Higher education

New Republic -  Higher education in the United States is far from a monolith. And though the media’s klieg lights have been trained on the Ivy League, from which so many high-profile journalists graduated—as well as Donald Trump (Penn Wharton, 1968) and JD Vance (Yale Law School, 2013)—there are some 6,000 other colleges and universities out there across the country. Many are silent on Trump’s pedagogical edicts. But some are standing up. The Big Ten conference, in particular, has mounted a formidable defense during the Trump blitzkrieg. Its stance, a blunt assertion of its own power, could be a model for other coalitions squaring off with the administration...

The Big Ten, to begin with, was not impressed by Columbia University’s early decision to cave to Trump’s demands. In May, Greg Beitel, a molecular biosciences professor at Northwestern, told the student newspaper that he gave up on appeasing the administration after seeing Columbia’s mortifying acquiescence to federal demands in March.

Nor were professors in the Big Ten conference especially wowed by Harvard’s much-praised two-step: mounting an opulently capitalized legal defense of higher education while continuing to truckle behind oaken doors....

The Big Ten, to begin with, was not impressed by Columbia University’s early decision to cave to Trump’s demands. In May, Greg Beitel, a molecular biosciences professor at Northwestern, told the student newspaper that he gave up on appeasing the administration after seeing Columbia’s mortifying acquiescence to federal demands in March.

Nor were professors in the Big Ten conference especially wowed by Harvard’s much-praised two-step: mounting an opulently capitalized legal defense of higher education while continuing to truckle behind oaken doors. After quietly folding to the billionaire-funded right-wing campaign to drive out its first Black president and renaming its graduate school of arts and sciences (my other alma mater) for GOP megadonor Ken Griffin, Harvard quietly renamed its DEI office in April—and dismantled DEI entirely in July...

Academically, the Big Ten’s assets are even greater: $18.4 billion in annual research and 145 million library volumes, more than twice the holdings of the Ivy League. Five of the Big Ten universities—Illinois, Penn State, Ohio State, Purdue, and Wisconsin—have nuclear reactors. There are more quantum computing facilities in the Big Ten than in all of Europe. More