More Presidents on the Rack and Some Consoling Words from Joseph Nye
And a ShortStack of News from All Over
Cornell President Joins the Ranks of the DEI Afflicted
College presidents are not having a fun time of it these days as last fall’s Congressional grilling of Ivy League college presidents attests. Two female presidents lost their jobs – Claudine Gray at Harvard and Liz Magill at Penn – and a third from that Capitol Hill slugfest, Sally Kornbluth from MIT, is still facing “a concerted effort to bring down her presidency.” And this week, as the brash new student publication College Fix blared, “Major Cornell donor yanks funding over DEI, demands President Pollack resign.” That’s Jon Lindseth, an alumnus and former Cornell trustee, and Martha Pollack, president of the Ivy League school since 2017. Lindseth made his announcement in a scathing open letter on the eve of a Cornell trustee meeting, accusing Pollack of creating a “toxic academic environment” owing to the school’s “disastrous involvement with DEI policies that have infiltrated every part of the university.” The university’s student newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, which touts its being “independent since 1880” attributed much of Lindseth’s animus to a pro-Palestine rally occurring off-campus at which a Cornell history professor called Hamas’s invasion of Israel “exciting” and “exhilarating.” Both Pollack and trustee Chair Kraig Kayser condemned the professor’s speech, but said that the University “doesn’t need [to] and shouldn’t ban deeply offensive or hateful speech.”
It may not be much consolation to these college leaders (or their trustees), but according to Joseph Nye, the legendary Harvard professor of international relations, “Compared to the turmoil in Harvard in the 1960s, what we’re seeing today is sad but modest.” During protests over Vietnam, a bomb was placed in his building. “My office was ransacked three or four times, with bookshelves pulled down and typewriters thrown through partitions. I remember one time calling the police and saying there’s a mob attacking our building. [They said:] ‘We know that, but there’s nothing we can do about it.’”
Sources and Further Reading
Shortstack
Dana Farber Fabrications, Price-Fixing by Yale and Friends, $100 million in Cuts at Penn State…and more
Doing educational equity right: School finance (Fordham Institute)
Top Cancer Center Seeks to Retract or Correct Dozens of Studies (New York Times)
Yale, Duke and Columbia Among Elite Schools to Settle in Price-Fixing Case (New York Times)
Penn State plans nearly $100 million in cuts for FY26 budget (Higher Ed Dive)
A New Civil Rights Agenda (City Journal)
The Harvard of the Unwoke (Wall Street Journal)
Don’t Ditch Standardized Tests. Fix Them. (New York Times)
After Affirmative Action Ban, They Rewrote College Essays With a Key Theme: Race (New York Times)
Mental Health Crisis at a Small College (New York Times)
Florida Public Colleges Banned from Using State and Federal Funding for DEI (National Review)
The Humiliation of Higher Ed (Inside Higher Ed)
What to know about Biden’s student loan income-driven repayment plan (Washington Post)
Spelman, a Historically Black Women’s College, Receives $100 Million Gift (New York Times)