Tag: Education

The Meaning of July 4 to Political Science Teacher (opinion)

Every year for the past 25 years, I have taught an intermediate-level undergraduate course at Indiana University Bloomington called The Declaration of Independence and the Meaning of American Citizenship. I love teaching this course, because it allows students to engage history by interpreting a rather simple text that is well recognized even if not necessarily well understood—and this tension between vague familiarity and real understanding makes the teaching fun.

My basic approach to the topic and the course, outlined on the syllabus, has remained pretty fixed over the years:

This class will pay special attention to the meaning of “America.” It will address serious questions about what it means to think “historically.” It will trace and analyze the many ways that the meanings of American citizenship have been contested since 1776, and it will do so through a focus on alternative interpretations of the Declaration of Independence, which has sometimes been called the “birth certificate of American democracy.”

The Declaration is not the only important text in American political history. In particular, we will pay attention to its complex relationship to the U.S. Constitution, the other seminal “founding” document of the U.S. political system. But it is a very important touchstone for many important historical debates, and it is an even more important symbol of American political identity (which is why the late historian Pauline Maier referred to it as “American Scripture”).

The Declaration is also a very instructive example of the fact that core political symbols, texts and principles can be interpreted in different ways and are often heavily contested. Such rhetorical contests play an important role in the evolution of democracy over time, as disenfranchised groups appeal to “foundational” texts, like the Declaration, to justify their demands for recognition and inclusion—and as those who oppose recognition and inclusion also sometimes draw upon the same texts, though in very different ways.

In this course we will discuss how the Declaration has been a source of inspiration for activists and social movements seeking to democratize American society, and how it has also been used, differently, by opponents of democratization.

As we will see, there is not one true “meaning” of the Declaration.

But there are more and less nuanced, and more and less inclusive, interpretations of the Declaration. The primary goal of this course is to develop a historically and philosophically informed understanding of the Declaration—what it says, what it has meant, how it has justified many of the things most of us hold dear and some things many of us find revolting—and, by doing so, to nurture a more informed and reflexive understanding of contemporary American democracy. And because it is a course taught in a U.S. public university, to students most if not all of whom are citizens of the U.S., such an understanding has potentially significant implications for the way each of us thinks and acts as a citizen.

The course was originally inspired by a chance encounter, many decades ago, with a fascinating anthology, published in 1976—the year of the Bicentennial—and edited by famed labor historian Philip S. Foner, entitled We, The Other People: Alternative Declarations of Independence by Labor Groups, Farmers, Woman’s Rights Advocates, Socialists, and Blacks, 1829–1975. This volume, as its title suggests, furnishes a wide range of texts to explore with students. Over the years, I have incorporated dozens of other texts, some modeled directly on the 1776 Declaration, others simply drawing heavily on it, including the speeches of a great many presidents, especially Lincoln.

Central to the course are three famous speeches delivered by dissenters who were widely reviled in their time: Frederick Douglass’s 1852 “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”; Eugene V. Debs’s “Liberty,” given in 1895 upon his release from six months in prison for leading the 1894 Pullman strike; and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, given at the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

But the syllabus also includes speeches by Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens; populist Tom Watson; and segregationist governor George C. Wallace. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Declaration of Sentiments,” adopted in 1848 at the Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights, plays an important role; so too the 1898 “White Declaration of Independence” published by white racists in Wilmington, N.C., who overthrew a multiracial city government and terrorized the Black community.

The course is very historical, but also very contemporary, because July 4 comes every year, and because past historical struggles over the meaning of the Declaration continue to resonate in the present—and indeed are sometimes revived in the present.

But in the coming year the course will be more relevant than ever, because President Donald Trump has made clear that he plans to turn the entire year leading up to next year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration’s signing into a celebration of “American greatness”—and thus of himself.

Back in May 2023, Trump released a campaign video promising what Politico described as “a blowout, 12-month-long ‘Salute to America 250’ celebration,” including “a ‘Great American State Fair,’ featuring pavilions from all 50 states, nationwide high school sporting contests, and the building of Trump’s ‘National Garden of American Heroes’ with statues of important figures in American history.”

In his second week in office, Trump issued two executive orders centered on the Declaration. The first, “Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday,” announced that “it is the policy of the United States, and a purpose of this order, to provide a grand celebration worthy of the momentous occasion of the 250th anniversary of American Independence on July 4, 2026.” The other, “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K–12 Schooling,” mandated the termination of “radical, anti-American ideologies” and the re-establishment of a “President’s Advisory 1776 Commission” charged with promoting patriotic education.

Trump has long laid claim to “the spirit of July 4, 1776.” In the final days of his first term, as the nation was overtaken by a wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations protesting the police killing of George Floyd, he established his “1776 Commission,” which was intended to legitimate his increasingly repressive approach to the demonstrations and to energize his 2020 re-election campaign (the resulting report was also an explicit repudiation of The New York Times’ 2019 “The 1619 Project”).

The commission and its hurriedly drafted “The 1776 Report” failed to help fuel Trump’s failing 2020 campaign. But its broader ideological mission—to inaugurate a MAGA-inflected cultural revolution in a second Trump term—was hardly defeated.

The MAGA movement’s attempt to overthrow Joe Biden’s 2020 election— “Today is 1776,” tweeted MAGA congresswoman Lauren Boebert on Jan. 6, 2021, speaking for the thousands of “3 Percenters,” “Proud Boys” and assorted “patriot” groups that invaded the Capitol building—may have failed. But only temporarily. For Trump has returned to the White House with a vengeance and has commenced an ideological and economic assault on higher education, committed to “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” by purging society of “divisive narratives that distort our shared history.”

Historical understanding and social criticism are out and national reverence is in.

I cannot imagine a more exciting time to be teaching a course on the Declaration of Independence and the meaning of American citizenship.

But I also cannot imagine a more challenging and indeed precarious time to do so.

For the course—which does not seek to promote reverence or national pride or “American greatness”—is at odds with the prevailing spirit of the time, or at least its ascendant ideology.

It seeks to promote historical understanding, based on serious historical scholarship, and a general appreciation for the complex ways that the Declaration has figured in debates and conflicts over the shifting meaning of American citizenship. The course refuses to ignore or whitewash the ways that patriotism and even the preamble of the Declaration itself have been mobilized to oppose the forms of inclusion, and democratization, that we now take for granted (like the abolition of chattel slavery, considered by Southern states to be such a despotic violation of slaveholder property rights that they seceded from the Union, and formed the Confederacy, by appealing to the Declaration’s “consent of the governed”).

It also refuses to treat American history as the happy working out over time of a beneficent commitment to universal freedom that was embraced from the beginning by all Americans. For while certain universalist words were there from the beginning—coexisting with much less universalistic words, to be sure—a commitment to their universal application was most definitely not there from the beginning. That promise took decades and even centuries to be even haltingly redeemed, partially and in steps, due to the blood, sweat and tears of generations of brave activists—a process that continues to this day. And the fact that the Declaration’s words played such an important role in this contentious politics is the very reason why it is such a seminal text, one that deserves appreciation and celebration even as it is a human invention not above moral reproach or historical critique.

In politics as in life, criticism, and not easy praise, is the sincerest form of flattery.

As a professor, my approach to the course material is not partisan in any sense. I have no interest in changing the minds of any of my students, whatever they happen to think, except in the sense that all good teaching is about getting students to think more deeply and more regularly. In this sense, I seek to change the mind of every student, by engaging every student with historical materials, and ideas, and intellectual challenges, and by fostering a climate of respectful questioning and disagreeing in the classroom so that students can hear and listen to those with viewpoints different from their own. The pedagogy of higher education is not normal out in the world beyond the academy, though it would not be a bad thing if it were much more normalized than it currently is. That is why colleges and universities exist.

All the same, we have arrived at a historical moment in the U.S., perhaps unlike any before, in which such education is considered partisan, and denounced as “indoctrination,” by a MAGA movement and a Trump administration obsessed with a closing of borders, and ranks, and minds, in the name of patriotic “unity” and “American greatness.”

At a time when historical education is reduced to the celebration of national greatness, a historically serious course on the Declaration of Independence that treats it as a text to be critically engaged, not worshipped, might be considered subversive. Indeed, GOP-controlled state legislatures across the country, following the Trump administration’s lead, have instituted a wide range of measures designed to subject university teaching to heightened political scrutiny (in my own state of Indiana, vague “intellectual diversity” standards have been enacted into law, and Attorney General Todd Rokita has created a web portal, ominously named “Eyes on Education,” that encourages parents and teachers to report “objectionable” forms of teaching).

The problem with such censoriousness is that, if taken seriously, it is hard to see how the Declaration is worth anything at all. None other than Frederick Douglass himself noted precisely this back in 1852: “There was a time when, to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! Here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day. The cause of liberty may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers.”

Since July 4, 1776, the Declaration’s words have resonated at every moment when citizens have together sought to make the society, in the words of that other foundational text, the Constitution, “a more perfect union.” To dismiss the critical appropriation of the Declaration is to devalue both the text itself and the entire course of American history.

This July 4, I will be reflecting on the historical and the contemporary meaning of the text whose publication Americans will celebrate, and gearing up to once again teach The Declaration of Independence and the Meaning of American Citizenship at a time when it could not be more relevant.

Jeffrey C. Isaac is completing a book, entitled Defending Democracy’s Declaration, that challenges the ways that the MAGA movement is poised to weaponize the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University Bloomington, Isaac writes regularly on current affairs at his blog, Democracy in Dark Times, and at his new Substack dedicated to the forthcoming book, also named Defending Democracy’s Declaration.

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July 3, 2025
A Re-Engagement Strategy for Administrators (opinion)

In American higher education, teaching is our business, research our currency and service our obligation. It has always perplexed me that the pursuit of higher education administration has traditionally compelled individuals to move away from a continued practice of two of these core faculty functions. The path of a faculty administrator is typically marked by a shift away from teaching and research, an evolution that makes returning to the faculty for some almost an impossibility, after years of being disconnected from the disciplinary practices that propelled their trajectory through the faculty ranks to secure an administrative role in the first place.

At Kennesaw State University, we are exploring a new approach to academic leadership that reverses this traditional model of administrative disconnect. Starting this past academic year, every senior academic administrator serving on the provost’s leadership team (including all deans) joined me (serving as provost) in a commitment to teaching or researching annually, with the goal of helping us better understand and serve our university community. For some, the move to formally carve out approximately 10 percent of their time for either teaching or research validates ongoing teaching and research practices, while for others, it provides administrative latitude to reignite their passion for teaching and/or research.

KSU’s president, Kathy Stewart Schwaig, co-taught an honors course with me this past spring, leading this strategy by example. President Schwaig, who holds a Ph.D. in information systems and whose leadership trajectory has evolved through faculty ranks across two Georgia institutions, takes this philosophical commitment to staying connected to the business of higher education even a step further, as she is currently enrolled as a graduate student at Dallas Theological Seminary pursuing a master’s in biblical and theological studies.

As Kennesaw State, a Carnegie-designated R-2 institution that serves a population of more than 47,800 students, some could see this strategy as a pragmatic way of extending the capacities of the senior academic administrators to serve the institution’s growing needs in research and teaching. At a time when the capacities of faculty colleagues are being optimized to serve one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing public institutions, the members of the senior academic administrative team are committing to optimize their own collective capacities to serve the mission of the university.

The consequences will be more than just pragmatic, however. The annual commitment to serve as a higher education practitioner in addition to a higher education administrator could help us pursue administrative approaches that are rooted in a pragmatic understanding of both the shifting needs of industry and the changing needs of students entering higher education today. And it can also help build goodwill among faculty colleagues, who sometimes feel university administrators fail to fully comprehend the growing challenges of the classroom and pressures of research productivity.

Serving as provost, I have found my annual commitment to teaching an opportunity to inform administrative priorities. In fall 2020, when we struggled to comprehend how best to reopen and calibrate to the safety needs of the COVID pandemic, I was scheduled to teach a senior seminar course in the Department of Dance, while I served as dean of the College of the Arts at KSU. For a moment, I thought I should excuse myself from the added responsibilities of teaching a course at a time when my administrative capacities were being tested in rather unconventional ways. Better judgment prevailed, however, as I realized that out of every year that I continued to teach in my higher education career, this would be the semester when being in the classroom and experiencing the challenge alongside my faculty colleagues was most critical.

I would be lying if I said the experience was transformative. The challenges of lecturing with a face mask to socially distant students, split into two groups and separated by technology and physical space, was an experience that most faculty would likely agree was frustrating. But serving as dean and being in the classroom all semester allowed me to skip past several steps to serve the needs of my faculty colleagues with an understanding and empathy that was experientially relevant.

I am hoping that the impact of KSU’s administrative re-engagement strategy will be similarly impactful, ensuring that all senior academic administrators reignite their capacities to contribute to the teaching and research mission of the university. The idea seems to have been embraced at the outset by most; its sustainability, however, will require a continued institutional commitment and individual prioritization. While the true outcomes are yet to be empirically assessed, my hope is that this move will convert administrative faculty into faculty administrators, building their capacities to more effectively serve the growth of our institution with relevant, ongoing experiences in teaching and research.

Ivan Pulinkala is the provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at Kennesaw State University.

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July 3, 2025
College Works to Reduce Failure Rates in Entry-Level Courses

First-year students who perform poorly in a course are particularly at risk of dropping out. To help boost retention of such students, the University of the Pacific has made strategic investments in promoting their success, including by remodeling gateway courses.

During an institutional data analysis, leaders at the California institution found that first-year students who earned a D or F grade or withdrew from a class (also called DFW rate) were less likely to persist into their second year, which affected the university’s overall attrition rate.

In particular, students who didn’t pass their gateway classes in economics, math, biology, physics or chemistry were less likely to remain enrolled at the university.

To improve student success, the university created top-down initiatives and structures to encourage student feedback, experimentation in the classroom and cross-departmental solutions to better support incoming students.

What’s the need: A 2018 study by EAB found that, on average, three in 10 students enrolled in any given course don’t earn credit for it, leaving them with what are known as “unproductive credits.” Among the gateway courses analyzed—Calculus 1, General Biology, Chemistry 1 and General Psychology—some universities reported an unproductive-credit rate as high as 46 percent.

A variety of factors can cause high DFW rates, including a lack of academic preparation or personal struggles experienced by first-year students, according to EAB’s report. Other research has shown that variability in the quality of instruction or in assessment tools can also increase DFW rates.

Closing the gap: To address obstacles in the classroom, the provost and dean of the College of the Pacific, the university’s liberal arts college, which houses the gateway courses, meet regularly with department chairs who oversee those courses.

Addressing DFW rates can be a challenge for institutions because it often focuses attention on the faculty role in teaching, learning and assessment, leaving instructors feeling targeted or on the hot seat. To address this, the provost is working to create a culture of innovation and experimentation for course redesign, encouraging new approaches and creating institutional support for trying something new or pivoting, even if it’s not successful.

One of the opportunities identified involved embedding teaching assistants in classes to serve as tutors for students and provide feedback to instructors. The embedded TAs are students who successfully completed the course, enabling them not only to mentor incoming students but also to provide a unique perspective on how to change the classroom experience.

The university has also created a retention council, which invites stakeholders from across the institution to break silos, identify structural barriers and discuss solutions; that has made a significant difference in addressing retention holistically, campus leaders said.

The university also hired an executive director of student success and retention who meets weekly with academic success teams from every department.

Another Resource

Indiana University Indianapolis’s Center for Teaching and Learning developed a productive discussion guide to facilitate conversations around course redesign and addressing DFW rates. Read more about it here.

How it’s going: Since implementing the changes, the university saw a 5 percent year-over-year drop in D’s, F’s and withdrawals among gateway courses. Retention of first-year, first-time students has also climbed from 86 percent in 2020 to 89 percent this past year.

Demand for curriculum redesign has grown from about 20 courses in the past year to 50 courses this year, requiring additional investment and capacity from leadership, administrators said. Faculty also indicate that they’re feeling supported in the course redesign process.

In the future, university leaders said, they will also redesign the first-year experience with a greater focus on integrating academic, experiential and student life along with academic advising to encourage belonging and a sense of community. For example, they plan to use data to identify students who may need additional support to navigate life challenges or financial barriers.

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July 3, 2025
Scientists Took Support “For Granted” Before Trump

Devastating cuts to U.S. science under Donald Trump’s presidency have been made possible by a pervasive complacency that scientific achievements will always be celebrated, a leading American Nobel Prize winner has said.

Frances Arnold, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018 for her work on engineering enzymes, told an audience of young scientists in Germany that the “utter chaos” in U.S. politics of recent months, which has seen billions of dollars removed from scientific research, might be viewed in terms of a wider failure to communicate the value of scientific discovery.

“Never take for granted that scientific achievement is celebrated—we took it for granted, and for far too long, and we are paying the price,” Arnold told the June 29 opening ceremony of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, an annual conference that brings together Nobel laureates and early-career researchers.

“Instead of viewing science as the foundation of prosperity, as an investment in the future, it is being portrayed as a burden on taxpayers,” said Arnold, professor of chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology.

The Trump administration has so far canceled at least $10 billion in federal grants on the grounds that they contravene its anti-DEI agenda, but further unprecedented cuts are in the pipeline; under Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill, the National Science Foundation’s budget will be cut by 57 percent, by $5 billion, while the National Institutes of Health will see its support slashed by 40 percent, or $18 billion.

In an address given on behalf of 35 Nobelists attending the conference on the Swiss–Austrian border, Arnold said that this “concerted attack on the universities will drive many brilliant young scientists to Europe and other places,” adding, “I hope you will make the best use of this opportunity and give them a home.”

On the need for more effective communication of science’s benefits, Arnold, who chaired former U.S. president Joe Biden’s presidential council on science and technology for four years, said she hoped other nations would “learn the lesson that we are learning the hard way—that it is so important to convey the joy of science, the joy of discovery and the benefits to our friends and neighbors outside the academic laboratory.”

“They pay the bills but do not necessarily understand the benefits [of science]—it is up to us to explain that better.”

Arnold’s comments about the likely U.S. brain drain were also picked up by Germany’s science minister, Dorothee Bar, who told the conference that her government would make funds available in its high-tech strategy, due to be launched shortly, to attract international researchers.

“We are launching the One Thousand Minds Plus scheme to attract minds from across the world, including from the U.S.,” she said on the plans to divert some of the $589 billion technology and infrastructure stimulus plan toward recruiting global talent.

Appealing directly to disaffected U.S. researchers, Bar said, “You are always welcome here in Germany.”

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July 3, 2025
USF Ditches Search Firm That Helped U of Florida Pick Ono

SP&A previously helped UF select Santa Ono, a former University of Michigan president.

Bryan Bedder/Stringer/Getty Images

The University of South Florida has dropped SP&A Executive Search as the firm leading its presidential search, The Tampa Bay Times reported Tuesday. The move comes after the Florida Board of Governors rejected the candidate that SP&A had helped the University of Florida pick for its top job: former University of Michigan president Santa Ono, whom the UF board unanimously approved.

Ono’s rejection came after conservatives mounted a campaign opposing him, citing his past support of diversity, equity and inclusion and his alleged failure to protect Jewish students.

After that failed hire, Rick Scott, a Republican U.S. senator representing Florida, blamed SP&A, telling Jewish Insider that the firm didn’t sufficiently vet Ono.

SP&A describes itself on its website as a “boutique woman- and minority-owned executive search firm.” Scott Yenor—a Boise State University political science professor who resigned from the University of West Florida’s Board of Trustees in April after implying that only straight white men should be in political leadership—highlighted that description in an essay he co-wrote, titled “How did a leftist almost become president of the University of Florida?”

“We can only speculate about how the deck was stacked,” Yenor and Steven DeRose, a UF alum and business executive, wrote. “SP&A colluded with campus stakeholders, especially faculty, when they were retained. Together, they developed the criteria necessary to hire a Santa Ono.”

They also pointed out that SP&A was leading the USF search. SP&A didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment Wednesday.

USF didn’t provide an interview or answer written questions. In a June 20 statement, USF trustee and presidential search committee chair Mike Griffin said the university was now using the international firm Korn Ferry.

“We value the expertise of our initial search consultant and thank them for their engagement,” Griffin wrote.

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July 3, 2025
Religion’s Ever-Shifting Role in American Higher Education

Religion, particularly Protestantism, was central to the mission of the country’s first universities. Chapels were constructed at the center of campuses. University presidents, often devout, worried over the salvation of their students.

James W. Fraser’s new book, Religion and the American University (Johns Hopkins University Press), offers a detailed history of how religion’s role in higher ed has been upended again and again by transformative events, including the discovery of evolution, the emergence of biblical criticism, the Industrial Revolution and the advent of the modern-day research university.

It outlines how religion cropped up in students’ lives in new ways as they continued to grapple with moral and ethical questions and as various denominations and faiths vied for their attention and adherence. The book charts how the academic study of religion developed, how campus chaplains and religious student groups diversified along with student bodies, and how religious differences on campuses created new learning opportunities and tensions.

Fraser, a professor emeritus of history and education at New York University and a United Church of Christ minister, argues that while much of academe pushes religion to its periphery, today’s students are still concerned with questions of spirituality and meaning.

Fraser spoke with Inside Higher Ed about the new book. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Your book details massive changes in the role of religion in higher ed, from Protestant-dominated universities to institutions with more diverse student bodies and chaplaincies, and from religion-centric to more secularized. You describe a shift away from the idea of colleges that “transmitted knowledge” to colleges that “created new knowledge” as research universities came about. What do you think higher ed has gained or lost in these transitions?

A: There is no question that the transition from the old-fashioned teaching college to the research university has done a couple of really important things, not only for students but for society. One is that being able to invite students to be fellow researchers in the pursuit of knowledge is always a much better pedagogical approach than “You will learn this, and you will learn that,” and people can learn it and forget it pretty quickly.

I also think for all of us who criticize the research university, we have to remember all of the extraordinary accomplishments. Human life is twice as long because of medical research. Food supplies are much more plentiful because of agricultural research. Educational studies have helped more and more students learn how to read. The list goes on and on. The breakthroughs of the research university are huge.

In terms of what is lost, I think the clearest issue is in some ways described by Julie A. Reuben in The Making of the Modern University. The intellectual developments have gotten so much stronger than … attention to issues of meaning, purpose and belonging … Attention to issues of spirituality and faith have been marginalized significantly, and there’s certainly a norm in the research university now that scientific research—what you can count—counts the most. And what you care about and what you value count less. And that I find very problematic.

Q: You discuss in the book how today’s students have a deep interest in meaning-making and spirituality, if not religion, per se. Do you think it’s part of a college’s role to address that, and if so, how should institutions go about it?

A: I think it better be a part of colleges’ role, and I would say that for a couple of reasons. One is, asking questions of meaning, purpose, belonging, questions of faith, questions of morality, are pretty essential if we’re going to maintain and protect our democracy and our society in the 21st century. And if we simply say institutions are going to do this very specific kind of research and are going to teach professional skills, and we’re going to evaluate universities by how much money the students make when they graduate, we stop teaching about things that will sustain our society and will sustain human beings in the future. That’s a huge loss. The second issue is, I just think it’s stupid for universities to disregard student interest when it’s there. If students are interested in these things, we should find ways to talk about it.

I also think—and this is an issue explored in the book a lot—it’s often in the extracurricular areas that the students are able to pursue these [questions]. They pursue them with chaplains, they pursue them with their own individual groups, whether it’s Baháʼí Fellowship or InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. They find other ways … But I don’t think that lets faculty off the hook to develop the kinds of courses [that] let it be done as part of the regular academic curriculum. That’s what we do as professors, and that’s something we ought to offer our students. I think it’s cheap letting ourselves off the hook when we say, “Oh well, they’ll find it elsewhere.”

Q: In the book, you repeatedly highlight a tension within religious communities as to whether to invest in and urge students toward explicitly religious colleges or whether to prioritize building up religious infrastructure at unaffiliated colleges—like chaplains, Hillels and other religious student organizations. Do you think that tension plays out today, and if so, in what ways?

A: I think it plays out very much today. There are people who feel like their young people will only be safe in religious institutions. And there are other people who say, “No, let’s go to the best college we can find. Let’s go to the best state university we can find.”

I have a bias. I favor the religious groups that are finding ways to make a place for themselves in the larger universities. As a conclusion of this book, I talk about Baylor University, which is trying so hard to do both—to both be a religious school and a Research-1 university. And I wish them luck. I admire them. And I think it’s going to be more difficult than they think it’s going to be.

But I think that for many universities … religion finds its own place on the margins, and that can be with chaplains, that can be with student groups. But students care about these issues, and they’re not going to disappear.

Q: The book touches on the beauties of campus religious diversity but also some of the challenges, including the ways that campuses have been rocked by the October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas and Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Since then, campus antisemitism has been a flash point for the Trump administration’s dealings with higher ed and institutions have been penalized for how they’ve handled pro-Palestinian protests. Having watched how these issues played out, is there anything you would have added to the book on the topic?

A: I mentioned it in one paragraph in the end because it was just going to press, but I would have done a lot more with the challenges that religious diversity [brings]. We live in a world where the Trump administration is attacking diversity, and yet religious diversity is a kind of diversity. Chaplains are telling me they’re feeling tensions about that.

I think the violence, particularly since the Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s response in Gaza, has set student against student in a way that is going to take decades to recover. Whether you’re a Jewish chaplain or a Muslim chaplain or a chaplain of some other faith, trying to deal with that, with that kind of student pain and student anger and student lashing out and student response, is making it very difficult. Discussions about religion are more difficult than they were two years ago.

And the same is true for religious studies. We’ve seen several examples of religious studies professors who have gotten in trouble. One got in trouble for showing a picture of the Prophet Muhammad in class when some interpretations of Islam say you can’t do it. Another professor lately, who The New York Times profiled, got fired. She was a Jewish professor, but she was outspoken in defense of Gaza, the Palestinian population, and she got fired for it. These things are going to happen. And the pressure on universities—a couple of chaplains have told me they feel like the administration is looking over their shoulders in a way that was not true two years ago and asking, “What are you saying to the students? What are they praying about? Why do we need this kind of disruption?”

I was talking to one of my [former] students, a current chaplain, and he said that this last year has been the most difficult of his decades in chaplaincy. I think that’s not rare.

Q: You focus a sizable chunk of the book on the role of religion at public universities, which aren’t necessarily the first institutions that come to mind when we think about higher education and religion. Why was it important to you to include these institutions and make them a focus?

A: The obvious answer is the majority of American students go to public universities, by far. And to do a study of any aspect of American higher education that ignores public universities is simply silly. I’ve read some other studies that I thought were very thoughtful about religion that didn’t include public universities, and I thought, “But that’s where the students are. We’ve got to do that.”

The second issue is, I found public universities’ relationship with religion very interesting and far more complicated than I thought. In the 1880s, University of Illinois expelled a student for not attending chapel. As late as the eve of World War II in 1939, a quarter of state universities had chapel services—not always required, but they offered them. So, state universities were … pretty much generic Protestant institutions until really the 1960s, 1970s. Faculty culture wasn’t particularly religious in the way it was in the 19th century, but the campus culture and the campus assumptions were.

The other thing I found is that there’s a wily religious life on state university campuses of one sort or another. It’s often led by chaplains working around the margins, and they feel marginalized, but they’re also very effective working around the margins … I was intrigued.

[For example,] I was intrigued by the University of Nevada, Reno, a public university barred by the state Constitution from supporting religion, but it fosters dialogue. I wish more universities were willing to do that. They hosted a conversation on the role of women in religion [in partnership with a local synagogue]. A public university cannot take a stand—we favor this or we favor that—but they don’t need to be afraid of hosting conversations on a variety of topics … That engages with the community. I think universities hold back from engaging with communities on all sorts of issues, but they certainly hold back from engaging with religious communities.

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July 3, 2025
Bronx CC, Olin, Bethune-Cookman, TCU and More

Shantay Bolton, who most recently served as executive vice president of administration and finance and chief business officer at Georgia Tech, became president and chief executive officer of Columbia College Chicago on July 1.

Sandra Bulmer, dean of Southern Connecticut State University’s College of Health and Human Services, has been appointed interim president of the institution, effective July 1.

Joyce Ester, who most recently served as president of Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minn., became president of Governors State University in Illinois on July 1.

Heather Gerken, dean of Yale Law School, has been named president of the Ford Foundation, effective in November.

Joseph Greene, vice chancellor of finance and administration at Johnson & Wales University, has been appointed president of the Johnson & Wales Providence campus, effective fall 2025.

Charles Lee Isbell Jr., provost of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has been named chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and vice president of the University of Illinois system, effective Aug. 1.

Larry Johnson Jr., president of the City University of New York’s Guttman Community College, has been appointed president of CUNY’s Bronx Community College, effective July 14.

David Jones, a former vice president for student affairs and enrollment management at Minnesota State University, Mankato, became interim president of Southwest Minnesota State University on July 1.

May Lee, vice president and chief strategy officer for institutional impact at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been named president of Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, effective Aug. 18.

Albert Mosley, president of Morningside University in Sioux City, Iowa, has been appointed president of Bethune-Cookman University in Florida, effective July 7.

Jeanette Nuñez, the interim president of Florida International University who formerly served as a Florida state representative and lieutenant governor, has been named FIU’s permanent president.

Daniel Pullin, who spent the past two years as president of Texas Christian University, has been appointed TCU chancellor, effective May 30.

Manya Whitaker, interim president of Colorado College, was named the institution’s permanent president in June.

James Winebrake, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, has been appointed president of Coastal Carolina University, effective July 7.

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July 3, 2025
Lawmakers Confront Columbia President About Old Messages

Shipman has been Columbia University’s acting president since March.

Claire Shipman, acting president of Columbia University, apologized Wednesday for writing messages in 2023 and 2024 that House Republicans say “appear to downplay and even mock the pervasive culture of antisemitism on Columbia’s campus,” Jewish Insider reported.

“The things I said in a moment of frustration and stress were wrong. They do not reflect how I feel,” Shipman wrote in a private email the outlet obtained Wednesday. Shipman said she was addressing “some trusted groups of friends and colleagues, with whom I’ve talked regularly over the last few months.”

The apology comes one day after the House Committee on Education and Workforce sent Shipman a letter asking her to explain the intent of internal messages she wrote about antisemitism on the Manhattan campus following the start of Israel’s war in Gaza and the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. During the time frame in question, Shipman, who became acting president in March, was co-chair of the university’s Board of Trustees.

In its letter, the committee, which has subpoenaed numerous documents related to antisemitism at Columbia, cited a message Shipman wrote to now-resigned president Minouche Shafik on Oct. 20, 2023, that said, “People are really frustrated and scared about antisemitism on our campus and they feel somehow betrayed by it. Which is not necessarily a rational feeling but it’s deep and it is quite threatening.” The committee told Shipman her statement was “perplexing, considering the violence and harassment against Jewish and Israeli students already occurring on Columbia’s campus at the time.”

The committee, which has already compelled Columbia and numerous other universities to testify about their responses to campus antisemitism, also cited in its letter several messages from Shipman that convey alleged “distrust and dislike” for Shoshana Shendelman, a Jewish member of the university’s board who has been outspoken about perceived inadequacies of Columbia’s antisemitism response. “I just don’t think she should be on the board,” Shipman said in a January 2024 message. In April 2024, Shipman wrote that she was “so, so tired” of Shendelman.

In addition to ongoing scrutiny from Republican members of Congress, the Trump administration has attacked Columbia for months, accusing the university of not protecting Jewish students sufficiently and cutting off more than $400 million in federal funds. Although Columbia agreed to the administration’s demands, including overhauling disciplinary processes, Trump hasn’t yet restored the university’s funding. Instead, the Education Department reported Columbia to its accreditor, which has since issued a warning to the university.

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July 3, 2025
Public Higher Education is Splitting in Two (Robert Kelchen)
Even though there have been longstanding ideological differences across states, higher education leadership was largely insulated against these differences over the last half-century. Yes, they popped up in meaningful ways on topics such as South African divestment, affirmative action, and antiwar protests, but it was possible for university leaders to move from red states to blue states and vice versa. It helped to share the state’s political leanings, but it was generally not a requirement.

The last month has clearly shown that potential presidents now must pass an ideological litmus test in order to gain the favor of governing boards and state policymakers. Here are three examples:
- Santa Ono’s hiring at Florida was rejected by the system board (after being approved by the campus board) due to his previous positions in favor of diversity initiatives and vaccine mandates. He tried to pivot his views, but it was not enough for Republican appointments on the board.
- Six red states, led by Florida and North Carolina, are seeking to launch a new accreditor to break free from their longtime accreditor (which was the only major institutional accreditor to never have a DEI requirement, although their diversity page is now blank). Florida Governor Ron DeSantis used his press conference to go on a tirade against higher education, but the North Carolina system’s statement was more cautious, focused on academic quality.
- The Trump administration’s Justice Department effectively forced out University of Virginia president James Ryan over his alleged noncompliance in removing diversity initiatives from campus. This effort was successful because Virginia’s Republican governor also supported removal and has the ability to push the institution’s governing board to take action.
While there has been a long history of politicians across the ideological spectrum leading universities (such as Mitch Daniels at Purdue, John King at the State University of New York, and Dannel Molloy at Maine), these politicians have generally set aside most of their ideological priors that are not directly related to running an institution of higher education. But now a growing number of states are expecting their campus presidents to be politicians that are perfectly aligned with their values.

There are two clear takeaways from recent events. The first is that college presidents are now political appointments in the same way that a commissioner of education or a state treasurer would be in many states. Many boards will be instructed (or decide by themselves) to only hire people who are ideologically aligned to lead colleges—and to clean house whenever a new governor comes into power. The median tenure of a college president is rapidly declining, and expect that to continue as more leaders get forced out. Notably, by threatening to withhold funding, governors do not even have to wait for the composition of the board to change before forcing a change in leadership. New presidents will respond by requesting higher salaries to account for that risk.

Second, do not expect many prominent college presidents to switch from red states to blue states or vice versa. (It may still happen among community colleges, but even that will be more difficult). The expectations of the positions are rapidly diverging, and potential leaders are going to have to choose where they want to be. Given the politics of higher education employees, blue-state jobs may be seen as more desirable. But these positions often face more financial constraints due to declining enrollments and tight state budgets, in addition to whatever else comes from Washington. Red-state jobs may come with more resources, but they also are likely to come with more strings attached.

It is also worth noting that even vice president and dean positions are likely to face these same two challenges due to presidential transitions and the desire of some states to clean house within higher education. That makes the future of the administrative pipeline even more challenging.

[This article first appeared at the Robert Kelchen blog.]
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July 2, 2025
University Autonomy Stems From Corporate Rights (opinion)

In an April 21 article entitled “We Haven’t Seen a Fight Like Harvard vs. Trump in Centuries,” Steven Brint wrote that the ongoing dispute between Harvard University and the federal government is “the most important showdown between state power and college autonomy since 1816, when the New Hampshire Legislature attempted to convert Dartmouth College into a public entity.”

While the Dartmouth College case, which the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1819 in Dartmouth’s favor, looms large in American history, universities have, prior to and since that decision, regularly fought for their rights—their corporate rights.

Today, we call this institutional academic freedom. But, as Richard Hofstadter wrote in his portion of The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (1955), co-authored with Walter Metzger, “academic freedom is a modern term for an ancient idea.” That ancient idea holds that university freedom is based on corporate rights, which is why Hofstadter begins with a section subtitled “Corporate Power in the Middle Ages.” Recovering that old idea could not be more important today.

It is no exaggeration to say that, in spring 2025, we may have entered the nadir of American academic freedom. Austin Sarat rightfully urged us, even before then, to find new ways to guard academic freedom “against external threats.” Now, in the face of ongoing hostility from both state and federal governments, it is imperative that universities deploy the full range of arguments at their disposal, including those based on their forgotten corporate rights. In other words, it’s time for universities to invoke their corporate rights. Allow me to explain.

Corporateness is the university’s hidden superpower. While every university is constituted differently, they are all corporations, regardless of whether they present themselves as public or private. That is because “corporation” is a general legal term denoting a unity at law.

“Incorporation,” David Ciepley has written, “is a powerful tool.” Corporations can sue and be sued in their own names, hold property, enter contracts, use their own seals and legislate. Importantly, the university’s corporateness bears no necessary relationship to its current autocratic constitution, whereby, according to Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn, universities are “ruled by external lay governing boards vested with the panoply of powers customarily granted to corporations, including the power to adopt, amend, and revoke its basic rules of institutional governance.” Thus, we can use the university’s corporateness to rebuff external attacks, while also working, as Arjun Appadurai wrote recently, “to break the unilateral power of boards of trustees.”

The university’s cherished autonomy springs from its corporate rights. In the U.S., these rights were first articulated in a now-forgotten line of cases starting with the 1805 North Carolina Supreme Court case Trustees of University of North Carolina v. Foy, a decision issued more than a century before the American Association of University Professors’ famous 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure—and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1957 discovery of a theretofore unknown academic freedom right in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Like Dartmouth College, these cases were about corporate rights. But, unlike Dartmouth College, they concerned universities we now consider public; they were decided by state supreme courts, rather than by the U.S. Supreme Court; and, when they implicated constitutional rights, they implicated rights protected by state constitutions, rather than by the federal one.

What I call the corporate theory of academic freedom explains why the rights that originally protected the American scholarly enterprise, including in the Dartmouth College case, were corporate rights by emphasizing that universities are, by law, corporations. (It’s actually in the name itself: “university,” derived from the Latin universitas, simply means “corporation.”)

Rather than an individual right, academic freedom is, properly understood, what Stanley Fish called “a guild concept.” More specifically, it is a concept belonging to the incorporated guild of professors and students (and others). This theory bases academic freedom not on freedom of speech—a troublesome basis for academic freedom—but on the university’s corporate rights. These corporate rights, not infrequently finding expression in constitutions, are also sometimes constitutional rights. By substituting corporate rights for freedom of speech, we turn a foundation of sand into stone.

It might prove difficult for some in the university to embrace a term they associate only with business corporations, but corporate rights have been, and still can be, used to protect universities. In this connection, it might help to recall the many corporations that are not business corporations, including municipal corporations, nonprofit corporations (often euphemized as “organizations”), church corporations and university corporations.

At a moment when the U.S. Supreme Court seems keen on granting corporate rights to business corporations, one might wonder why business corporations should get all the rights. With state and federal governments increasingly targeting universities, we simply cannot afford to leave these arguments on the table. Understanding and utilizing these neglected corporate rights cases requires shifting our focus, on the one hand, from private to public universities, and, on the other hand, from federal to state courts (where Dartmouth College began).

While the federal government’s recent attacks on Columbia and Harvard have captured headlines across the country, state legislatures continue to menace public universities. Although these universities have, through centuries of experience, become highly familiar with governmental intrusion, they have become less adept at repulsing it than they once were. As a result, one recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education could observe that “it’s well understood that public colleges are in the thrall of their state lawmakers.” The corporate theory of academic freedom challenges this understanding.

Consider two post–Dartmouth College cases about universities we call public today. The first is an 1887 Indiana Supreme Court case about Indiana University. The second is an 1896 Michigan Supreme Court case about the University of Michigan. Each case furnishes ideas about how to address academic freedom’s most vexing and persistent challenge: protecting public universities from state legislatures.

In an 1887 case called Robinson v. Carr, the Indiana Supreme Court considered what interest rate applied to a fund established by the Indiana Legislature for Indiana University. The statute that established the university fund indicated that any loan made from the university fund would carry a 7 percent interest rate. The trustees of Indiana University, who were established as a “body politic” by the Indiana Legislature, could then use the interest to cover annual university expenses. But a later statute repealed laws concerning certain funds, including “public funds,” and applied an 8 percent interest rate instead. The question as to which interest rate applied therefore turned on whether the university fund was a “public fund.” If it was a public fund, an 8 percent rate would apply; if it was not, the 7 percent rate would remain.

The Indiana Supreme Court concluded that the university fund was not a public fund because “the university, although established by public law, and endowed and supported by the state, is not a public corporation, in a technical sense.” The court meant by this that the Board of Trustees “has none of the essential characteristics of a public corporation.” The university was “not a municipal corporation,” and “its members are not officers of the government, or subject to the control of the legislature in the management of its affairs.”

The court reasoned, “That the university was established under the direct authority of the state, through a special act of the legislature, or that the charter contains provisions of a purely public character, nor yet that the institution was wisely established, and is and should be perpetually maintained at the public expense, for the public good, does not make it a public corporation, or constitute its endowment fund a public fund.” In the final analysis, “the legal status of the state university being that of a technically private, or at most a quasi public, corporation, the university fund, of which it is the sole beneficiary, is therefore not a public fund, within the meaning of the law.” In short, the court’s careful analysis under the corporate framework led it to conclude that the university’s legislative establishment and public funding did not make it public.

Less than a decade after Robinson, the Michigan Supreme Court decided a case called Regents of the University of Michigan v. Sterling. There, the court had to decide whether the Michigan Legislature could require the University of Michigan Board of Regents to relocate its homeopathic medical college from Ann Arbor to Detroit. The Michigan regents had refused to comply with the Legislature’s relocation law, and Charles Sterling, a private citizen, then asked the Michigan Supreme Court to order the Regents to comply.

The court denied Sterling’s request, noting that, “under the [Michigan] constitution of 1835, the legislature had the entire control and management of the university and the university fund. They could appoint regents and professors, and establish departments.” But, after the university languished under this governance model, the people of Michigan withdrew the power of the Legislature to control the university. To that end, the 1850 Michigan Constitution ordained that “the board of regents shall have the general supervision of the university, and the direction and control of all expenditures from the university interest fund.”

The court offered three “reasons to show that the legislature has no control over the university or the board of regents.” First, both entities “derive their power from the same supreme authority, namely, the constitution,” and, “in so far as the powers of each are defined by that instrument, limitations are imposed, and a direct power conferred upon one necessarily excludes its existence in the other, in the absence of language showing the contrary intent.”

Second, the Board of Regents “is the only corporation provided for in the constitution whose powers are defined therein”—whereas “in every other corporation provided for in the constitution it is expressly provided that its powers shall be such as the legislature shall give.” Third, “in every case except that of the regents the constitution carefully and expressly reposes in the legislature the power to legislate and to control and define the duties of those corporations and officers.”

Because the constitution entrusted “the general supervision” of the university to the regents, “no other conclusion … is possible than that the intention was to place this institution in the direct and exclusive control of the people themselves, through a constitutional body elected by them.” The people of Michigan had entrusted the university’s governance to the regents directly, thereby removing the university from the Legislature’s purview. As a result, the Legislature could no longer govern the university.

These 19th-century cases, together with many other state cases like them, contain resources that universities can use to meet today’s extraordinary challenges. (Edwin D. Duryea lists many, but not all, of these cases in the first appendix to his 2000 monograph, The Academic Corporation: A History of College and University Governing Boards.) Indeed, the cases remain relevant today. The Montana Supreme Court’s 2022 decision affirming the Montana regents’ “exclusive authority to regulate firearms on college campuses” borrowed, with slight alterations and no attribution, one of the aforementioned passages from Sterling.

Harvard’s battle with the federal government is truly momentous, but it is one of many that American universities—public and private—have consistently waged for centuries. When these universities rose up to defend their corporate rights, state supreme courts across the country often affirmed those rights. The time has come to assert those rights once again. As state governments, along with the federal government, apply new and in some ways unprecedented pressure, universities can no longer ignore their powerful claims to corporate rights. Continuing to do so may incur costs none of us are willing to pay.

Michael Banerjee, a 2019 graduate of Harvard Law School, is a doctoral candidate in jurisprudence and social policy at the University of California, Berkeley, where his dissertation focuses on universities’ corporate rights.

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July 2, 2025