RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/06/toward-a-negotiated-settlement-of-the-trump-harvard-showdown/

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

In the high-stakes clash between the Trump administration and Harvard – fraught with peril for the White House, for America’s oldest and most famous university, and for higher education in America – both sides have hardened their stances. In an April 11 letter, the Trump administration demanded supervision over reform of the university’s admissions, hiring, curriculum, and internal governance. In an April 14 email to the Harvard community, President Alan Garber rejected White House demands. The Trump administration promptly froze more than $2 billion in federal grants to Harvard and $60 million in contracts, and threatened to eliminate the university’s tax-exempt status. On April 21, Harvard sued several Trump administration officials.

Conservatives, who have been sounding the alarm about higher education’s failings for decades, have divided over how best the Trump administration should hold Harvard accountable.

On the one hand, the federal government has considerable leverage: It provides Harvard more than $500 million annually with billions in the pipeline. On the other hand, the Trump administration must respect constitutional and statutory limits on executive power. Political prudence dictates, moreover, that the president and his team consider that a sizeable majority of the public opposes increasing the federal government’s oversight of universities and that the federal government is ill-suited to the task.

Best for both sides would be a negotiated settlement. The settlement should minimize the federal government’s role in managing Harvard while ensuring that the university obeys civil-rights law, curbs progressive indoctrination, and bolsters traditional liberal education.

Harvard precipitated the crisis. The proximate cause of the Trump administration’s drastic intervention was the university’s violation of civil-rights law by indulging antisemitism and discriminating based on race.

Harvard’s indulgence of antisemitism stands in marked contrast to the alacrity with which it has protected non-Jewish minorities and women. For decades, Harvard has been narrowing the boundaries of permissible campus speech to shield students – particularly favored minorities and women – from supposedly offensive utterances, the offense of which often consists in departure from progressive orthodoxy. Yet following Iran-backed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, former Harvard President Claudine Gay discovered that campus free speech is wide and flexible enough to sometimes protect calling for the genocide of the Jews. Furthermore, as the university has acknowledged, it has harbored antisemitism and has been slow and ineffective in responding to campus antisemitism’s post-Oct. 7 surge.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/education-battles-get-national-attention/

Two critical education issues have reached the U.S. Supreme Court. One involves Montgomery County Public Schools, one of the nation’s largest school districts. A group of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim parents is arguing that the Maryland school district violated their First Amendment right to religious freedom when it refused to allow them to opt their children out of LGBTQ-themed lessons.

The case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, illustrates the growing tension between sex-obsessed schools and the rights of religious parents, who are  challenging the Montgomery County School Board’s decision in 2022 to approve more than 22 LGBTQ+ books for classroom use, including works like “Pride Puppy,” “Intersection Allies,” and “What Are Your Words.”

According to court documents, one of the books, Pride Puppy, is a “picture book directed to three and four-year-olds that describes a Pride parade and what a child might find there.” The book invites students to search for various images, including “underwear, leather, lip ring, drag king, and drag queen.”

Other books adopted by the Montgomery County School Board promote pride parades and gender transitioning while advocating for a “child-knows-best” approach to social transitioning. The books tell students that their decision to transition to another gender doesn’t have to “make sense,” and unbelievably, that physicians in the delivery room guess newborn babies’ sexual identity.

Montgomery County argues that if families choose to attend public schools, they “are not cognizably coerced by their children’s exposure there to religiously objectionable ideas.” If the First Amendment gives parents a right to pick and choose from the curriculum, the county says there’s “no discernible limit,” and it would work the same in science or history classes. Public schools “simply cannot accommodate” these exceptions.

Ultimately, the case is really about parental rights, as it also applies to nonreligious parents. As Melissa Moschella, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame, writes, “When I told my father, who is secular and a staunch Democrat, about this case, he said that you don’t have to be religious to object to telling 3-year-olds that doctors only ‘guess’ a baby’s sex at birth or giving them a ‘Pride Puppy’ storybook instructing them to search for images of things they would find at a pride parade, such as a drag queen, leather and an intersex flag. He thinks that parents having the right to opt their children out of such indoctrination is just common sense.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-administration-wants-colleges-to-reveal-foreign-donors/

The Trump administration is not letting up in its determination to make American colleges and universities shape up and fly right. First, it has asked the universities to supply the administration with information on what they have been doing to record, punish, and prevent antisemitic acts on their campuses. Second, the administration has asked them to furnish the government with information on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs that are enforced at the schools, so that their observance of the law, or failure to do so — the law as set out in the 2023 Supreme Court decision that struck down Affirmative Action programs for college admissions — can be judged. And now the Trump administration wants colleges and universities to reveal what foreign money they have accepted, with particular attention to moneys coming from China and Qatar, two countries that do not share our values, and are, indeed, hostile to us.

More on this request for more information on foreign “influencers” of American universities can be found here: “Trump order will prevent Qatari, Chinese influence at schools, ed. sec. says,” by Michael Starr, Jerusalem Post, April 24, 2025:

A Wednesday executive order from US President Donald Trump will require transparency in foreign university funding, with Education Department Secretary Linda McMahon emphasizing that the order would address the problem of Chinese and Qatari influence in American academic institutions.

Trump’s order called for McMahon to take all appropriate action to enforce preexisting laws on foreign funding to universities and to demand the disclosure of more details about the donations, their sources, and purposes.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/04/332062/

Academia is once again in the news. Donald Trump’s recent commencement address at the University of Alabama, where he said that America’s “next chapter will not be written by The Harvard Crimson, it will be written by you—the Crimson Tide,” sounded one leitmotif of the new, Trump-inspired populism that is washing over the academic establishment. Trump’s announcement that he was seeking to remove Harvard’s tax-exempt status sounded another.

These days, whenever the public’s attention is roused by academia, the oculus of media scrutiny turns up references to my book Tenured Radicals, first published more than 30 years ago but subsequently expanded and updated several times.

Given the renewed interest in academic culture, I thought I would adapt a few thoughts from the introduction to the most recent edition of the book.

Academic life, like the rest of social life, unfolds within a frame of rules and permissions. At one end, there are things that one must (or must not) do; at the other end, there is the rule of whim. The middle range, in which behavior is neither explicitly governed by rules nor entirely free, is that realm governed by what the British jurist John Fletcher Moulton, writing in the early 1920s, called “Obedience to the Unenforceable.”

This middle realm is a place governed not by law or mere caprice but by virtues such as duty, fairness, judgment, and taste. In a word, it is the “domain of Manners,” which “covers all cases of right doing where there is no one to make you do it but yourself.”

A good index of the health of any social institution is its allegiance to the strictures that define this middle realm. “In the changes that are taking place in the world around us,” Moulton wrote, “one of those which is fraught with grave peril is the discredit into which this idea of the middle land is falling.” One example was the abuse of free speech in political debate: “We have unrestricted freedom of debate,” say the radicals, “We will use it so as to destroy debate.”

The repudiation of obedience to the unenforceable is at the center of what makes academic life (and not only academic life) today so noxious. The contraction of the “domain of Manners” creates a vacuum that is filled on one side by increasing regulation—speech codes, rules for all aspects of social life, efforts to determine by legislation (from the right as well as from the left) what should follow freely from responsible behavior—and on the other side by increased license.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/houston-schools-merit-pay-teachers-salaries-students

In early April, the Houston Independent School District announced the details of its merit-pay system, which will launch during the 2026–2027 school year. Spearheaded by reform-minded superintendent Mike Miles, the new compensation scheme sets teachers’ salaries based on several performance-based criteria, including quality of instruction, student academic outcomes, professionalism, and school-wide achievement.

With this new program, Houston will become one of the few districts in the nation fully to tie teacher salaries to performance, rather than simply adding incentives or bonuses to a standard seniority-based pay structure. The plan will require significant administrative effort: the district will conduct up to 20 classroom evaluations per teacher, assess student progress on various exams—including the state’s annual standardized test—and rank teachers across six proficiency levels. Those with unsatisfactory scores may be fired

Initiatives like Houston’s almost always face pushback, particularly from teachers’ unions and some education advocates. While supporters argue that these plans reward effective instruction, critics contend that they impose arbitrary evaluation standards and encourage “teaching to the test.” Yet research shows that, when properly implemented, merit pay is supported by teachers, improves workforce quality, and ultimately benefits students.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/harvard-students-graduating-without-finishing-212516959.html

They may be the intellectual elite, but Harvard students could graduate without reading a work of fiction during their time at America’s oldest university.

Chastising her fellow 25,000 students at the college dating back to 1636, Claire Miller has claimed that the university should require them to at least pick up a book.

Writing in The Harvard Crimson, the college newspaper, Ms Miller has called for the university to make an English course compulsory for students, who pay more than $56,000 (£44,350) a year for their tuition.

Posing a question to her peers, she asked: “When was the last time you read a book cover to cover?

“For me, a prospective English concentrator, it was last week. But ask my peers in other concentrations and you’re more likely to get a shrug.

“Harvard students complain about readings constantly.

“They lament any assignments requiring they conquer more than 25 pages as tedious or overwhelming (if they aren’t passing the work off to ChatGPT). It’s far too rare that we’re assigned a full book to read and rarer still that we actually finish them.”

‘Blame rests with Harvard’

It was a withering condemnation of students at a university which in recent years has become better known for political activism than rigorous study.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/yale-professors-open-letter-faculty-hiring

Nearly 100 Yale professors have signed a letter calling for the university to “freeze new administrative hires” and conduct a “faculty-led audit” of its sprawling bureaucracy. The missive, sent to Yale’s president and provost last month, proposes an audit aimed at “cutting or restructuring administrative roles” and aligning the university’s “resources . . . with its core academic mission.”

While faculty have long complained about administrative growth and overreach, the Yale letter is a rare example of organized pushback. Its publication could inspire faculty at other schools to follow suit and potentially provide a roadmap for a tacit alliance between reform-minded liberal professors and the Trump administration.

Like other elite universities, Yale’s bureaucracy has grown much faster than its professoriate. The signatories note that “over the last two decades, faculty hiring has stagnated while administrative ranks have by some estimates more than doubled—outpacing peer institutions and leaving Yale with five times as many administrators as tenured faculty.”

This out-of-control growth, the professors argue, clashes with the university’s mission. They call for a “top-to-bottom audit of non-academic positions,” which “would not only generate immediate savings—potentially in the hundreds of millions—but would send a resounding message: Yale prioritizes intellectual vitality over bureaucratic inertia.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/university-fellow-to-faculty-hiring-diversity-independence

Late last year, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) slammed the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in an unusual social media exchange. “FIRE receives major funding from groups with clear and well-known political, ideological, and economic interests,” the 110-year-old professional organization’s X account said in a back-and-forth with FIRE vice president Alex Morey. “FIRE is complicit w/ the attacks on higher education being led by the Right. You know this but still push the line that you are somehow nonpartisan. How hypocritical.”

The criticism was ironic, given that last year the AAUP received $1.5 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which extensively funds ideological projects. More ironic still, AAUP claims to cherish faculty self-governance—that is, the faculty’s freedom to manage its own professional affairs. Yet, it has remained silent as social-justice advocates, many funded by the Mellon Foundation, have undercut faculty authority—a major issue created by the “fellow-to-faculty” activist pipeline.

Throughout my recent City Journal series, I’ve shown how dozens of American universities have developed special fellow-to-faculty hiring programs. Universities use these initiatives to recruit postdoctoral fellows—often with extra administrative involvement in the selection process and a heavy emphasis on diversity—and favor those fellows for tenure-track jobs. It’s a favorite tool of the Mellon Foundation, and it helps administrators strong-arm departments into hiring their preferred candidates.

That threatens faculty self-governance. Multiple professors told me how deans denied or limited their departments’ funds for regular hiring, while strongly encouraging them to hire through fellow-to-faculty programs. In effect, these initiatives allow administrators to use budgetary carrots and sticks to reshape faculty hiring, normally the domain of academic departments.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/30/education-battles-get-national-attention/

Two critical education issues have reached the U.S. Supreme Court. One involves Montgomery County Public Schools, one of the nation’s largest school districts. A group of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim parents is arguing that the Maryland school district violated their First Amendment right to religious freedom when it refused to allow them to opt their children out of LGBTQ-themed lessons.

The case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, illustrates the growing tension between sex-obsessed schools and the rights of religious parents, who are challenging the Montgomery County School Board’s decision in 2022 to approve more than 22 LGBTQ+ books for classroom use, including works like “Pride Puppy,” “Intersection Allies,” and “What Are Your Words.”

According to court documents, one of the books, Pride Puppy, is a “picture book directed to three- and four-year-olds that describes a Pride parade and what a child might find there.” The book invites students to search for various images, including “underwear, leather, lip ring, drag king, and drag queen.”

Other books adopted by the Montgomery County School Board promote pride parades and gender transitioning while advocating for a “child-knows-best” approach to social transitioning. The books tell students that their decision to transition to another gender doesn’t have to “make sense,” and unbelievably, that physicians in the delivery room guess newborn babies’ sexual identity.

Montgomery County argues that if families choose to attend public schools, they “are not cognizably coerced by their children’s exposure there to religiously objectionable ideas.” If the First Amendment gives parents a right to pick and choose from the curriculum, the county says there’s “no discernible limit,” and it would work the same in science or history classes. Public schools “simply cannot accommodate” these exceptions.

Ultimately, the case is really about parental rights, as it also applies to nonreligious parents. As Melissa Moschella, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame, writes, “When I told my father, who is secular and a staunch Democrat, about this case, he said that you don’t have to be religious to object to telling 3-year-olds that doctors only ‘guess’ a baby’s sex at birth or giving them a ‘Pride Puppy’ storybook instructing them to search for images of things they would find at a pride parade, such as a drag queen, leather, and an intersex flag. He thinks that parents having the right to opt their children out of such indoctrination is just common sense.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/princeton-university-president-christopher-eisgruber-anti-semitism-racial-discrimination

In 2020, Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber made headlines for declaring the university guilty of “systemic racism.” He meant systemic racism against racial minorities, but in truth, Eisgruber’s institution has practiced the opposite: systematically discriminated against supposed “oppressors,” like whites and males.

Though most Princeton faculty support Eisgruber’s “anti-racism” policy, a faction of dissenters—a few dozen in number—has grown bolder in recent months. In these professors’ telling, Princeton’s president is a vengeful administrator who punishes anyone who questions DEI orthodoxy. They have worked behind the scenes to assemble evidence of his discriminatory policies and hope the Trump administration will restore the principle of colorblind equality on campus.

I sat down with one of these professors for a wide-ranging discussion about anti-Semitism, radical ideologies, and DEI at Princeton. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Christopher Rufo: Harvard and Columbia have drawn the most attention for radical ideologies and anti-Semitism on campus. Set the stage for what’s happening here at Princeton.

Professor: Anti-Semitism is really a symptom of a deeper malaise at Princeton, which is that the university decided to go woke and—as President Eisgruber wrote in the last few months of the first Trump administration—declare that we were “systemically racist.” But if we have been systemically racist, it’s been against whites, Jews, Asians, and Indians, in favor of other demographics. We’ve always been told that we have to give special treatment to women and certain demographic minorities.