As is now well known, on October 24, 2023, the New York Post submitted allegations to Harvard of plagiarism committed by Dr. Gay. The Harvard Corporation, the governing body of the institution, stated that it “promptly initiated an independent review by distinguished political scientists and conducted a review of her published work. On December 9, the Fellows reviewed the results” which they claimed, “revealed a few instances of inadequate citation” (italics added). After additional plagiarism allegations were made by an anonymous source, Dr. Gay resigned on January 2. 

In light of several credible and well-documented press reports, ACTA believes that the Harvard Corporation conducted an irregular and hasty investigation in violation of the university’s established procedures. Therefore, ACTA is asking NECHE to determine whether Harvard has the capacity, policies, procedures, safeguards, and willingness to investigate and adjudicate allegations of academic dishonesty and research misconduct equitably, ethically, and forthrightly. 

ACTA’s complaint reads, “Additional evidence suggesting that Harvard University may be in violation of several provisions of NECHE’s Standards for Accreditation continues to appear. Harvard’s former president, Dr. Claudine Gay, admitted to multiple instances in which her published work and dissertation required corrections to her citations; instances of this sort would normally be seen as plagiarism according to the Harvard Guide to Using Sources.” 

Dr. Steven McGuire, ACTA’s Research Fellow, said “Academic dishonesty offends against the very nature of the university as an institution devoted to the pursuit of truth. Unfortunately, it appears that Harvard has not followed its own policies or lived up to its motto—veritas, or truth—in reviewing the allegations of plagiarism against Dr. Gay. But it is critical that our elite institutions adhere to rigorous standards in such matters both for the sake of their own integrity and because the rest of higher education will follow their lead. Thus, we are asking NECHE to investigate this issue.”

To read ACTA’s complaint in its entirety, click here.

The post ACTA Submits Complaint to NECHE Calling for Investigation of Harvard Corporation’s Mishandling of Plagiarism Allegations by Harvard President Claudine Gay appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Having recently embarked on a new five-year DEI plan, UM is paying more than $30 million to 241 DEI staffers this academic year alone, Mark Perry found in a recent analysis for the College Fix.

That represents an astounding expansion of the school’s already-infamous DEI bureaucracy, which had a mere 142 employees last year.

And the price tag accounts for neither the money spent on programming and office expenses nor the hundreds of other employees who use some of their time to assist with DEI initiatives.

These expenditures are a reckless waste of taxpayer money considering the impact of UM’s last five-year plan.

It cost $85 million, and what did it accomplish? 

According to the university’s Black Student Union, “85 million dollars was spent on DEI efforts and yet, Black students’ experience on campus has hardly improved.”

Hispanic and Asian enrollments increased, but black enrollment dropped slightly from 4.3% in 2016 to 3.9% in 2021.

And the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, “The percentage of students who were satisfied with the overall campus climate decreased from 72 percent in 2016 to 61 percent in 2021.”

These results are consistent with findings at other institutions.

A Claremont Institute study of Texas A&M University found that despite an annual DEI budget of $11 million, the percentage of students who felt they belonged at the school dropped significantly from 2015 to 2020: Among whites, the number went from 92% to 82%; among Hispanics, from 88% to 76%.

Among blacks, there was an astonishing drop from 82% to 55%.

At the University of California, Berkeley, whose Division of Equity and Inclusion boasts 152 staffers and a $36 million budget, black undergraduate enrollment dropped from 3% in 2010 to 2% in 2021.

The truth is that DEI does not work and frequently makes matters worse.

DEI trainings not only fail to achieve their purposes but often exacerbate grievances and divisions by antagonizing people and teaching them to monitor one another for microaggressions and implicit biases.

DEI often leads to illegal activities, too.

The University of Washington recently revealed, for example, that its psychology department actively discriminated against faculty candidates based on race, elevating a lower-ranked candidate for a position over others because of a desire to hire a black scholar.

In another case, a former assistant director of multicultural student services at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire recently filed a lawsuit alleging that despite exemplary performance reviews, she was harassed and discriminated against simply for being white, until she resigned.

“We don’t want white people in the MSS office,” a student reportedly said during an open house.

Even with the failures and the excesses, Michigan is not the only school ramping up its DEI expenditures.

Another College Fix analysis found that Ohio taxpayers are spending $20.38 million annually on DEI salaries and benefits at UM’s famous rival, Ohio State University, where the number of DEI bureaucrats has grown from 88 in 2018 to 189 in 2023.

Oklahoma’s public universities spent $83.4 million on DEI over the last 10 years.

Florida’s public universities reported spending $34.5 million during the 2022-23 academic year.

The University of Wisconsin was poised to spend $32 million over the next two years.

Why not use all that money to give students a much-needed tuition break?

Or why not fund need-based scholarships for promising students instead of giving cash to bureaucrats who are actively damaging our higher education institutions?

Fortunately, some states are taking action.

Florida and Texas passed laws eliminating DEI bureaucracies, and Wisconsin lawmakers recently curbed DEI in the state university system by compelling the board of regents to agree to DEI staff cuts and a hiring freeze.

Many other state systems have ended the use of DEI statements in hiring, recognizing they are used to screen out heterodox thinkers when studies show ideological diversity is beneficial to the search for knowledge, which is a university’s core purpose.

And that points to the greatest cost of DEI: While the financial waste is appalling, the price of expecting everyone on campus to conform to an ideology that undermines free expression and excludes intellectual diversity, two foundational values of the academy, is one we should be unwilling to pay.

This post appeared on New York Post on January 11, 2024

The post How one college spends more than $30M on 241 DEI staffers … and the damage it does to kids appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Download a transcript of the podcast HERE.
Note: Please check any quotations against the audio recording.

The post Nadine Strossen: Free Speech in a Time of Campus Crisis appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Gay resigned as president on Jan. 2 after facing multiple plagiarism allegations and pushback from failing to say whether calls for genocide violated the school’s code of conduct at a Dec. 5 congressional hearing on campus antisemitism. She was involved in a series of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives on campus during her time as a dean and as president, including creating new DEI positions and creating a task force that recommended portraits of white men be taken down. 

Gay joined Harvard’s faculty in 2006 as a professor and became a part of the Harvard administration in 2015, serving as the dean of the social sciences at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) at Harvard, according to the Harvard Gazette. She then served as the Edgerley Family Dean of FAS starting in 2018 before ascending to the university presidency in July 2023.

Gay announced a slew of “racial-justice” initiatives as FAS dean in August 2020 following the George Floyd riots, according to Harvard Magazine. She created a “visiting professorship in ethnicity, indigeneity and migration” to “recruit leading scholars of race and ethnicity to spend a year at Harvard engaged in teaching our undergraduates.”

She also announced a “study of the hiring, professional development, and promotion practices that may contribute to the low representation of minority staff in managerial and executive roles,” according to Harvard Magazine. The study was designed to “identify concrete steps” Harvard can take “to increase racial diversity of senior staff.”

Gay also announced the addition of an associate dean of diversity, inclusion, and belonging, according to Harvard Magazine.

“Instead of enhancing polarization by subscribing to the far left of the political spectrum, academia should heal societal tension and represent the diverse set of views within American society. The students should witness dialogues where opposing ideas are debated on campus, so they can make their own choice. Faculty should not be afraid to speak their mind,” Avi Loeb, theoretical physicist at Harvard, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Gay also formed the “Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage” in 2020, a group designed to assess the imagery around campus for its effects on students, to “advance racial justice,” according to The Harvard Crimson. The task force recommended changing “spaces whose visual culture is dominated by homogenous portraiture of white men,” according to its report.

It called for the redecoration of the walls of Annenberg Hall, which in December 2021 contained 23 portraits, of which 20 were white men, according to the Crimson.

“While it’s unclear how much the DEI bureaucracy has contributed to this hostile environment for free speech, the rise of DEI on campus has certainly coincided with a devaluing of free speech principles at Harvard. Additionally, much of the censorship at Harvard is directed at those opposed to liberal and progressive ideas, which suggests that the DEI bureaucracy has influenced the culture of free speech on campus,” Zachary Greenberg, senior program officer for campus rights advocacy at Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told the DCNF.

Harvard is ranked last on FIRE’s 2024 free speech report of universities in the U.S.

“The components of DEI are often defined in ways that bring them into conflict with free speech. For example, many proponents of DEI believe ‘inclusion’ requires others to refrain from saying certain things that are deemed ‘harmful,’” Steve McGuire, Paul & Karen Levy fellow in Campus Freedom at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, told the DCNF.

Harvard Psychology Professor Steven Pinker, alongside 70 other professors at the university, announced the creation of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard in April 2023, which advocates for more free speech on campus, according to the Crimson.

“Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them,” Pinker wrote in a December op-ed for the Boston Globe.

Harvard Law Professor Mark Ramseyer said that DEI was partially to blame for the fall of free speech on Harvard’s campus in an email shared on X, formerly Twitter, by former Harvard Lecturer Carole Hooven.

“Better alignment of campuses with the diverse set of values within American society would have helped avoid the recent turmoil. It could also help universities recruit the very best scholars and students from all parts of the political spectrum and develop good relationships with both Democrats and Republicans,” Loeb told the DCNF.

Gay came under fire after staying silent after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, after which over 30 student organizations signed a letter blaming the “Israeli colonial occupations” for the attacks. The university created an antisemitism task force in November, however one of the members of the group, Rabbi David Wolpe, quit on Dec. 7 and argued that it was infected by Marxist ideology.

“The system at Harvard, along with the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil,” Wolpe said.

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce opened an investigation into several universities following its hearing in December. After the resignation of Gay, the committee said they would not be halting their investigation and expanded it to include DEI on campuses.

Harvard University and Pinker did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comments. Gay could be reached for comment.

This post appeared on Daily Caller on January 11, 2024.

The post Claudine Gay Had A History Of Adding To Harvard’s Diversity Bureaucracy Before Stepping Up To The Presidency appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

When Harvard University president Claudine Gay stepped down on Jan. 2 amid swirling plagiarism charges, it was a win for her conservative political opponents and a blow to her many supporters.

Gay cast herself as a victim of right-wing forces that pushed her out for political reasons, taking minimal responsibility for the flawed scholarship, ineffectual leadership and bungled performance at the congressional hearing on antisemitism that contributed to her downfall.

While some of her conservative critics crudely took credit for the takedown, Gay’s decision to resign over plagiarism charges follows what has largely been the trend for presidents accused of such actions—even when those claims are not accompanied by a political sideshow, as hers were. Some scholars have suggested that plagiarism allegations are being weaponized against college presidents, but Gay did what many of her peers have done in the past when confronted with similar accusations: she resigned.

Now, in the wake of her exit, questions abound about Harvard’s vetting process for Gay, how institutions should assess a presidential candidate’s academic work during the search and how plagiarism may be deployed as part of the culture war between liberals and conservatives.

Before Gay resigned, she submitted corrections to several past articles, despite disagreement about whether the work qualified as plagiarism, as her critics have argued, or simply academic sloppiness, as others have claimed. Harvard has also come under scrutiny for its opacity on the issue; now the institution must answer to Congress for the way officials handled the plagiarism claims.

Whether issues with Gay’s scholarship should have been caught during the presidential search is unclear. Harvard has remained silent on the matter, and Gay’s work was peer reviewed. But given the highly public nature of the scandal, search committees have surely taken notice—though it’s too early to say what that means for future presidential searches.

Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, believes the evolution of presidential searches is “inevitable and salubrious for higher education,” especially at a time when public confidence in the sector is low and many institutions are struggling to attract students.

Poliakoff described the Harvard issue as a “reputational crisis within a reputational crisis.”

To avoid the same fate, he urged governing boards at other institutions to do their own due diligence in presidential searches, rather than delegating those responsibilities or relying too heavily on search firms.

“The academy needs to restore public trust, and one of the ways they can do this is by taking all steps to ensure that its members—faculty and administrators—are operating at the highest ethical standards. It should not be that difficult to find people who are worthy of that trust,” he said.

But evolving the presidential search processes will likely be neither easy nor cheap.

Larry Ladd, a senior consultant at AGB Consulting, noted that candidates for college presidencies are already subject to extensive background and reference checks. Colleges and search firms review academic credentials, work history, legal records, credit scores, research records and more to ensure that candidates don’t have skeletons looming in their closets.

“It’s a pretty thorough background check. Whether that background check might extend to the content of academic research, we don’t know yet. If it does, it will be very time-consuming,” he said. He questioned whether “the technology is sufficient” to police academic integrity.

To illustrate the challenges of identifying such issues, Ladd pointed to Stanford University, where former president Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned last year after an institutional investigation into research misconduct determined that he “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record” related to articles he had co-authored dating back to the early 2000s.

The investigation lasted eight months, Ladd noted.

“It takes a lot of work, even with improvements in technology,” Ladd said.

As politically motivated as the charges against Gay may have been, the claims were valid enough to force corrections from the short-lived Harvard president. A look at other cases of alleged plagiarism by college presidents from the past 20 years show that such accusations were often career ending.

In more than a dozen instances where presidents were accused of plagiarism, the outcomes followed similar patterns. In some cases, the presidents were cleared of the charges. But when plagiarism was proven, presidents retired or resigned, or their contracts were not renewed; some decamped for another job.

After Gay, the most high-profile presidential plagiarism case in the past few years is arguably that of Robert Caslen, who stepped down from the University of South Carolina in 2021 after he admitted to swiping a quote for a commencement speech without proper attribution. (Caslen was already under fire for mistakenly congratulating “University of California” graduates in a commencement speech.)

Similarly, Gregory J. Vincent resigned as president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 2018 after the institution opened an investigation into claims he had plagiarized his dissertation.

Those who didn’t have their contracts renewed include West Liberty University president W. Franklin Evers in 2021 and LeMoyne-Owen College president Andrea Lewis Miller in 2019—though both were also plagued by other issues.

And some presidents simply retired when accused of plagiarism.

Malone University president Gary Streit retired in 2010 “in response to recent concerns about the use of unattributed materials in some of his speeches,” the university announced at the time. Blandina Cárdenas retired as president of the University of Texas–Pan American in 2008, making no mention of a plagiarism investigation into her academic work. Central Connecticut State University president Richard Judd also retired in 2004 after his superiors determined he had plagiarized an op-ed for The Hartford Courant. Both Cárdenas and Judd emphasized health issues in their respective retirement announcements.

A rare few have managed to continue their presidencies despite plagiarism allegations.

William Meehan was hit with plagiarism accusations in 2007 and again in 2009 when he was president of Jacksonville State University, a position he held until he retired in 2015. Saint Louis University’s president the Reverend Lawrence H. Bondi was accused of borrowing significant portions of a homily he delivered in 2005, only to shrug off the allegations and serve until 2013.

Ladd noted that presidential resignations over plagiarism claims are typically about doing what’s best for the university, given the potential for reputational damage.

“When you see presidents resign, sometimes it’s fair to the president and sometimes it’s not fair to the president, but it’s always in the best interest of the university,” Ladd said, emphasizing that instances of academic dishonesty by presidents are fairly rare.

In any case, presidential plagiarism allegations don’t always stick.

Weymouth Spence, president of Washington Adventist University, was accused of plagiarism in 2019 but later cleared by the Board of Trustees after an outside investigation. Glenn Poshard, who served as president of Southern Illinois University from 2006 to 2014, was accused of plagiarism in 2007. A faculty panel found Poshard was careless with citations but ultimately stopped short of declaring him a plagiarist.

Some scholars and news organizations have warned that the attack on Gay’s scholarship is likely just the beginning of the coming plagiarism wars. Bill Ackman, a billionaire Harvard graduate who repeatedly called for Gay to step down over her citation issues, has signaled an appetite for toppling other academics over similar missteps.

Ackman threatened to review the academic work of the entire faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after his wife, Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor, was exposed as a plagiarist.

“We will begin with a review of the work of all current @MIT faculty members, President [Sally] Kornbluth, other officers of the Corporation, and its board members for plagiarism,” Ackman wrote in a social media post on X earlier this month after his wife’s work was exposed. Ackman also threatened to review the work of reporters at Business Insider, which published the story on Oxman.

Jonathan Bailey, founder of the website Plagiarism Today, who has served as an expert witness in plagiarism cases, argues that weaponizing such allegations has a long history. But he believes the plagiarism war is changing, moving away from metaphorical guns and into its nuclear phase, in which the tools are used primarily to advance a political agenda.

“Plagiarism has been weaponized for as long as there’s been plagiarism in politics. Because when you’re calling someone a plagiarist, you’re fundamentally calling them a liar. You’re calling them someone who can’t be trusted. It’s a convenient way to disparage an opponent’s name,” Bailey said.

To illustrate his point, Bailey referenced plagiarism allegations leveled against Barack Obama, John McCain and other public figures accused of lifting various materials. But he noted that those charges rarely derailed campaigns or altered careers. Yet in academe, as Gay’s experience shows, “plagiarism is often a career-ending sin.”

Still, Bailey is skeptical of Ackman’s threatened review, noting the sheer amount of time and money investigating MIT’s faculty would require, even with a billionaire’s resources; the website lists 1,080 faculty members as of fall 2022.

Bailey also stressed the need for clear policies so institutions can deal with such allegations when they arise. In the case of Harvard, he suggested the initial review of Gay’s scholarship was not thorough enough, given the continual drip of plagiarism allegations.

“One thing I would encourage schools to do when they get [plagiarism] allegations is to find someone independent of the school to examine them,” Bailey told Inside Higher Ed. “Someone who is not beholden to that individual or president in any way should be the ones examining the claims and making a decision about whether or not the claims are valid, whether they point to any corrective action as needed, and whether they point to the need for a further investigation.”

In the end, he argued, everyone will benefit.

This article appeared on Inside Higher Ed on January 12, 2024.

The post When Presidents Plagiarize appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Initially celebrated as the first black woman to serve in the role, she will be remembered as a serial plagiarist and free speech hypocrite who presided over the punishment of heterodox thinkers but was unable to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews.

Most of all, she will be regarded as a symbol of the folly of hiring for diversity without regard for merit — another hard lesson on affirmative action for Harvard just six months after it was told by the U.S. Supreme Court to stop racial discrimination in admissions.

Harvard responded to that decision with arrogance, or what it called “resolve,” indicating that its desire to discriminate remained unhindered. The university’s ultimate response to the current fiasco remains to be seen. Will it finally learn the right lesson? Will it take this opportunity to reform itself, abandoning ideology and repression to embrace truth and freedom? Will it retreat into the ivory tower and refocus on the intellectual life after getting walloped in the political arena?

Gay’s resignation is barely an occasion for hope. While it is remarkable that the president of Harvard — a rich, powerful, and independent institution — was compelled to resign, neither she nor the Harvard Corporation, the board that elected her president, have shown any sign of true remorse.

Instead, Gay has portrayed herself as a victim. In the New York Times, she wrote, “Trusted institutions of all types . . . will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility,” without any apparent reflection on how her own history of plagiarism and her failed leadership at Harvard does just that.

And no member of the Harvard Corporation has accepted any responsibility, including Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker, who led the search that resulted in Gay’s selection. Unlike her counterpart at the University of Pennsylvania, Scott Bok, who resigned immediately after Liz Magill did, she has announced she will not resign.

Worse than the lack of remorse, there is little indication that anyone in charge recognizes or cares about the deeper problem Harvard faces, of which Claudine Gay was an avatar.

As two eminent Harvard professors, Harvey Mansfield and James Hankins, independently observed, the very selection of Gay as president illustrated the fundamental problem: Harvard wants to be a political actor advancing progressive ideology rather than an institution dedicated to the life of the mind. Gay said as much in her first speech as president-elect, pronouncing that “the idea of the Ivory Tower, that is the past, not the future, of academia” and that she wanted Harvard “to be engaged with the world.” As Mansfield quipped, that “turned out to mean having to face Elise Stefanik in Washington and answer her questions.”

Not only is Harvard ill-equipped to play such a political role, but, as Professor Hankins points out, “the path of political engagement . . . undermines its true mission.” Harvard’s motto, which it still parades around on shields like a war prize, is Veritas, or truth. The key to fixing Harvard is returning to that motto and recognizing that Harvard is an institution whose purpose is not political activism, which demands ideological conformity, but truth seeking, which depends on openness to heterodoxy.

Whether Harvard will be reformed ultimately depends on the Harvard Corporation. The immense pressure from donors, alumni, journalists, and even Congress, all of which have played essential roles so far, should continue, but the necessary changes will take place only when those who bear fiduciary responsibility for the university accept their duty and exercise their authority to lead.

One cause for the slimmest of hopes is a reported dinner between two members of the corporation and a few faculty representatives of Harvard’s Council on Academic Freedom. That group included Jeffrey Flier and Steven Pinker, two long-standing defenders of free expression and intellectual diversity. Professor Flier has defended institutional neutrality and urged the board to live up to its responsibility. Professor Pinker has laid out a five-point plan for Harvard that includes embracing free speech and viewpoint diversity and seriously curtailing DEI work on campus.

As donor Bill Ackman has learned, that last point is critical. DEI offices and programs have had a pernicious effect on American campuses, including Harvard’s. The explosion of anti-Semitism last fall fueled by the “oppressor-oppressed” framework advanced by DEI made that plain to see. Campuses should be open and welcoming to anyone admitted through merit and initiative, regardless of background or immutable characteristics.

The free and open pursuit of truth cannot coexist with an ideology that favors some groups over others and expects everyone to think the same.

Claudine Gay’s resignation creates a small opening that could lead to reform at Harvard, but it is more likely that Harvard will continue down the same path it has been on. Now is not a time for those who care about the future of higher education in this country to rest satisfied but to keep pushing — not to destroy Harvard but to reform it before it destroys itself.

This post appeared on Blaze Media on January 5, 2024.

The post Her truth, her Harvard, her failure appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Gay announced Tuesday she would resign as president after only five months on the job and return to teaching at the Ivy League institution, blaming in part “racial animus” for her decision in a statement that ignored controversies that engulfed her presidency over the last three months.

Harvard’s first black, female president resigned after shrugging off the deadly terrorist attacks that targeted Israeli civilians Oct. 7 and the rabid antisemitism on campus that followed, then telling a congressional committee in December that calls to annihilate the Jews do not necessarily violate Harvard’s codes of conduct.

In recent weeks it came to light that Gay’s scholarly work contains dozens of instances of plagiarism, and what’s more, the Harvard Corporation, the 13-member board in charge of the nation’s most prestigious institution, was likely complicit as university brass tried to cover it up by threatening the New York Post with a defamation lawsuit and claiming an investigation found the plagiarism did not amount to academic misconduct.

The months of controversy has cost Harvard a parade of billion-dollar donors who have pledged to stop giving money to the scandal-plagued school.

That fact has not gone unnoticed by observers and watchdogs who say members of the corporation are ultimately responsible for the entire affair, first for hiring Gay despite her mediocrity to advance a left-wing agenda and then for allowing an attempt to cover up her shoddy research and scholarly dishonesty, which in late December after everything came to light prompted a congressional probe.

“The Harvard Corporation that so recently appointed her president should resign,” famed civil liberties attorney and Harvard alumnus Harvey Silverglate told The College Fix on Tuesday. He called the entire situation a “disaster” and said he will continue his efforts to be elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers to clean house.

“Claudine Gay’s problem was that she was never suited to be president of Harvard,” Silverglate said via email. “Her career has been mainly that of an academic bureaucrat. She famously devised programs to inculcate students and even faculty members in the mantra of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion,’ in which students would look different but think alike.”

Silverglate isn’t the only one who argues the buck stops with the Harvard Corporation, which the New York Times reports is a cadre of rich and influential progressives, mostly wealthy business owners, attorneys and philanthropists.

“There is no indication from either the Gay resignation letter or the Harvard Corporation follow-up that the university is moving away from identity-based scholarship, hiring, and admissions,” wrote scholar Heather Mac Donald for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. 

“…If the Harvard Corporation had learned anything from the Gay debacle, it would have left out that coded rhetoric of ‘inclusiveness.’ Unless the board itself undergoes a revolution, nothing at Harvard will change,” Mac Donald wrote.

University of Tennessee College of Law Professor Glenn Reynolds, on his personal Substack, wrote Tuesday that “Next to go should be Penny Pritzker, senior fellow (essentially chair of the board) of the Harvard Corporation.”

“The fellows of the Harvard Corporation hire the president,” Reynolds wrote. “Pritzker had a responsibility to learn if Claudine Gay had a history of plagiarism, and if she had the personal and intellectual qualities to lead a top university. (The answer to both questions is now clearly ‘no.’)”

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni also weighed in, arguing in a statement posted Tuesday on X that the “whole sordid episode is not really about Gay and it isn’t over because she has stepped down; it is about the misguided governance at Harvard, the trustees who put her in this untenable position, thinking that they were inoculated against any scrutiny and criticism because … Harvard.”

“They have a lot to answer for.”

Billionaire businessman and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman agrees, writing on X in a lengthy statement Jan. 2 that Harvard’s embrace of DEI is behind the mess and the board needs to be completely revamped.

“The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done,” wrote Ackman, one of the wealthy donors who yanked support early on.

“…The new board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be comprised of the most impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically diverse members of our country and globe.”

This post appeared on The College Fix on January 3, 2024.

The post Harvard Corporation members should resign in wake of Gay fiasco, watchdogs say appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

“The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic,” stated the University of Chicago’s Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action, issued at the height of protests over the Vietnam War and the need for civil rights. The report further stated, “to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, (a university) must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community.”

But that’s not happening at many universities. Viewpoints are either morally superior or wrong, shout-downs replace debates and dissenting speakers are canceled or heckled. Most recently, Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel ignited firestorms on campuses. As a result, fear and anger have spread on campuses. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s College Free Speech Rankings revealed that 26% of college students censor themselves at least a few times a week in conversations with friends. One in four are more likely to self-censor now than when they started college.

To ensure freedom of speech and safety on campuses, Gov. Glenn Youngkin convened a summit of Virginia’s public and private college presidents and asked VMI’s superintendent, Major General Cedric Wins, U.S. Army (retired), to address VMI’s program for promoting civil discourse through debates. The debates are not competitive, nor seek to change minds. Their purpose is to enlighten and show how to disagree thoughtfully and respectfully. This is in keeping with VMI’s leadership development, which emphasizes service, respect and civility.

The debates have examined such divisive topics as diversity, equity and inclusion, social media, women in combat and divides between student athletes and nonathletes. Debates follow a light parliamentary format that promotes discussion, listening and critical thinking. Following presentations, speakers and audience members may address comments to the trained debate moderator, thus avoiding personalizing clashing viewpoints.

In November, VMI pushed the program’s bounds. It invited students from Mountain Gateway Community College, Southern Virginia University and Washington and Lee University to participate in an intercollegiate debate on book banning in K-12 schools. The debate attracted over 100 participants from these schools. The following student comments attest to the program’s value:

“I have never in my life been involved in such a thought-provoking discussion, getting to understand the ideas and thoughts of not only other VMI cadets but also students from other colleges. Braver Angels has helped me gain a new perspective on discussion and communication in my generation,” said VMI cadet Isabella Bruzonic. “I got to hear perspectives I would have never thought of. I gained respect for the people who were willing to have a conversation without anger and animosity.”

“I was grateful for the opportunity to speak my mind candidly in an environment where candid opinions were welcome,” said Jared Smith, a Southern Virginia University student. “During this time of political and ideological polarization in America, we need more events like these! We have the freedom of speech in America, but it hardly serves our society if we do not implement the structure and activities that give people the opportunity to exercise it productively and peacefully.” 

VMI initiated the program in 2021, based on the acclaimed College Debates and Discourse Program, jointly sponsored by Braver Angels, American Council of Trustees and Alumni and Bridges USA. In January 2023, VMI was named one of 10 colleges in the country in the program’s Community of Practice, enabled by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. These institutions are collecting data on the debates, which the University of Delaware will use to assess students’ performance, and leadership skills.

Alex Morey of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression states, “The college campus is the place to have people’s different authentic views come together, where we can have discussions in a scholarly and civil way.”

That’s VMI’s civil discourse program and universities need similar programs. But VMI provides another example. VMI “introducing Braver Angels debates and civil discourse to other colleges in the surrounding area is exemplary for the nation,” said Doug Sprei, director of the College Debates and Discourse Alliance. Higher education needs more champions of civil discourse.

This post appeared on the Richmond Times-Dispatch on January 2, 2024.

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On December 23, 2022, the Virginia Council of Presidents, a group of 39 college and university presidents in the state, released a statement affirming free speech. The first lines of the statement read, “As presidents of Virginia’s public colleges and universities, we unequivocally support free expression and viewpoint diversity on our campuses. Free expression is the fundamental basis for both academic freedom and for effective teaching and learning inside and outside the classroom.”

This was a welcome development. Despite producing two of America’s fiercest defenders of free speech, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson (the latter of whom founded the University of Virginia in 1819), Virginia’s higher education institutions do not always live up to their duty to protect constitutional freedoms. In April 2023, students disrupted a pro-life speaker at Virginia Commonwealth University, and two protesters were arrested on charges of simple assault and disorderly conduct. In the days before Mike Pence was scheduled to speak at the University of Virginia, posters advertising the speech were ripped down, and the editor of the university’s student newspaper chastised university leadership for allowing the event to proceed in an article titled, “Dangerous rhetoric is not entitled to a platform.”        

With its free speech statement, the members of the Virginia Council of Presidents recognized the serious free expression challenges afflicting Virginia’s campuses. In an article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch announcing the new statement, higher education leaders Jonathan Alger, Shannon Kennedy, Katherine Rowe, and Timothy Sands wrote, “Our 39 public institutions are committed to action. Students, faculty and staff will see a renewed focus on participatory citizenship, free expression and the purposeful inclusion of disparate viewpoints.”

The state of Virginia has made admirable efforts to uphold free expression in public education. On November 28, 2023, Governor Glenn Youngkin addressed an assembly of higher education leaders, exhorting them to improve the climate for free speech on campus. And at ACTA’s 2023 Alumni Summit on Free Expression, Virginia Secretary of Education Aimee Rogstad Guidera encouraged alumni to advocate for free expression and intellectual diversity on campus.

It is up to university leadership to make the spirit of the free speech statement a reality by implementing policies and practices that protect the First Amendment and foster open inquiry.

The post On This Day In Campus Freedom: Council of Presidents Commits to Protecting Free Speech appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

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