Straws in the Wind - Part 312

From Bloomberg: President Donald Trump’s administration has opened a new front in its campaign to reshape US colleges, homing in on racial diversity at some of the top medical schools in the country. The Department of Justice has launched investigations into medical programs at Stanford, the University of California San Diego and Ohio State University, accusing them of giving a leg up to minority applicants. The administration has made similar claims about a swath of universities. But for medical schools, those accusations — and the accompanying risk to their federal funding — are an especially potent weapon.

Medical programs already took a hit last year when the president slashed billions in research grants, which disproportionately affects biomedical fields. The National Institutes of Health alone terminated nearly $2 billion in payments to medical schools as of last June. But even bigger sums could be at stake if the DOJ investigations widen beyond the initial slate of schools.

The NIH awarded over $19 billion to medical programs last year, and students rely on federal aid and loans to afford famously expensive medical degrees. If schools are found to be in violation of anti-discrimination law, they risk getting cut off from all this funding...

Full story at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-08/trump-targets-top-medical-schools-as-next-higher-ed-battleground.

Straws in the Wind - Part 268

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: ...New York University will begin a new initiative aimed at getting students to spend less time on their phones. It’s called NYU IRL (short for “in real life”), and it spans the university’s Manhattan, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai campuses, where students will be enticed to enter “device-free zones" ...NYU IRL, which Linda G. Mills, NYU’s president, announced earlier this year, includes new resources for faculty to try “device optimization” in their classrooms, such as making it a featured topic in the university’s faculty learning exchange week, which is happening now. NYU will also host in-person events like a “supper club” in its dining halls.

To mark the beginning of the effort, NYU professor and author Jonathan Haidt is hosting a “fireside chat” early next month to talk through his bestselling book, The Anxious Generation. The 2024 book argues that the rise in smartphone usage in childhood over the last decade has contributed directly to the rise in mental illness in younger generations. Mills cites Haidt’s findings as a major inspiration for the new program...

Full story at https://www.chronicle.com/article/nyu-wants-students-to-put-down-their-phones-will-they.

===

From the NY Times: The Defense Department has decided to cut academic ties with nearly two dozen top universities and think tanks as part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s campaign against what he calls anti-American values and “wokeness.” ...In a video published to social media* ...Mr. Hegseth denounced the institutions in blistering language, calling them politically liberal institutions with “wicked ideologies” that were indoctrinating U.S. service members. He said that, beginning in the new school year in September, the Defense Department would ban service members from attending those universities.

===

*https://x.com/secwar/status/2027474502876070386.

===

In addition to Harvard, which was banned earlier this month, the Defense Department said the banned institutions would include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, Yale, Brown, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, George Washington, Tufts, St. Louis and Carnegie Mellon, as well as the College of William & Mary, Middlebury College and Queen’s University in Ontario.

When Mr. Hegseth cut ties with Harvard, it was seen as part of a wider pressure campaign by the Trump administration to force the university to cut a deal with the government. But some of the universities that were banned on Friday have already agreed to a laundry list of demands from the Trump administration as part of an effort to remake the culture of higher education. The Defense Department said it would also cut ties with seven high-profile think tanks in Washington known for their defense and national security analysis: the Center for Strategic and International Studies, New America, the Brookings Institution, the Atlantic Council, the Center for a New American Security, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Henry L. Stimson Center...

Mr. Hegseth, who served as an infantry officer with the National Guard, graduated from Harvard’s Kennedy School in 2013 with a master’s degree in public policy... The Defense Department said it was considering replacing the programs with those at institutions including state universities and conservative Christian schools like Liberty University and Hillsdale College...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/us/politics/pentagon-universities-think-tanks.html.

Foreign Funding

The US Dept. of Education has released a list of foreign funding of US universities in 2025. As can be seen above, having a med school helps in obtaining such funding. But prestige also helps. (MIT doesn't have a med school.) 

UCLA ranks as number 23 with over $750 million.

Source: Section 117 Foreign Gift and Contract Public Transparency Dashboard:

https://www.foreignfundinghighered.gov/.

Straws in the Wind - Part 178

From the Columbia Daily Spectator: Columbia is absent from the list of 38 universities facing proposed suspensions from a Department of State federal research partnership program, according to an internal memo... The memo and an attached spreadsheet indicate that the department is looking to suspend institutions from partnering with its Diplomacy Lab program effective Jan. 1, 2026, because they “openly engage in DEI hiring practices.” Diplomacy Lab is an initiative between the federal government and over 60 universities that aims to harness “the expertise and fresh perspectives of students and faculty members to conduct research on key foreign policy topics,” according to an information sheet about the program.

A State Department spokesperson told Spectator that all agency programs are under review to ensure they are aligned with the priorities of President Donald Trump’s administration. The spreadsheet evaluated the hiring practices of 75 universities on a 4-point, color-coded scale... Universities showing “clear DEI hiring policy” were marked red for suspension from the program, whereas institutions showing “merit-based hiring with no evidence of DEI” were marked in green.

...In its July 23 $221 million settlement with the federal government, Columbia pledged not to consider “race, color, sex or national origin” as a factor in its hiring decisions. Columbia has also committed to submitting admissions data to the federal government, beginning with an initial October report...

Full story at https://www.columbiaspectator.com/news/2025/11/23/columbia-set-to-retain-embattled-state-department-research-partnership-as-other-universities-face-potential-suspensions-over-dei-hiring-practices/.

From The Guardian: More than three dozen universities including Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Duke have their participation in a federal research partnership on the chopping block after the state department proposed to suspend them over their diversity, equity and inclusion hiring practices. Last week, the Guardian obtained an internal memo and spreadsheet showing that the state department is moving to exclude 38 institutions from the Diplomacy Lab program, which pairs university researchers with state department policy offices on foreign policy projects. The suspensions would take effect on 1 January, and because the list is not finalized, the schools have not yet been informed.

The targeted schools include elite universities such as Stanford University, Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, Duke University and the University of Southern California, as well as American University, George Washington University, Syracuse University and several University of California campuses. 

Universities recommended to remain include Columbia University, MIT, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia and the University of Texas at Austin. Several of these moved to comply with the administration’s anti-DEI demands earlier this year – Columbia agreed in July to pay more than $200m to the federal government and pledged not to use “race, color, sex or national origin” in hiring decisions, while the University of Virginia’s president resigned in June after the justice department demanded he step down over the school’s diversity practices...

Full story at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/25/us-universities-cuts-dei-state-department.

Straws in the Wind - Part 82

From the Forward: ...Admissions officers at six universities — including Columbia — are using a new tool to assess how prospective students might navigate this increasingly charged campus political climate. Schoolhouse Dialogues, hosted on the nonprofit tutoring platform Schoolhouse founded by Sal Khan, pairs high schoolers with opposing viewpoints to discuss controversial issues one-on-one and give feedback on each other’s civility. A handful of schools will use that feedback, dubbed “civility transcripts,” in admissions.

The participating schools — several of which are engaged in high-profile disputes with the Trump administration over alleged campus antisemitism — say they are seeking applicants willing to engage in respectful civil discourse across political divides...

Six schools — Columbia University, Colby College, Johns Hopkins University, University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Washington University in St. Louis — are allowing students to optionally submit Schoolhouse Dialogues portfolios as part of their application for the upcoming admissions cycle. Neither recordings nor transcripts of conversations are sent to admissions officers. Instead, students who choose to submit will send colleges their “dialogues portfolio,” which shows how many sessions the student has attended, what topics they discussed, their self-reflections, and the feedback they received from other students...

Not every institution has embraced the use of Dialogues in admissions. Both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Vanderbilt ultimately decided not to continue after initial trials — with Vanderbilt stating it withdrew from the program “after careful consideration and hearing some concerns.” ...

Full story at https://forward.com/news/762715/columbia-university-antisemitism-schoolhouse-dialogues/.

Straws in the Wind - Part 48

From State News: Michigan State University has quietly removed references to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, from its 2030 Strategic Plan website and several other public-facing pages. The changes include updates to pages for the College of Human Medicine, the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, and the DEI plan previously posted on the Office of the President’s website. The University Outreach and Engagement Plan has also been removed from MSU’s website.

In statements to The State News, Amber McCann, university spokesperson and Diversity and Inclusion Communications Manager Henry Mochida both said MSU is conducting “an ongoing review of its 2030 Strategic Plan” and is also “engaged in an ongoing review of programs and activities in compliance with civil rights laws.” ...

Full story at https://statenews.com/article/2025/07/msu-removes-dei-language-from-websites-amid-strategic-plan-review.

From The Hill via Yahoo News: The Education Department announced on Thursday a civil rights investigation against George Mason University over allegations of discrimination regarding its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies. The federal agency said multiple professors at the university alleged leadership is giving preferential treatment to underrepresented minority groups for hiring and promotion considerations among faculty.

“Despite the leadership of George Mason University claiming that it does not discriminate on the basis of race, it appears that its hiring and promotion policies and practices from 2020 to the present, implemented under the guise of so-called ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,’ not only allow but champion illegal racial preferencing in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This kind of pernicious and wide-spread discrimination—packaged as ‘anti-racism’—was allowed to flourish under the Biden Administration, but it will not be tolerated by this one,” said Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights at the Education Department...

Full story at https://www.yahoo.com/news/education-department-announces-investigation-against-182020931.html.

From Inside Higher Ed: America First Legal has called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for alleged racial discrimination, according to The Baltimore Banner. In a 133-page complaint filed Thursday, the conservative legal group, run by President Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, urged the DOJ to investigate Johns Hopkins “for its systemic, intentional, and ongoing discrimination within its School of Medicine on the basis of race, sex, ethnicity, national origin, and other impermissible, immutable characteristics under the pretext of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (‘DEI’) in open defiance” of civil rights laws, Supreme Court precedent and presidential executive orders...

The America First Legal complaint singles out certain medical school divisions and programs for seeking to recruit a “diverse applicant pool,” including residency programs in gynecology and obstetrics, emergency medicine, dermatology, anesthesiology and critical care. But the complaint leaves room for attacks beyond the medical school, noting that DEI practices “are part of a comprehensive, university-wide regime of racial engineering.” ...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2025/07/21/america-first-legal-urges-doj-investigate-hopkins-dei.

Straws in the Wind - Part 32

From the NY Times: As President Trump unleashes dizzying firepower at the nation’s top universities, he and his supporters have made the argument that the institutions have brought such action onto themselves. They turned into bastions of leftism hostile to conservative thought and lost the trust of the American people, according to the administration. The universities accrued massive endowments, becoming less like noble nonprofits spreading good to the world and more like corporations taking advantage of government largess, the argument goes.

Ronald J. Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University, which receives the most federal funding of any American university, has been listening. For years, he has been warning that higher education should make efforts to attract more conservatives to the ranks. His school has pushed for more viewpoint diversity and has touted a partnership with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

Those efforts do not appear to have protected the university. Johns Hopkins, the first research university in the United States, has been one of the hardest hit by a Republican effort to reduce federal funding flowing to schools. The Trump administration has not singled out Johns Hopkins with lists of demands or threats that it would be cut off from funding, as the administration has done with Harvard and Columbia. Still, Johns Hopkins has already laid off more than 2,000 people in the wake of an $800 million research cut. And officials of the university are bracing for deeper cuts to the $4.2 billion it receives in annual federal research money.

The university’s troubles show how a Republican campaign against higher education could decimate the nation’s research enterprise...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/us/johns-hopkins-university-federal-funding-cuts.html.

18 friends... But not UC

From Forbes: A group of the nation’s leading research universities has requested that a federal judge allow them to file a legal brief supporting Harvard University’s lawsuit against the Trump administration over more than $2 billion in frozen federal grant money. The 18 institutions requesting permission to file an amicus curiae (or “friend of the court”) brief are:

Boston University; Brown University; California Institute of Technology; Colorado State University; Dartmouth College; Johns Hopkins University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Michigan State University; Oregon State University; Princeton University; Rice University; Rutgers University; Tufts University; University of Maryland, College Park; University of Oregon; University of Pennsylvania; University of Pittsburgh; and Yale University.

The request was granted on Friday by Judge Allison D. Burroughs, who is presiding over the federal lawsuit. The schools have not yet filed the brief, but in their request they state that each of them “has received millions of dollars in federal investments in scientific research over the decades.” ...

Full story at https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2025/06/07/18-research-universities-back-harvards-lawsuit-against-funding-cuts/.

Terrell

From Politico: The head of the federal antisemitism task force that has helmed the controversial crackdown on universities in recent months says his team plans to intensify its actions in the wake of the shooting that left two Israeli Embassy staffers dead in downtown Washington. Leo Terrell, a former Democrat and Fox News contributor-turned Department of Justice senior counsel in the civil rights division, is the little-known figure behind the Trump administration’s efforts to target 10 academic institutions across the country over claims of antisemitism...

Harvard isn’t the only school facing the administration’s ire. Terrell’s task force in February announced a list of 10 institutions that it planned to investigate for allegedly allowing antisemitism on their campuses. In addition to Harvard, the universities include: Columbia; George Washington; Johns Hopkins; New York University; Northwestern; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Minnesota; and the University of Southern California...

Full profile at https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/23/leo-terrell-trump-universities-harvard-00368352.

More Cuts

From the NY Times: The Trump Administration’s abrupt withdrawal of $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University cast a pall over at least nine other campuses worried they could be next. The schools, a mix that includes both public universities and Ivy League institutions, have been placed on an official administration list of schools the Department of Justice said may have failed to protect Jewish students and faculty...

Harvard University, whose former president Claudine Gay resigned last year following a bruising appearance before a House committee, is also on the list. So are George Washington University; Johns Hopkins University; New York University; Northwestern University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Minnesota; and the University of Southern California...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/08/us/columbia-trump-colleges-antisemitism.html.

The Visit

From a DOJ news release of 2/28/25:

The Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced that it will be visiting 10 university campuses that have experienced antisemitic incidents since October 2023. Created pursuant to President Trump’s Executive Order on Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism, the Task Force set as its first priority to eradicate antisemitic harassment in schools and on college campuses...

The 10 universities identified by the Task Force are: Columbia University; George Washington University; Harvard University; Johns Hopkins University; New York University; Northwestern University; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Minnesota; and the University of Southern California...

Full release at https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-task-force-combat-antisemitism-announces-visits-10-college-campuses-experienced.

The 15% Cap - Part 5

From an email received earlier today:

To: Faculty, Graduate Students, Postdoctoral Scholars and Staff

Dear Colleagues:

As you may have already read, the Federal Court in Massachusetts acted quickly to issue a temporary restraining order in the lawsuit that California joined as one of 22 states seeking to stop the National Institutes of Health from reducing their Facilities and Administration (also known as Indirect Cost (IDC)) rates to 15%. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) along with the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health, Conference of Boston Teaching Hospitals, and Greater New York Hospital Association took similar steps today and that restraining order was approved by the Massachusetts court as well.

To add to the chorus of institutions in opposition to the NIH reduction in F/A (IDC), the Association of American Universities (AAU), the American College of Education (ACE), and the Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities (APLU) have now filed their complaint and motion for a temporary restraining order. The University of California is a named plaintiff in the lawsuit, along with 12 other institutions (Brandeis, Brown, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, University of Chicago, Cornell, George Washington, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Penn, Rochester, and Tufts).

It is heartening to see this degree of unity in the higher education sector, across so many different states. We know there is a longer road to travel before this issue is resolved, but we are working overtime on it. And, as you probably also realize, this is not the only issue the University faces. The recent announcement that grants from the Institute for Education Science have been cancelled represents another area of concern and we are tracking/responding there as well.

So as not to take up additional space in your inbox, I recommend that you consult this site for weekly updates on issues in Washington, DC developed by our Federal Relations colleagues: UC Federal Updates website:

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/federal-updates

Going forward, that will be the best place to find updates.

Thank you, once again, for all that you do for UC. It has never been more important.

Cordially,

Katherine S. Newman

UC System Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs

UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy

Follow the (federal) Money

Top 20 Universities Receiving NIH Grants (2023)

---

Johns Hopkins University $842,956,584

University of California, San Francisco $789,196,651

University of Pennsylvania $703,217,343

Duke University $701,940,461

University of Michigan $698,264,076

University of Pittsburgh $658,312,303

Washington University, St. Louis $633,343,121

Columbia University Health Sciences $633,309,114

Stanford University $628,835,527

Yale University $622,499,969

University of California, Los Angeles $580,267,623

University of California, San Diego $572,451,525

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill $559,512,811

University of Washington, Seattle $558,170,733

Vanderbilt University $546,405,280

Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine $501,120,829

Emory University $485,429,870

University of Wisconsin, Madison $446,888,313

New York University $424,963,095

Northwestern University $413,561,989

---

Source: Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2024/02/10/top-20-universities-for-nih-funding-johns-hopkins-ranks-first-again/.

---

Note: The table above shows only grants from NIH. In UCLA's case, the total contracts and grants revenue was $1.3 billion, much of which comes from the federal government of which NIH is a part. UCLA's total budget was $11.7 billion. Note also that money flows into UCLA from other federal programs such as Medicare, Medi-Cal (Medicaid), student loans, etc.

Source: UCLA Annual Report 2023 at https://ucla.app.box.com/v/acct-pdf-AFR-22-23.

---

From the NY Times: ...The opening weeks of President Trump’s second term have cast America’s campuses into turmoil, with upheaval that threatens to erode the financial foundation of higher education in the United States. As the administration orders the end of diversity programs and imposes cuts to foreign aid, university presidents and their lawyers fear that millions of dollars in federal funding could ultimately vanish. Some research projects, including many connected to the U.S. Agency for International Development, have been suspended, and program directors have made plans for layoffs.

But universities have largely been quiet. Professors and administrators alike seem wary of provoking a president who has glorified retribution and has already started to tighten the funding spigot. Staying out of the spotlight, some reason, is prudent. Those who have spoken have often relied on carefully calibrated letters and statements, noting that they are watching but hardly offering any overt opposition. In some instances, researchers and campus leaders have been pressured into silence by a government that has demanded they not speak to reporters as money remains bottled up...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/us/trump-executive-orders-universities.html.

Let it not be said

Yesterday, we posted about Johns Hopkins' decision to resume using the SAT/ACT.

Today we note another trend in higher ed: universities deciding they will no longer take official positions on events other than those immediately affecting the university. Here is the Johns Hopkins' version:

On institutional statements from the university

August 15, 2024

Dear Colleagues: 

As leaders of Johns Hopkins University, we are often called upon in the face of global, national, or local occurrences to issue public statements on behalf of the institution. These requests are usually grounded in a sense of connection to the values and purpose of our university and our common humanity, and on the occasions when we have issued such statements, we have attempted to choose our topics and words carefully. 

In recent years, requests for institutional statements have increased in frequency. The subjects upon which we have been urged to speak have varied widely—human rights violations, acts of discrimination, changes in health regulations, incidents of targeted violence, military conflicts, and natural disasters, among others, have led to calls for a university statement. Often those seeking such statements want us to identify and condemn the actors whom they regard as principally responsible. In other cases, those seeking statements simply desire an expression of concern or sympathy for the persons directly affected by the incident in question. However, we must recognize that taking institutional positions can interfere with the university’s central commitment to free inquiry and obligation to foster a diversity of perspectives within our academic community. 

As is the case with many of our peers, we have been weighing the value, appropriateness, and limitations of such institutional statements. We—as university leaders and deans—have arrived at a strong commitment to make institutional statements only in the limited circumstances where an issue is clearly related to a direct, concrete, and demonstrable interest or function of the university. We write today to share our reasoning on this important issue and to clarify and deepen our commitment to a posture of restraint. 

To begin, the very idea of an “official” position of the university on a social, scientific, or political issue runs counter to our foundational ethos—articulated most clearly in our Statement of Principles of Academic Freedom—to be a place where competing views are welcomed, challenged, and tested through dialogue and rigorous marshaling of evidence. The university is the site, more than any other institution in our society, where the process of truth-seeking through intense and open contestation is given pride of place. Although institutional statements may feel warranted, consoling, or, at times, even necessary to guide the university through difficult moments, experience has shown that they can be counterproductive, and even at odds with our core mission. These statements can too easily fuel a perception that there are approved or endorsed “institutional” views on political or social issues, which may, in fact, conflict with the views of members of our community. They risk interfering with our truth-seeking function and compromising the ethos and credibility of the institution in the process. 

Additionally, institutional statements can be perceived as performative or rote: They can excuse the absence of meaningful action to bring the community together in challenging moments, take up difficult questions, and learn, discuss, and debate together in a mutually respectful and supportive manner. They also can unintentionally model for our students that the only, or best, avenue for engaging with issues is to make public statements, obscuring that there are more effective ways to make change in the world. 

Moreover, such statements foster an expectation that the institution will speak on a wide range of topics and a perception that when we decline to do so, it is a signal that the issues or the concerns of affected community members are unworthy of our attention. Why do some domestic or international conflicts or crises command our institutional attention, while others are regarded as less salient? As the tide of statements has risen across the university, it has become clear that the more statements we publish, the more injurious the slight to members of our community when we decline to issue a statement in response to some other incident. This pattern not only undermines our commitment to inclusivity but also erodes trust in institutional leadership and, as noted earlier, compromises our core mission as a place of open inquiry and diverse perspectives. 

For these reasons, we will restrict our communications to the standard we have articulated—limiting our statements to those occasions where an issue is clearly related to a direct, concrete, and demonstrable interest or function of the university. This means that not issuing a statement will be our default in the great majority of cases we are likely to face. We acknowledge that the line between those issues that implicate a core interest of the university and those where the impact is less direct is not always easily drawn. But the inevitability of hard cases is not an argument against the approach we are adopting, which we believe will address the lion’s share of cases that typically confront the university. Against this benchmark, for instance, a decision by government to reduce our permitted scope of activities might well justify a statement, but an event that has occurred internationally or nationally and that has no direct or concrete impact on our capacity to discharge our mission would not. 

Critically, this posture of restraint does not mean the university will be unresponsive or unfeeling in the face of controversy or tragedy. Our priority is to respond to the events around us through the channels that are our university’s core strength and time-honored calling—creating knowledge, engaging with ideas, and bringing discoveries and care to the world. When an external event affects members of our community, our university’s focus will be to engage interested members of our community in educational and community programming that addresses the topic. Where appropriate, the university can offer direct support and engagement for those among us who are affected by the matter. 

Further, our commitment as university leaders to embrace a policy of restraint is not meant to signal that members of the community should retreat from the world or the priorities of our institution. Indeed, our faculty, students, and staff engage the communities around us in countless productive ways, and we will continue to encourage our scholars to bring their ideas and expertise to inform the critical issues of the day. With the opening of the Hopkins Bloomberg Center, our capacity to serve as a platform to explore these issues has been magnified. And the university will remain unwavering in its commitment to values and aspirations in areas of strategic importance such as those embodied in foundational documents like the Ten for One and the Second Roadmap on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. 

Finally, we are eager to engage faculty colleagues in an examination of whether this posture of restraint is appropriate not only for university leaders and deans but also for departments, centers and other units of the university. We will be working with the Johns Hopkins University Council to develop an answer to this question over the course of the fall term and to solicit broad input from the university, including divisional academic advisory boards and senates. Of course, the dedication to institutional restraint will not apply to any individual faculty member speaking in their own scholarly or personal capacity. Again, the intent of this commitment is to extend the broadest possible scope to the views and expressions of our faculty, bolstering the freedom for them to share their insights and perspectives without being concerned about running counter to an “institutional” stance. 

Ours is an extraordinary institution, a place furthered by the courageous interrogation and boundless discovery of our colleagues. The project of the university as an institution is to create the conditions for that exploration, discovery, and engagement, even for controversial or disquieting ideas. Against that overarching and foundational goal, we believe that the policy of restraint to which we are now committing ourselves is timely, principled, and critical for the continuing relevance and mission of our university. 

Sincerely, 

Ron Daniels, President 

Ray Jayawardhana, Provost 

Fred Bronstein, Dean of the Peabody Institute 

Christopher S. Celenza, James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences 

Theodore L. DeWeese, Dean of the Medical Faculty and CEO, Johns Hopkins Medicine 

Elisabeth M. Long, Sheridan Dean of University Libraries, Archives, and Museums 

Ellen J. MacKenzie, Dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health 

Christopher C. Morphew, Dean of the School of Education 

T.E. Schlesinger, Benjamin T. Rome Dean of the Whiting School of Engineering 

James B. Steinberg, Dean of the School of Advanced International Studies 

Sarah L. Szanton, Dean of the School of Nursing 

Alexander Triantis, Dean of the Carey Business School

===

Source: https://president.jhu.edu/messages/2024/08/15/on-institutional-statements-from-the-university/.

===

UC hasn't made a decision such as the one above. But the Regents did recently adopt a policy on departmental political statements which includes a requirement for a disclaimer stating such statements are not the official position of the university.

 

More Title IX and the Courts

Newsweek carries an article about a Title IX (sexual assault) case from Johns Hopkins University in which a student was "convicted" and suspended, but won a court decision that essentially said due process had not been provided. Oddly, the article focuses on the fact that when the US Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by the university, Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself but did not say why.

However, the "why" was obvious. She had participated in a lower court's opinion in the case before becoming a member of the Supreme Court.

What is of interest in the case was it provides yet another example of something we have discussed in the past: external courts look for due process as they understand due process in evaluating university procedures. And we have noted that UC, and many other universities with union contracts, have long had grievance and arbitration procedures that external courts will defer to because - while such procedures may be less formal than those of courts, they provide basic due process. From Newsweek:

...In a decision siding with the [accused] student, the appeals court agreed that the university violated his right to due process and engaged in gender discrimination under Title IX. In an opinion and order authored by Barrett, the panel said it was "plausible" that Purdue's investigation panel "chose to believe Jane [Doe] because she is a woman and to disbelieve John because he is a man." ...

Full story at https://www.newsweek.com/supreme-court-refuses-take-amy-coney-barrett-case-1885574.

Legacy and Related Issues

In the aftermath of the recent Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action at Harvard and the U of North Carolina, there has been analysis of Harvard's admissions data with a spotlight on so-called legacy admissions. Here is an op ed worth considering on that issue:

Junking Harvard’s Legacy Admissions Would Be Just a Baby Step

Adrian Wooldridge | Bloomberg | Washington Post

August 4, 2023

Sometimes a nation’s most cherished idea about itself can act like a slow poison. That is what happened in Britain after the Second World War with the idea that Britain remained a great power. This folie de grandeur not only produced the debacle of Anglo-French Suez intervention in 1956. It prevented Britain from becoming a founding member of the European Union (and thereby shaping it in a more liberal direction) and distracted it from the labor of rebuilding the economy.

The equivalent across the Atlantic is the idea that America is the world’s greatest meritocracy — and a living rebuke to the closed aristocratic societies of the Old World. This assumption was reasonable in the 19th century when millions of immigrants fled class-bound Europe in search of wealth and opportunity. It was a reasonable assumption for much of the 20th century — particularly after the Second World War — when an expanding economy created the world’s biggest middle class.

But over the past 20 years it has ceased to be true as inequality has increased sharply, and mass education has deteriorated. The US has lower levels of social mobility than most European countries. It is also generating a hereditary ruling class that is beginning to resemble the hereditary elite of old Europe rather than the open elite of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

Yet America’s conviction that it is a meritocracy has not only blinded it to this malign development, but has also led it to tolerate practices that would be beyond the pale in supposedly class-bound societies such as Great Britain. Old Europe is astonished by the practice of American ambassadors buying their political appointments with lavish donations to party funds, thereby leapfrogging over professional diplomats with sometimes embarrassing consequences. This is something that European powers abandoned a century ago. Old Europe is even more astonished by the preferences that America’s elite universities give to the children of alumni (“legacies”) or to people who donate mounds of cash to the institutions. Only a country that is convinced, deep down, that it is a meritocracy can tolerate such flagrant abuses of the meritocratic principle.

Is America finally waking up to the reality that it’s not as meritocratic as it thinks it is? The recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action for minorities has had the unexpected effect of igniting debate about affirmative action for the rich. The majority’s opinion included several swipes at legacy admissions in order to undermine the tone of moral superiority adopted by the defendants of the status quo. And surprisingly, the mainstream press devoted almost as much space to debating the merits of legacies as it did to lamenting the death of race-based admissions. Six conservative judges have done more to stir up debate about the flagrant abuse that is legacy admissions than an army of social justice warriors.

A new study by three leading economists — Raj Chetty and David J. Deming of Harvard University and John N. Friedman of Brown University — is perfectly timed to give this debate some analytical rigor and empirical heft.* The three economists establish two vital points by poring over a combination of anonymized admissions data to Ivy-Plus Colleges (the “plus” being Stanford, MIT, Duke and the University of Chicago) and income tax returns.

The first is that elite colleges make a big difference when it comes to admission to the very summit of American society — what might be loosely called “the establishment.”(1) Less than half of one percent of Americans attend Ivy-Plus colleges, yet these 12 institutions account for more than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of US senators, half of all Rhodes Scholars, three-fourths of Supreme Court justices, and 13% of the top 0.1% of earners. The staffs of America’s leading newspapers, particularly the New York Times, are thick with Ivy graduates. By comparing two groups of waitlisted students — those who are admitted to Ivy-Plus universities and those who are rejected — they note that the successful are much more likely to reach the top 1% of the income distribution, attend an elite graduate school and work for a prestigious firm. When elite colleges talk grandly about shaping the leadership class, they are not just blowing smoke.

The second is that, for all their vaunted commitment to diversity and social justice, Ivy-Plus colleges are machines for perpetuating — or perhaps amplifying — class privilege. One in six students at Ivy League schools has parents in the top 1% of the income distribution. This is not just because the children of the rich are more likely to apply to elite colleges. Nor is it because the children of the rich have higher academic scores than middle class applicants: Children from the top 1% of the income distribution (more than $611,000) are 55% more likely to secure admission than a typical middle-class applicant with the same SAT or ACT scores, and children from the top 0.1 percent are more than twice as likely to get in. It is because elite colleges deliberately discriminate in favor of the rich.

The economists point to three mechanisms that perpetuate such discrimination: the preferences given to the children of alumni, to private schools that specialize in producing strong non-academic credentials, and to athletes. Legacy students from families in the top 1% are five times as likely to be admitted as the average applicant with similar test scores. This adds to other damning data on the subject: Evidence submitted by the plaintiffs in the affirmative action case reveals that 34% of legacy applicants were admitted to Harvard compared with 6% of non-legacies; last year, an Associated Press review found that “legacy students outnumbered Black students in freshman classes at four schools: Notre Dame, Cornell, Dartmouth and the University of Southern California.”

Applicants from private schools (such as Phillips Academy and Choate Rosemary Hall) are more than twice as likely to be admitted as those who attend public high schools with the same test results. This is largely because such private schools are so good at burnishing CVs with extra-curricular activities, flowery letters of recommendation and judicious phone calls.

The most flagrant abuse is with athletes, who are admitted at four times the rate of nonathletes with the same test scores. Forget about the idea that athletes are likely to be minority children from inner cities. They are almost always rich whites who specialize in sports — particularly elite sports such as fencing or golf — from an early age. One in eight students from the top one percent was an athlete. The comparable figure for the bottom 60% is one in fifty. In the days when Britain had a pipeline from the playing fields of the great public schools to Oxbridge colleges, such athletes were referred to as “flannelled fools and muddied oafs.” Today that dubious tradition is stronger in America than Britain.

Ivy-Plus universities have strong reasons for fighting for the status quo. Just as affirmative action for minorities gives them a moral boost, affirmative action for the rich provides them with a material boost. College sports teams solidify alumni loyalty (and donations) while reinforcing the college spirit more generally. A 2022 study of admission data for an anonymous elite northeastern college found that legacies are much more likely to give money and time to their alma mater and massively more likely to give big donations, with 42% of legacy graduates flagged as potential top givers compared with only 6% of non-legacy graduates. Big gifts not only help to keep America’s universities at the forefront of academic research, the argument goes; they also give them the wherewithal to fund poorer students.

But such arguments are hardly dispositive: What do fancy gyms or generous research grants count for if you pollute the academic ethic by selling places to the highest bidder? With an endowment of $53.2 billion as of June 2021, Harvard (“a hedge fund with a university attached”) could survive on its interest for an age without sending out any more begging letters to alumni. And Princeton has an even higher endowment per capita than Harvard.

The case against positive discrimination for the rich is gathering momentum. Wesleyan University recently announced that it will end legacy admissions, adding its name to an honor roll that now boasts Johns Hopkins, Amherst, and Carnegie Mellon and has long included Harvard’s meritocratic neighbor, MIT. Several advocacy groups are suing Harvard over the legacy admissions, citing the high proportion of legacy students who are white as well as rich. And there is no doubt where public opinion lies: An opinion poll conducted last year by the Pew Research Center found that 75% of Americans were against legacy admissions, up from 68% in 2019, and higher than the proportion of Americans who are against affirmative action for minorities.

The Chetty et al research can only add to this momentum. The economists demonstrate that Ivy-Plus colleges could easily diversify the pipeline into America’s elite — long their claimed intention — by the simple expedient of getting rid of “hooks” that benefit the already privileged. Doing so would increase the share of students from the bottom 95% of the income distribution by 8.7 percentage points, adding 144 students from families earning less than $240,000 to the typical Ivy-Plus college. Such an increase in poorer students is comparable to the reduction in the number of Black and Hispanic students that would follow from the elimination of race-based affirmative action. And it would increase social diversity without compromising economic outcomes. On the contrary: The proportion of Ivy-Plus students who go on to work for the most intellectually demanding elite firms should actually increase.

But simply removing unjustified privileges for the rich should only be the beginning given how skewed the admission to elite institutions is to the plutocracy, and given the price that America is paying for this in terms of social tension and lost ability. Several elite colleges now make attendance free for families who earn below a certain income — $100,000 at Stanford and Princeton and $85,000 at Harvard — though so far this has had surprisingly little impact on the class-composition of the universities. Chetty et al make the case for “need affirmative” admissions policies in which low-income students with high academic ratings are given an admission preference. Others point to the virtues of the Texas model in which students in the top 10% of graduating classes in all the state’s schools, in poor districts as well as rich, are guaranteed places in the University of Texas system.

The renewed debate is a sign that the US status quo — plutocracy diluted by affirmative action for favored minorities — is breaking apart. I would simply reiterate two arguments that I have made. The first is the case for planting elite academic schools in poorer areas. This strategy worked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when America was facing similar problems with social calcification, and progressive educationalists founded schools such as San Francisco’s Lowell High School (1856) and New York City’s Stuyvesant High School (1904) that proved extraordinarily successful in getting the children of poor immigrants into elite universities.

The second is the case for preserving standardized tests in the face of calls for holistic assessment.** There is certainly evidence that such tests favor richer children who can afford expensive test prep. But they are nevertheless much less class-biased than holistic assessments that give you points for doing community service in Guatemala or excelling at fencing. Highly selective public colleges such as the University of California, Berkeley, that follow more standardized processes in evaluating applications exhibit smaller disparities in admission rates by parental income than private colleges that make more use of holistic evaluations. In Ivy-Plus universities standardized tests are also “substantially better” predictors of success after college than the non-academic factors (polish or academic ability) — indeed, according to Chetty et al, such non-academic factors may “negatively predict” later success.

Standardized tests provide an invaluable way of holding elite universities accountable to an external measure of merit (which may be one reason so many admissions officers are so keen to get rid of them). The Chetty research would have been impossible without using SAT and Act evidence. They are also better predictors of academic performance at college than school grades, not least because accelerating grade inflation is now eroding the value of such grades.

Let us by all means start by abolishing obvious abuses such as legacies and athletic boosts. It is highly unusual for an economic research paper to point to such a clear-cut solution to a big social problem. But let us go further and use time-honored tools such as standardized tests and selective high schools to make a reality once again of one of America’s most cherished ideas about itself — that it is a country where ability can be matched with opportunity and where success in life is distributed according to the logic of merit rather than the lottery of parental income.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/08/04/junking-legacy-admissions-at-top-us-schools-is-just-a-baby-step/b4dda4ca-3303-11ee-85dd-5c3c97d6acda_story.html.

====

*https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/CollegeAdmissions_Paper.pdf.

**This paragraph should - but probably won't - stir the interest of the Regents who got rid of test scores for admissions. Blog readers will recall that the Academic Senate originally recommended keeping tests as one element of admissions.

Patents, Patents

Patent Office in 1924

We're catching up with some data on patent production at various universities. (No, yours truly doesn't know the story behind the high scores of two Saudi universities.)

From Forbes: The University of California system led the world in 2022 for the number of U.S. utility patents awarded to a university. Across its 10 campuses and six academic health centers, the UC system received 570 patents, outpacing runner up MIT by more than 200 patents. Utility patents are patents granted for inventions. They are issued for the invention of a new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or a new and useful improvement in those inventions. They generally permit their owners to exclude others from making, using, or selling the invention for a period of up to twenty years.

The list for 2022 was compiled by the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) in its report, Top 100 Worldwide Universities Granted Utility Patents. The report relies on data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark office to create its list, which NAI compiles annually.

The top 20 universities worldwide were:

• University of California 570
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology 343
• King Fahd University Of Petroleum and Minerals 233
• The University of Texas 225
• Purdue University 192
• Stanford University 184
• Harvard University 179
• King Abdulaziz University 177
• California Institute of Technology 164
• Arizona State University 160
• Johns Hopkins University 159
• Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology 147
• University of Michigan 145
• Seoul National University 144
• Zhejiang University 142
• University of Florida Research Foundation 139
• Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (University of Wisconsin) 132
• Duke University 126
• University of Colorado 115
• University of Pennsylvania 108

Of the top 20 universities, 15 were located in the United States, and 38 American institutions are included in the top 50 universities.

Commenting on the University of California’s ranking, Theresa Maldonado, UV Vice President for Research and Innovation, said in a news release from the university, “the UC system has a vibrant culture of innovation, entrepreneurship and cross-disciplinary collaboration across our 10 campuses, so it’s gratifying to see that reflected in this ranking from the National Academy of Inventors. As a public institution, our faculty and researchers are working to improve lives every day with their groundbreaking work.”

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2023/04/26/university-of-california-system-leads-all-universities-worldwide-for-most-patents/.

No Triggers: The Empire Strikes Back - Part 2

We noted on Friday that there seems to be push-back developing in higher ed, and maybe in the New York Times, regarding speech limitations. The "saga" - as the poster image says - seems to be continuing.* Excerpts from a column by David French in the NY Times: 

...Let’s take Stanford University, for example. In the days and weeks since law students shouted down and disrupted a speech by a federal judge, the center has taken a stand. The dean of Stanford Law School, Jenny Martinez, penned a powerful, 10-page memorandum that mandated a half-day of instruction on free speech and legal norms, [and] reaffirmed the school’s dedication to the Stanford Statement on Academic Freedom...

Then there’s Cornell University. In March, the school’s undergraduate student assembly unanimously approved a resolution calling for trigger warnings in syllabuses to warn students of “graphic traumatic content” in course content. Cornell’s president, Martha E. Pollack, promptly vetoed it...

The faculty at Harvard University is also stepping up. In an opinion essay in The Boston Globe, Harvard’s Steven Pinker and Bertha Madras announced the creation of the Council on Academic Freedom, a coalition of 50 faculty members and several other Harvard employees “devoted to free inquiry, intellectual diversity and civil discourse.” ...

Vanderbilt University will announce the expansion of the American branch of the Future of Free Speech Project, an initiative run by the Danish think tank Justitia, which will include an international focus on free expression...

And we cannot forget the University of Chicago. Since 2014, it’s arguably been the single most influential academic institution in the United States supporting academic freedom. Its statement on free speech declares the “university’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the university community to be offensive, unwise, immoral or wrongheaded.” A version of the Chicago statement has been adopted by almost 100 colleges, universities and state university systems, including Princeton University, Johns Hopkins University and the North Carolina and Wisconsin state university systems...

Full column at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/opinion/free-speech-campus-universities-promising-news.html.

At least some of this interest in speech and academic freedom seems to be a reaction of university leadership to political antipathy towards higher ed that has developed in some states and more general skepticism about the value of college degrees.

===

*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/04/no-triggers-empire-strikes-back.html.

Lawsuit against the Internet Archive: Important

Blog readers will know that we often have preserved material, including quarterly pdf editions of this blog, on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/about/. There is substantial material - text, books, music, other audio, photos, video - on the Internet Archive. It also has a feature - the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/ - that reproduces the internet as it was at dates in the past. Thus, if a website disappears, it lives on via the Wayback Machine. 

The Internet Archive can be a very important source for researchers. However, some publishers have filed a lawsuit regarding copyright infringement on one aspect of what the Internet Archive does: act as a library. (The Internet Archive is a member of the American Library Association.) As yours truly understands it, what the Internet Archive does is emulate a physical library. It buys a book just as a physical library would, and it lends that book out for a fixed duration to one patron at a time. But what it lends out is a digital copy that expires after the fixed period, again, one patron at a time. 

It might be noted that anyone can post on the Internet Archive for free. Thus, instructors can make class lectures and other material easily available to students. It is supported by foundation donations and individual donations. The National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation are among its institutional donors. It has a search engine - which is not as effective as what you will encounter on commercial social media, say on YouTube, but on the other hand there is more flexibility on the Internet Archive about posting than - again - on YouTube and other social media.

Below we reproduce an opinion piece about the above-mentioned lawsuit from Inside Higher Ed of 3-17-2023:

===

The Internet Archive Is a Library

A lawsuit against the Internet Archive threatens the most significant specialized library to emerge in decades, say a group of current and former university librarians.

By Dave Hansen, Deborah Jakubs, Chris Bourg, Thomas Leonard, Jeff MacKie-Mason, Joseph A. Salem Jr., MacKenzie Smith, and Winston Tabb. 

Dave Hansen is executive director of Authors Alliance. Deborah Jakubs is university librarian emerita at Duke University. Chris Bourg is director of libraries at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Thomas Leonard is university librarian emeritus and professor of journalism emeritus at University of California, Berkeley. Jeff MacKie-Mason is university librarian, chief digital scholarship officer and professor in the School of Information and the Department of Economics at UC Berkeley. Joseph A. Salem Jr. is the Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian and vice provost for library affairs at Duke. MacKenzie Smith is university librarian and vice provost of digital scholarship at University of California, Davis. Winston Tabb is the Sheridan Dean of University Libraries, Archives and Museums Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University. They each write in their individual capacity and provide titles and institutional affiliations for identification purposes only.

--

The Internet Archive, a nonprofit library in San Francisco, has grown into one of the most important cultural institutions of the modern age. What began in 1996 as an audacious attempt to archive and preserve the World Wide Web has grown into a vast library of books, musical recordings and television shows, all digitized and available online, with a mission to provide “universal access to all knowledge.”

Right now, we are at a pivotal stage in a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Internet Archive, still pending, brought by four of the biggest for-profit publishers in the world, who have been trying to shut down core programs of the archive since the start of the pandemic. For the sake of libraries and library users everywhere, let’s hope they don’t succeed.

You’ve probably heard of Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which archives billions of webpages from across the globe. Fewer are familiar with its other extraordinary collections, which include 41 million digitized books and texts, with more than three million books available to borrow. To make this possible, Internet Archive uses a practice known as “controlled digital lending,” “whereby a library owns a book, digitizes it, and loans either the physical book or the digital copy to one user at a time.”

Despite its incredible library collections, which serve the needs of millions of people, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons Inc., and Penguin Random House assert that the Internet Archive is not a real library.

In their lawsuit against the Internet Archive, which could extract millions of dollars from the nonprofit organization, the publishers claim that the Internet Archive “badly misleads the public and boldly misappropriates the goodwill that libraries enjoy and have legitimately earned.” In their view, the archive’s “efforts to brand itself as a library” are part of a scheme to “fraudulently mislead” people, circumvent copyright law and limit how much profit publishers can extract from the ebook market. They describe the Internet Archive as a “pirate site” and its business model as “parasitic and illegal” and characterize controlled digital lending as “an invented paradigm that is well outside copyright law.”

The Internet Archive, in turn, argues that the practice of controlled digital lending constitutes fair use under copyright law, and asserts that “libraries have been practicing CDL in one form or another for more than a decade, and hundreds of libraries use it to lend books digitally today.”

Why is it so important to the publishers that the Internet Archive not be identified as a library? Primarily because Congress has long recognized the valuable role that libraries play in our copyright system and has created special allowances in the law for their work. In this suit, the publishers seek to redefine the Internet Archive on their own terms and, in so doing, deny it the ability to leverage the same legal tools that thousands of other libraries use to lend and disseminate materials to our users.

The argument that the Internet Archive isn’t a library is wrong. If this argument is accepted, the results would jeopardize the future development of digital libraries nationwide. The Internet Archive is the most significant specialized library to emerge in decades. It is one of the only major memory institutions to be created from the emergence of the internet. It is, and continues to be, a modern-day cultural institution built intentionally in response to the technological revolution through which we’ve lived.

Libraries are defined by collections, services and values. In The Librarian’s Book of Lists (ALA, 2010), George M. Eberhart offers this definition: “A library is a collection of resources in a variety of formats that is (1) organized by information professionals or other experts who (2) provide convenient physical, digital, bibliographic, or intellectual access and (3) offer targeted services and programs (4) with the mission of educating, informing, or entertaining a variety of audiences (5) and the goal of stimulating individual learning and advancing society as a whole.”

The Internet Archive has all these characteristics. It is a one-of-a-kind independent research library, with its holdings fully available in digital form. Its substantial physical and digital collections are unique. It employs librarians and other information professionals. It is open to all interested readers. It cooperates with peer libraries in support of archiving the information and contemporary discourse as manifested in the World Wide Web. It has an active community of researchers who depend on its collections. And it is an engaged, responsive, resource-sharing partner to hundreds of peer libraries. It is also now an integral part of the interlibrary loan system, sharing its holdings with other libraries worldwide. It shares the keystone values of all libraries: preservation, access, privacy, intellectual freedom, diversity, lifelong learning and the public good. And it does all this without commercial motive as a mission-driven not-for-profit organization.

Those of us who have worked with the Internet Archive or drawn on its many offerings have long seen the organization as a peer. The Internet Archive fulfills the mission of a library in ways we could only dream of a few decades ago. We cannot defend against the publishers’ lawsuit. We can, however, stand with Internet Archive as it fights for the right to buy, preserve and lend books, which is what libraries do.

Source: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2023/03/17/librarians-should-stand-internet-archive-opinion.

Sometimes No (US) News Is Good News - Part 12 (What's Up Doc?)

Rest assured, dear readers, that we are, as always, preserving the recordings of the Regents meetings this week and will get to review them in due course. We have already reviewed the Tuesday meeting. Meanwhile, other things are happening in the world. 

Remember the story of the law schools, including at UC, which pulled out of cooperating with the rankings published by US News and World Report? Now the Harvard Med School has joined the pull-out movement. Will other med schools follow? What about UC med schools? From the New York Times:

Harvard Medical School will no longer submit data to U.S. News & World Report for the magazine’s annual “best medical schools” rankings, becoming the university’s second graduate school to boycott the list in recent months, the school’s dean said on Tuesday. In a letter, Dr. George Daley, dean of the faculty of medicine, said he had been debating the decision since becoming dean six years ago and was inspired by a group of top law schools that withdrew from the rankings last fall. “My concerns and the perspectives I have heard from others are more philosophical than methodological, and rest on the principled belief that rankings cannot meaningfully reflect the high aspirations for educational excellence, graduate preparedness, and compassionate and equitable patient care that we strive to foster in our medical education programs,” Dr. Daley said.

U.S. News has published the rankings for decades, and while they have come under growing criticism, they continue to be an influential guide for students and their parents during the college selection process. Dr. Daley said the rankings create what he called “perverse incentives” for institutions to report misleading information and set policies that boost rankings. Although Harvard’s medical school will no longer share key data with the magazine, it will continue to share some of the data on its admissions website. Harvard Medical School was ranked first in the magazine’s 2023 best medical school for research list, released last spring, and the Grossman School of Medicine at New York University was ranked second. Tying for third were the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, the School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University and the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Medical schools are evaluated on faculty resources, the academic achievements of entering students and qualitative assessments by schools and residency directors, according to U.S. News...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/us/harvard-medical-school-us-news-rankings.html.

Yours truly, who taught labor economics for many years, can't help but noting that all rating and evaluation systems create perverse incentives "to report misleading information and set policies that boost rankings." We live in an imperfect world with incomplete information with which to make decisions. So, if you are going to have any kind of review system, the issue is not which one is perfect - since there will never be perfection - but which one is better than the others. But maybe it's not surprising that lawyers came up with better objections and arguments than doctors!

====

To hear the text above, click on the link below:

https://ia904704.us.archive.org/3/items/new-year-outlook/harvard%20med.mp3