University, heal thyself
University, heal thyself
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University, heal thyself

🕒︎ 2025-10-20

Copyright The Philadelphia Inquirer

University, heal thyself

Whew. Professors and students at the University of Pennsylvania — where I teach — breathed a sigh of relief on Thursday when the university rejected a compact that would have given us preferential treatment in federal funding. All we needed to do in exchange was comply with the Trump administration’s demands around teaching, student costs, and much else. As our faculty senate warned, the compact asked universities to “surrender their institutional autonomy.” I’m delighted — and proud — that Penn joined four other institutions — MIT, Brown, the University of Southern California, and the University of Virginia — in rejecting the offer, which the White House sent to nine schools earlier this month. Now comes the hard part: to institute the goals of the compact on our own. The problem wasn’t with the demands of the Trump administration. It was with the mechanism of enforcement, which would have let it determine if we were satisfying them. Consider the compact’s requirement that we foster “a vibrant marketplace of ideas” and abolish “institutional units” that “belittle” conservative ideas. Of course, we should aim for a full and free dialogue of all ideas, including conservative ones. But do you trust Donald Trump and his disciples to determine — fairly and impartially — whether universities are belittling conservatives? I certainly don’t. Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, has already declared that “the universities are the enemy.” The only way to make friends with Trump is to echo his own ideas, which is what the compact would have required us to do. But if we’re honest, we’ll also admit that we have indeed belittled — or suppressed — conservatives, via the cultures we have created on our campuses. We talk a good game about the free exchange of ideas. If you think we’re living that ideal, however, you haven’t talked to right-leaning students. I have. They come out to me in my office, with the door shut, because they’re afraid of being canceled by their peers or their professors. In a 2024 survey, 12% of Penn students said they planned to vote for Trump. That’s a small fraction, but Penn is a big place; we have about 12,000 undergraduates, which means more than 1,000 students probably backed Trump. We almost never hear from them, which harms everyone. We won’t understand the Trump phenomenon if they are biting their tongues. I want my conservative students to speak their minds, especially in class, so they can teach the rest of us. But classes have become something of an afterthought at our elite universities, where reading requirements have plummeted and almost everyone gets an A. As the Trump compact correctly notes, grades should reflect “the quality, breadth, and depth of the student’s achievement.” They don’t. “When we act as though virtually everything that gets turned in is some kind of A — where A is supposedly meaning ‘excellent work’ — we are simply being dishonest to our students,” Yale philosopher Shelly Kagan told the New York Times in 2023. And earlier this month, the Times reported that Harvard students routinely skip classes, and even register for two courses that meet at the same time. When they do show up, they often spend the class period surfing on their phones or laptops. It’s not their fault. The problem lies with their professors, who are rewarded for their research rather than their teaching. So we let the students skate by with an easy A so we can get back to our keyboards. We talk a good game about the free exchange of ideas. If you think we’re living that ideal, however, you haven’t talked to right-leaning students. Again, though, I don’t want the federal government monitoring our “commitment to grade integrity” — to quote the Trump compact — or penalizing us if we fall short. That would give the White House another cudgel to use against a school that said or did something Trump didn’t like. We should instead address the problem on our own, by instituting grade curves and making effective teaching a requirement for tenure and promotion. Ditto for college costs, which the Trump compact properly identifies as a huge burden on our students. But the answer is not to freeze tuition for five years, as the compact demands, even as it instructs us to limit our enrollment of international students. Cutting the number of students from other countries — most of whom pay our full sticker price — would make it even harder for us to keep that price down. Rather, we need to make a stronger argument for public assistance to all our universities. Over the past four decades, as state governments slashed their aid to higher education, students and their families have had to finance college on their own. What began as a public good — to serve all Americans, and to sustain our democracy — has become a private one. But we’ll never make the case for more government dollars unless we can show we’re doing well with what we already have. That will require us to put good teaching — and the free exchange of ideas — front and center. I’m glad we rebuffed Trump’s effort to impose his will on us. Now we’ll find out if we can muster the will — and the courage — to do the job ourselves.

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