Davidson Freedom Roundup

A public university has a novel idea for creating a true marketplace for ideas.

Progressive politics has dominated elite universities since before the term woke was coined. But one university is trying to revive the academic ideal of a campus as a haven for free inquiry and debate. On Thursday the University of North Carolina board of trustees voted 12-0 to create a new school committed to free expression in higher education.

The University of North Carolina faculty is outraged that the school’s trustees favor open academic inquiry.

of North Carolina’s effort to create a new school dedicated to free inquiry and open academic discourse has caused a fuss on campus that illustrates why the new school is needed. It seems that faculty grandees are outraged that the UNC board of trustees thought such a school is necessary and didn’t even seek the faculty’s permission.

We have been quite critical of Princeton's orientation a year ago, which contained not one word about Princeton's robust free speech rule and in fact contained a section on racism at Princeton that suggested free speech is a tool for racists. We will not revisit those criticisms here.

Squalls of indignation gust across campuses so frequently that they seem merely performative — synthetic, perfunctory, uninteresting. Princeton’s current contretemps, however, fascinatingly illustrates how wokeness, which lacks limiting principles, limits opposition to itself.

An obsession with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion threatens students, professors, and the very credibility of higher education in the U.S.

In June 2020, Gordon Klein, a longtime accounting lecturer at UCLA, made the news after a student emailed him asking him to grade black students more leniently in the wake of the “unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.”

Stop making politics about partisan identities and tribalism and get back to persuasion and policy.

The most important divide in American politics isn’t red versus blue. It’s civic pluralists versus political zealots. This is the truth no one in Washington acknowledges but Americans must realize if we’re going to recover.

The phrase “generation gap” became popular in the late 1960s, as baby boomers were coming of age. To hear social psychologist Jonathan Haidt tell it, today’s generation gap has widened into a chasm. “We have a whole generation that’s doing terribly,” he says in an interview at his professorial office, book-lined and hushed, at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He calls it a “national crisis.”

A faculty perspective on academia’s “professional managerial class.”

In a famous exchange in the “The Sun Also Rises,” Ernest Hemingway wrote: “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

“Gradually” and “suddenly” applies to higher education’s implosion.

During the 1990s “culture wars,” universities were warned that their chronic tuition hikes above the rate of inflation were unsustainable.