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If you are a university donor, this is a key moment. You're seeing the bad fruit of 2 related things:
1. Years of faculty searches that have been explicitly ideological & partisan, prizing & hiring for the illiberal radicalism on display in the Kendi debacle & Hamas-praise alike.
1. Years of faculty searches that have been explicitly ideological & partisan, prizing & hiring for the illiberal radicalism on display in the Kendi debacle & Hamas-praise alike.
What you see from faculty exhilarated by murder or who require all teaching be antiracist & decolonial is a feature not a bug. It's the fruit of hiring in ideological fields that normalize & prize radicalism. They're outliers, but they're doing just what they've been paid to do.
2. Senior administrators, who've spent a decade violating due institutional neutrality, brashly speaking on divisive political topics, always in one partisan direction & always lockstep with ideological DEI, which they've made both normative & as important as teaching & research.
Presidents were silent on Hamas terrorism b/c the same DEI folks who told them what to say every time before told them what to do now. Much DEI is expressly anti-Israel (settler colonialism/whiteness) & conflates mandatory support for Palestine (liberation) w/ supporting Hamas.
You can change things. Here's what I urge you to demand, all of which universities should do regardless:
❌An end to institutional statements & partisanship on contested political & ethical topics
✅Endorsement *and practical enforcement* of the Kalven Report & Chicago Principles
❌An end to institutional statements & partisanship on contested political & ethical topics
✅Endorsement *and practical enforcement* of the Kalven Report & Chicago Principles
❌No sanctions for *protected* faculty speech, however offensive. Unis are bad & biased on this front. That must stop. Don't demand sanctions yourself.
Yes, many of these folks should never have been hired, but trying to fire them is bad, in principle & strategically. What to do?
Yes, many of these folks should never have been hired, but trying to fire them is bad, in principle & strategically. What to do?
✅Creation of academic centers, chairs, & curricula focused on civil discourse, virtue, & the common good. Centers whose aim is research & teaching on these & liberty & citizenship amidst pluralism. Pulling this off well is tricky but there are models & strategies I'd point to.
❌Defund & de-radicalize DEI. Millions to pay faculty to cheer terror & presidents not to condemn it. There are real goods of diversity. DEI has little to do w/ them & can be as ideological as Marxism & MAGA. Stop funding a mission-undermining, hyper-partisan, cultural super-PAC.
❌Stop ideological hiring & audit programs that pursue it. Some searches require & select for radical politics/activism, not scholarly excellence. Those hired reject open inquiry & aim to transform the uni in their image. Meanwhile, non-ideological searches/fields go unfunded.
✅Creation of Free Speech & Academic Freedom Offices. While DEI gets millions, there is ZERO funding admin, or intention related to free speech & academic freedom. We desperately need dedicated staffing & institutionalization to advance, defend, & educate on free speech & AF.
Past weeks have revealed corruption decades in the making that, alongside the demographic cliff, put in question the university's future.
Now is the time for wise, principled reform, lest we lose the vital contribution to the common good & human flourishing that unis can make.
Now is the time for wise, principled reform, lest we lose the vital contribution to the common good & human flourishing that unis can make.
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