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EDUCATION

Is the Jig Up for Elite Higher Education? Elite universities face a reckoning as public backlash and new legislation threaten their finances, admissions policies, and ideological excesses, forcing them to reform or risk irrelevance. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/13/is-the-jig-up-for-elite-higher-education/

Over the last three decades, elite American universities have engaged in economic, political, social, and cultural practices that were often unethical, illegal—and suicidal.

They did so with impunity.

Apparently, confident administrators assumed that the brand of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other elite universities was so precious to the nation’s elite movers and shakers that they could always do almost anything they wished.

By the 1970s, non-profit universities had dropped pretenses that they were apolitical and non-partisan.

Instead, they customarily violated the corpus of iconic civil rights legislation by weighing race, gender, and sexual orientation in biased admissions, hiring, and promotions.

Graduation ceremonies became overtly racially and ethnically segregated. The same was true for dorms and “theme houses.”

So-called “safe spaces,” in the spirit of the Jim Crow South, reserved areas of campus solely for particular races.

Affluent foreign students often openly protested on behalf of designated terrorist groups like Hamas.

First-Amendment-protected free speech all but vanished on elite campuses. Any guest speaker who dared to critique abortion on demand, Middle East orthodoxy, biological males dominating women’s sports, or diversity/equity/inclusion dogmas was likely to be shouted down, or on occasion roughed up.

University administrators either ignored the violence done to the Bill of Rights or quietly approved when their rowdy students were turned loose on supposed conservatives.

But in their hubris, the universities began a series of blunders that may now end them as they once were.

A former Columbia professor applauds the defunding By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/03/a_former_columbia_professor_applauds_the_defunding.html

I almost cheered out loud when I read that the Trump administration has cancelled $400 million in funding for Columbia University, despite the fact that when I taught there about three and a half decades ago, I no doubt directly benefitted from federal money flowing in, enjoyed my colleagues, and was treated very well. My animus and support for the cuts derives from the reluctant conclusion that as an institution, it has been corrupted, and nothing less than traumatic levels of change are required. The level of change required includes firing administrators, faculty, and admissions officers, expelling students, and revising hiring and admissions criteria. Only fear of financial catastrophe will suffice to strengthen sufficiently the spines of trustees and the administration.

Consider this abuse:

Some Columbia University professors canceled in-person classes on Monday in support of Mahmoud Khalil, the student activist and foreign national whom the Trump administration moved to deport over his pro-Hamas campus organizing. The cancellations — which came amid a pressure campaign from the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter — put the professors at odds with Columbia’s provost, who emailed “faculty colleagues” Monday morning to issue “a reminder that faculty must meet all scheduled classes.”

Faculty who cheat their students in order to make a political point should be immediately fired. They are defrauding the young minds whose families have coughed up the exorbitant tuition Columbia (and every other prestige college) charges: $71,170 per year. That works out to a quasi “ticket price” per hour of classroom instruction of $182 to $228, depending on whether a student takes 4 or 5 courses per semester. (See Columbia’s requirements, regulations and costs posted online for the underlying data.)

Imagine a theatre cancelling a performance that people spent over $200 to attend and refusing to refund the tickets.

It’s obvious that deeply politicized faculty, staff, and students are so numerous that they dominate the campus and poison the atmosphere, making the campus unsafe for Jews and any other minority that they may decide to target. They can’t be “reformed” because, as ideologues, they will resist.

Teacher Wins in Court After Being Fired for Refusing to Use Preferred Pronouns By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/11/teacher-wins-in-court-after-being-fired-for-refusing-to-use-preferred-pronouns/

On Monday, a teacher in Wisconsin who had been fired for refusing to use the “preferred pronouns” of students who believed themselves to be “transgender” won a legal settlement with his former employer.

As reported by the Daily Caller, Jordan Cernek had been an English teacher with the Argyle School District until his contract was not renewed, after two students in the 2022-2023 academic year demanded that staff refer to them by their preferred names and pronouns. Following his termination, Cernek sued the school district in July of 2024, claiming a violation of his First Amendment right to freedom of religion, as well as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The lawsuit was filed on Cernek’s behalf by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.

“Mr. Cernek has a sincerely held religious belief that God makes no mistakes when it comes to sex and gender and that calling a transgender student by a name or pronouns at odds with their biological sex would cause Mr. Cernek to affirm that God made a mistake in creating a transgender person as a male or a female,” the lawsuit read in part. “In Mr. Cernek’s religious view, affirming a transgender person’s identity through the use of preferred names and pronouns would be speaking a falsehood and violate his religious beliefs.”

Court records reveal that the school had initially agreed to a religious exemption for Cernek, before suddenly revoking the agreement and ordering him to use the students’ preferred names and pronouns.

The case was dismissed in February following the announcement that both parties had reached a settlement. The school district confirmed in a statement that it had agreed to pay the amount of $20,000 to Cernek.

The Department of Education’s Time Has Come And another Deep State force needs a reckoning as well. by Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/the-department-of-educations-time-has-come/

President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has terminated nearly $1 billion in contracts with the federal Department of Education (ED) and cut 29 DEI programs costing taxpayers $101 million. While further revelations await, the people should know that ED has no constitutional foundation – education is the purview of the states – and has existed only since 1979.

In 1976, the National Education Association, the nation’s most powerful teacher union, endorsed Jimmy Carter for president. The Georgia Democrat returned the favor by establishing the federal Department of Education, which did nothing to improve student achievement. That was confirmed in 1983 by A Nation at Risk, which contended that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.”

ED was more about fattening the government payroll and boosting government power. Consider the actions of Biden education secretary Dr. Miguel Cardona, for example. Cardona’s “doctoral degree,” like Jill Biden’s, is in education, a non-discipline most useful as a bureaucratic credential. A classic zealot, Cardona used new Title IX regulations to impose gender junkthought.

“In a nutshell, the new rewrite means: – men can take academic AND athletic scholarships from women,” Riley Gaines explained. “Men will have FULL access to bathrooms, locker rooms, etc – men could be housed in dorm rooms with women – students and faculty MUST compel their speech by requiring the use of preferred pronouns If the guidelines above are ignored or even questioned, then YOU can be charged with harassment.” Cardona also deployed ED against schools congressional Democrats don’t like.

Grand Canyon University is an independent college that “reaches a broad variety of like-minded Christian congregations and organizations,” and many students want to attend. By contrast, Connecticut Democrat Rosa DeLauro called GCU a “predatory for-profit school.” The dutiful Cardona told her ED was aiming “to shut them down” and hit GCU for $37.7 million, the “largest fine in history against a school that lied about costs,” and so on. Compare Cardona’s predations with Obama ED boss Arne Duncan.

Renu Mukherjee Are Universities Following the Supreme Court’s Affirmative-Action Ban? Data suggest that some of America’s top schools may be practicing racial preferences by other means.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/universities-supreme-court-affirmative-action-racial-preferences

When the Supreme Court, in 2023, banned the use of racial preferences in university admissions, observers expected the number of black and Hispanic freshmen on elite campuses to fall and the number of Asian freshmen to rise. At many schools, however, that didn’t happen.

Admissions data reveal that Yale, Princeton, Duke, and several other highly selective schools enrolled fewer Asian students in their Classes of 2028—the first group admitted since the Court decided Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—than they did in their Classes of 2027. Black enrollment at these schools, by contrast, remained virtually unchanged.

In the run up to SFFA, these elite colleges repeatedly asserted that they could not maintain racial diversity on campuses without affirmative action. Sixteen prestigious colleges filed a joint amicus brief arguing that “no race-neutral alternative presently can fully replace race-conscious individualized and holistic review to obtain the diverse student body Amici have found essential to fulfilling their missions.” Several had advanced the same argument in amicus briefs filed in 2003’s Grutter v. Bollinger and 2016’s Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, earlier cases examining the use of racial preferences.

For more than two decades, universities claimed that socioeconomic preferences, geographic sorting, and other race-neutral alternatives could not achieve the same level of racial diversity on campus as could affirmative action. Yet the demographics of many schools’ Class of 2028 suggest otherwise. It raises an awkward question: Did America’s top universities mislead the Supreme Court then, or are they breaking the law now?

Consider data from an Inside Higher Ed database that tracks the demographics of the Classes of 2027 and 2028 at 31 highly selective universities. The database includes the first-year demographics for 13 of the 15 highly selective universities that alleged, in the SFFA amicus brief, that their campuses would lose racial diversity absent racial preferences. I’ve listed the demographics for 12 of those universities below. (The University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania were not included in the database. I chose to omit the California Institute of Technology because its data appeared unclear.)

Retooling Schooling We must change the way we pay teachers and get back to traditional reading methods. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/07/retooling-schooling/

As I noted in January, the public school enrollment count for the 2023-24 school year showed that 9 of the top 10 and 38 of the 50 largest districts have lost students since 2019-20, while 31 of the 50 largest districts lost students between the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 school year, according to a National Center for Education Statistics report.

Now, there is more bad news. The results of a Gallup poll released Feb. 5 show that Americans’ opinions about the quality of public education in the U.S. continue to tank.

The percentage of adults who are dissatisfied with public education increased from 62% to 73% between 2019 and 2025, making the percentage of adults who feel satisfied with public education the lowest since 2001. (The report tracks Americans’ satisfaction across 31 aspects of U.S. society or policy, such as the military, health care, and crime, and it found that public education ranked 29th among those 31 areas.)

What can be done to change this sorry state of affairs?

First, we must change the way we pay teachers. Whereas private sector employees are paid via merit, K-12 educators rarely are, courtesy of the teachers’ unions. Instead, teachers are part of an industrial-style “step and column” salary regimen, getting salary increases for the number of years they work and for taking (frequently meaningless) professional development classes. Great teachers are worth more—a lot more—and should receive higher pay than their less capable colleagues. Of course, any suggestion to augment any form of merit pay, turning teachers into independent professionals, is a red flag for the teachers’ unions, which view educators as identical dues-paying automatons.

One significant loss for the teachers’ union occurred in Wisconsin when Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 became law in 2011. The measure all but eliminated collective bargaining for teachers and created a marketplace where school districts could compete for better educators by paying valued teachers more.

Cut Federal Funding to Barnard by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21459/cut-federal-funding-to-barnard

[Barnard’s] radical “studies” departments are propaganda mills that teach students what to think rather than how to think. Consider, for example, the “Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Department”. Its website calls for students to “smash the white supremacist hetero-patriarchy.”

In other words, this women’s studies department has little to do with scholarship, teaching or learning. It has everything to do with advocacy. That is true of many other specialized studies departments at Barnard.

Signs at these protests call for “war” and “intifada”. Nor is the war limited to Israel. It is directed against Americans as well. The protests involve masked students, faculty and non-students who occupy buildings, prevent Jewish students from attending classes and threaten to close down the college unless it divests from Israel and takes other bigoted actions.

The college administration, instead of disciplining students who break the rules and the law, negotiated with them. Cutting off funding from Barnard will not hurt students who want a real education, because Barnard students can enroll in courses at Columbia, which is affiliated with Barnard. It will put an end to the propaganda “courses”, and “studies” “programs” in which Barnard seems to specialize.

It is imperative that freedom of speech, protected by the First Amendment, not be compromised by the government. Barnard is a private institution not bound by that amendment. Moreover, those activities that would cause a shutdown of federal funding are not covered by freedom of speech. They consist largely of physical actions, such as trespassing, blocking access, harassment and other forms of intimidation. Pure protests consisting of speech should not be a basis for defunding.

President Donald Trump has pledged to cut federal funding to schools that do not protect Jewish students from anti-semitic harassment and violence. The best place to begin this process is Barnard College in New York City. Cutting funding to major research universities threatens cutbacks on grants for medical and other important scientific research. Barnard College, on the other hand, is not a university. It does not have a medical school. Its faculty does little or no research that would affect Americans on a day-to-day basis. Cutting off federal aid to Barnard would have few negative impacts on issues that legitimately concern Americans, especially if it focuses on discriminatory actions and does not interfere with protected free speech

Pro-Terror Professors Targeted in Freedom Center’s Fall Campus Campaign Exposing the “Hamas Loyalists” who are teaching terror on our campuses. by Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/pro-terror-professors-targeted-in-freedom-centers-fall-campus-campaign/

Over the past year, headlines in mainstream publications and the legacy media have finally validated what supporters of the Freedom Center have long known—American campuses are awash in a crisis of Jew hatred and Hamas fetishism. From Columbia to UCLA, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to the University of Texas-Austin, last spring the public witnessed the hostile takeover of campuses by supporters of the genocidal Hamas regime.

Shouting such genocidal slogans as “Globalize the Intifada” and “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be Free” student protestors—aided by radical faculty members and coddled by university administrators—proudly established and defended zones that were effectively declared Judenrein—no-go zones for Zionists and supporters of the world’s only Jewish state.

Students belonging to Muslim Brotherhood-linked campus organizations including the Muslim Students Association and Students for Justice in Palestine celebrated Hamas’s barbaric October 7 massacre of innocent Israeli Jews and did not shy away from encouraging more bloodshed.

In every aspect of these macabre exhortations for Jewish genocide, these students were encouraged and led by university faculty members, in many cases highly celebrated tenured professors in the world of academia, who have gleefully championed the slaughter, mutilation, and rape of innocents as justified revenge on Israeli “colonizers.”

Determined to expose these Hamas apparatchiks, the Freedom Center published a lengthy and detailed report naming the ten most extreme pro-terror professors as “Hamas Loyalists” and documenting their statements and actions in support of the terrorist regime.

Michael Lachanski, Jonah Davids A Simple Tax-Code Change Would Protect Academic Freedom Donors want their gifts to universities to fund exceptional scholars, not bloated bureaucracies and ideological initiatives.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/tax-code-change-university-donations-scholars-academic-freedom

Every year, donors give billions of dollars to American colleges and universities. Some give for social or sentimental reasons, but most do so because they want to aid exceptional students, faculty, and research. Yet, far too often, these donations disappear into administrative costs and ideological projects that do little to advance real scholarship. At the same time, scholars who challenge the consensus within their fields, or simply hold opinions unpopular with their colleagues, frequently find themselves without support from their department or institution.

It doesn’t have to be this way. A simple change to the tax code—making direct payments to faculty and graduate students tax-deductible, just like donations to universities—could strengthen scholarship, revitalize independent inquiry, and ensure that donors can directly support the people who matter most to our intellectual future.

The practice of institutional control over scholarly funding emerged at a time when direct payments were hard to process, and universities could be trusted to steward academic funding. Neither of these conditions holds today. Consider Amy Wax, a tenured University of Pennsylvania professor who was suspended last September for controversial remarks about race and immigration. Those who admired her teaching and scholarship, with its uncommon conservative perspective, would typically donate to Penn’s Law School, where she teaches. But this same law school has now withdrawn Wax’s research funds, undermined her tenure protections, and constrained her academic freedom. Donations to Penn’s Law School and the University of Pennsylvania were diverted, at least partially, towards the undermining of Wax’s academic freedom via a dubious, ideologically motivated disciplinary process. In this manner, universities can use institutional donations to subvert the viewpoint diversity that donors hope to foster.

Sally Satel Medical Schools’ Botched Pass-Fail Experiment The early results of the United States Medical Licensing Exam’s new grading process are worrisome.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/united-states-medical-licensing-exam-pass-fail-grading

Medical schools and institutions are now among the zealous champions of progressive ideology. Within days of George Floyd’s death in May 2020, the Association of American Medical Colleges demanded that the nation’s medical schools “employ anti-racist and unconscious bias training.” The following year, the American Medical Association called on physicians to “dismantle white supremacy, racism, and other forms of exclusion and structured oppression.” But efforts to enhance diversity among the medical student body—too often by compromising standards of excellence—have long been in place at America’s medical schools, from affirmative action policies to pass-fail grading of courses and clinical rotations.

In a recent Journal of the American Medical Association commentary, however, four Stanford University-affiliated scholars pushed back on these changes—a ripple that suggests a potential academic shift. In their essay, Drs. James Agolia, David Spain, and Jeff Choi, and medical student Allen Green, denounce the “diminishing objectivity” of the residency-admissions process. “We believe that some objective standards are necessary,” they write, “for programs to identify candidates who best fit their program in a fair, consistent, transparent, and efficient fashion.”

Specifically, the authors lament that the United States Medical Licensing Exam made its initial test pass-fail. The USMLE, which all would-be doctors take, is administered in three parts. Step 1 is taken after the second year in medical school to test pre-clinical medical knowledge; Step 2 is taken after the fourth or final year to assess clinical knowledge; and Step 3 is taken after the first year of residency to evaluate clinical decision-making.

The change was several years in the making. The exam’s co-sponsors, the National Board of Medical Examiners and the Federation of State Medical Boards, first recommended making Step 1 pass-fail in 2019. Other groups, including the AMA and AAMC, collaborated in developing the proposal, which was eventually adopted in 2022.