Latest news with #viewpointdiversity
Daily Mail
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Harvard makes biggest concession to Trump yet after he said Ivy League college was anti-conservative
Harvard is scrambling to shake off its woke image with a multimillion-dollar plan to launch a new academic center championing conservative thought - after months of pressure from Donald Trump and the White House. The Ivy League giant is reviving plans for a 'viewpoint diversity' center, modeled on Stanford's Hoover Institution - a hub for free-market ideas and small-government principles, the Wall Street Journal reported. Talks that had been happening behind the scenes picked up speed after pro-Palestinian unrest hit campus in late 2023 and the Trump administration ramped up attacks on what it brands Harvard's 'Marxist' ideology. The Journal reported that Harvard is courting deep-pocketed donors to fund the initiative, which insiders say could carry a price tag of $500 million to $1 billion. A Harvard spokesperson said the center wouldn't take sides politically but would 'model the use of evidence-based, rigorous logic and a willingness to engage with opposing views.' The effort unfolds as Harvard remains locked in a fierce clash with the Trump administration, which has accused the university of allowing antisemitism and enforcing what it calls biased DEI policies. In response, the government has slashed its federal funding, challenged its tax-exempt status, and taken aim at its international student programs. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said this week that talks with Harvard and fellow Ivy League college Columbia are still underway, noting, 'We're getting close... it's just not moving as fast as I'd like.' Some members of the Harvard Corporation view the initiative as a reasonable way to encourage viewpoint diversity while maintaining the university's independence, a person familiar with their thinking to the Journal. But a source close to the Trump administration dismissed it as 'window-dressing.' Harvard President Alan Garber has pushed back against external influence, even as he promotes a broader campaign for 'intellectual vitality' on campus. Internal surveys show growing concerns over self-censorship - and a 2023 poll found only 3 percent of Harvard College faculty identify as conservative, the Journal reported. Former Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria floated the idea to donors back in 2020, according to the Journal - and now Provost John Manning is leading the charge to bring it to life. If the initiative moves ahead, Harvard would be the latest elite school to join a growing wave of universities launching centers dedicated to civics, classical education, and Western political thought - a trend already embraced by Arizona State, the University of Florida, and Yale. 'This is a national reform movement,' Paul Carrese, founding director of one such center at Arizona State, told the Journal.
New York Times
10-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Why Hiring Professors With Conservative Views Could Backfire on Conservatives
Is hiring more conservative professors and admitting more conservative students a solution to liberal bias in American higher education? Many people think so. The Trump administration, in threatening to cut Harvard's federal funding, demanded that the university foster greater 'viewpoint diversity,' including by recruiting faculty members and students who would restore ideological balance to campus. Other political actors have embraced the idea, too. At least eight states have passed or introduced laws to require viewpoint diversity at public educational institutions. Certainly, there is not enough engagement with conservative ideas on college campuses. Schools can and should do more to ensure that students encounter a greater range of political perspectives in syllabuses and among speakers invited to give talks. But a policy of hiring professors and admitting students because they have conservative views would actually endanger the open-minded intellectual environment that proponents of viewpoint diversity say they want. By creating incentives for professors and students to have and maintain certain political positions, such a policy would discourage curiosity and reward narrowness of thought. I am a philosophy professor whose views are, for the most part, politically progressive. When I teach the social contract — the theory that underpins many of our ideas about government and its justification — I assign the work of the philosopher Robert Nozick, one of the most prominent and effective defenders of libertarianism. I do so because I want my liberal students to be challenged and my libertarian students to think carefully about the arguments that support their position. Mr. Nozick's own story helps show why hiring professors and admitting students for viewpoint diversity would be misguided. When he arrived at Princeton as a graduate student around 1960, he was a socialist. At Princeton he encountered the writings of the political economist Friedrich Hayek, a Nobel Prize-winning libertarian. In trying to argue against Hayek, Mr. Nozick found himself developing the ideas that would form the basis of his influential 1974 book, 'Anarchy, State, and Utopia,' which made a forceful case for a minimal state. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
26-06-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Johns Hopkins Gets the Most Federal Money, but Now Much of It Is at Risk
As President Trump unleashes dizzying firepower at the nation's top universities, he and his supporters have made the argument that the institutions have brought such action onto themselves. They turned into bastions of leftism hostile to conservative thought and lost the trust of the American people, according to the administration. The universities accrued massive endowments, becoming less like noble nonprofits spreading good to the world and more like corporations taking advantage of government largess, the argument goes. Ronald J. Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, which receives the most federal funding of any American university, has been listening. For years, he has been warning that higher education should make efforts to attract more conservatives to the ranks. His school has pushed for more viewpoint diversity and has touted a partnership with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Those efforts do not appear to have protected the university. Johns Hopkins, the first research university in the U.S., has been one of the hardest hit by a Republican effort to reduce federal funding flowing to schools. The Trump administration has not singled out Johns Hopkins with lists of demands or threats that it would be cut off from funding, as the administration has done with Harvard and Columbia. Still, Johns Hopkins has already laid off more than 2,000 people in the wake of an $800 million research cut. And officials of the university are bracing for deeper cuts to the $4.2 billion it receives in annual federal research money. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Wall Street Journal
06-06-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Is Harvard Worth Saving—and How?
President Trump has cut Harvard's federal funding, threatened to withdraw its tax exemption, and taken steps to ban it from enrolling foreign students. He says he seeks compliance with civil-rights laws, respect for viewpoint diversity, and other reforms. Journal writers weigh in on the conflict. Mr. Trump's aim isn't to destroy Harvard but to make an example of it—to scare other universities into reforming, lest they suffer the same fate. If Harvard is broken up or destroyed in the process, America can live with that. Harvard is a well-chosen target—not only for its prestige and wealth but also because it has a lot to answer for. Its failure to control antisemitism on campus is only the most recent example. Harvard is the wellspring of DEI madness: Justice Lewis Powell's controlling opinion in University of California v. Bakke (1978), which established 'diversity' as an excuse for racial discrimination for the next 45 years, was based on what he called 'the Harvard College program.' Harvard's defenders say that much of what the university does is worthwhile, and that is no doubt true. But what is the public interest in propping up the conglomerate known as Harvard Corp., which refuses to shut down or reform departments and subsidiaries that are a public menace?
