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Want to know how few students pay full price, or the odds of getting merit aid? The so-called Common Data Set can help, but some schools don’t post it.
By now, many people shopping for college have gotten the message that not everyone pays the list price. But what percentage do get some kind of discount, how much is it and what sorts of students get one?
One way to answer these questions — and many more about the overall undergraduate experience — is by reading the so-called Common Data Set. The C.D.S. is a collection of information about admissions, demographics, financial aid, academics and campus life. Schools assemble it each year and send it along to U.S. News & World Report, Peterson’s and other entities that sort or rank colleges and universities.
Most institutions post their C.D.S. somewhere on their websites. But at least a dozen did not at the start of this week. Over the last five days, I reached out to ask why, and a number of them — including Boston College and the University of Chicago — said they planned to release the C.D.S. after all. Others, like Emerson College, stood firm on keeping it to themselves. Albright College and High Point University did not respond to my queries at all.
If the C.D.S. is familiar, it may be because it was a bit player in the recent drama at Columbia University. A Columbia professor had called the school out for questionable data that led to a higher-than-warranted U.S. News ranking. The school’s mea culpa included publication of its own C.D.S.
The C.D.S. is a product of the uneasy relationship between the U.S. News college rankers and their overburdened rankees. Schools don’t have the capacity to spend months responding to different data requests from the magazine, Peterson’s, the College Board and others like them. Filling out a single, giant form saves labor. Plus, it’s in everyone’s interest to have standard definitions of the information under examination.
For college shoppers, the C.D.S. is excellent reading, even if the PDFs that most schools post are not all that reader-friendly. If your kid is not a joiner, the form can tell you the percentage of the students who are in fraternities and sororities. You can also learn how many people live off campus.
Instructor demographics are a feature as well. Faculty who are members of minority groups can be rare at some schools, and the C.D.S. spells out the figure at any given institution.
On the financial aid side, a quick read of the C.D.S. can give families hope and concern in equal measure. While colleges, on their “cost of attendance” web pages, often list sky-high prices, plenty of students at the schools don’t pay them.
Many people qualify for need-based financial aid, but most schools can’t afford to meet every family’s full need. Section H2 of the C.D.S. tells you how much of the need, on average, a school is able to meet. Families often end up filling any gap with student or parent loans.
Parents whose kids get in but find that a school meets even less of their need than average can appeal the financial aid offer. And if the school’s average gap seems particularly foreboding before application season begins, you can have a conversation with the financial aid officers. Ask them how they assess your odds of getting a decent amount of aid — and ultimately being able to afford the place at all.
Then there are the higher-income families. Plenty of people with household incomes of, say, $300,000 won’t qualify for much need-based aid, if any. Still, they may not have much college savings for their offspring if they’ve been repaying their own student debt for decades, and they may not feel able to afford a college’s full price or be willing to borrow a lot of money to do so.
That’s where Section H2A comes in. The technical description of what schools are revealing here is “institutional non-need-based scholarship or grant aid.” My translation is this: “Here’s how many discounts we issue to people who have the ability to pay, at least according to our financial aid calculations, but lack the willingness to do so.”
This is the so-called merit aid that so many schools give out nowadays. At lots of schools, nearly everyone gets something, and the C.D.S. lists the average amount of merit aid that people with no financial need end up getting.
The next step might be to use the form to find the number of people who get need-based aid and then the number who receive no-need merit. Add those together and subtract the sum from the total number of students, and you can figure out how many — or how few — people are paying the full price.
Maybe you don’t want to be among a low number of people paying retail. And perhaps some schools keep the C.D.S. to themselves because they don’t want to make it too easy for you to know what that number is — or whether you got a below-average merit aid offer.
The representatives of the schools I spoke to this week did not say this themselves. In fact, the reverse may be true, at least according to their consultants.“Most of our partners are trying to encourage families to understand that they probably will get something,” said Nathan Mueller, principal at EAB, which helps colleges recruit and retain students and determine what discounts to offer. “We’d rather have them know that.”
“Gen Z and their parents have much less confidence and trust in institutions, and unfortunately colleges and universities fall into that category,” she said. “Transparency sends a good-faith message to the market that we want to be open about who we are and how we’re helping people financially.”
So, hats off to the schools I contacted this week that seemed to see the wisdom in this way of thinking. Ohio Wesleyan University is working to fill in a blank C.D.S. webpage that currently has just a few Latin words on it. La Salle University’s new senior leaders “expect” to start publishing the C.D.S. “in the future.” Babson College sent similar word.
The University of Chicago said in a statement that it had “recently” reviewed its approach and planned to publish the C.D.S. “soon.” Boston College threw its C.D.S. up on a webpage and thanked me for bringing the matter to its attention. Bard and Marist Colleges will post their forms soon as well, and Stevens Institute of Technology intends to in 2023. I couldn’t bring Emerson around, though it said it would “certainly review our current practices.” Bentley University was another holdout at the beginning of the week, and its vice president of institutional research said in an email that the school had “just not found it helpful for families.”
My experience is the exact opposite. When I sit families down with a C.D.S. and take two minutes to explain things, I quite often see their eyes pop out of their heads as they finally understand who pays what and under what circumstances. By the end of the week, Bentley had changed its mind and published it.
The C.D.S. is not foolproof. U.S. News has ended up with incorrect data over the years. Good-faith errors do occur.
Meanwhile, college counselors and start-up services of various sorts have assembled their own collections of pricing data. The College Transitions Dataverse site is worth a look, as are Big J Educational Consulting, Road2College, TuitionFit, MeritMore and Moore College Data.
Collecting and sorting college pricing and other data should not be this hard or require so many entities to do so much parsing, but this is personal finance in America, after all. There are lots of market players, plenty of opacity and a good chance that big feelings get in the way of common sense.
Plaintive wailing aside, it is indeed worth some effort, before you apply, to get a clear sense of the price a school might quote you if you get in — and why it might do so. The C.D.S. can help you figure that out.
If you run across a school that doesn’t post it or has an old one online, you are well within the bounds of politeness to ask the institution to hand the latest version over. And while you’re at it, please ask that it post the data somewhere where all of us can find and benefit from it.
The Discount Data That Some Colleges Won’t Publish
by Ron Leiber
Re “How ChatGPT Hijacks Democracy,” by Nathan E. Sanders and Bruce Schneier (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, Jan. 15):
I fed this essay into ChatGPT and asked it to write a rebuttal. ChatGPT read the article and wrote the following in less than a minute:
As a writer and researcher who is familiar with the capabilities of language models like ChatGPT, I was surprised to read the recent New York Times essay that suggested that this technology could be used to “upend” democratic processes through lobbying.
While it is true that ChatGPT can generate text that is often indistinguishable from human writing, it is important to note that this technology is not capable of understanding the nuances and subtleties of political networks and systems.
Additionally, the idea that ChatGPT could be used to “ruthlessly exploit” policymaking vulnerabilities is a gross exaggeration of its capabilities.
Furthermore, it is important to note that the problem of automatically generated comments is not new. For several years, we have struggled with bots that automatically post content. Platforms like Facebook have become better at removing “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
In reality, ChatGPT and similar technologies have the potential to be powerful tools for businesses, researchers and educators. They can be used to automate repetitive tasks, improve efficiency and generate new insights. However, the notion that ChatGPT could be used to compromise democratic processes is fear-based speculation that is not rooted in reality.
It is important to approach new technologies with caution and to understand their capabilities and limitations. However, it is also essential not to exaggerate their potential dangers and to consider how they can be used in a positive and responsible manner.
REMEMBER NOW…THIS IS THE BOT SPEAKING!!!!
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”
Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.
Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”
Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”
Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.
“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.” And if “we want to make certain that fascism does not come to America, we must make certain that it does not thrive anywhere in the world.”
Seventy-eight years after the publication of “FASCISM!” with its program for recognizing that political system and stopping it from taking over the United States, President Joe Biden today at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, honored those who gave their lives fighting to preserve democracy. “On this day, we come together again to reflect, to remember, but above all, to recommit to the future our fallen heroes fought for, …a future grounded in freedom, democracy, equality, tolerance, opportunity, and…justice.”
“[T]he truest memorial to their lives,” the president said, is to act “every day to ensure that our democracy endures, our Constitution endures, and the soul of our nation and our decency endures.”
—
Fascism
by Heather Cox Richardson
Actually, legacy admissions are good. Here’s why.
By Steven B. Gerrard
The torches are aflame, and the castles of higher education are being stormed: Burn down legacy admissions!
I teach my students never to begin with a cliché, but it’s appropriate here, as the arguments against legacy admissions are clichés, matters of myth and superficial branding, not of reason. In reality, at highly selective liberal arts colleges, legacy admissions benefit everyone — especially those not historically welcome at these citadels.
Universities such as Harvard might operate differently, so my analysis applies only to colleges like the one I attended (Amherst) and the one where I teach (Williams). But it has broader implications.
The great myth: Legacy admissions are the enemy of diversity, institutionalizing privilege at everyone else’s expense. The surprising truth: Legacy admissions do not harm diversity. They enhance it.
Well over half the applicants to highly selective colleges could shine equally as students. How, then, do admissions officers decide who gets the golden ring? They always say they are constructing a class. A freshman cohort consisting only of science nerds or political activists or athletes would not make a genuine liberal arts college. And demographics are part of that construction.
If the legacy student took the place of a first-generation student, I would light the torches myself. But that’s not the way it works. At least at the colleges I am talking about, no legacy is admitted at the expense of a first-generation student; they are admitted at the expense of other privileged students who have other excellent options.
The corporate lawyer’s daughter attending the elite Phillips Academy boarding school in Andover, Mass., is not competing against the factory worker’s son from West Virginia’s Charleston High School (which I attended). She is competing against her equally privileged classmate. And if that classmate is beaten out because the corporate lawyer went to Williams, that classmate will then have to go to another highly selective college, or, tragically, to a merely selective college.
Furthermore, legacy admissions contribute to the sense of community at small liberal arts colleges. When our students metamorphose into alumni, they do not leave us behind. They still feel part of our intergenerational community. Most alumni at some point happily contemplate the possibility of their offspring wearing their school colors, whether that ultimately happens or not. (And, thanks to previous affirmative action, this community now includes a significant number of alumni of color. It would be a bitter irony if, just when affirmative action is eliminated and alumni of color’s children are finally candidates for legacy admissions, that ladder, too, should be kicked away.
This sense of community benefits everyone, most especially those who are not from privileged backgrounds. Consider one of the chief advantages of attending a highly selective liberal arts college: the network. A student from a privileged background can always call his uncle or his parents’ friends for advice or an internship. He doesn’t need the advantage of a highly selective college. But a first-generation Williams sophomore can call any Williams graduate and almost always get through, gaining through her hard work some of the advantages her privileged classmates simply inherited. She especially benefits from the sense of community. Many factors contribute to this, and legacy admissions might be only one, but this intergenerational loyalty and inheritance of social capital are real, and what is real should count.
What do we find in the opposing corner? Symbolism. Marketing. Propaganda. Public relations posturing. (Only those with a fondness for clichés would call it virtue signaling.) The message to high school students: Welcome to the elite! No one by birth has a better chance than you! To the public: We might charge $65,000 a year, but we are for the proletariat! (Yes, only old college grads say “proletariat,” but you know what I mean.) To alumni: See how good your old school is! By the way, click on this link to donate.
Divesting from legacy admissions (and loudly proclaiming it to the world) is a lot easier than doing the real work of making admissions fair: reaching out to neighborhoods and schools that haven’t heard of your institution, partnering with community colleges, recruiting veterans with the same fervor you bring to recruiting athletes, and contributing talent and money to the difficult, multigenerational task of genuinely educating all elementary school students regardless of their Zip code. This is not to say that some of the colleges that boast of eliminating legacy admissions aren’t doing that work, but if they are, why add empty symbolism to the mix?
Never has respect for higher education in our country been so low. There are many reasons, including stratospheric tuition and genuine admissions scandals. (Varsity Blues, anyone?) But one serious reason is that the public no longer believes universities are engaged in the objective search for truth, that they merely spew propaganda for their preferred political tribe.
There is some truth to that, but higher education hasn’t wholly given in to a world of sound bites and irrationality yet, and it must not give in if it is to regain any authority. Every time a college or university trades reason for myth, the ivy on our walls begins to wither. The question of legacy admissions is admittedly minor, affecting extraordinarily few people. But the question of following bad arguments and political pressures is not minor: It is (or should be) at the heart of higher education.
So douse the torches, keep legacy admissions and get to work.
In the first weeks of the war between Israel and Hamas, Nancy Andrews read about American college presidents under fire and something nagged at her.
Why, she wondered, did it seem like so many of those presidents were women?
Dr. Andrews, who was the first female dean of Duke Medical School and until last year the board chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, looked up the list of federal discrimination complaints filed against colleges and universities since the start of 2022. The vast majority — 80 percent — were against universities led by women, even though just 30 percent of colleges and universities nationwide have female presidents. Of the seven complaints filed in the weeks after the war began, all were seeking investigations of schools led by women.
Then four presidents were summoned by Congress, under threat of subpoena, to answer for what Republicans called the rampant antisemitism engulfing their campuses. All were women: Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, Claudine Gay of Harvard, Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Minouche Shafik of Columbia, who escaped to a prior commitment outside the country.
“Four women presidents, all new in their roles, far too new to have shaped the culture on their campuses, called before Congress? Of course there’s a pattern,” Dr. Andrews said. “The question is, What’s the agenda? Is it to take down women leaders? To attack elite universities through a perceived vulnerability? To further a political purpose?”
Privately if not always publicly, other women in the academy described a similar reaction to the spectacle around the hearing on Dec. 5 and the fallout since: Ms. Magill and Dr. Gay resigned, their critics made it clear they were coming for Dr. Kornbluth, and last week, prominent male donors demanded the ouster of Cornell president Martha Pollack, too.
Almost invariably, the women will run through a list of qualifiers and questions. Yes, there might have been plagiarism, in the case of Dr. Gay, and the issue of race to consider. Yes, the presidents sounded so lawyerly, so coached, at the hearing: Why couldn’t they have more passionately declared their opposition to slogans encouraging genocide?
But then there are the suspicions in the other direction: If the question was safety, why didn’t Congress summon the (male) presidents of Yale and the University of Chicago, where pro-Palestinian groups occupied quads and administrative offices? Underlying all the conversations was the most maddening, familiar and ultimately unanswerable question of all: Would a man have been treated the same way?
Nancy Gertner, a law professor at Harvard and a retired federal judge who filed some of the earliest lawsuits on behalf of women denied tenure in the 1980s and 90s, said the measure of discrimination in those cases was whether women were subject to stricter scrutiny, or held to a different standard. To her mind, both were true for the female presidents.
“Had there been three men at that table,” Ms. Gertner said, “it would not have gone from ‘bad performance’ to ‘you’re not qualified.’”
To some women in the academy, merely having to ask the question was especially frustrating, as the school year had started with more female leaders than ever in higher education — a third of all presidents, six out of eight in the Ivy League.
“This is a momentous change in and of itself,” said Daphna Shohamy, a neuroscientist and director of the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia. “Of course, we would expect that women, like all leaders, be held to the highest standards.” Still, she said, “It’s striking that the only leaders that were condemned to this degree were women. How do we know how much of this is simple accountability and how much is the effect of the same biases that held women back from leadership positions for so long? At the moment, I think it is difficult to disentangle these issues.”
The Problem of Perceived ‘Fit’
The increase in female presidents coincides with a crisis in the academy. Polls show a sharp drop in Americans’ trust in higher education, and a rise in the share of those, predominantly Republicans, who agree that the institutions have a negative impact on the country. College presidents worry about drops in enrollment and in alumni donations. The women leading have become the face of diversity, equity and inclusion policies, which are criticized by left and right.
If there is concern about gender discrimination on campus, it’s lately been about the question of what’s happened to young men, whose enrollment has been dropping since the 1980s. Women now outnumber them, roughly 60-40, among undergraduates. As for female presidents, the proportion looks positively egalitarian when compared with the Fortune 500.
But those numbers can obscure the stubborn disparities for women in academia. They make up only about 45 percent of professors on the tenure track, and around 33 percent of full professors, below what would be expected given that women have long earned more than half of all doctorates.
The big jump in the number of female presidents came between 2021 and 2023, rising to 33 percent from 20 percent at what the American Council on Education distinguishes as the nation’s top research institutions. It was a shift that seemed overdue, given the representation of women among students. But trustees also looked for a different kind of leader for the post-Covid, post-George Floyd moment.
Presenting Ms. Magill as the new president of Penn in 2022, trustees cited her warmth and compassion, her “unusual humility” and “genuine care,” as well as her experience promoting D.E.I. The announcements went on to list some of her extensive accomplishments as well, including how as dean of Stanford Law School, her role before she became provost of the University of Virginia, she had pulled in the biggest-ever alumni donation and hired roughly 30 percent of the faculty. Yet even there, they noted that she had made time to teach and host students at her home.
Pitching her as “campus mom” had its appeal, but it didn’t fit the traditional expectations of what it takes to run a university. “You have to be kind of an asshole to be president of Harvard,” Larry Summers told me in the summer of 2017, as Harvard began its search to replace Drew Gilpin Faust, its first female president, who had succeeded Dr. Summers.
Campus politics are famously vicious, even more so as universities have simultaneously become a political target and a big business. All the shareholders — students, parents, faculty, lawmakers, donors, alumni — think their demands are the most important. Managing budgets and egos requires projecting decisiveness, a quality expected from men and often bristled at in women. “People do expect you to be more nurturing,” said Ana Mari Cauce, the president of the University of Washington.
It can be hard for women to win: During racial justice protests in 2020, student-made posters on campus portrayed Dr. Cauce as moody and angry, and insincere for meeting with students but not agreeing to all of their demands. “The stereotype of being a woman is different from the stereotype of being a leader,” she said. “You’re either good at one and bad at the other, or vice versa.”
It’s conventionally recalled that Dr. Summers himself was forced to resign after he mused that the lack of female STEM professors could be attributed to women’s lesser “intrinsic aptitude” in math — a lawsuit accusing Harvard of antisemitism cites this as evidence of the university’s hypocrisy. But the actual chronology suggests that it is more an example of the leeway granted men. Dr. Summers had clashed with prominent Black scholars four years earlier, and he did not resign until more than a year after his comments on women in science. The immediate prompt was a faculty revolt over revelations that suggested he had protected a friend implicated in a federal fraud investigation that Harvard had paid $26.5 million to settle.
A long line of research talks about the problem of perceived “fit”: Prestigious fields are dominated by men, so men in those fields are considered the norm, especially as leaders. Women are perceived — by men and women alike — to be “at least slightly unsuited to that profession,” as Virginia Valian, a psychology professor at CUNY, wrote in her book “Why So Slow: The Advancement of Women.” The same goes for anyone else who does not look like the norm; Black women get caught in what has been called the “double bind.”
Ruth Simmons, the former president of Smith, Brown and Prairie View A&M, recalled the resistance she faced when she proposed that Brown adopt need-blind admissions, as every other Ivy had already done. Board members worried it would break the bank. Dr. Simmons, the first Black president in the Ivy League, told them it was the right thing to do, and that she could raise the money to pay for it. But she remains convinced that the reason they let her do it was that she was also on the board of Goldman Sachs. (Students, by contrast, complained that her Goldman affiliation brought shame on the university.)
Board members and big donors can pose particular challenges for women, coming as they often do from the male-dominated world of finance. The first rumblings of trouble for Ms. Magill, over a Palestinian literature festival featuring speakers with a record of antisemitic statements, came in the financial press. Male donors, several who are prominent hedge fund managers, went into activist shareholder mode, taking to CNBC and social media to declare the presidents who testified incompetent.
Following Ms. Magill’s resignation, Marc Rowan, the chair of the board of advisers at Penn’s Wharton School of Business and her loudest critic, sent trustees a letter urging them to consider exercising more power over decisions traditionally reserved for presidents, such as tenure and free speech policies. After the congressional hearing, Mr. Rowan and Ronald Lauder, another prominent Penn donor and Magill critic, held a fund-raiser for the Republican congresswoman who ordered the college presidents to testify.
‘A Lethal Error for a Woman’
Are women more likely to end up in vulnerable positions? Social psychologists have proposed the idea of the “glass cliff” to describe the phenomenon of women who become leaders in times of crisis. In institutions not used to female leaders, they are seen as weaker. Subject to greater scrutiny, they tend to fail sooner.
“It’s not clear whether they’re selected because it’s a difficult time and people think women can make it better when things are bad, or if women are really set up, inadvertently or advertently,” said Madeline Heilman, an emerita professor at New York University who has conducted decades of experiments on sex bias in the workplace. Whatever the case, she said, “if they both start well and a man does poorly, people offer excuses and other reasons before they see it as indicative of what he’s like. For a woman, it fits into the stereotype of not being qualified. What is seen as a mistake for men is a lethal error for a woman.”
Decades of experiments show other ways that stereotypes disadvantage women. Men and women alike are too stingy when evaluating women and too generous when evaluating men, whether what’s being judged is their height or the strength of their C.V. Studies of millions of scientific papers find that those with women as lead author are far less likely to be cited than those led by men. Reports on the status of women on individual campusesand from national organizations document marginalization and persistent disrespect. Taken in isolation, such episodes can seem small, but they add up, leaving female professors earning less and taking longer to be promoted, irrespective of productivity. Fed up, many “senior” women leave.
Some women who went on to become presidents say they persisted by putting on blinders to discrimination. That may be harder to do now. Presidential search firms report that candidates are withdrawing their names from consideration for the many open presidencies — including women and people of color.
“It kind of amazes me that people want to become a president,” said Dr. Simmons, who left Prairie View early after the chancellor of the Texas A&M system attempted to curb her authority over hiring. “What madness, really.”
The Campus Wars Aren’t About Gender … Are They?
By Kate Zernike
The college application essay challenges high school students to distill a formative experience in around 650 words. It may be the first time students write about themselves, the first time they are compelled to meditate on the moments that have shaped who they are, and commit those reflections into words.
For six years, I worked as an admissions essay coach. I loved the work; helping young people string together narratives around key moments in their lives was meaningful. And while I may struggle to recall some of my former students’ names, I will never forget their essays.
I worked with two students who left indelible impressions. One explored how learning to play the guitar prepared her to care for her father, who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Another focused on a harrowing experience during the coronavirus pandemic, which ultimately taught her that vulnerability was a sign of strength.
Both essays required rounds of revisions and took months to finalize. My experience editing those essays and others guided me as I reported an article for The Times about the changes students made to their college essays after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in June.
After the court’s ruling was announced, I began brainstorming article ideas that would explore how young people were grappling with the decision. In September, I settled on one: The essay was now the only area on the application where students could directly indicate their race. With the ban on affirmative action, would students use the essay to share their racial identities or ethnic backgrounds?
I began reaching out to high school seniors across the country. Most whom I spoke to said that, in response to the Supreme Court making admissions race-blind, they chose to rewrite their essays to emphasize their racial identities. Often it was a choice they made after personal reflection and discussions with their parents and school counselors.
The questions I asked my sources mirrored those I had asked my pupils: How did you spend your summer? What are your hobbies? What moments in your life shaped those interests?
Some of those queries sat in the foreground of my interviews. More often than not, the answers provided context for what students chose to write about.
I carried with me other lessons from coaching. For example, I remember pushing one student too far on her essay, causing her to pull back. As I interviewed students, some of whom had anxiety about the application process, I adapted my questions based on their comfort level.
As an undergraduate student at New York University, one of my journalism professors, the author James McBride, told our class that “writing teaches writing.” I echoed that message to my students, and kept it in mind as I revised my article under the guidance of my editors, Mary Suh and Christine Chun.
By the end of 2023, a lot of controversy had surfaced in higher education. As the Israel-Hamas war ignited debates around free speech and antisemitism on college campuses, I asked my sources about how they were dealing with one of the most turbulent years in American education.
And after months of speaking with students about their college essays, I began to reflect on my own.
My personal statement, which I wrote in 2013, centered on my journey toward accepting Vienna, the city in Austria my mother moved to when I was in boarding school in Massachusetts, as my new home. Back then, I did not appreciate Vienna — it was the far away place that made me feel uprooted.
While reporting for this article, I wondered if the Supreme Court ruling would have influenced my essay. Would I have introduced my race? Maybe I would have kept my essay the same. Maybe I would have woven in how I became part of an international community in my new home, where I made friends with people from Iran, Turkey and Cambodia. Or maybe I would have reflected on my experience as a Black American in Vienna, writing about some of the ugly realizations I had made.
Who knows what I would have written.
But I know this: Whether or not they chose to write about race, by reflecting on this moment of change, the students I interviewed learned about themselves and their values. That was inspiring to witness.
A College Essay, Revisited Over 10 Years Later
After affirmative action fell, students began rewriting their application essays to emphasize race. The moment led a reporter and former essay coach to reflect on the power of the personal statement.
•
By Bernard Mokam
By Agnes Callard
Dr. Callard is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and the author of “Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming.”
If a group of math students fails to learn the material, that might be because the teacher is not trying hard enough or because she has been inappropriately tasked with, for example, teaching calculus to toddlers. Supposing, however, that neither of these things is true — the teacher is passionately invested in teaching, and she has many suitable students — yet her students all fail the final exam, eventually we would be forced to say that she might not know math so well.
I believe that we humanists are in the position of this math teacher. We have been issuing a steady stream of defenses of the humanities for many decades now, but the crisis of the humanities only grows. In the face of declining student interest and mounting political scrutiny, universities and colleges are increasingly putting humanities departments on the chopping block.
We humanists keep on trying to teach people what the value of the humanities is, and people keep failing to learn our lessons. This suggests to me that humanists do not know the value of the thing they are trying to defend. We can spout pieties that sound inspiring to those already convinced of our cause, but so too can an ignorant math teacher “teach” math to those who already know it.
As a humanist — someone who reads, teaches and researches primarily philosophy but also, on the side, novels and poems and plays and movies — I am prepared to come out and admit that I do not know what the value of the humanities is. I do not know whether the study of the humanities promotes democracy or improves your moral character or enriches your leisure time or improves your critical thinking skills or increases your empathy.
You might be surprised to learn that this bit of ignorance poses no obstacle to me in the classroom. I suppose it would if I approached the teaching of Descartes as a matter of explaining why reading Descartes will make you a better person, but that is not how I teach Descartes, nor does any philosopher I know teach Descartes in that way. I am there to lay out the premises of his reasoning, to explain some of the relevant concepts, to entertain questions and objections and to work through the arguments together with the students to see if they hold water. We are searching, trying to find the value that may be there.
I once asked the best teacher I ever had why she no longer taught her favorite novel, and she said that she stopped teaching a book when she found she was no longer curious about it. The humanistic spirit is, fundamentally, an inquisitive one.
In contrast, defenses of the humanities are not — and cannot be — conducted in an inquisitive spirit, because a defensive spirit is inimical to an inquisitive one. Defensiveness is, it must be admitted, an understandable response when budgets are being cut and the chopping block is brought out and you need to explain why you shouldn’t be on it. It may be that humanists need to spend some of our time joining political battles, which, like all political battles, require their participants to pretend to know things that they do not actually know.
Nonetheless, we should be alert to the danger of becoming accustomed to putting our worst foot forward. An atmosphere of urgency and calls for immediate action are hostile to fields of study like literature and philosophy that require a contemplative mood, and the pretense of knowing what one doesn’t actually know is hostile to forms of inquiry that demand an open mind.
A defensive mind-set also encourages politicization. If the study of literature or philosophy helps to fight sexism and racism or to promote democracy and free speech — and everyone agrees that sexism and racism are bad and democracy and free speech are good — then you have your answer as to why we shouldn’t cut funding for the study of literature or philosophy. Politicization is a way of arming the humanities for its political battles, but it comes at an intellectual cost. Why are sexism and racism so bad? Why is democracy so good? Politicization silences these and other questions, whereas the function of the humanities is to raise them.
Defensiveness also threatens to infect our work as humanists. A posture that we initially assumed for the purposes of confronting skeptics comes to restructure how we talk to our students, how we construct our syllabuses and even how we read the texts we assign, which now must prove themselves useful toward whichever political goals currently receive the stamp of approval.
Humanists are not alone in their ignorance about the purpose of their disciplines. Mathematicians or economists or biologists might mutter something about practical applications of their work, but very few serious scholars confine their research to some narrow pragmatic agenda. The difference between the humanists and the scientists is simply that scientists are under a lot less pressure to explain why they exist, because the society at large believes itself to already have the answer to that question. If physics were constantly out to justify itself, it would become politicized, too, and physicists would also start spouting pious platitudes about how physics enriches your life.
I will admit that every time I hear of a classics department being cut, it hurts. I may not know why it is important to read Homer and Plato, but I do have a deep love for reading, teaching and pondering those texts. That love is what I have to share with others, as well as the surprise and delight of finding that people thousands of years dead can be one’s partners in inquiry.
If at some point I am called on to defend the study of Homer or Descartes at some official hearing, I will do my best, but I do not deem it right to change my approach to what I study and teach in anticipation of that encounter. I will not run to battle; the battle will have to come to me.
The task of humanists is to invite, to welcome, to entice, to excite, to engage. And when we let ourselves be ourselves, when we allow the humanistic spirit that animates us to flow out not only into our classrooms but also in our public-self presentation, we find we don’t need to defend or prove anything: We are irresistible.
Are the humanities valuable? What is their value? These are good questions, they are worth asking, and if humanists don’t ask them, no one will. But remember: No one can genuinely ask a question to which she thinks she already has the answer.
I Teach the Humanities, and I Still Don’t Know
What Their Value Is
That is the urgent question of our time. The rapid progress being made on artificial intelligence means that we face a strategic choice about what kind of world we are going to live in: Will it be one in which the United States and allied nations advance a global AI that spreads the technology’s benefits and opens access to it, or an authoritarian one, in which nations or movements that don’t share our values use AI to cement and expand their power?
There is no third option — and it’s time to decide which path to take. The United States currently has a lead in AI development, but continued leadership is far from guaranteed. Authoritarian governments the world over are willing to spend enormous amounts of money to catch up and ultimately overtake us. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has darkly warned that the country that wins the AI race will “become the ruler of the world,” and the People’s Republic of China has said that it aims to become the global leader in AI by 2030.
These authoritarian regimes and movements will keep a close hold on the technology’s scientific, health, educational and other societal benefits to cement their own power. If they manage to take the lead on AI, they will force U.S. companies and those of other nations to share user data, leveraging the technology to develop new ways of spying on their own citizens or creating next-generation cyberweapons to use against other countries.
The first chapter of AI is already written. Systems such as ChatGPT, Copilot and others are functioning as limited assistants — for instance, by writing up patient visits so nurses and doctors can spend more time with the sick, or serving as more advanced assistants in certain domains, such as code generation for software engineering. More advances will soon follow and will usher in a decisive period in the story of human society.
If we want to ensure that the future of AI is a future built to benefit the most people possible, we need a U.S.-led global coalition of like-minded countries and an innovative new strategy to make it happen. The United States’ public and technology sectors need to get four big things right to ensure the creation of a world shaped by a democratic vision for AI.
First, American AI firms and industry need to craft robust security measures to ensure that our coalition maintains the lead in current and future models and enables our private sector to innovate. These measures would include cyberdefense and data center security innovations to prevent hackers from stealing key intellectual property such as model weights and AI training data. Many of these defenses will benefit from the power of artificial intelligence, which makes it easier and faster for human analysts to identify risks and respond to attacks. The U.S. government and the private sector can partner together to develop these security measures as quickly as possible.
Second, infrastructure is destiny when it comes to AI. The early installation of fiber-optic cables, coaxial lines and other pieces of broadband infrastructure is what allowed the United States to spend decades at the center of the digital revolution and to build its current lead in artificial intelligence. U.S. policymakers must work with the private sector to build significantly larger quantities of the physical infrastructure — from data centers to power plants — that run the AI systems themselves. Public-private partnerships to build this needed infrastructure will equip U.S. firms with the computing power to expand access to AI and better distribute its societal benefits.
Building this infrastructure will also create new jobs nationwide. We are witnessing the birth and evolution of a technology I believe to be as momentous as electricity or the internet. AI can be the foundation of a new industrial base it would be wise for our country to embrace.
We need to complement the proverbial “bricks and mortar” with substantial investment in human capital. As a nation, we need to nurture and develop the next generation of AI innovators, researchers and engineers. They are our true superpower.
Third, we must develop a coherent commercial diplomacy policy for AI, including clarity around how the United States intends to implement export controls and foreign investment rules for the global build out of AI systems. That will also mean setting out rules of the road for what sorts of chips, AI training data and other code — some of which is so sensitive that it may need to remain in the United States — can be housed in the data centers that countries around the world are racing to build to localize AI information.
Our existing AI lead, at a time when nations worldwide are vying for greater access to the technology, will make it easier to bring more countries into this new coalition. Making sure open-sourced models are readily available to developers in those nations will further bolster our advantage. The challenge of who will lead on AI is not just about exporting technology, it’s about exporting the values that the technology upholds.
And fourth, we need to think creatively about new models for the world to establish norms in developing and deploying AI, with a particular focus on safety and ensuring a role for the global south and other nations who have been historically left behind. As with other issues of global importance, that will require us to engage with China and maintain an ongoing dialogue.
I’ve spoken in the past about creating something akin to the International Atomic Energy Agency for AI, but that is just one potential model. One option could knit together the network of AI safety institutes being built in countries such as Japan and Britain and create an investment fund that countries committed to abiding by democratic AI protocols could draw from to expand their domestic computer capacities.
Another potential model is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which was established by the U.S. government in 1998, less than a decade after the creation of the World Wide Web, to standardize how we navigate the digital world. ICANN is now an independent nonprofit with representatives from around the world dedicated to its core mission of maximizing access to the internet in support of an open, connected, democratic global community.
While identifying the right decision-making body is important, the bottom line is that democratic AI has a lead over authoritarian AI because our political system has empowered U.S. companies, entrepreneurs and academics to research, innovate and build.
We won’t be able to have AI that is built to maximize the technology’s benefits while minimizing its risks unless we work to make sure the democratic vision for AI prevails. If we want a more democratic world, history tells us our only choice is to develop an AI strategy that will help create it, and that the nations and technologists who have a lead have a responsibility to make that choice — now.
Opinion Who will control the future of AI?
by Sam Altman
co-founder and CEO pf OpenAI
Polls suggest young Americans are less enchanted with their country than previous generations. Yet even those who want to serve their country, conducting some form of national service, are too often turned away by top programs. The opposite should be true: Volunteer organizations such as AmeriCorps, Teach for America, the Peace Corps and the newly formed American Climate Corps should be well-funded and encouraged. National service could become a pervasive post-graduation option that all young Americans consider.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak this year proposed a national service plan that would have granted young adults the option of enrolling in a year-long military training program or committing to civil service one weekend every month for the same amount of time. The proposal was highly unpopular, with Brits balking at what they saw as the effective conscription of their nation’s youths.
The idea has more support here in the States. A 2017 Gallup poll shows that nearly half of Americans favor mandatory national service. Many teenagers themselves, it turns out, are interested — too many for the system to accommodate. Relevant programs are underfunded, and, as a result, can’t accept the millions of Americans who sign up, even if there’s plenty of useful work those applicants could do. Expanding opportunities for national service is one of the few topics that transcend political affiliation, age and race in the United States. People see the benefits of serving their country, whether it be through the military or helping out at their local soup kitchen. But the costs of doing so can be high — so it’s on the government to reduce them.
To be clear, Congress should not impose a mandate. Forcing a year or two of service from the nation’s next great tech innovators, or star athletes, or cohort of primary-care physicians, or skilled construction workers needed to build new infrastructure, would do more harm to society than good — though such people should obviously be welcome in these programs. Rather, as they and their peers approach their later teenage years, they should discuss with their friends who will go right to college, or directly to graduate school, or immediately into a trade, and who will take a year or two to make the United States more livable, more safe or more healthy, along with millions of others from around the country.
The Unity Through Service Act would make it easier for Americans to find their way into national service, building an interagency council that includes military, national and public service officials working together to inform young adults about existing service opportunities. Heads of agencies such as AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps could engage in joint recruitment campaigns. The costs for the council itself, according to one legislative official, are “negligible” and would create the infrastructure needed to support the expansion of service programs while many wait for additional funding.
But passing this modest bill would be only a start. Participating in a program such as AmeriCorps or the Peace Corps means sacrificing one or two years in the workforce, and the likely higher salary that would come with a job. Meanwhile, the stipends these programs offer usually do not cover the cost of living — largely because the programs have faced years of sharp funding cuts. National service might never pay as well as a Wall Street internship, but Congress should invest in increasing pay for young people so it’s at least a plausible option for Americans with little money to spare. National service initiatives should also provide flexibility to applicants, allowing them to focus on a particular skill set, say, or geographic location. Doing so would attract Gen Z participants who want to develop skills during their service that could further their career goals.
America should make it easier for young people
to serve their country
by The Editorial Board of The Washington Post
Last week Jonathan Holloway, the president of Rutgers University, announced he would be stepping down at the end of this academic year — the latest in a series of university president departures.
Given the widespread discord and protests on campuses, the past academic year was tough for any college president. But unlike others who left their posts, like Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay of Harvard, Holloway isn’t leaving the kind of elite institution that tends to attract outraged headlines and ire. Nor was he resigning in a heated moment of backlash or scandal.
So why did he do it?
“It’s a punishing job in normal times,” Holloway, a scholar of African American history, told me when I spoke to him last week. “But the standards we’re being held to are impossible. I had to ask myself, ‘What is it I want to do, how can I do it, and is this the right position?’”
Holloway, who previously served as a dean at Yale and a provost at Northwestern, said he struggled with how to balance the role of a college president today, which demands quick responses, with what he described as his own values — listening to people, carefully weighing potential actions and having the freedom to speak his mind.
The pressures on university leadership currently make delivering on those propositions extremely trying: The politics of accusation and the world of social media are seemingly out to wreak havoc. Problems don’t have clear solutions but need decisions anyway. Universities can’t respond at the pace of a tweet. You need time to determine facts and consult with many constituencies, especially at a massive state operation like Rutgers, which employs nearly 30,000 people and serves 67,620 students.
That’s all par for the course. But Holloway faced a hellish series of unfortunate events. His tenure began during the crisis of Covid and, after only a year’s respite, endured a protracted union conflict with university workers that ended with an intervention by Gov. Phil Murphy.
During that strike, a number of prominent Rutgers faculty members and scholars from other institutions signed an open lettercalling on Holloway to allow for greater bargaining power for the union, which was calling for larger pay increases for full-time faculty, adjuncts and graduate student teachers. Last September, the university Senate issued a vote of no confidence. At one point during the strike, protesters planted themselves outside his home at 7:30 a.m. Campus police officers informed him that he would have 24-hour security at his house until they felt his safety was no longer at risk. From that point on, he had a security escort when he traveled. Holloway decided not to look at the online threats. “The stuff that people say online, the bravado when they’re not in person — if it gets to your personal email, it’s hard to unsee those things.”
“I thought I couldn’t possibly have had a harder year than that one,” Holloway said. “Joke was on me.”
Then came Oct. 7. In April, students protesting Israel’s war in Gaza set up an encampment on the school’s main campus. Holloway eventually came to an agreement with the protesters that included neither divestment from Israel nor severing its ties with Tel Aviv University but pledged to investigate proposals such as the establishment of a cultural center for Palestinian and other Arab American students. Nonetheless, Republicans in Congress attacked him for, in the words of Representative Virginia Foxx, having “made shocking concessions to the unlawful antisemitic encampments.” Murphy accused Rutgers of overlooking the needs of Jewish students.
“I had hard choices to make at Yale and Northwestern, too, but people there knew who I was as a person, and it’s hard to be nasty when you’re up close and live,” Holloway said. “I didn’t have an appreciation for the fact that at a place this big, the president is an abstraction, and once someone is an abstraction, you can say anything you want about that person. It’s exhausting.”
Everything Holloway told me made sense. Yet I was still surprised by the news, which I heard while participating in a program at the University of Toronto devoted to improving civil discourse. Only a year earlier, I heard him speak at a similar conference, on a panel dedicated to universities and civic culture.
There he described an episode in which he’d received over 10,000 emails — what he called “cut and paste” activism — protesting a seminar that was planned at least nine months earlier, the last session of which featured scholars of Palestinian liberation struggles. The demand was for him to cancel the seminar. Holloway discussed the situation with calm and deliberation, citing the need to air views that some might find repugnant, the importance of listening and the standards of academic freedom. He seemed genuinely committed to those values.
In other words, Holloway demonstrated that he is just the kind of conscientious, intentional leader universities need. A member of College Presidents for Civic Preparedness, he taught a class at Rutgers on engaged citizenship.
His goal, he told me, is to challenge students to be critical thinkers in an era of righteousness, an atmosphere in which people have stopped considering whether someone else may be right.
“People will make claim to you: ‘You’re supposed to be here to protect us.’ And I want to say, ‘I am. This is the way I’m trying to protect you.’ But it’s hard to make that argument in an emotional moment.”
If any university president could handle this heated moment, I figured Holloway would be the one.
He’d already been through the wringer. In 2015 he was the dean of Yale College during a then infamous, now nearly forgotten scandal over what was considered cultural appropriation when it came to Halloween costumes. As the first Black dean of Yale College, Holloway, whose appointment to the position had been met with jubilation, walked a fine line. He spent hours listening to angry, chanting students on the green — mostly in silence, taking notes — many of whom felt their experiences and needs as minority students had been overlooked. According to The Washington Post, at times he appeared to be choking back tears.
This past July, Holloway retreated with his family to a house he recently bought in Vermont, a place he envisioned for his eventual retirement. He thought long and hard about what had become a serious strain on his physical health, his emotional well-being and his family life. He tried to figure out how much “gas there was in the tank,” he said.
At first, he thought he might simply have had bad luck — Covid, strikes, protests. But the problem was bigger than that. The atmosphere on campus, he realized, has fundamentally changed in discouraging ways. The culture of curiosity, the culture of empathy seemed to have gone. He no longer felt he could function to the best of his abilities as a leader in this charged university environment. He didn’t feel he could do the job and stay true to himself.
“One of my strengths is empathy, and I think it’s made me a very effective administrator, and I’m proud of those elements, but it comes at an incredible cost,” Holloway said. “I don’t want to change who I am. It’s gotten me to this point. If I were to change and become hardhearted, I wouldn’t want to be that person.”
If American universities continue to lose leaders like Jonathan Holloway, higher education is in even greater trouble than it already was.
It's Easy to See What Drove Jonathan Holloway to Quit
by Pamela Paul
Colleges and universities have tightened rules around protests, locked campus gates and handed down stricter punishments after the disruptions of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments last spring.
The efforts seem to be working.
Universities have seen just under 950 protest events this semester so far, compared to 3,000 last semester, according to a log at the Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard University’s Ash Center. About 50 people have been arrested so far this school year at protests on higher education campuses, according to numbers gathered by The New York Times, compared to over 3,000 last semester.
When students have protested this fall, administrators have often enforced — to the letter — new rules created in response to last spring’s unrest. The moves have created scenes that would have been hard to imagine previously, particularly at universities that once celebrated their history of student activism.
Harvard temporarily banned dozens of students and faculty members from libraries after they participated in silent “study-ins” — where protesters sit at library tables with signs opposing the war in Gaza — though a similar protest did not lead to discipline in December 2023. At Indiana University Bloomington, some students and faculty members who attended candlelight vigils were referred for discipline under a new prohibition on expressive activity after 11 p.m. University of Pennsylvania administrators and campus police officers holding zip ties told vigil attendees to move because they had not reserved the space in compliance with new rules.
And at Montclair State University in New Jersey, police officers often outnumber participants in a weekly demonstration where protesters hold placards with photos of children killed in Gaza and the words “We mourn.”
“They say it’s to keep us safe, but I think it’s more to keep us under control,” said Tasneem Abdulazeez, a student in the teaching program.
The changes follow federal civil rights complaints, lawsuits and withering congressional scrutiny accusing universities of tolerating antisemitism, after some protesters praised Hamas and called for violence against Israelis.
Some students and faculty have welcomed calmer campuses. Others see the relative quiet as the bitter fruit of a crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech. They worry President-elect Donald J. Trump, who as a candidate called for universities to “vanquish the radicals,” could ratchet up the pressure.
In many cases, universities are enforcing rules they adopted before the school year began. While the specifics vary, they generally impose limits on where and when protests can occur and what form they can take.
Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors and an associate professor of media studies at Rutgers, said the restrictions have made people afraid.
“They feel like they’re being watched and surveilled,” he said. “I think there’s a strong degree of self-censorship that’s taking place.”
But Jewish students who felt targeted by protesters have praised the rules — and the speed at which universities are enforcing them — for helping to restore order and safety. Naomi Lamb, the director of Hillel at the Ohio State University, said the school’s new protest policies seem to be working well.
"I appreciate the response of administrators to ensure that there is as little antisemitic action and rhetoric as possible,” she said.
Some of the tactics protesters used last semester have been met with stringent responses this school year. At the University of Minnesota, 11 people were arrested after they occupied a campus building. Last school year, some universities let protesters occupy buildings overnight and even for days at a time.
At Pomona College, the president invoked “extraordinary authority” to bypass the standard disciplinary process and immediately suspend or ban some pro-Palestinian protesters who took over a building on Oct. 7 of this year. A college spokeswoman said the unusual move was justified because the occupation had destroyed property, threatened safety and disrupted classes, and noted that students were given opportunities to respond to the allegations against them.
“It’s kind of designed to put the administration in this bind of either you ignore it, or you enforce rules but you look like kind of a jerk,” said Jay Ulfelder, research project manager at Harvard’s Nonviolent Action Lab.
A Harvard spokesman said that a January 2024 statement from university leadership made clear that demonstrations are not permitted in libraries or other campus areas used for academic activities.
At some campuses, protesters have taken up new tactics to challenge the new restrictions.
Study-ins like those at Harvard have also taken place at Ohio State, Tulane University and the University of Texas at Austin. Students typically wear kaffiyehs and tape signs to their laptops with messages like “Our tuition funds genocide.”
During Sukkot, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the harvest, members of the anti-Zionist organization Jewish Voice for Peace set up “solidarity sukkahs” at about 20 schools including Northwestern and the University of California, Los Angeles. The sukkahs, or huts, commemorate the structures the Israelites lived in while wandering in the desert for 40 years and are often decorated with gourds, fruit and lights. JVP members added signs saying “Stop Arming Israel.”
The sukkahs were removed at nine universities, according to JVP, with administrators citing new rules prohibiting unauthorized structures.
When facilities workers arrived with power tools to tear down the sukkah at Northwestern, JVP members told them it was wrong to do so before the end of the weeklong holiday, said Paz Baum, a senior.
“They do not care about our ability or right to practice our religion,” Ms. Baum said. “They only care about limiting
Palestinian speech.”
The new restrictions may not be the only factor behind diminished protest activity this semester. Some protest groups have embraced more violent rhetoric — praising Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, for example — alienating some students who had sympathized with their cause.
Some things have not changed, however: There is still little consensus about what it means for a campus to be safe and when speech critical of Israel crosses the line into antisemitism.
At Montclair State, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators have criticized the number of police officers and administrators at their events, President Jonathan Koppell said he was trying to strike a balance between “competing priorities.”
In an interview, Dr. Koppell said the officers stationed at protests are necessary to protect everyone on campus, including the protesters. He noted that demonstrations on campus have been peaceful and people have “engaged responsibly.”
He added that some community members want him to prohibit the pro-Palestinian gatherings altogether, something he has resisted.
“You have a desire for some people to be able to say whatever they what, wherever they want, whenever they want,” Dr. Koppell said. “And you have some people who would like to see an environment where there’s an absolute limitation on people’s ability to protest.”
“Anybody who wants an absolute in either direction is going to be unhappy,” he added.
Even as universities crack down, administrators and faculty say the federal government under Mr. Trump could try to force further changes at institutions.
Still, much remains unclear about what could happen. His pick to lead the Department of Education, Linda McMahon, has less education experience than is typical of education secretaries in the past and has publicly said little about campus protests.
Abed A. Ayoub, the executive director of the American-Arab Anti-
Discrimination Committee, said he did not think Mr. Trump could make campuses more hostile to pro-Palestinian protests than they already are.
“Are they going to continue with their crackdown on anti-Israel speech? I think they will,” he said, referring to universities. “That’s not because Trump is in office. They started this. It’s been happening.”
How Universities Cracked Down on Pro-Palestinian Activism
by Isabelle Taft
