Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Starting with the recent accusations of gang rape against 7 denizens of a fraternity at Cornell University, Bill Maher’s latest real-time episode takes out after the Greek houses, including sororities. (Maher went to Cornell, with a double major in literature and history). I agree with Maher: when I went to William & Mary, I participated in fraternity rush, but gave up after visiting two houses and seeing the “brothers” making cryptic notes on the freshmen. I’d prefer to find brothers using my own criteria rather than theirs, and many of the friends I made, most not in fraternities, are still friends today.
While he doesn’t conclude anything about whether there was a rape or not, but he does think that fraternities, with their hazing, drinking, and rowdiness, don’t conform to their mission to produce “gentlemen.” I’ve never heard of the “elephant walk” he describes as a bonding event. but Grok (below) affirms that it has been a real thing.
The guests you see on the panel are U.S. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Sara Eisen(financial reporter for CNBC).
The “elephant walk” described by Grok (my quesiton in bold). I’ve left out the links.
Do fraternities really practice the “elephant walk”?
Yes, some fraternities have practiced the “elephant walk” as a hazing ritual, though it is not universal, is often illegal, and has become less common (or more underground) due to bans, lawsuits, and scrutiny.
The ritual typically involves pledges (new members) forming a single-file line or circle, frequently while nude or partially clothed. Each person holds the genitals of the person in front of or behind them and walks together. Variations include inserting a thumb into the anus of the person ahead (sometimes with a rule that if it slips out, the thumb goes in the mouth). The posture is said to resemble elephants linked trunk-to-tail. It is framed by participants as a bonding or loyalty test through shared humiliation.
Documentation and evidence
It is treated as a known practice in academic work. Folklorists Alan Dundes and Lauren Dundes analyzed it in their 2002 essay “The Elephant Walk and Other Amazing Hazing: Male Fraternity Initiation through Infantilization and Feminization,” placing it in the broader context of humiliating initiation rites.
Dictionaries and references record the slang meaning explicitly (e.g., Wiktionary).
News coverage has referenced it as an established form of hazing. A prominent 2019 case involved Sacramento State’s Delta Chi chapter: an anonymous tip with a photo of a “simulation” (clothed men holding objects) triggered an investigation. Participants described it as an educational skit about hazing rather than the real thing; the university treated the allegation seriously amid other Greek life issues. Other reports and student accounts mention similar incidents or rumors at various schools.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has issued its yearly free-speech rankings of American colleges and universities, and I’m happy to say that, after a few years of hovering below the top rank, the University of Chicago is back at #1 among the 261 schools surveyed. We get an overall “green light” for free expression. The bad news is that the “grade” assigned to my school is a paltry “B-“. (No school got an “A”.) When I asked Grok why we got such a low grade, the bot said this:
FIRE’s composite score combines student survey responses (~63,000 students), written policies, and how schools handle controversies. Student perceptions of the climate carry heavy weight, which makes an A extremely difficult.
The drag [our B- grade] comes from student attitudes and culture, which FIRE measures in components such as self-censorship, comfort expressing ideas, disruptive conduct, and political tolerance. Even at the top school these remain well short of an ideal:
35% of Chicago students said they self-censored at least once or twice a month.
72% said shouting down a speaker is acceptable at least in rare cases.
29% said using violence to stop a speaker is acceptable at least in rare cases.
“Disruptive Conduct” is a relative weak spot (mid-pack nationally).
Absolute letter grades on several student-perception components are modest (D+ on comfort expressing ideas and self-censorship) even when the school ranks well relative to peers.
Nationwide, students report difficulty discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, and abortion. FIRE treats the overall student climate as the main limiter: excellent policies and a clean controversy record cannot produce an A when a large share of students still self-censor or condone disruption. Chicago’s administration and formal commitments outperform almost every peer, but the survey data on student culture keeps the composite score in B- territory.
Those statistics on Chicago bespeak a country-wide problem. Shouting down a speaker or using violence to stop a speaker are never acceptable practices, and are inimical to free speech. Yet 72% of our students thought that shouting-down is okay, and 29% said that violence to stop speech can sometimes be okay. Both of those figures should be o%
You can read the whole article with links to specific schools, their ratings, and FIRE’s written summaries, by clicking on the link below:
The searchable database is here. You’ll want to look up your school. As for my college and graduate schools, William & Mary gets a respectable rank of #28 and Harvard ranks #74, up a hundreds points for its score last year when it was rock bottom, the worst school in the lot.
The best and worst schools:
The highest-ranked colleges for free speech:
1. University of Chicago 2. Claremont McKenna College 3. Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus 4. Michigan Technological University 5. Vanderbilt University 6. Dartmouth College 7. Purdue University-Main Campus 8. Appalachian State University 9. University of Virginia-Main Campus 10. George Mason University
The lowest-ranked colleges for free speech:
252. Howard University 253. University of Miami 254. Loyola University Chicago 255. Boston College 256. Indiana University-Bloomington 257. Rutgers University-New Brunswick 258. Northeastern University 259. Texas State University 260. University of Washington-Seattle Campus 261. New York University
From their announcement:
The University of Chicago takes the top spot, while Texas State University, the University of Washington, and New York University sit at the bottom
Most difficult topics for students to discuss on campus include the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, and abortion
Some schools fall in rankings following Charlie Kirk-related controversies
121 of the 261 schools ranked got an “F” for their speech climate
Here is some more information from FIRE:
One hundred and twenty-one of the 261 schools ranked got an F for their speech climate, while only 24 schools received a speech climate grade of C or higher. The lowest-rated schools have restrictive speech policies and some of last year’s most shocking anti-free speech moments. Several incidents cited in the report include:
The terminations of Thomas Alter, a tenured professor of history, and Idris Robinson, a professor of philosophy by Texas State University, for off-campus protected expression.
Multiple disruptions, attempted disruptions, and event cancellations — six in totalsince 2024— at the University of Washington.
The cancellation of a planned lecture by Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and genocide scholar, after the Northeastern University Police Department demanded a list of names of all the registered attendees.
. . . Encouragingly, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s seventh annual College Free Speech Rankings found the percentage of students who said it was acceptable to shout down a speaker, block entry to a campus speech, or use violence to stop a campus speech declined slightly from last year’s record highs.
Here’s the graph, over the last seven years, of the percentage of students who think it’s okay to impede or stop speakers they don’t like. It’s pretty depressing, as all three forms of impediment are unwarranted if you favor freedom of speech. And they’ve all gone over this period, with the okaying of violence rising nearly ten points: from 18% to 30% nationwide.
Self-censorship is also way too high, but of course students are timorous, so I’m less likely to criticize a monthly rate of 35% self-censoring than I am to criticize any approval of blocking, shouting down, or using violence against speakers. But remember, the same factors that make students think it’s okay to impede speakers are the factors that make students reluctant to express opinions on difficult topics.
It is the chilling of student and University speech that prompted the University of Chicago to become the nation’s first school to make a policy of institutional neutrality—as embodied in our Kalven Report of 1967. The number has grown a lot recently, and now 50 schools follow a version of the Kalven principle. Since there are 5600 higher-education schools in the U.S., however, that is only 1% of all schools. And among the Kalvenists you won’t find Williams College, whose President refuses to adopt a policy of institutional neutrality, something I’m always harassing Luana about.
Daniel Diermeier, previously the Provost of the University of Chicago, moved to Vanderbilt University in 2020 where he became the Chancellor (i.e., the Boss). I wish he’d stayed here, for he might have become President after Bob Zimmer died, and I admire a lot about Diermeier. For example, he has no truck with coddling protestors or allowing violations of campus regulations: he had illegal “sit-in” protestors arrested at Vanderbilt, something that the University of Chicago never did and never would do.
And he’s been controversial, most recently for commissioning a group report on the “State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” which called out these fields for the erosion of scholarship promoted by ideology (see my post here). Humanities scholars went wild in response, many denying that there was such erosion or, even if politics invaded the humanities, it was what was desirable. Anthropology took the biggest hit: here’s a sentence from the report:
In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.
Them’s strong words, and woke anthropologists like Agustín”Sex Is a Spectrum” Fuentes got their knickers in a twist. Note that Diermeier was not among the ten authors of the report, but he did commission it and presumably helped suggest the authors, and for sure he agrees with most of the report’s conclusions. And yes, ideological erosion of scholarship is a danger, not just in the humanities but also STEM fields.
One of Diermeier’s biggest projects has been the promotion of ideological neutrality in universities, i.e., the principle that universities should not take stands on moral, political, or ideological issues unless those issues involve the very mission of the university (scholarship, teaching, etc.). The University of Chicago was the very first university to adopt ideological neutrality, now embodied in our Kalven Report that was created in 1967. As Provost at Chicago, one of Diermeier’s responsibilities was ensuring that Kalven remained intact, and since then he’s both talked and written about the importance of ideological neutrality. I won’t repeat the rationale here, as you can see it at the preceding link, and Diermeier has both talked and written about it.
Below is a recent 2.5-minute interview Dieremeier did with Fox News (of course). Although the report and Diermeier claim that more than 150 universities have adopted institutional neutrality, I’m not sure where that figure comes from. The FIRE list of colleges that have adopted institutional neutrality lists but 50 schools (the list is growing rapidly), but there’s a Heterodox Academy (HxA) report that lists about 150 schools. Some schools on the HxA report, like Reed College, do not appear in the FIRE report, and I’m wondering if there are different standards used by HxA and FIRE
Regardless, it’s true that institutional neutrality—something anathema to the woke, many of whom demand that colleges and universities take stands—is spreading. I remember not too long ago when FIRE had only about a dozen schools on the list.
But I think the case for institutional neutrality is virtually unassailable, for it is a way of ensuring that the university community can speak freely without fear of retribution from bucking an “official” university position. This holds University-wide at Chicago, and also for departments, schools, subunits, and so on—even for the University’s Lab Schools that run from kindergarten through grade 12. (The Lab Schools are a perennial problem, as the teachers and administrators have often insisted on taking political positions and have to be repeatedly reminded that they’re violating University policy in so doing (the Lab Schools are considered part of the University).
Is it a surprise that students are using AI to cheat when they get the opportunity? I guess it does surprise some people, for a pretty clear case of cheating at Brown University made headlines at Inside Higher Ed (click on the screenshot to read).
Excerpts:
For the first time since he started teaching Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory nearly two decades ago, Brown University economics professor Roberto Serrano gave his students a take-home midterm this spring. Quite a few students had expressed anxiety about being in a classroom after a gunman killed two students and injured nine in a December mass shooting at Brown, and so “it was appropriate,” he said, to allow students to take their exams at home.
But by the end of the semester, Serrano regretted the decision. Dozens of students in the class likely used artificial intelligence to cheat and earn perfect or near-perfect scores on their midterm, he said. Serrano in turn made the final exam in-person, which led more than a dozen students to drop the course and even more to fail it. Administrators’ response to the widespread cheating event has been “meek,” he said, and the incident has raised questions about how universities can—and should—respond to AI-enabled cheating at scale.
His welfare economics class typically attracted up to 30 students, but this spring he taught 86—an increase he attributes to the promised take-home exams. When the midterm came along, the average score was 96 percent.
“Historically the average grade in the midterm of this course has ranged between 65 and 80 [percent], and this exam was harder than the exams I wrote in the past, because … take-home is an opportunity to challenge the class a little bit more, given that you’re giving the students unlimited time,” Serrano said.
He knew something “fishy” was going on, and so he and his graders ran the test through ChatGPT. The AI gave answers that mirrored what his students had written, and which were “kind of correct, but very off and with a very convoluted style,” Serrano said. For example, one question asked students to prove a mathematical statement that could most obviously be done using a “direct argument,” Serrano explained. ChatGPT—and many of his students—used a “contradiction argument,” which gave the right answer but was “very contrived” and which Serrano could tell wasn’t written by a human.
Prof Serrano said he wasn’t going to fail students for cheating (the allegation can’t be proved) but would give them a final exam in class. At that announcement 18 students dropped the course and 9 decided not to take the final.
Here’s the distribution of scores for both exams, with the final in gray and the midterms in orange. They didn’t plot a correlation, but there doesn’t appear to be one because many of the students who did terrible on the final got nearly perfect scores on the midterm:
The University turned a blind eye to this cheating—for that’s what it surely is—until Serrano went public.
In May, Serrano submitted the data shown above to Brown’s Standing Committee on the Academic Code and received no response. After he went public with his story in late June, the committee, through his department chair, asked Serrano to submit individual complaints against each student suspected of cheating, including copies of their exams, he said.
Most people with a sense of right and wrong would find this behavior unethical, tempting though it may be to cheat, but some misguided profs think that, well, if the chance to cheat is there, there’s nothing wrong with taking it. Here’s from P.Z. Myers, who found the same results with his students.
I figured this out back during the pandemic, when by necessity I had to offer exams online. Scores shot up! I knew immediately what was going on, but I didn’t punish the students — I couldn’t blame them for taking advantage of the system.
“I couldn’t blame them for taking advantage of the system”?? That’s equivalent to telling the students, “It’s okay to cheat if you can get away with it.”
More:
Asked about the university’s response to the cheating, Brown spokesperson Brian Clark told Inside Higher Ed that the procedure for investigating cheating allegations is the same whether it’s one student or several.
“Brown treats every allegation of academic integrity with the utmost seriousness. In regard to this economics course, multiple academic leaders from Brown were in touch with the faculty member who raised concerns to provide details about how the allegations raised could be formally adjudicated. To date, the faculty member has not provided the necessary details to the Standing Committee on the Academic Code to pursue this path toward resolution,” Clark wrote.
If Brown took it seriously, why didn’t they respond to Serrano’s original complaint? Now Brown is adjusting its rules—to be easier on the students! My bolding:
As the cheating scandal unfolded in Serrano’s classroom, a Brown committee on generative AI in teaching and learning was examining how the technology was being used at the university and formalizing recommendations for how Brown can adapt and respond to AI developments. Its inaugural report was published Tuesday.
Three-quarters of Brown professors said they are concerned about students using AI to cheat, according to feedback from 105 faculty members. The same share of respondents said the same in a 2025 nationwide survey from the American Association of Colleges and Universities. As part of a set of medium-term recommendations, the committee encouraged the university to amend the College Academic Code and the graduate student code “to address GenAI realities and safeguard against misuse.”
The committee also suggests that faculty “de-emphasize punishment” and avoid highly restrictive rules around generative AI use.
There is no way to check with 100 percent accuracy whether GenAI has been employed, and norms are likely to change in the years to come,” the report states. “Moving the conversation beyond punishment also allows for open dialogue that will be necessary as Brown navigates this moment.
What is motivating this softness on cheaters, which includes relaxing bans on using AI? I can see this only as a misguided extension of the victim/oppressor narrative, with the students seen as victims. Alternatively, it could be the new mentality that sees students as customers of the university, with their high tuition buying them good grades and a degree. ChatGPT, which launched at the end of 2022, was the first program that made AI cheating widely available, and the oppressor/victim dichotomy was intensified by the killing of Geore Gloye in 202.
The problem of course is that how can you prove that a student used AI unless more than one student gives the same answer. I know there are programs to detect whether AI was used, but I also hear they’re not that good.
The only solution is to not let students have take-home exams, and ensure that in class they cannot have their laptops or phones open, or surrending them before you take the test. (I am told by one professor that students got around this by bringing two phones and then cheating on the second phone when they ask to go to the bathroom).
It would be harder to cheat in labs, for you have to actually do something like run experiments or synthesize an organic compound. I remember that in O-chem (the bane of all biology students) we had to extract caffeine from coffee, and then you were tested when the prof looked at the melting point of your caffeine when it was tested in a glass tube. That would be hard to fake with AI, though I suppose you could purchase caffeine. But if professors want to ensure that students don’t cheat, they’ll have to be creative. Recent surveys show that over 60% of college students admitted to cheating in some way, and that goes up to 95% if you consider high school.
****
Here’s a tweet lauding the highest achiever and two students who apparently didn’t cheat as their midterm scores weren’t that different from their final-exam score.
Friends don’t let friends continue to give exams and papers that are not adapted to the current AI landscape (this is AFTER 27 bailed so the reality is even worse)
I’m proffering you a must-watch video, at least if you’re interested in the rise and fall of American academia.
Vanderbilt University, with its emphasis on free speech, academic freedom, and institutional neutrality, is rapidly becoming the University of Chicago of the South—or should I say that The University of Chicago is the Vanderbilt of the North? For Vanderbilt has been transformed since hiring the University of Chicago’s previous Provost, Daniel Diermeier, as its Chancellor (i.e., President). Diermeier is implementing the Chicago Principles in a big way at Vanderbilt. In fact, he’s doing better than Chicago. For example, when pro-Palestinian protestors illegally occupied a university building in Vanderbilt in 2024, the protestors were removed after 22 hours, with some students arrested and others suspended.
In contrast, when this happened four times at Chicago (i.e., violations of University rules during anti-Israel demonstrations), nothing happened to the students. Some of them, and lik-minded faculty, were arrested after a sit-in in our Admissions Office, but all charges were dropped. Bachelor’s degrees with temporarily withheld here from a few later protestors, but then the degrees were granted soon thereafter. At Chicago, violations of university rules during protests—invariably pro-Palestinian protests—are met with no punishment, which of course simply encourages further rules violations. When inquiring about this laxity, I was told that it would be the worst possible optics if the University police were seen to “lay hands on protestors.”
So here’s a one-hour talk by Chancellor Diermeier at the Heterodox Academy meeting at UC Berkeley (he’s introduced by the UCB Chancellor). The Youtube notes are below.
Centered on the theme “The Value of Viewpoint Diversity: Why It Matters and How to Practice It Well”, this conference offers actionable insights, fosters rich intellectual exchange, and brings together individuals from across the region who are invested in the future of higher education.
Notice that Diermeier speaks without notes, yet the speech is well constructed and logical. Kudos to him. At the beginning he outlines three areas of inquiry, which I’ve put in bold. I’ve also added comments.
Progress
Diermeier argues that there has been progress in free expression of universities: there is now less shouting down of speakers—something he attributes largely to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). To see if he’s right, you can check FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database. So far, there have been 98 deplatformings or attempted deplatformings in 2026, and the year isn’t half over. I’m not sure that this isn’t an increase rather than a decrease over previous years. You can count them if you wish.
Diermeier is also glad that institutional neutrality is spreading rapidly: more than 140 schools, he says, have adopted some kind of position of being institutionally neutral—that is, taking no official position on political, moral, or ideological issues unless they have a direct influence on the stated mission of a university. I was dubious of this figure, but he’s right. Here’s a chart from an article in Free the Inquiry showing the remarkable rise in U.S. and Canadian universities adopting institutional neutrality. Look at the big jump starting in 2024!
And there’s also been some improvements in the UK as reported by Times Higher Education: click to read (h/t Jez):
Finally, Diermeier states that the intrusive and ideologically extreme versions of DEI are becoming less powerful in universities. Here he’s right, too, though that may disappear after Trump goes. Extreme forms of DEI will certainly return if we get a Democratic President—one of the bad side effects of Democrats, especially “progressive” Democrats, gain power.
Principle is the second area of Diermeier’s talk. His topic is the answer to the question, “What is the purpose of a univesity?” And here he has no doubts, for the purpose is to produce “pathbreaking research and transformative education”—production of knowledge and conveying this knowledge to society via publications or other scholarly outlets.
He goes on to discuss the importance of free speech and emphasizes that it’s not the same thing as academic freedom, a point I’ve made repeatedly. As a private citizen I am free to espouse creationism as much as I want, but I am not free to teach creationism—or other palpable falsehoods—in my biology classes. You can’t say anything you want as a professor teaching classes.
Diermeier takes up the issue of the meeting: “viewpoint diversity”, which many people think is the real kind of diversity that universities should strive for. But he notes that although viewpoint diversity is a worthy goal if it’s meant to buttressfree speech, he’s not clear about what the term really means. Diermeier notes that viewpoint diversity as a desideratum is really the byproduct of a more important goal: preventing the erosion of scholarly standards by political or ideological principles. If that erosion is taking place, as it is in many areas (science is somewhat of an exception, but, as Luana and I showed, the erosion is even affecting biology), then it enforces a conformity that stifles free speech and academic freedom. Thus, if you prevent that kind of erosion and its chilling effect on speech, viewpoint diversity should automatically inrease.
Diermeier then gives several examples of the kind of symptoms we see when academic fields are afflicted with ideological erosion. The symptoms are “citation justice,” “positionality statements,” and “avoidance of trans issues” (he means the fear of academics to even discuss trans issues). I’ve never heard a college president be so open in opposing these trends, but he’s right.
Politics is Diermeier’s third topic, and this is where he suggests remedies. He notes that ideology isn’t pervasive in academia, guessing that about 85% of faculty are committed to doing their academic mission—investigating the areas of interest to them, like me working on speciation in fruit flies. But, he says, the other 15% “have political commitments that they consider essential to who they are as scholars.:” Examples of these people, in my view, are Chicago professors like Alireza Doostdar and Eman Abdelhadi, pro-Palestinian scholars who are always spouting off or demonstrating against Israel. Abdelhadi is reported as saying this:
Abdelhadi. . . . described the University [of Chicago] as “evil” and “a colonial landlord” in her remarks, which centered on the topic of political organizing in one’s community.
“Why would I organize here? I don’t care about this institution. Like I don’t—like fuck the University of Chicago, it’s evil. Like, you know? It’s a colonial landlord. Like, why would I put any of my political energy into this space,” Abdelhadi said at the conference. “And I kind of had a moment of disdain for people who spent a lot of time doing that.”
“The genocide really collapsed that and made me realize two things,” she continued. “One is that, well, my students need me. So, it was like: ‘Oh, I actually have to organize here to take care of my students, who I do care about.’ But I also realized—and I think this is a painful lesson that a lot of us in the Palestine solidarity movement have been learning—is that we don’t have power.”
Despite her criticisms of the University’s role as a “landlord, a healthcare provider, [and] a police force,” she described UChicago as “a place where [she has] access to thousands of people that [she] could potentially organize” politically.
In other words, damn the scholarship; she is here to ideologically convert “thousands of students.” This is what Diermeier means by the “other 15%.” He adds that people with such an agenda are mostly on the Left, and yes, that is also correct.
How do we fix this? In the Q&A session beginning 44 minutes in, this is precisely the question that Abby Thompson of UC Davis asks Diermeier, and his answer isn’t completely satisfying: he says that the faculty must organize and stand together against this kind of ideological erosion. My response is that that’s way easier said than done.
But I’ve gone on too long, and my summary is no substitute for listening to this engaging talk. It’s the best discussion of the state of American universities that I’ve heard since I started teaching:
Over at the Heterodox Stem site, Iván Marinovic, a professor at Stanford, has hit on a way to measure wokeness in college curricula. He uses key words to distinguish “ideological and activist” courses from those that hew to the “Western intellectual tradition” (note the caveats in his piece), and shows that, using this measure, the curriculum of the University of Chicago over the 13 years from 2012 to2025 has more than doubled the percentage of courses whose description include woke words, while the percentage of courses described with “Western canon” words has remained relatively constant. Marinovic calls this process “curriculum degradation,” and notes this:
The University of Chicago occupies a unique position in American higher education. Its undergraduate Core Curriculum, built on the Hutchins-era Great Books model, has historically been the strongest institutional commitment to the Western canon at any major research university. If curriculum degradation is occurring even at Chicago, it is likely occurring everywhere.
Click the title below to see the article:
Here’s Marinovic’s methods
We classify every course in a university catalog using two keyword lists: a progressive list and a Western canon list, as described below. We assign a course to a category if its title or description contains at least one keyword from the category’s keyword list.
We matched via word-boundary regular expressions on the combined title and description text (case-insensitive). Word-boundary matching ensures that partial matches are avoided (e.g., the term “race” does not match “interface” or “brace”). Each course’s title and description are concatenated into a single text field; if any keyword from a given list appears within that text, the course is flagged for that category.
The progressive keyword list comprises approximately 55 terms and phrases signaling engagement with progressive social frameworks, diversity/equity/inclusion initiatives, or critical identity scholarship. These terms are organized into eleven thematic sub-categories, shown in Table 1.
Here’s Table 1: Progressive-signal keyword list by thematic category.
And the Western canon method:
The Western canon keyword list comprises approximately 45 terms and phrases signaling engagement with the traditional Western intellectual and literary canon, spanning classical antiquity through the Enlightenment. These terms are organized into six thematic sub-categories, shown in Table 2.
This is Table 2: Western-canon keyword list by thematic category.
The example school chosen (Marinovic suggests that this be done for other schools as a preliminary indicator of what’s going on in them):
We extract course data from thirteen annual catalogs (2012–2013 through 2024–2025). After deduplicating crosslisted courses, which appear under multiple department codes, we obtain 21,381 unique courses across 114 departments. Departments are mapped to broad areas: Humanities, Social Sciences, STEM, Professional, and Other.
Figure 1 presents the central finding. The progressive signal rose from 12.7% of the catalog in 2012–2013 to 28.3% in 2024–2025—more than doubling over thirteen years. The canon signal dropped from 13.2% to 11.9%. The progressive-to-canon ratio consequently rose from 1.0× (parity) to 2.4×.
Now you can say that this is obvious because “wokeness” or “progressivism” is a fairly recent phenomenon, and has invaded academia since most professors are liberals or Democrats. And that invasion is expected to be reflected in course content. But this index is a way of measuring the extent of that invasion (or “degradation” as the author calls is), and seeing which universities and which feels have been the most “degraded.”
Marinovic also divided up the proportion of “progressive” versus “canon” courses in each of four area: the humanities, the social sciences, STEM (science, technology, enginnering and mathematics), and professional areas, presumably courses in medicine, business, and the laws. The conclusion, presumably for the final period, is shown in Table 3 below:
Table 3 shows that the progressive signal is highest in the Social Sciences (27.4%) and Humanities (24.6%). The progressive signal is naturally lower in STEM (7.6%) but still unexpectedly high given the technical nature of STEM content.
Indeed, I have personal experience with the increasing “progressivization” of the biological sciences:
Marinovic proposes that we might make Curriculum Content Indices for many schools, saying it takes only a few hours to do this if course information is publicly available. How would we use thse?
Such an index would allow prospective students to assess how much of a university’s catalog engages the Western intellectual tradition versus ideological content; donors to direct funding toward institutions that maintain intellectual breadth, and policymakers to monitor trends and evaluate the effects of reform efforts.
Finally, Marinovic gives an important caveat about the data and how it should be used:
A word of caution is in order. Keyword-based textual analysis of course descriptions is a blunt instrument. A course flagged by our progressive keyword list may turn out, on closer inspection, to be a rigorous scholarly treatment of the topic; conversely, a course that escapes detection may nonetheless promote an activist agenda in practice. The signals we measure should therefore be understood as a noisy first approximation—useful for identifying broad trends and prompting further inquiry, but never a substitute for substantive evaluation of what is actually taught. Policymakers, in particular, should resist the temptation to use simple keyword counts as the basis for funding decisions or regulatory action. Our goal is to promote transparency and informed conversation, not to supply a scorecard that short-circuits careful judgment.
As far as I know, the University of Chicago is the only school to be vetted this way, but many universities have their course catalogue—though not necessarily the course descriptions—online and could be crunched in this way. I’d love, for example, to see similar data from the University of California at Berkeley, as well as Columbia University, Barnard College, and, of course, Reed College, Swarthmore, Harvard, and Smith. And how could we forget Oberlin?
It must be strike season at American universities. Spring seems to be the time when well-paid, privileged, and entitled graduate students look to their unions—unions like the United Auto Workers—to demand even higher wages, other privileges, and, as I posted yesterday, political statements by some universities.
As I reported yesterday, there’s an impending graduate-student strike at Columbia, with the union demanding not only big salary increases for the students, but also that the University do all manner of anti-Israel things, like divesting from Israel and withdrawing from opening a program in Tel Aviv. That seems to me a violation of institutional neutrality, and I trust that Columbia won’t en
Now Harvard is follow suit, threatening a strike about wages, though fortunately there are no demands there about Israel. (It’s unlikely that any union demands related to Israel would be accepted by either university, as they’ve both been subject to lawsuits for ongoing antisemitism.)
As the article in the Harvard Crimson reports, both teaching fellow and research assistants (two ways that grad students can get paid while getting advanced degrees) want raises, with teaching fellows demanding a huge increase in pay.
Harvard is not biting, so a strike may be impending.
Click the link to read the Crimson article:
This is a bit complex; see what you make of it. First, the demands (Crimson quotes indented):
Harvard rejected graduate student workers’ demands for sweeping wage increases at a Tuesday bargaining session, countering with more modest raises and declining to equalize pay between teaching fellows and research assistants.
The proposals come as contract negotiations between Harvard and Harvard Graduate Student Union-United Auto Workers stretch past a year and union members vote in an ongoing strike authorization vote launched last Tuesday.
Last month, HGSU-UAW proposed a plan to close the wage gap between teaching fellows and research assistants, which would raise TF pay by roughly 74 percent — bringing it in line with the equivalent of a 10-month RA salary. The proposal also included a 12 percent increase to base salaries and annual raises of five percent.
Harvard instead offered a 10 percent raise over four years and a nearly 3 percent raise in the first year, amounting to annual raises of roughly 2.5 percent, according to a Harvard spokesperson.
It declined to match TF and RA monthly pay, according to HGSU-UAW president Sara V. Speller.
It appears, though that TF and RA pay is the same for the first four years of graduate fellowships:
Under Harvard’s current pay structure, graduate students earn roughly $50,000 annually during the first four years of their program, typically comprising two years of fellowship funding and two years of teaching fellowships supplemented with salary top ups and summer funding.
But those supplements expire after four semesters and summer funding ends after four years. During the remainder of their time at Harvard, many graduate students rely solely on teaching fellowships — which pay roughly $6,500 per section.
Now $50,000 is certainly enough to live, even in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Notice that this is appears to be a minimum salary, as there is summary salary and diverse “top ups”. After four years, you can either teach or be an RA, and that seems to be when the differential kicks in. I know that in the biological sciences there’s no substantial disparity even after four years, as they somehow find money to adequately support all students, but perhaps it’s in the humanities where they are demanding salary increases. And I’m unable to find out much about the humanities given the time constraints of time for writing posts.
Given that no student has to pay tuition, and the salary is what the university gives them on top of tuition remission, I was told that in biology the students are sitting pretty throughout their entire graduate career, even if they have to teach after four years. They are not making $6500 per year. In fact, they’re getting paid well on top of a free education at Harvard, so one may argue that these kinds of union demands are excessive. One of those who feel that way is reader Bat, who who called my attention to the Crimson article and commented,
Much like scholarship uni athletics and the obscenities of NIL pay [universities now paying student athletes] and free agency portals for colleges, I just think none of this [graduate-student unions] has a place in higher education.
Throw the rascals out. Plenty of hungry and bright applicants in the sea (as you informed Harvard when turning them down for grad school years ago if I recall correctly).
Sometimes we geezers are right. You kids get off my lawn!
