Harvard, Princeton, and Yale were originally founded as seminaries. They are seminaries once again. The doctrine they embrace is both insecure and oppressive in its prohibition of insiders and outsiders from pursuing free inquiry. Rather than wrestle with hard questions about human dignity, individual agency, and speech, many in the Ivy League seem poised to double down on fanaticism.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic

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The moral confusion on too many campuses after the October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis fits a familiar pattern. The acceptability of the speech depends on the speaker. Individuals from oppressed groups are given leeway to target oppressor groups through disruptions and threats. This victimology allows Palestinians and their supporters (the oppressed) to target, intimidate, and harass Jews (the oppressors).
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic

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The institution I now lead, the University of Florida, faces all sorts of challenges, and Florida is the site of important battles about the responsibilities of academia to our society. As a public university, our incredibly talented and dedicated faculty aim to provide an elite education that promotes resilience and strength in our students so that they are tough enough, smart enough, and compassionate enough to engage big ideas in a world where people will always disagree.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic

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At root, intersectionality teaches that the relative victim status of various groups is the deepest truth, and this framework must drive our interpretation of both natural and built reality. Truth, moral claims, beauty, dignity, the explanatory value of a research insight—all of these must be subjugated to a prior determination of the historical power or powerlessness of certain sociological categories.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic

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Thirty years from now, Americans will likely recall a witness table of presidents—representing not top corporations in one single sector, but the nation’s most powerful educational institutions—refusing to speak plainly, defiantly rejecting any sense that they are part of a “we,” and exhibiting smug moralistic certainty even as they embraced bizarrely immoral positions about anti-Semitism and genocide.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic

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Decades into a digital revolution that will make lifelong work in any single sector rare, we need dynamism—not status quo–ism—in higher education. In our knowledge-intensive economy, we will need an ever-expanding, highly educated workforce. As important, we will need a broader base of wise, gritty learners. We cannot build what we need if we assume that the developmental experience of every 20-year-old will be the same.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic

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The famed Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen argued before his death in 2020 that much of what is wrong with higher education lies in our political class’s fetishizing of the Ivy League, and the consequent status-chasing of so many “almost Ivies” in pursuing activities that help in rankings but do little for students or social mobility.
~ Ben Sasse via The Atlantic

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