It is well known that the large majority of academy faculty is progressive-liberal leaning, in literally every field of study, across all states and institutions, public or private. Many are independent, many are centrists. Few are republican.
In an attempt to try to police university autonomy and try to directly intervene admissions and hiring policy, and the operation of university life by student and community organizations, the government is threatening major educational institutions to pull funding unless several demands are met.
They want a reduction of the power of students and untenured faculty, faculty who engages in activism, and among tenured faculty giving prerogatives to senior faculty those
who abide to the guidelines of the government.
"Harvard must make meaningful governance reform and restructuring to make possible major change consistent with this letter, including: fostering clear lines of authority and accountability; empowering tenured professors and senior leadership, and, from among the tenured professoriate and senior leadership, exclusively those most devoted to the scholarly mission of the University and committed to the changes indicated in this letter; reducing the power held by students and untenured faculty; reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship"
Adjunct faculty, as is well known, are the most vulnerable economically in the academy, and work as contractual workers who are closely associated with unions and the most active members of syndicate struggles for what is truly a grossly underpaid sector of our education system (look at the salaries of adjunct professors and you will hardly believe what you see). And of course, by "those who engage more in activism than research" we know what they mean.
Additional provisions include, predictably, the dismantling of all DEI divisions, regardless of any assessment of performance or services provided, with no data or evaluation given with regard to why they are being forced to be shut down, and no indication as to how the services currently provided can be replaced or met otherwise. Of course, these are not only providing services for minorities, but are tracking active cases of racism, bigotry, abuse in campuses.
Admissions procedures are supposed to be 'meritocratically' decided and assessed by the government, ruling out criteria based on race, ethnicity, gender, or nationality. Of course,
overwhelmingly, foreign students are against American republicanism, as are racial and gender minority groups. No indication of how metrics of evaluation (which are obviously field-discipline dependent) are supposed to function across hundreds of thousands of applicants and dozens of different expert disciplines by the Department of Education.
Needless to say, anyone with a morsel of cognitive prowess understands that this is not about meritocracy at all, which is a laudable ideal (which I agree has been lost in the American education system to worrying degrees), but rather about
ideological control. Absolutely nothing, not one single sentence, describes any policy or measure proposed by the government to strengthen research and educational opportunities for students and faculty.
It is true that the universities (particularly the humanities) have strayed quite close to specific paradigms of research and thought that are very strongly sympathetic to contemporary leftist progressivism, like gender studies, literature departments, and cultural studies; but these cases, which compose the majority of the humanities and arts, represent (also worryingly) a relatively small sector of the academy, which has nothing to do with the work of the sciences and other fields like economics, medicine, law, etc. The 'woke' humanities are in actuality an extremely fringe phenomenon.
The proof? There is one exception to the pseudo-meritocratic standard that allows for discrimination:
They seek to enforce what is called
viewpoint diversity. This obviously doesn't mean bringing in people who hold different views about quantum mechanics, or divergent views about epistemology in philosophy, Marxist and Liberal theories in economics, or making psychology departments equal parts behavioral and cognitive. Certainly not diverse viewpoints on the role of American interventionism or millitary support to Israel. That's not what they want.
What this means in this document is that they are trying to force hiring committees to bring in conservative-leaning faculty.
Put simply: the government wants to control the admissions and hiring procedure of every department and faculty, to turn it into a politically sympathetic domain. Of course, nothing is said about
who would be carrying these evaluations or auditing, or how they propose to have experts for every single specialty and department. No indication of the criteria for evaluation either. It is evidently an attempt to try to gain ideological control over the academy by seizing their autonomy.
And last but not least, the forced dismantling of every single pro-Palestinian and Human Rights organizations, again hiring auditors to ensure compliance to the preservation of school order and American values.
It is worthy of note to see just exactly which institutions are being targeted.
"August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture. The programs, schools, and centers of concern include but are not limited to the Divinity School,
Graduate School of Education, School of Public Health, Medical School, Religion and Public Life Program, FXB Center for Health & Human Rights, Center for Middle Eastern Studies,
Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and the
Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic."
These are not just organizations of Palestinian students or Muslim adherents. They represent
every single Human Rights and Public Health organization in the university, which are unanimously against the Israeli intervention in Gaza (as is
every single international human rights agency in the world). Because, of course, being against the Israeli role in Gaza is, somehow, to be "anti-American" and "pro-Hamas", which is to say pro-terrorist.
Not a single similar provision is indicated or even recommended for Islamophobic institutions or actions in campuses targeted against the discrimination of other groups or minorities.
If Harvard does not comply to these demands, federal funding is threatened to be pulled by the billions. If this doesn't work, as Harvard seems to be playing hardball, accreditation hurdles will follow. The same is to be expected for every major university in the country, and then some.
The actual result? A decimation of departmental stability leading to the paralysis of research, admissions, and hirings. And a massive flight of intellectual capital from the end of both prospective students, faculty, and researchers.
I am at UCLA and also work at CSUSB and CalArts, and have colleagues and relatives in Cornell, NYU, New School, Berkeley, Princeton, Duke, and other institutions.
Most departments have essentially frozen all hirings for faculty until further notice. Many have rescinded offers from graduate students. All the hirings at the atmospheric science department at UCLA, for instance, have been suspended, and grants for research have across the board been paralyzed. Adjunct professors are in limbo across the board.
Since funding is completely up in the air and departments face a future of extreme economic and political volatility, facing censorship, intellectual control, and precarious funding, research initiatives are freezing and the academic labor market which was already in shambles is now further agonizing. Columbia already gave in.
The situation is even worse at public-state universities, which do not have the immense philanthropic revenue of institutions like Harvard or Columbia. In California, Sonoma, CSULB, and CSUSB, among others, are closing down departments and undertaking massive layoffs since the economic prospects have wilted. Across the board, researchers and prospective students are looking elsewhere since the future of the American academy, and intellectual freedom, is jeopardized.
Of course, there will be imbecilic, racist, homophobe shills who snort everything this government does who will applaud this as part of the amazing plan to make education "safe from woke ideology," and rooted in meritocratic American values.
