Category: colleges and universities

College essays change for the worse, rendered ineffectual by both how universities use them and how students can cheat using AI

February 24, 2026 • 11:03 am

Today’s article, by Liza Libes, was published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a conservative think tank in Raleigh, North Carolina.

In its decision of the two cases Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court strongly limited the role of race in college admissions.  Using race as a prima facie criterion for admission was declared unconstitutional, but race could still be considered in admissions in a limited way. As the decision of the Harvard case said on page 8 (both were decided together)

At the same time, nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university. 

Everyone immediately speculated that, because many colleges are determined to continue using race as a criterion for admission, they would try to circumvent the Court’s decision by asking students, in their admissions essays, to describe how they overcame hardships or would contribute to the university community, realizing that students would slip in race or ethnicity in these essays to lubricate their admission. As Libes describes in her piece (click screenshot below to read), that’s exactly what was done in North Carolina.

Libes also stresses the importance of real writing—as opposed to AI—as a skill that will help students in their later lives, for of course one can get AI to write essays along the lines of the themes above. I did that for one admissions essay (see below).

First, why students should learn to write well with their own brains and hands, and why colleges should ask for more than boilerplate essays designed to foster racial diversity or assess students’ ideologies. Libes’s extracts are indented:

Despite what our schools may have students believe about the relative uselessness of writing, strong writers achieve disproportionate professional success because good writing is a proxy for creative thinking—and creative thinkers become society’s visionaries. Take Steve Jobs, who was a storyteller before he was a programmer, or Thurgood Marshall, who reshaped American law not only through legal mastery but through powerful rhetoric. These mavericks have gone down in history not necessarily for their technical proficiency but for their aptitude for creativity.

Writing ability remains the most important predictor not only of academic but also of professional success.Writing is the best tool we have to showcase creative thought.

. . . A good writer is therefore a strong thinker—and this distinction transcends academic disciplines. In my counseling practice, for instance, I routinely observe smart STEM students producing more insightful essays than average humanities students, because good writing is not so much a measure of technical ability as it is a proxy for the capacity to express ideas. Because creative thinking is invaluable in any walk of life, writing ability remains the most important predictor not only of academic but also of professional success.

I suppose that part of Libes’s job is to prepare students for college admissions, as she’s not on a faculty.  But I’m heartened by her observation that STEM students write better essays than humanities students.  I have no experience of whether that’s true, as I never taught humanities students.

According to Libes, the changing of the college admissions essay, which began as a way to keep Jews out of elite colleges by looking for “Protestant values,” started after the banning of racial quotas in the Bakke case (1978):

In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, however, with many universities forced to drop their racial quotas, the college essay evolved into a tool for admissions officers to gain a glimpse of applicants’ “backgrounds and perspectives.” Soon, the college essay became less about the discriminatory idea of “fit” and more about the ideas that students could bring to the intellectual table.

Around the same time, the revamped college essay shifted admissions practices towards a more holistic evaluative model that relied less on grades and test scores than on the applicant’s intellectual potential as a whole. In one sense, this model is still in use today: I have students with perfect GPAs and SAT scores who not only fail to secure admission to “elite” colleges but who are also destined to land in menial professional roles—not because they aren’t smart but because they have never learned to effectively express their ideas. In theory, the college essay should be an effective tool to separate “smart but dull” from “smart and interesting” students. Though many college-consulting professionals have expressed doubts about the viability of the college essay in the face of generative AI, so-called large language models will only ever fall into the category of “smart but dull,” giving truly visionary students a chance to shine by demonstrating their capacity for original thinking.

These changes, then, apparently occurred between the early Sixties and the Bakke decision in 1978:

For a brief moment in time—the halcyon decades following the Civil Rights era—the college essay did indeed allow strong writers and thinkers to rise to the top of our society. In his book On Writing the College Application Essay, for instance, former Columbia admissions officer Harry Bauld wrote that the college essay “shows you at your alive and thinking best.” That was 1987. Today, colleges seem to be doing everything they can to move the college essay away from the model of “thinking” prowess towards the infamous doctrine of “fit.”

And so college essays have degenerated into exercises that allow admissions offices to judge both the rcial and ideological “fit” of students to a given school. Libes uses as examples schools on  in North Carolina. Get a load of this:

Of the five most competitive colleges in North Carolina—Duke, Davidson, Wake Forest, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State—three ask the ubiquitous “fit” question, prompting students to identify their reasons for wishing to attend these universities in a short-answer statement. [JAC: as you see below, the University of Chicago also asks a “fit” question.] Duke explicitly uses the language of “values” in its prompt, suggesting that the university cares less about academic preparation than it does about the morals of each individual applicant. Share the wrong moral values—conservatism, religious traditionalism, or moral absolutism, among others—and risk facing a rejection letter in your inbox the coming spring.

The “fit” question is not the only way these colleges screen for values. UNC-Chapel Hill and Wake Forest both insist that students demonstrate their readiness to make contributions to their “community,” thereby favoring students with a natural bent towards communal rather than individualistic values. Wake Forest, in fact, has no reservations about framing its “community” prompt in terms of social justice:

Dr. Maya Angelou, renowned author, poet, civil-rights activist, and former Wake Forest University Reynolds Professor of American Studies, inspired others to celebrate their identities and to honor each person’s dignity. Choose one of Dr. Angelou’s powerful quotes. How does this quote relate to your lived experience or reflect how you plan to contribute to the Wake Forest community?

Similarly, Wake Forest asks students to identify their top-five favorite books. While this might seem an innocuous and even intellectually worthy question, there is no doubt that a student who includes Born a Crime by Trevor Noah will fare better in the admissions process than a student who dares to list Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

Oy gewalt: that Wake Forest question seems to be there to weed out students who don’t have the correct “progressive” ideology! And does Wake Forest also give a selection of Maya Angelou quotes, or does it assume that students already know her books? If they don’t, they’ll be scurrying like termites to read them ASAP.

And Duke, which I’ve realized is woker than I knew, raises the issue of the goodness of diversity, and explicitly incorporates that in a question. You know the students are going to go full Kendi with this one:

Adapting to the rise of wokeness in 2014, for instance, Duke added the following college-essay prompt:

Duke University seeks a talented, engaged student body that embodies the wide range of human experience; we believe that the diversity of our students makes our community stronger. If you’d like to share a perspective you bring or experiences you’ve had to help us understand you better—perhaps related to a community you belong to, your sexual orientation or gender identity, or your family or cultural background—we encourage you to do so. Real people are reading your application, and we want to do our best to understand and appreciate the real people applying to Duke.

But with the rise of Trumpism and the suppression of DEI and wokeness in universities, Libes notes that essay questions are now concentrating on the value of viewpoint diversity, which Libes says is “this year’s new ‘it’ essay.” She concludes by once again emphasizing real essays that inspire independent thought rather than ticking off presumed boxes about race and ideology:

If colleges wish to remain institutions devoted to intellectual excellence rather than moral choreography, they must abandon their obsession with “fit” and return to the college essay’s original purpose: to identify students most capable of independent thought.

It is precisely those students who go on to shape ideas, build institutions, and sustain our free, pluralistic society.

Libes doesn’t deal with AI so much (see below), but her essay is well worth reading, and inspired me to look up the University of Chicago’s admissions essays. My school is famous for asking unusual and sometimes off-the-wall questions aimed at demonstrating a student’s ability to think. And commercial sources publicize them during the admissions cycle, to let students see what they’re in for and to offer students “help” by producing company-written answers for a fee (I consider this unethical). You can see the list of admissions questions for 2025-2026 at the commerical site here (“we can help you draft in time for submission”). Sadly, the only required question is of the anodyne type seen above:

Question 1 (Required)

How does the University of Chicago, as you know it now, satisfy your desire for a particular kind of learning, community, and future? Please address with some specificity your own wishes and how they relate to UChicago.

A big yawn for that one! It’s a “fit” question like the ones in North Carolina.  HOWEVER, we offer seven other essays that are far more interesting as gauges of creativity, and applicants must choose to answer just one of these in addition to Question 1. I’ll show you just three:

Essay Option 1

In an ideal world where inter-species telepathic communication exists, which species would you choose to have a conversation with, and what would you want to learn from them? Would you ask beavers for architectural advice? Octopuses about cognition? Pigeons about navigation? Ants about governance? Make your case—both for the species and the question.

Essay Option 2

If you could uninvent one thing, what would it be — and what would unravel as a result?

Essay Option 6

Statistically speaking, ice cream doesn’t cause shark attacks, pet spending doesn’t drive the number of lawyers in California, and margarine consumption isn’t responsible for Maine’s divorce rate—at least, not according to conventional wisdom. But what if the statisticians got it wrong? Choose your favorite spurious correlation and make the case for why it might actually reveal a deeper, causative truth.

Now THOSE are questions worth offering, and do you really need the required question to assess a student’s ability?

But there is one big problem: AI can answer all of these questions, and better than most students. As an example, I chose the Option 1 question, about telepathy, and sent it to Luana to put into her paid AI bot. I will put the bot’s answer below the fold. But do read it because it’s amazingly good and, to me at least, indistinguishable from a human answer. In fact, it’s much better than I think many high-school students could write. THAT is why they use AI, and why Luana thinks that AI spells the death of humanities in liberal-arts schools.

In the end, then, given the existence of AI and its ubiquitous use by students, is there really any point to asking essay questions? I doubt it, especially because you can “guide” the AI bot by asking for specific things to appear.  After due cogitation, I decided that universities should require only four things for admission, none of them essays:

  1. High-school grades
  2. SATs or ACT standardized test scores. Sadly, these are optional at the University of Chicago, and 80% of American colleges and universities either do not require test scores or forbid submitting test scores. (Grok says 90-93% don’t require them, though in 2015 60-65% of them did.) Doing away with test requirements is a big mistake.  There is no downside to using such scores; they were banned or made optional solely as a way to increase ethnic diversity, even though an article in the NYT shows that using standardized tests does not hurt diversity.and is also the best predictor of success in college, success in getting into graduate school, and success in the workplace in later life.
  3. Letters of recommendation. (These are not great, as students won’t ask for letters unless they know they’ll get good ones. In fact, I’ve been asked by students requesting letters from me to assure them that I’d write a good one.)
  4. Personal interviews.  You can tell a lot about a person from a 20-minute interview. Unfortunately, those have been used, as at Harvard, as a tool to weed out students—in their case Asian students, who were deemed from interviews to not be as “personable” as other students. That this was a bogus way to reduce the percentage of Asians admitted came from data showing that the difference appeared only when Harvard staff did the interviews, not when alumni were recruited to do interviews.

Some schools, like those concentrating on music, art, or fashion design, require submitting samples of your work, which cannot (as of yet) be faked by AI.

The four criteria above should suffice to properly assess students.  And standardized tests should always be required.  I’m hoping for the day when the University of Chicago realizes that.

Click “continue reading” to see the AI answer to the essay option 1 (on telepathy) below. We didn’t specify a word limit, though both essays that Grok produced were close to 500 words (I show just one response).  Thanks  to Luana for interacting with the bot.

Continue reading “College essays change for the worse, rendered ineffectual by both how universities use them and how students can cheat using AI” →

The University of Chicago funds big project on (Israeli) “scholasticide”

February 20, 2026 • 10:50 am

The other day I wrote about a course in “Liberatory Violence” given by U of C professor Alireza Doostdar, a course that seemed to me to be (while probably not violating academic freedom) designed to propagandize students—largely against Israel. (Doostdar has a long history of anti-Israeli activism, and is director of our Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and the Anthropology of Religion.)  While I can’t say that the course should be deep-sixed, I can say that it’s likely to promote hatred of Jews and Israel, which Doostdar sees as guilty of “Zionist settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.”  Ah, three big lies in one sentence!

But it’s one thing to teach a permissible but dubious course, and another to fund an initiative designed to indict Israel for “scholasticide”: the destruction of Palestinian academia by design.  Yes, the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, a unit that “brings unlikely partners together to work on complex problems”, has announced funding for ten new group projects in 2026-2027.  Here’s one of them, and, lo and behold, Dr. Doostdar is one of the stars:

Scholasticide in and Beyond Palestine
Jodi Byrd (Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity), Alireza Doostdar (Divinity School), Eve Ewing (Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity), Darryl Li (Anthropology)

Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this project will use a mixed-methods approach in undertaking empirical research and comparative analysis to investigate “scholasticide” as a critical category for political and historical analysis. In addition to the resident research team, the project will involve a sequence of virtual visiting fellows.

This is another way to use College money to do down Israel, and this I object to. Believe me, if there were a similar project designed to investigate “genocide by Palestinian terror groups,” it would not only not get funded, but would raise an ruckus. This one has elicited nary a peep.  I’m wondering whether the University of Chicago even thinks about the optics of giving money for a project like this.

The University of Auckland passes free speech and institutional neutrality policy

December 16, 2025 • 10:17 am

The newish government of New Zealand is finally seeing the light, and has mandated that every one of the country’s eight universities (all government funded) must at some point adopt a policy of freedom of speech and institutional neutrality (the latter resembles Chicago’s Kalven Report).

The University of Auckland, the country’s flagship university and its best and most important one, issued a public announcement after adopting this policy, which happened this month via the University’s council. The PR announcement is here, and reads like this:

Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland has formally adopted its Freedom of Expression Statement, following approval by the University Council at its meeting on 10 December.

The statement outlines the University’s commitment to protecting and promoting freedom of expression and academic freedom, and reaffirms its role as a critic and conscience of society. It sets expectations for lawful, constructive and civil debate across the University and outlines the principle of institutional neutrality, which helps create an environment where conversations can freely take place.

Vice-Chancellor Professor Dawn Freshwater says the statement reflects extensive engagement and consultation with the University community.

“Freedom of expression and academic freedom are foundational to our role as a university. This statement provides clarity about our responsibilities and expectations as a community, and reaffirms our commitment to fostering an environment where diverse viewpoints can be expressed lawfully and constructively.”

The statement’s development involved an extended period of careful discussion and refinement through both a Senate working group and the Vice-Chancellor’s Advisory Group.

Professor Cathy Stinear, Pro Vice-Chancellor Equity and a member of the Advisory Group, says the work was challenging but rewarding for those involved.

“I’m particularly proud of the way we respectfully debated the issues and carefully balanced the tensions between free expression and caring for the diverse communities that make up our University.”

istinguished Professor Sir Peter Hunter, who chaired the Senate working group and led the development of the statement with support from Professor Nikki Harré and the Vice-Chancellor’s Advisory Group on Freedom of Expression, says the process was shaped by robust feedback.

“In my view, the process of finding common ground between many different points of view has been as important as the statement itself. Universities must demonstrate the ability to freely debate contentious issues.

“I would like to thank the members of the groups involved and the near unanimous endorsement from Senate.”

And below is the official statement itself. Notice the critical neutrality phrase, “The University will not take public positions on matters that do not directly concern university roles, functions or duties.”  That’s very similar to the Kalven report. Further, the last sentence justifies institutional neutrality as a way to avoid chilling speech—exactly the same rational that the University of Chicago has.

I’ve also obtained a copy of the Senate’s minutes that resulted in this outcome, and here’s a brief excerpt:

The majority of Senate voted in favour of the motion with only a few votes against and abstentions recorded.

The motion was declared carried.

Professor Hunter expressed appreciation for the extensive work undertaken by the Working and Advisory Groups and all contributors throughout the consultation process. He observed that the process had demonstrated the value of constructive debate and the willingness of participants to listen and adapt their views. He acknowledged all involved in the process and specifically Professors Stinear and Clements and encouraged commitment to ongoing dialogue and improvement.

The Vice-Chancellor concluded by encouraging Senate to continue fostering an environment in which open and respectful debate could take place and the voice of academic excellence could be heard. She recommended that Senate would continue to provide leadership in this regard.

Note that Sir Peter Hunter, the head of the working group, thanks not only Professor Cathy Stinear for help, but also Kendall Clements, one of the demonized signers of the infamous “Listener Letter” arguing why indigenous “ways of knowing” are not the same as modern science.  I find it interesting and heartening that all three of these people are in STEM: Hunter is a bioengineer, Stinear a neuroscientist, and Clements is an evolutionary biologist and ichthyologist. And note that there was very little dissent about passing this.  I suspect, though I don’t know, that the administration of Auckland Uni had put this on the back burner for years.  I find it ironic as well that the Vice-Chancellor, Dawn Dishwater, now says she’s in favor of this policy when for years she has put roadblocks on freedom of speech. (Remember when she promised an open discussion of indigenous versus modern science and then it never took place?)

Now why is this important?  Because it codifies what the rules are in the country’s most notable university, and one hopes that other universities will follow suit. They will more or less have to in principle, and draft their own statements, but what happens in practice in New Zealand could be quite different.  The country and its universities are rife with intimidation and peer pressure, and, as I’ve written about repeatedly, there is a huge amount of self-censorship. Nobody dares criticize indigenous “knowledge” nor even arrant preferences given to indigenous people. If you criticize any of that, you’re likely to lose your job. This kind of pressure has turned the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi into a sacred document, in effect the Constitution of New Zealand, despite the fact that “Te Tiriti,” as it’s called, is both ambiguous and wasn’t even signed by all the indigenous leaders. The Treaty has been interpreted as saying that indigenous people get half of everything, including presence of indigenous “ways of knowing”—which include superstition, legends, morality, and rules for living)—in science classes

 

This intimidation is especially notable in New Zealand’s universities.  The hope of those who pushed this policy is that the University of Auckland will be a model for the country’s other schools. But the policies outlined above will face stiff opposition—opposition from an entrnched academic and ideological culture based on identity politics. Fingers crossed! At least it looks like a step forward.

FIRE’s new rankings of American universities and colleges: freedom of speech and expression is in trouble

September 9, 2025 • 9:30 am

At midnight last night, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released its annual rankings of American colleges and universities for how open they are to freedom of speech and expression.  Although I’m happy to report that the University of Chicago weighs in at #3 out of 257 schools ranked, the grade we got was only a C, reflecting the general overall decrease in freedom in American colleges over the last year. (The #1 school, Claremont McKenna College, got only a grade of B-.) The survey involved 68,510 students, and I think it should be taken seriously, for the better schools for expression fall near the top and the worst ones (e.g., Harvard, Barnard, and Columbia) are at the rock bottom.

You can see the introduction by clicking on the headline below, where you can look up any school that was surveyed.  Further, you can download the full 41-page report here and read about the survey methodology here. The pdf showing the survey methodology is here. I won’t go much into the methodology except to say that involves a combination of administrative censorship, self-censorship, how comfortable students are expressing views that are seen as controversial, official school speech and expression policies, willingness to tolerate views students find “offensive,” how much disruption of speech occurs, and, for the first time this year, whether schools adhere to the “Chicago Statement” of free expression and whether the colleges has adopted “institutional neutrality”: the refusal of a school to make official ideological, political, or moral pronouncements unless they directly affect the mission of the school. (Kudos to FIRE for including adherence to these two policies! They give big points to schools who adopt them.)

Oh, and you can check your own college by going to this site.

Here’s the report’s executive summary that I don’t want to repeat in my own words. As you see, several measures of freedom of expression have decreased, including acceptability of students to shouting down a speaker or preventing others from hearing a speaker, as well as the acceptability of using violence to stop a speech or letting their school invite speakers dealing with six controversial topics (three “conservative” topics and three “liberal” ones).

KEY FINDINGS: 

  1. Claremont McKenna College is this year’s top-ranked school, its second time earning the honor. Purdue University, the University of Chicago, Michigan Technological University, and the University of Colorado at Boulder round out the top five. 
  2. Barnard College is this year’s lowest-ranked school. Columbia University, Indiana University, the University of Washington, and Northeastern University round out the bottom five. 
  3. The average overall score (58.63) is a failing grade in a college course. Overall, 166 of the 257 schools surveyed got an F for their speech climate, while only 11 schools received a speech climate grade of C or higher. 
  4. Since 2020, CMC, Purdue, UChicago, Michigan Tech, CU Boulder, North Carolina State University, Florida State University, the University of Virginia, George Mason University, and Kansas State University have all consistently performed better than most of their peers.
  5. Vanderbilt University, Dartmouth College, and Yale University all improved significantly this year, ranking 7, 35, and 58 respectively. Harvard University, which was ranked last the previous two years, also improved to rank 245. 
  6. Over half of students (53%) say that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a difficult topic to “have an open and honest conversation about on campus.” On 21 of the campuses surveyed, at least 75% of students said this — including 90% of students at Barnard. 
  7. The percentage of students saying it is acceptable to shout down a speaker, block entry to a campus speech, or use violence to stop a campus speech all increased since last year and are at record highs. 
  8. For the first time ever, a majority of students oppose their school allowing any of the six controversial speakers they were asked about — three controversial conservative speakers and three controversial liberal ones. 

Here are the top ten schools in order from best to worst:

Claremont McKenna College
Purdue University
University of Chicago
Michigan Technological University
University of Colorado, Boulder
University of North Caroina, Greensboro
Vanderbilt University
Appalachian State University
Eastern Kentucky University
North Carolina State University

Note that Vanderbilt University rose 133 points, from #140 to #7.  A lot of this is due to its adopting institutional neutrality (only 33 schools have done so), and that has to be credited largely to its newish President, Daniel Diermeier, who was previously Provost at the University of Chicago. FIRE says this:

Much of Vanderbilt’s meteoric rise up the rankings from 140 last year to 7 overall this year can be attributed to its adoption of the Chicago Principles and a stance of institutional neutrality years ago, along with its more recent reform of its lone “yellow light” policy. Yet, these are not the only reasons for Vanderbilt’s improvement. This year, significantly more students at the university said that they can have an open and honest conversation about topics like abortion, climate change, freedom of speech, hate speech, religion, and transgender rights. On top of that, more students this year say this about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Willingness to discuss topics and not demonize speakers, as well as lack of self censorship, play a big role in these rankings. The University of Chicago rose two points: it was #5 last year.

Here are the bottom ten schools in order from worst to slightly better. Note that Harvard was at the bottom last year, ranked as “abysmal”, but it moved up a full 12 points to rank 245 out of 257, getting a grade of “F”:

Barnard College
Columbia University
Indiana University
University of Washington
Northeastern University
University of California, Davis
Boston College
New York University
Middlebury College
Loyola University Chicago

Barnard and Columbia are rated at the bottom because they did not handle free-speech violations well or consistently, and both schools suffered from having a dreadful climate for free speech. (I’ve written a bit over the past few years on the trouble on these campuses and the adherence of many students to Hamas and its policies, which cows other students from expressing themselves.)

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Williams College, where Luana teaches. It’s always been in the low middle of the rankings, and remains so this year, with a rank of 166 (out of 257). having dropped ten points since last year.  Here’s the FIRE assessment:

Williams College ranks 166 out of 257 schools in the 2026 College Free Speech Rankings, earning a score of 56 and an F speech climate grade. The college continues to operate under a “yellow light” Spotlight rating.

Student perceptions place Williams in the top 25 on “Disruptive Conduct,” signaling greater opposition to tactics that shut down speakers compared to other schools. The ranking for “Comfort Expressing Ideas” also improved enough to move out of last year’s bottom 50.

Williams could improve by revising its written speech policies to earn a “green light” Spotlight rating, adopting a free speech statement based on the Chicago Statement, and adopting an official commitment to institutional neutrality.

As far as I know, Williams refuses so far to adopt either policy. Its President has stated that while she herself favors free speech and will not makes statements that violate institutional neutrality, she will not push for official adoption of these statements by Williams.  That is very bizarre, and bespeaks an administration who follows but will not lead.

I’ll give a few bar graphs and plots (there are many more in the report) showing what I consider the most interesting data. First, a bar graph showing the decrease over the last year (across all schools) in students’ willingness to allow speakers on three conservative topics (left side) and three liberal topics (right side). Dark bars are from 2024, lighter ones from this last year. Notice that saying that trans people have a mental disorder and BLM is a hate group  are the views evoking the most pushback, though speakers saying that “children should be able to transition without parental consent”–a “liberal” stand–gets less pushback (higher bars mean more acceptance of speakers):

The plot below is the one that most disturbs me. It shows the rise in percentage of students who would accept illegal and antispeech tactics to stop speakers whose views they don’t like. Look at the number of students who tolerate shouting down a speaker (71%!), blocking other students from hearing a speech (54%), and even using violence to stop a speech (34%).  These have all risen 5-10% since 2021.  The high values are simply unacceptable to those who favor free speech.

The summary ends before the colleges are ranked, and FIRE says this about why schools are going downhill on the free-speech slope:

Harvard is far from alone. While it has earned a great deal of attention for its consistently low rankings, most of the 257 colleges and universities in this year’s report receive similarly poor grades when it comes to fostering a healthy climate for free expression. In fact, only 11 institutions score a C or higher, and many of the nation’s most prominent schools fall well below that mark. If Harvard’s modest gains are worth noting, they also underscore just how low the national baseline remains.

The 2026 rankings reveal a bleak picture: 166 of the 257 schools evaluated received an overall score below 60 — earning a failing grade for their campus speech climate. This group includes some of the nation’s most prestigious institutions: Brown University, Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, and both the University of California at Berkeley and in Los Angeles. Notably, UCLA also holds the distinction of being the lowest-ranked “green light” school this year.

Another 64 schools fall into the D range, with scores ranging from 60 to 69. Among them are several “green light” institutions — schools that earn top marks for their written speech policies, yet where the day-to-day climate for free expression remains flawed. This list includes Duke University, Emory University, Texas A&M University, the University of Florida, the University of Maryland, and Washington University in St Louis.

In short, even the so-called success stories struggle to meet a minimal basic standard. Only 11 schools earned a campus speech climate grade of C or higher. Their average score? A modest 75, and we give a golf clap to schools like Purdue University whose administration has long been a vocal proponent of free speech and, last year, adopted a policy of institutional neutrality, proclaiming that “it itself is not a critic.”

. . . These findings should continue to raise alarm. The topranked school for freedom of speech got a B-, the only time any school has even gotten above a C+. This means that the vast majority of American colleges and universities are failing to protect and foster free expression. In an era when open inquiry and dissent are more essential than ever, campus speech climates are not just unhealthy — they are in free fall.

Given this dire and worsening situation, what can we do if we’re members of a university?  There’s not much we can do at the moment to affect the views of students towards invited speakers or their willingness to speak their minds, but there are two things that would help: get your school to adopt Chicago’s Principles of Free Expression and also the doctrine of Institutional Neutrality, as expressed in our Kalven Report. Both of these policies are in place to ensure that students feel free to express their views without fear of reprisal from the university.

In the meantime, rah rah for Claremont McKenna and boo for Columbia, Barnard, and, of course, Harvard. (My undergraduate alma mater, The College of William and Mary, did pretty well in the rankings, coming in at number 33 but getting an overall an overall grade of D+.)

Harvard v. Trump: Harvard wins! (for now)

September 4, 2025 • 5:45 am

As you know, in April Harvard sued the government for taking away $2.2 billion dollars in research funding and fining the university $500 million dollars; this was Trump’s response to various infractions supposedly committed by the university, including creating a climate of antisemitism.  Trump et al. demanded a number of changes to the university, including an “overseer” to determine whether Harvard was complying with his demands.

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that the government had no business doing this. This ruling was more or less expected, but it will surely be litigated up to the Supreme Court. From the New York Times (archived here):

Harvard University won a crucial legal victory in its clash with the Trump administration on Wednesday, when a federal judge said that the government had broken the law by freezing billions of dollars in research funds in the name of stamping out antisemitism.

The ruling may not be the final word on the matter, but the decision by Judge Allison D. Burroughs of the U.S. District Court in Boston was an interim rebuff of the Trump administration’s campaign to remake elite higher education by force.

Harvard’s case centered on its research funding, and the university contended that the administration had compromised its First Amendment and due process rights when it sought to strip it away. The judge’s decision could give Harvard new leverage in its settlement talks with the White House.

Although the ruling was a milestone for Harvard, the only university to sue over the administration’s targeted assault on its research funding, President Trump had vowed to appeal any decision that went against him. His administration has spent months seeking to pressure Harvard in ways beyond research money, and while Judge Burroughs’s ruling may not put an end to that campaign, her opinion was a bracing rebuke.

“We must fight against antisemitism, but we equally need to protect our rights, including our right to free speech, and neither goal should nor needs to be sacrificed on the altar of the other,” Judge Burroughs wrote in an 84-page ruling. “Harvard is currently, even if belatedly, taking steps it needs to take to combat antisemitism and seems willing to do even more if need be.”

She added, “Now it is the job of the courts to similarly step up, to act to safeguard academic freedom and freedom of speech as required by the Constitution, and to ensure that important research is not improperly subjected to arbitrary and procedurally infirm grant terminations, even if doing so risks the wrath of a government committed to its agenda no matter the cost.”

As a part of the decision, Judge Burroughs said the Trump administration could not issue new blockades on Harvard’s federal research funding “in retaliation for the exercise of its First Amendment rights, or on any purported grounds of discrimination without compliance with the terms” of civil rights law.

. . . . The New York Times reported in July that the university was open to spending $500 million to resolve the matter, but that Harvard was seeking an array of provisions to protect its independence.

Although the university and the administration have continued to move toward a potential agreement, they have not reached a settlement. Mr. Trump, who has taken a special interest in the financial terms of pacts his administration has reached with universities, said last week that he wanted “nothing less than $500 million from Harvard.”

This is surely the right decision. Although Trump’s blackmail did partly motivate Harvard to act, I don’t think that freezing research funds of professors who had nothing to do with the charges is the ethical way to go. In the meantime, Harvard will continue to spend money litigating this affair, and will almost certainly some to some compromise understanding with the government.

You can see Judge Burroughs’s full ruling here.

As a Harvard alum, I get messages from the University, and here’s announcement from the President of Harvard:

I wonder what Garber will say if Harvard eventually comes to a settlement with the Trump administration.

The Atlantic: The decline of higher education

September 2, 2025 • 10:00 am

As time goes by, The Atlantic seems to be getting less and less woke and more and more sensible. Who would have guessed that it published an article not only highlighting the problems of higher education, but saying that perhaps Trump’s intervention has called these to our attention? At any rate, if you click on the title below, you’ll go to the archived version of the article written by E. Thomas Finan, author and professor of humanities at Boston University.

There’s not a lot new here beyond the well-known fact that all Americans (Republicans more than Democrats) are losing faith in colleges and universities, and we hear some familiar prescriptions, like stopping self-censorship. (A lot of this was already given in Steve Pinker’s Boston Globe article, “A five-point plan to save Harvard from itself,” an article fleshed out and expanded in the new anthology edited by Lawrence Krauss.

First, the unpleasant facts:

The Trump administration and its allies are upending American higher education: freezing funding, launching investigations, ratcheting up taxes, and threatening to do much more. Not so long ago this would have been political poison. But in the last decade, Americans’ faith in colleges and universities has plummeted. In 2015, 57 percent had either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to Gallup. As of last year, that group had shrunk to 36 percent, only a few points larger than the share who have “very little” confidence or none at all.

Universities should see the White House’s campaign as a wake-up call rather than the root of their troubles—a warning that they have to rebuild trust among not just prospective students, parents, and donors, but also voters and elected officials across party lines. America’s higher education has always depended to some degree on the patronage of its elected leaders, an arrangement that has often been a civic boon, encouraging schools to respond to public needs and serve the common good. Today, universities have to prove that they can uphold their end of the deal.

. . . .Today, the American university system continues to receive massive amounts of public funding, Trump’s cuts notwithstanding. According to the Urban Center, state and local governments spent $311 billion on higher education in 2021. The federal government spent almost $60 billion on research at colleges and universities in 2023, and the Federal Student Aid office spends an estimated $120 billion each year to fund work-study programs, grants, and loans for postsecondary education.

These commitments are the result of a long-held democratic consensus that promoting higher education pays off for the whole country. Now that consensus is fracturing, on both sides of the political spectrum. In 2015, Gallup found that a majority of Republicans had high confidence in America’s universities; by 2024, a majority of Republicans had almost none. Some on the left blame this loss of faith on the GOP’s supposed anti-intellectualism. At best, that’s a comforting illusion for the academy: The same polls also revealed slipping trust among Democrats and independents. This year, polling does show a slight rebound in public support for universities, perhaps in response to the Trump administration’s interventions. The overall trajectory, though, remains negative.

Universities can begin to assuage this skepticism by committing to addressing America’s biggest problems, starting with polarization. American colleges must become a venue for the frank but charitable exchange of ideas. College is not simply a debating society, yet many schools risk stifling dialogue, even if unintentionally. A recent study of University of Michigan and Northwestern University students by the psychology researchers Kevin Waldman and Forest Romm found that 72 percent reported self-censoring their political beliefs. Perhaps more troubling, 82 percent had turned in work that misrepresented their beliefs “to align with a professor’s expectations.” Such pervasive self-censorship not only undercuts universities’ academic mission—it also validates the widespread suspicion that campuses replicate bias instead of challenging it.

Here’s the Gallup Poll giving those results, and note that the “rise” is over only one year. Instead, note the overall fall from nearly 60% to less than 40% in those having a lot of confidence in higher education. And this between 2015 and 2024!. The phenomenon of self-censorship is also well known.

And here are the remedies (bold headings are mine; quotes from the Atlantic article are indented):

Institutionalize free speech:

American colleges must become a venue for the frank but charitable exchange of ideas. College is not simply a debating society, yet many schools risk stifling dialogue, even if unintentionally. A recent study of University of Michigan and Northwestern University students by the psychology researchers Kevin Waldman and Forest Romm found that 72 percent reported self-censoring their political beliefs. Perhaps more troubling, 82 percent had turned in work that misrepresented their beliefs “to align with a professor’s expectations.” Such pervasive self-censorship not only undercuts universities’ academic mission—it also validates the widespread suspicion that campuses replicate bias instead of challenging it.

Enforce institutional neutrality:

Colleges and universities should also consider remaining neutral on more political issues: Constant interventions can sap the academy’s credibility and make students who take opposing views feel unwelcome.

This was a major point of Pinker’s article, and it shouldn’t be “considered,” it should immediately be adopted. Yet far fewer colleges have adopted institutional neutrality (embodied in Chicago’s Kalven Report) than have adopted free-speech policies. Universities and departments just can’t seem to be able to pass judgement on political and ideological issues, as they’re determined to parade their virtue at the expense of chilling free speech. Only 33 universities, in fact, have adopted a version of Kalven, while 113 or more have adopted free speech.

More “heterodox” universities:

A promising set of entrants could help the academic sector branch out. For instance, the new University of Austin has enshrined diversity of thought and open debate as its founding principles. Elsewhere, state legislatures have recently established schools—such as the Hamilton School at the University of Florida and the School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina—that prioritize civics, intellectual pluralism, and the American political tradition. The Florida legislation that established the Hamilton School included a charge to educate students “in core texts and great debates of Western civilization,” recognizing the role that shared cultural knowledge plays in creating an informed citizenship. To live up to their stated ideals, these institutions will have to resist the temptations of tribalism. If they’re successful, they can help counter allegations that American higher education is an ideological monolith.

I’m reserving judgement on this suggestion. What I’ve heard, at least about the University of Austin, is that it’s seems designed to promulgate “antiwoke” views, which of course gives it an ideological leaning—just in the opposite direction. But I admit that I know little about these schools.

Confront AI, using it for educational benefit:

To demonstrate their value to the public, universities also need to confront the rapid technological changes of recent years, particularly the rise of artificial intelligence. The digital revolution has great promise, but it risks fragmenting our attention, replacing human interaction with digital stimulation, and numbing introspection. Recent studies by researchers at MIT and Microsoft suggest that prolonged use of AI can potentially dull a person’s critical-thinking skills.

But schools need to ensure that students are doing their own thinking, rather than relying on the polished vacuity of chatbots. That might mean incorporating more in-class writing and exams, prioritizing small seminars over lectures, or experimenting with a wider variety of assignments. In the courses I teach at Boston University, I recently began having my students memorize poetry and recite it in front of the class—an exercise that I know ChatGPT can’t do for them, and that helped them develop a better understanding of the texts.

I really haven’t seen any positive use of AI for undergraduate education; it seems to be used mostly for either cheating or avoiding doing academic legwork, Although it seems to be of immense value in professional (post-school) venues, all the suggestions above are simply ways to curb cheating, not using AI for educational benefit. Which leads us to the last suggestion:

.A general education that includes the humanities will give students skills with greater longevity.

We all know that humanities, as part of a good liberal education, is circling the drain. This is a great pity, and may derive simply from students thinking (probably correctly) that a degree in English Literature or Art History won’t help them get a job.  And that is the unfortunate result of colleges becoming “degree mills to help you get jobs” instead of places to spark intellectual curiosity and learning.

While the article briefly mentions the promulgation of viewpoint diversity, this diversity, for reasons I’ve mentioned before, is hard to create without discriminating against faculty and prospective students.  One way to do it would be for woke humanities departments to stop hiring faculty that agree with all the other faculty.  But they won’t, and this has plagued my own university.

Notably, the Atlantic doesn’t mention Pinker’s recommendation for “disempowering DEI”, especially because DEI is a major reason why Americans are losing respect for their colleges and universities. It creates uniformity of opinion, not diversity, demotes merit in its drive for equity, and is certainly not inclusive for many, like Asians and Jews.

h/t: Mike

The problems of grade inflation

August 31, 2025 • 9:30 am

In my view, colleges and universities in America face two existential threats. The first is AI, which can destroy the ability of students to do homework, write essays, and learn to write. In many places it’s facilitated cheating, even during in-class assignments.  If AI expands, it will destroy one of the main purposes of higher education: to teach students (and also spark a lifelong love of learning).

The second threat is the subject of this new article in The Atlantic: grade inflation. In many elite schools, the average GPA of students is near perfect, which is 4.0 (“straight As”).  Here’s Harvard, for example, as portrayed in the article (click it to read an archived version):

During their final meeting of the spring 2024 semester, after an academic year marked by controversies, infighting, and the defenestration of the university president, Harvard’s faculty burst out laughing. As was tradition, the then-dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, had been providing updates on the graduating class. When he got to GPA, Khurana couldn’t help but chuckle at how ludicrously high it was: about 3.8 on average. The rest of the room soon joined in, according to a professor present at the meeting.

They were cracking up not simply because grades had gotten so high but because they knew just how little students were doing to earn them.

. . . . The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker told me that, 20 years ago, he gave a quarter of the students in his intro psych course an A or A–. Then students stopped signing up. Now almost two-thirds of the class are in the A range.

Grade inflation, in turn, destroys education in three ways: the students don’t know how they stand in relation to their peers, and it makes it harder for those going beyond college—say, to grad school or a job—to evaluate students’ performance.   Finally, and counterintuitively, it makes the students more stressed out, for reasons described below.

There are ways around this, like giving the median GPA of a course or an overall class on the grade report. Alternatively, schools could put a cap on the number of As they give out  But these fixes haven’t worked very well. For one thing, putting median grades on transcripts or limiting the number of As lets the students know which courses are the easiest, and the harder courses tend to lose students.

Fixing grade inflation, however, is easier said than done. Princeton, for example, experimented with an informal 35 percent cap on the share of A’s that professors were expected to give out. It abandoned the effort after a 2014 faculty report found, among other things, that the policy made it harder to recruit students, particularly student athletes. Beginning in 1998, Cornell began including courses’ median grades on student transcripts. Far from mitigating grade inflation, the practice only made the problem worse by giving students extra insight into which classes were the easiest. Last year, the faculty senate voted to end the policy.

Read more about the issues by clicking below:

Why has this happened. Well, college has, over the years, become not an educational institution but a degree mill: a commercial operation to certify students to get good jobs and make good money.  This “consumer culture” puts enormous pressure on students to wheedle good grades however they can, and, more important, on professors to make their courses more popular by making them easier.

Further, as the article notes, competition for access to elite universities has intensified, so the entering class is simply better qualified. Even if grading standards remained the same, the average GPA will go up. (There is of course, a ceiling at 4.0, which argues for a non-numerical way of evaluating students.

And as students’ emotional well being declines due to the therapy culture described by Abigail Shrier, faculty attend to this by raising grades. As the article argues:

At the same time, professors were coming under more pressure to tend to their students’ emotional well-being, Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, told me. They received near-constant reminders that Harvard was admitting more students with disabilities, who’d matriculated from under-resourced schools, or who had mental-health issues. Instructors took the message as an exhortation to lower expectations and raise grades.

And the pandemic increased student anxiety even more, leading to–you guessed it–higher grades:

The pandemic only made matters worse. In 2011, 60 percent of all grades at Harvard were in the A range (up from 33 percent in 1985). By the 2020–21 academic year, that share had risen to 79 percent. Students were more anxious than ever, so professors further eroded norms to help them.

The reason higher grades have only increased student stress is because grades don’t matter that much any longer, and students hunger for a way to distinguish themselves from their peers. As the article describes, a “shadow system of distinction” has arisen in elite schools, whereby extramural groups form that deal with stuff like finance and consulting, and the standards for getting into these clubs (which of course count as useful extramural activities after college) are often as rigorous as those for getting into elite schools.  This leads the students to further neglect their coursework, which doesn’t matter because you’ll do well no matter what, and put their effort into these “clubs.”

The whole purpose of a liberal-arts education has gone down the tubes:

Claybaugh assured me that Harvard is committed to bringing about a lasting culture change around learning. She thinks of the change as a matter of fairness. Harvard students have access to a trove of intellectual treasures and the chance to commune with many of the greatest living minds. “If we have the world’s biggest university library, then our students should be reading these books,” Claybaugh told me. “And if the students we’re admitting don’t want to read those books, or if we have set up an incentive structure that dissuades them from reading these books, then that is immoral, and we need to reincentivize them to do so.”

So what to do?  Individual professors capping the percentage of As in their classes will accomplish nothing, for that will just reduce the enrollment in their classes. If there is to be a solution like this, everyone has to agree to participate (and that might lead to an academic “tragedy of the commons“).

Nevertheless, Harvard is going to try by taking action on several fronts:

Now that they know that making college easier doesn’t reduce stress, Harvard administrators are attempting to rediscover a morsel of lost wisdom from the ancient past: School should be about academics. In March, the faculty amended the student handbook to emphasize the highly novel point that students should prioritize their schoolwork. The university has advised professors to set attendance policies and make clear that students, contrary to their intuition, are expected to come to class. And it formed a new committee to consider how to rein in runaway grade inflation. The committee is considering proposals such as switching from letter grades to a numerical scale (to get rid of students’ frame of reference) or reporting grades as the difference between what a student earned and the course median. In the meantime, Claybaugh has asked each department to standardize and toughen its grading policies. Faculty will need to move collectively so no one gets singled out as a harsh grader.

Attendance policies? How do you enforce that in a class of several hundred students, like the one Pinker teaches? Card-swiping at the door? That could fail for obvious reasons?  And it doesn’t help that many professors record their classes so you don’t even have to be there (I think you should in case you have questions.) I’m not sure how to “reign in grade inflation” unless every professor in a university agrees to cap the number of As (or Bs).  But nobody is going to sign onto that, and it seems a bit unfair: what if a class is full of high achievers, but not all of them are eligible for As?

I’m not sure that, given the Zeitgeist, there is any solution.  Colleges becoming certification factories seems to me an unstoppable process. Luana thinks that this, combined with AI, spells the death of American liberal-arts education. I refuse to believe it, mainly because when I went to college (1967-1971) there was no AI, you had to work for your grades (sometimes there was a set cutoff system, e.g. 90-100 = A, 80-90 = B and so on), and, most of all, the school was not a research school. Teachers were deeply dedicated to teaching, and had the time to do so, as well as to chat with their students.  Do such schools even exist any more? I don’t know, but I’m glad of one thing: I’m retired and don’t have to buy into the whole AI/grade-inflation mishigass.