the faculty is selected using the standard of meritocracy and hard scientific facts you're advocating. And the less freedom of thought exists in the general society relative to academia, the more atheists are likely to disproportionately converge in the latter.
"Universities are absolutely right to reject the US administration’s blatant attempt at social engineering disguised as Viewpoint Diversity in Admission and Hiring."
In fact, a reasonable approach for doing just that was recently discussed in this column by Dorian Abbott.
Realistically, even if faculty hiring is meritocratic, this meritocracy is only the secondary factor. In most cases, the primary factor is viewpoint-based. When even science departments such as chemistry or physics put out job ads, first and foremost they list the specific subfield or topic of interest (e.g., organic chemistry; astrophysics theory) -- not to mention the humanities departments . This topic of interest arises from internal faculty discussions, where some faction convinces other factions that it's time to search in their subfield. Such a method works fine if the department's research already covers a broad range of topics. But it fails if the range is narrow from the start, since the ideological exclusion quickly becomes self-reinforcing.
So the "reasonable approach" is that faculty decides to hire in the area of "structural racism", promising that Greek philosophy will get its turn in some future cycle? This is no solution at all and lets universities continue to sin.
Until they come up with a better solution that satisfies the current administration, they had better comply with the orders given. If it's social engineering, so be it, it's better social engineering than what they were already doing. But surely they will get a hearing if they have an honestly better idea of how to do this.
Turn their own reasoning (such as it is) against them. The presence of merely token conservatives in the faculty is ipso facto evidence of discrimination. They should be ashamed.
Funny how these institutions and vice-chancellors had nothing to say about the DEI-requirements mandated by the federal government.
And nothing to say about the Title IX "Dear Colleague" letter that threatened to stop federal funding (sounds familiar?) unless the college instituted $10M/yr Title IX offices to find males on campus guilty of "misconduct". The gender bias in the investigations and punishments was imposed by the Department of Education.
Some demands of the administration are certainly overboard bur are they all ``unreasonable, undemocratic and unconstitutional'' ? Which ones among the ten demands in the letter to Harvard https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/14/us/trump-harvard-demands.html are unreasonable?
All good points. but does Alexander really beliefs that any change could come without that ``ugly prompt'' of the Trump administration? If he truly believes that, he has to explain why this did not happen before? He appears to think that now that the administration asked for systematic changes the universities are right to reject these ``unreasonable, undemocratic, and unconstitutional demands of the authoritarian bureaucracy''. Really?
What is missing from this and numerous other discussions, is that the Administration's letter explicitly said that they required an agreement on principles with the specifics to be worked out in later discussions and negotiations. THERE WERE NO DEMANDS.
Well said!
DEI is poison that must be removed from academia. A very large job that likely cannot be done without some mistakes.
These calm discussions about academia seem out of touch with the scale of the problem, represented by the most prestigious university, Harvard. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Harvard's race-conscious admissions program violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Further, Harvard's president, Dr. Gay, was unable to state that calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s code of conduct. When Dr. Gay's plagiarism was exposed, the Harvard Board of Directors gave her unanimous support. Meanwhile, Harvard's DEI and Title IX programs routinely investigate hundreds of students, mostly male, for "misconduct". Then, on October 8, 2023, 34 Harvard student organizations blamed Israel as “entirely responsible for the violence” the day before. Meanwhile, DEI and Title IX operate as unchecked enforcers, while male enrollment in U.S. universities has dropped to just 42%, and universities puff their feathers about secretly admitting more "students of color" and hiring faculty based on gender and race. Yes, Berkeley, UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, and UC campuses, with DEI and Title IX programs costing $20M/yr, pursue the same policies as Harvard. Behind closed doors, the racism and sexism happens.
It has been claimed by faculty that they are the university. As such, they are responsible for what the university does...and fails to do. Universities have gone far off the rails and the faculty are entirely to blame. Like abusive parents who neglect and abuse their children, it is not the state to blame when outside intervention which strips away privileges of the "parents" is required to correct the problem. The universities created their problem. Resisting correction merely demonstrates that they should be left to their own devices to fix the problem.
But decades ago, the faculty abdicated this responsibility at most schools. So...they are really not in control of things at many places, not any longer. This might have been cowardice or it might have been complacency or laziness. But, it happened.
Not buying it. Faculty control hiring committees and the university conduct system. They are fully complicit in the failures of their universities. Judgement Day is here...and the faculty have no where to hide.
Sort of. This depends on the school, I think.
I have heard of terrible counterexamples, unfortunately.
Of course, the faculty ALLOWED this to happen. So they are NOT blameless. Not even close.
However, at Harvard and many other places, these institutions at this point are runaway trains with incompetents controlling the system, that is, in charge. For the most part, these are either not faculty, or they are faculty in name only, just appointed for appearances or DEI purposes or whatever. These characters would NEVER have been appointed to the faculty under the systems and rules prevalent a few decades ago. Stanford and Yale are effectively dictatorships by nonfaculty now. Is the UC system much different?
And this same thing is going on in many other domains besides hiring, including admissions and curricula and grading and standards and all kinds of other stuff.
Things have become SO bad at Stanford, that neighboring high tech companies in Silicon Valley privately say that they would rather hire community college graduates and train them, rather than Stanford graduates (who they also have to retrain since they are so awful currently). This is not a great sign, even if it is only partially correct and these accounts are somewhat exaggerated (as I suspect might be true).
Obviously there is nuance in different institutions but if we are speaking of academic generally, it is the faculty that have embraced DEI, antisemitism and cancel culture, either enthusiastically or by remaining silent when they could/should have spoken out. We see the same thing in the professional societies which demonstrates that the problem is not driven by academic administrators, but by the membership of these societies...a.k.a. the faculty. Academics need to start taking responsibility for the state of their industry and stop trying to pass the buck to others.
Allowing ambiguity, or letting universities make "good faith efforts", just means it will be more of the same and it won't be stopped. These people can't be trusted; they live for their ideology. We just have to react to Harvard's refusal by stopping the funding.
Let Harvard exist in the free market. If people want that stuff and are willing to pay a full market price, so be it. If not, so be it.
Trump's solution may be absurd but this is no time to nitpick or slow him down. Harvard has to say yes, and try, and if it results in some new abuses, at least they'll be in the other direction. To use the words of the left, a restorative solution (discriminating in the opposite direction), beyond mere fixing of bad policies, wouldn't be out of place. "But then the left will tear it all down!" They'll do that anyway.
"even if it were popular, virtuous, and novel, institutionalizing any ideology is corrupting"
The idea of an Enlightenment university that we inherited in North America mandates a disinterested intellectual engagement with reality and a free intellectual exchange over findings and ways of understanding the findings. Our universities have abandoned this mandate and betrayed this tradition in favor of political activism fueled by extreme ideologies held as religious truths. Recruitment and reward in those institutions are based on the "holy truths" of those ideologies, just as heretics are punished and removed. What is no longer seen, and is in fact forbidden, is intellectual diversity. From Berkeley to Harvard and everywhere in between, our "universities" no longer deserve that label. At this point, what they deserve is to be bulldozed.
Philip Carl Salzman, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, McGill University
I do not expect the proportion of atheists among faculty to mirror that of the general population, provided the faculty is selected using the standard of meritocracy and hard scientific facts you're advocating. And the less freedom of thought exists in the general society relative to academia, the more atheists are likely to disproportionately converge in the latter.
But sound article.
"Universities are absolutely right to reject the US administration’s blatant attempt at social engineering disguised as Viewpoint Diversity in Admission and Hiring."
In fact, a reasonable approach for doing just that was recently discussed in this column by Dorian Abbott.
Realistically, even if faculty hiring is meritocratic, this meritocracy is only the secondary factor. In most cases, the primary factor is viewpoint-based. When even science departments such as chemistry or physics put out job ads, first and foremost they list the specific subfield or topic of interest (e.g., organic chemistry; astrophysics theory) -- not to mention the humanities departments . This topic of interest arises from internal faculty discussions, where some faction convinces other factions that it's time to search in their subfield. Such a method works fine if the department's research already covers a broad range of topics. But it fails if the range is narrow from the start, since the ideological exclusion quickly becomes self-reinforcing.
So the "reasonable approach" is that faculty decides to hire in the area of "structural racism", promising that Greek philosophy will get its turn in some future cycle? This is no solution at all and lets universities continue to sin.
Until they come up with a better solution that satisfies the current administration, they had better comply with the orders given. If it's social engineering, so be it, it's better social engineering than what they were already doing. But surely they will get a hearing if they have an honestly better idea of how to do this.
Really? "Astrophysics theory" is the same as a view that whites must be slaughtered wholesale?
Quite an amazing suggestion...