What’s going on in higher ed?
Back from a break, HxA’s Alice Dreger brings you a round-up of the news.
If you haven’t had time to keep up with what’s happening in the space Heterodox Academy’s efforts focus on – the culture of open inquiry in higher education – you’re not alone. Here’s a weekend round-up of some key developments to help you catch up.
Even as various calls go up to fix higher education because of the loss of public trust, a new Gallup poll shows that the numbers are already turning around. HxA Director of Communications Nicole Barbaro Simovski reported earlier this week, “Of Americans polled in the [annual] survey last month, 42% said they have either ‘quite a lot’ or a ‘great deal’ of confidence in higher ed — up six percentage points from the previous year.”
That doesn’t mean troubles aren’t persisting; as Nicole and HxA Research Assistant Erin Shaw noted in a post Thursday, new research shows students are self-selecting by ideology as they pick colleges, and that threatens to grow the campus silos.
Speaking of silos, a new working paper examining syllabi on contentious issues brings evidence suggesting highly lopsided teaching. (Guess which way it leans.) Tuesday, The Chronicle of Higher Ed brought an interview with the three authors of the paper, with one of them, Claremont McKenna College’s Jon Shields saying:
“I thought we’d find some large contingent of professors who tend to teach these issues in predictably one-sided ways. But I didn’t expect that group to be as large as it seems to be. So I came away from this study feeling more depressed, actually. In past years, when I’ve had conversations with colleagues about the politicization of the university, particularly when I’m talking to people far to my right, I tend to defend the university and tell them, ‘Things aren’t really nearly as bad as you think.’ But I feel like I’ve got to revisit my prior assumptions.”
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that “Columbia University and the Trump administration have reached an agreement to resolve a months-long dispute over federal research funding that made the Ivy League university a symbol of White House efforts to force cultural changes in higher education nationally.” The site of many highly disruptive protests over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Columbia will have to pay $221 million to settle discrimination claims and end an EEOC investigation. The school also agreed to increased government oversight. The administration agreed to restore “most of the $400 million in research grants that were frozen by the government.”
Pressure continues on other universities, including notably George Mason University, the largest public institution of higher education in Virginia. The intense approach against GMU has some scratching their heads; GMU is well known for being relatively conservative. Its law school, named in honor of the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, boasts being Washington’s own school of civic discourse. GMU is also home to the Institute for Humane Studies, a nationally-renowned academic booster of the liberal tradition, supporting work on human dignity and economic freedom. Reporting on the latest, the Washington Times noted that the fed’s letter announcing the fourth round of DEI investigation “didn’t specify any civil rights complaints or violations of federal law.”
In an analysis and commentary for the Chronicle of Higher Education this week, three GMU professors argue what’s happening at their school is “the [Christopher] Rufo doctrine in action: fabricate a crisis, flood the zone with misinformation, start coordinated media attacks, trigger federal investigations, and force institutions to collapse under the weight of bad-faith pressure. It worked at UVa,” where the president recently resigned.
Rufo led the recently-issued Manhattan Statement on Higher Education, signed by nearly 50 prominent academics, ex-academics, politicians, and individuals affiliated with conservative nonprofits and think tanks. The statement calls on President Trump “to draft a new contract with the universities, which should be written into every grant, payment, loan, eligibility, and accreditation, and punishable by revocation of all public benefit.” The contract would include requirements for universities to “advance truth over ideology,” “cease direct participation in social and political activism,” “abolish DEI bureaucracies,” “provide a forum for wider range of debate and protect faculty and students who dissent from the ruling consensus,” and “uphold the highest standard of civil discourse, with swift and significant penalties” for transgressions.
Heterodox Academy President John Tomasi responded with an explanation of “What the Manhattan Statement Gets Wrong on University Reform,” disagreeing with the Manhattan Statement’s diagnosis of the problem and arguing that “viewpoint diversity can be political, but it can also mean disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, etc.” Tomasi noted “Heterodox Academy is not calling for federal reaction to reform our universities,” working instead for cultural change from within.
It appears the Manhattan Statement’s central call for strong federal control of universities is what’s causing the most controversy around it. UATX President Carlos Carvalho responded with a ringing endorsement of the call for major action (“This crisis is why UATX was founded”), but that in turn led to the resignation of Larry Summers from the UATX Advisory Board (“I am not comfortable with the course that UATX has set nor the messages it promulgates and so am withdrawing”). In his inaugural post for what will be a regular Inside Higher Ed column, historian of academic freedom John K. Wilson parses out what it could look like if President Trump follows the call.
A number of scholars who attended the Centre for Heterodox Social Science’s inaugural conference in June have now issued The Buckingham Manifesto for a Post-Progressive Social Science. It “calls for a new social science to free up inquiry, fill in blind spots, and render a richer and more accurate account of our social world. This does not require that every conceivable question be researched, only that those that are researched be treated with scientific objectivity and openness to multiple hypotheses.”
Meanwhile, positive ripples continue from HxA’s July conference on Truth, Power, and Responsibility in higher education, with coverage of the event by Cathy Young in the Bulwark and reporting on the HxA presidents’ panel in this week’s New Yorker. The videos from the conference are now up. Check out the program here and all see the recordings here by looking at the right-side screen scroll.
And, if you’re out west or wanting to be, join me and other HxA members for our regional gathering August 14-15 at Colorado State University.
A couple other programming notes:
Sign up now for our Aug. 7 webinar on Sway, a new, practical AI tool to help promote constructive disagreement on campus, including in your classroom. Seats are limited, so register now.
The new open call for pitches to inquisitive, the quarterly intellectual magazine I edit for HxA, is out. Issue #6 will be on the theme of “Limits.” Subscribe to get notified when we publish our fourth issue, on the theme of “Class,” in early September and “Eve,” coming out in December.
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