RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-spoiled-brats-of-academe/

President Trump’s campaign to restore Constitutional order and common sense to our government has rightly targeted our educational institutions, keeping the pledge he made on the campaign trail “to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left.” These institutions, like a fish, rot from the head down, and so the corruption of our universities must be reduced by starting with their administrations and faculties.

That corruption became obvious during the campus protests celebrating Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. The despicable anti-Semitism of the students and faculty of some of our most prestigious universities, as well as violence directed at Jewish students, replete with genocidal chants and rhetoric, were tolerated by campus authorities and met with shameful appeasement, if not encouragement, rather than arrests and expulsions.

Trump has responded by garnishing some of the billions of dollars that taxpayers provide to universities, which use these funds to finance politicized or dubious research, create anti-American programs, and graduate majors rife with leftwing curricula filled with postmodern “higher nonsense,” but lacking any prospects of employment other than political activism. Indeed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Wall Street Journal reports, “You have a higher chance of being unemployed these days if you go to college.”

In response, these institutions have been caterwauling like a spoiled, entitled brat whose rich father has reduced his exorbitant allowance. Typical are the comments of Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, who blustered, “The attack on Columbia is a radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research . . . Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.”

So how did private universities with multi-billion-dollar, tax-free endowments get a “right” to taxpayer money? And how did the common-sense wisdom that “He who pays the piper calls the tune” disappear? Aren’t there conditions the feds impose on how public funds are spent? Are not politicized curricula, programs, and majors verboten?

But the left-wing’s “long march” to politicize universities is just one example of the left’s corruption of our schools. Postmodern and poststructuralist ideologies––the idiot children of Marx’s malign ideas such of “false consciousness” –– incorporate other sophistic ideas such as the simplistic, radical materialist determinism and relativism.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-universities-dei-diversity-center-right-critics

Since Inauguration Day, the Trump administration has taken decisive action against DEI in universities, threatening to investigate, punish, and withhold funding from higher education institutions that discriminate in the name of diversity. Most conservatives, who correctly see DEI as a threat to colorblind equality, have celebrated these maneuvers. But some center-right intellectuals, who claim to oppose DEI in theory, have criticized the White House for using administrative power to eliminate it in practice.

One such figure is Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School, who has gained attention in recent years as an insider critic of DEI. He has been mildly critical of diversity statements in faculty hiring, which he claims infringe on “academic freedom” and diminish “the true value of diversity.” Some conservatives praise him as a reformer, but the truth is more complicated: as dean, Flier was not a critic of DEI at all. In fact, he oversaw its rapid expansion and became a critic only after he retired from that position.

Last month on X, I asked Flier to substantiate the facts about his opposition to DEI. “When you were Dean of Harvard Medical School, what did you do to stop racial discrimination in admissions, hiring, and programs?” I asked. “Why can’t I find any record of you speaking out against your department’s illegal DEI practices when you were in charge?”

Flier attempted to duck the question but eventually relented. “[W]hen I was dean, affirmative action in admissions and various DEI programs were not illegal,” he replied.

This approach distorted the law—discriminatory hiring programs have always violated the Civil Rights Act. And Flier’s reply was an evasion. He would rather quibble over legal technicalities than grapple with his conduct as an administrator.

After resigning as dean, Flier himself admitted that he knew requiring diversity statements in faculty hiring was wrong but could only publicly express his criticism once he was out of power. “As a dean of a major academic institution, I could not have said [that I oppose requiring diversity statements]. But I will now.” In other words, Flier knew that these initiatives violated his principles but refused to voice his opinion at the time, not because of legal technicalities—a post hoc rationalization—but because it would have jeopardized his career. He could have opposed DEI, but chose not to, out of fear.

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.”