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    Over 100 US university presidents sign letter decrying Trump administration

    More than 100 presidents of US colleges and universities have signed a statement denouncing the Trump administration’s “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” with higher education – the strongest sign yet that US educational institutions are forming a unified front against the government’s extraordinary attack on their independence.The statement, published early on Tuesday by the American Association of Colleges and Universities, comes weeks into the administration’s mounting campaign against higher education, and hours after Harvard University became the first school to sue the government over threats to its funding. Harvard is one of several institutions hit in recent weeks with huge funding cuts and demands they relinquish significant institutional autonomy.The signatories come from large state schools, small liberal arts colleges and Ivy League institutions, including the presidents of Harvard, Princeton and Brown.In the statement, the university presidents, as well as the leaders of several scholarly societies say they speak with “one voice” and call for “constructive engagement” with the administration.“We are open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight,” they write. “However, we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.”Harvard’s lawsuit comes after the administration announced it would freeze $2.3bn in federal funds, and Donald Trump threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status, over claims the university failed to protect Jewish students from pro-Palestinian protests. The suit and the statement, taken together, mark an increasingly muscular response from universities following what initially appeared to be a tepid approach.While some university leaders have in recent weeks criticised the administration and indicated they will not abide by its demands, the statement marks the first time presidents have spoken out collectively on the matter. The joint condemnation followed a convening of more than 100 university leaders called by the AAC&U and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences last week to “come together to speak out at this moment of enormity”, said Lynn Pasquarella, the president of the AAC&U.Pasquarella said that there was “widespread agreement” across a variety of academic institutions about the need to take a collective stand.“Much has been written about this flood-the-zone strategy that’s being used in the current attacks on higher education, and it’s a strategy designed to overwhelm campus leaders with a constant barrage of directives, executive orders, and policy announcements that make it impossible to respond to everything all at once,” she said, explaining why it has taken until now for a joint response. “Campus leaders have had a lot to deal with over the past few months, and I think that’s part of the reason, but it’s also the case that they are constrained by boards, by multiple constituencies who are often asking them to do things that are at odds with one another.”The Trump administration has issued a barrage of measures aimed at universities the right has described as “the enemy” – some under the guise of fighting alleged antisemitism on campuses and others in an explicit effort to eradicate diversity and inclusion initiatives. Billions in federal funds are under threat unless universities comply with extreme demands, such as removing academic departments from faculty control, “auditing” the viewpoints of students and faculty, and collaborating with federal authorities as they target international students for detention and deportation. Along with its actions against Harvard, it has threatened and in some cases withheld millions more from Cornell, Northwestern, Brown, Columbia, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania.Columbia has largely accepted the administration’s requirements to restore funding, including placing an academic department under outside oversight. Its president did not sign the collective statement.The measures against the schools, which are already upending academic research, undermine longstanding partnerships between the federal government and universities, and are contributing to an atmosphere of repression, the statement’s signatories note.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Our colleges and universities share a commitment to serve as centers of open inquiry where, in their pursuit of truth, faculty, students, and staff are free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation,” they write.Last week, Harvard University issued the strongest rebuke yet of the administration’s demands, with president Alan Garber setting off a showdown with the White House by saying that the university would not “surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights”.While Harvard’s lawsuit was the first by a university, higher education associations and organisations representing faculty have filed other legal challenges over the cuts.Faculty at some universities are also organising to protect one another, with several members of the Big Ten Academic Alliance, a consortium of some of the country’s largest state universities, signing on to a resolution to establish a “mutual defence compact”.At a second convening by the AAC&U on Monday some 120 university leaders also discussed what steps they may take next, including efforts to engage their broader communities and the business world to defend academic freedom.The joint statement, Pasquarella added, was just the beginning, and intended “to signal to the public and to affirm to ourselves what’s at stake here, what’s at risk if this continual infringement on the academy is allowed to continue”. 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    The AP’s win against Trump shows principles still have power in America | Margaret Sullivan

    Given the constant flow of bad news – recession nearing, markets tanking, federal agencies run amok – a victory in court for a news wire service might seem trivial.But the Associated Press’s win against the Trump administration this week is meaningful for two reasons. It underscores the judiciary’s commitment to the first amendment, and it suggests that standing up for one’s principles may not be just a gesture made in vain.Here’s what the US district court judge Trevor McFadden – a Trump appointee – had to say about the AP’s being denied access to White House news events because of the organization’s editorial decision to continue using the term Gulf of Mexico instead of Gulf of America:“The Court simply holds that under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists – be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere, it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints. The Constitution requires no less.”The Trump administration is appealing the ruling. It is not clear that a higher court will not overrule McFadden.But what is clear is that Julie Pace, the AP’s top editor, was right when she made the argument in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that more was at stake here than the name of a body of water. “It’s really about whether the government can control what you say,” Pace wrote.This administration wants to do that – and it is willing to punish those who don’t fall in line.Yet, courageous voices are out there. And sometimes, they make a difference.When Jaime Cook, the school principal in Sackets Harbor, New York, put out a heartfelt public statement about three students and their mother being abruptly taken to a Texas detention facility by federal agents, her words required the same kind of guts.“Our 3 students who were taken away by ICE were doing everything right,” Cook wrote. “They had declared themselves to immigration judges, attended court on their assigned dates, and were following the legal process. They are not criminals.”Others found their voices, too. In this tiny town of fewer than 1,400 people – which happens to be a vacation residence of the US “border czar”, Tom Homan – nearly 1,000 people came out to protest last weekend. This week, the mother and three children were on their way back home.Courage mattered.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionConsider, too, the words of the Princeton University president, Christopher Eisgruber, in an NPR interview about how that university plans to navigate the suspension of federal funding: “We make our decisions at Princeton based on our values and our principles.” When asked by a reporter whether that meant no concessions, as other universities have made to the Trump administration, Eisgruber responded with strength.“We believe it’s important to defend academic freedom, and that’s not something that can be compromised,” he said.Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia University, which took a far different approach by capitulating to Trump administration demands, compared the universities to two law firms, one of which has capitulated to Donald Trump’s bullying while the other has refused to do so.“Princeton is making us [Columbia] look like Paul Weiss to their Wilmer Hale,” Wu wrote.These cases have something in common: a line in the sand and the courage to defend it.The same was true of the former Department of Justice prosecutor Ryan Crosswell, testifying before Congress, as he explained why he felt compelled to resign recently after federal corruption charges against the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, were abruptly dropped. Too many lines had been crossed, he said; he had no choice.“The day after I resigned,” Crosswell testified, “my sister had her first daughter and I want my niece to know the same democracy that I’ve known. That’s worth any cost.”None of this is easy. After all, Trump and those around him are famously vindictive. It’s not hard to understand why law firms, universities, school officials, news organizations and so many others have decided to avoid the fight and to rationalize the decision to give in or remain silent.But those mentioned here chose to act on principle. In so doing, they have the power to inspire the rest of us, which is likely to be important in the long run.Do brave words or principled resignations or expensive, possibly fruitless lawsuits really accomplish anything? Will they keep America’s teetering democracy from falling off a cliff?Maybe not. But everyone who cares about fairness, freedom and the rule of law ought to be grateful nonetheless for these demonstrations of integrity. Amid the darkness, they cast some faint light along our treacherous path.

    Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist More

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    ‘A case study in groupthink’: were liberals wrong about the pandemic?

    Were conservatives right to question Covid lockdowns? Were the liberals who defended them less grounded in science than they believed? And did liberal dismissiveness of the other side come at a cost that Americans will continue to pay for many years?A new book by two political scientists argues yes to all three questions, making the case that the aggressive policies that the US and other countries adopted to fight Covid – including school shutdowns, business closures, mask mandates and social distancing – were in some cases misguided and in many cases deserved more rigorous public debate.In their peer-reviewed book, In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee argue that public health authorities, the mainstream media, and progressive elites often pushed pandemic measures without weighing their costs and benefits, and ostracized people who expressed good-faith disagreement.View image in fullscreen“Policy learning seemed to be short-circuited during the pandemic,” Lee said. “It became so moralized, like: ‘We’re not interested in looking at how other people are [responding to the pandemic], because only bad people would do it a different way from the way we’re doing’.”She and Macedo spoke to the Guardian by video call. The Princeton University professors both consider themselves left-leaning, and the book grew out of research Macedo was doing on the ways progressive discourse gets handicapped by a refusal to engage with conservative or outside arguments. “Covid is an amazing case study in groupthink and the effects of partisan bias,” he said.Many Covid stances presented as public health consensus were not as grounded in empirical evidence as many Americans may have believed, Macedo and Lee argue. At times, scientific and health authorities acted less like neutral experts and more like self-interested actors, engaging in PR efforts to downplay uncertainty, missteps or conflicts of interest.It’s a controversial argument. Covid-19 killed more than a million Americans, according to US government estimates. The early days of the pandemic left hospitals overwhelmed, morgues overflowing, and scientists scrambling to understand the new disease and how to contain it.Still, Macedo and Lee say, it is unclear why shutdowns and closures went on so long, particularly in Democratic states. The book argues that in the US the pandemic became more politically polarized over time, after, initially, “only modest policy differences between Republican- and Democratic-leaning states”.After April 2020, however, red and blue America diverged. Donald Trump contributed to that polarization by downplaying the severity of the virus. Significant policy differences also emerged. Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, moved to re-open physical schools quickly, which progressives characterized as irresponsible.Yet in the end there was “no meaningful difference” in Covid mortality rates between Democratic and Republican states in the pre-vaccine period, according to CDC data cited in the book, despite Republican states’ more lenient policies. Macedo and Lee also favorably compare Sweden, which controversially avoided mass lockdowns but ultimately had a lower mortality rate than many other European countries.The shutdowns had foreseeable and quantifiable costs, they say, many of which we are still paying. Learning loss and school absenteeism soared. Inflation went through the roof thanks in part to lockdown spending and stimulus payments. Small businesses defaulted; other medical treatments like cancer screenings and mental health care suffered; and rates of loneliness and crime increased. The economic strain on poor and minority Americans was particularly severe.Covid policies escalated into culture wars, amplifying tensions around other social issues. Teachers’ unions, which are often bastions of Democratic support, painted school re-openings as “rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny” and “a recipe for … structural racism”, the book notes, despite the fact that minority and poor students were most disadvantaged by remote learning.These measures also had a literal price. “In inflation-adjusted terms,” Macedo and Lee write, “the United States spent more on pandemic aid in 2020 than it spent on the 2009 stimulus package and the New Deal combined” – or about what the US spent on war production in 1943.View image in fullscreenYet of the $5tn that the US Congress authorized in 2020 and 2021 for Covid expenditure, only about 10% went to direct medical expenses such as hospitals or vaccine distribution, according to the book; most of the spending was on economic relief to people and businesses affected by shutdowns. Ten per cent of that relief was stolen by fraud, according to the AP.The pandemic was an emergency with no modern precedent, of course, and hindsight is easy. But In Covid’s Wake tries to take into account what information was known at the time – including earlier pandemic preparedness studies. Reports by Johns Hopkins (2019), the World Health Organization (2019), the state of Illinois (2014) and the British government (2011) had all expressed ambivalence or caution about the kind of quarantine measures that were soon taken.“We take a look at the state of the evidence as it was in early 2020,” Lee said. “It was clear at the time that the evidence was quite unsettled around all of this, and if policymakers had been more honest with the public about these uncertainties, I think they would have maintained public trust better.”The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted a wargaming exercise in October 2019, shortly before the pandemic began, to simulate a deadly coronavirus pandemic; the findings explicitly urged that “[t]ravel and trade … be maintained even in the face of a pandemic”. Similarly, a WHO paper in 2019 said that some measures – such as border closures and contact tracing – were “not recommended in any circumstances”.“And yet we did all of that in short order,” Macedo said, “and without people referring back to these plans.”He and Lee also believe there was a strong element of class bias, with a left-leaning “laptop class” that could easily work from home touting anti-Covid measures that were much easier for some Americans to adopt than others. Many relatively affluent Americans became even wealthier during the pandemic, in part due to rising housing values.At the same time, the laptop class was only able to socially isolate at home in part because other people risked exposure to provide groceries. Stay-at-home measures were partly intended to protect “essential workers”, but policymakers living in crisis-stricken major metropolitan areas such as New York or Washington DC did not reckon with why social distancing and other measures might be less important in rural parts of the country where Covid rates were lower.Lockdowns were intended to slow Covid’s spread, yet previous pandemic recommendations had suggested they only be used very early in an outbreak and even then do not buy much time, Macedo said.View image in fullscreenPolicymakers and experts often embraced stringent measures for reasons that are more political than medical, Macedo and Lee argue; in a pandemic, authorities are keen to assure anxious publics that they are “in charge” and “doing something”.In strange contrast, policymakers and journalists in the US and elsewhere seemed to take China as a model, the book argues, despite the fact that China is an authoritarian state and had concealed the scale of the outbreak during the crucial early days of the pandemic. Its regime had obvious incentives to mislead foreign observers, and used draconian quarantine measures such as physically welding people into their homes.When the WHO organized a joint China field mission with the Chinese government, in February 2020, non-Chinese researchers found it difficult to converse with their Chinese counterparts away from government handlers. Yet the WHO’s report was “effusive in its praise” of China’s approach, the book notes.“My view is that there was just a great deal of wishful thinking on the part of technocrats of all kinds,” Lee said. “They wanted there to be an answer – that if we do X and Y, we can prevent this disaster. And so they’re kind of grasping at straws. The Chinese example gave them hope.” She noted that Covid policymakers might have been better served if there had been people assigned to act as devil’s advocates in internal deliberations.Lee and Macedo are not natural scientists or public health professionals, they emphasize, and their book is about failures in public deliberation over Covid-19, rather than a prescription for managing pandemics.But they do wade into the debate about Covid-19’s origin, arguing that the “lab leak” hypothesis – that Covid-19 accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than spontaneously leaping from animals to humans – was unfairly dismissed.The Wuhan Institute studied coronaviruses similar to the one responsible for Covid-19, had a documented history of safety breaches, was located near the outbreak, and is known to have experimented on viruses using controversial “gain-of-function” methods funded by the US, which involve mutating pathogens to see what they might look like in a more advanced or dangerous form.Perhaps because Trump had fanned racial paranoia by calling Covid-19 the “China virus” and rightwing influencers were spreading the notion that it had been deliberately engineered and unleashed on the world by China, many scientists, public health experts and journalists reacted by framing the idea of a lab leak – even an accidental one – as an offensive conspiracy theory. Dr Anthony Fauci and other top public health figures were evasive or in some cases dishonest about the possibility of a lab leak, Macedo and Lee say, as well as the fact that a US non-profit funded by the National Institutes of Health allegedly funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute.Since then, though, the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have cautiously endorsed the lab leak theory, and the discourse around Covid has softened somewhat. The economist Emily Oster sparked immense backlash by arguing against school closures in 2020. Now publications such as New York Magazine and the New York Times have acknowledged the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis, for example, and there is growing consensus that school closures hurt many children.The reception to In Covid’s Wake has been more positive than Macedo and Lee expected – perhaps a sign that some of their arguments have penetrated the mainstream, if not that we’ve gotten better as a society at talking about difficult things. “The reception of the book has been much less controversial [and] contentious than we expected,” Macedo said.Yet the wounds fester and debates continue. Some readers of the New York Times were furious when The Daily, the newspaper’s flagship podcast, recently interviewed them, with subscribers arguing that the episode was not sufficiently critical of their stance. And some coverage of the book has criticized it for underplaying the danger of the disease.Macedo and Lee said that a few of their colleagues have expressed concern that their critique could fuel political attacks on science – a worry that crossed their minds too. “Our response is that the best way to refute criticisms that science and universities have been politicized is to be open to criticism and willing to engage in self-criticism,” Macedo said.“We need to make sure these institutions are in the best possible working order to face the challenges ahead. And we think that’s by being honest, not by covering over mistakes or being unwilling to face up to hard questions.” More

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    Harvard faculty organize amid anxiety university will capitulate to Trump

    The day after the Trump administration announced a review of $9bn in federal contracts and grants with Harvard University due to what it claimed was the university’s failure to combat antisemitism on campus, the university’s president, Alan Garber, sent an email to the Harvard community titled: Our resolve.“When we saw the Garber statement’s subject line, everybody thought: ‘Oh, great, Harvard’s going to stand up!” said Jane Sujen Bock, a board member of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard, a group of alumni founded in 2016 amid a legal battle over affirmative action.But the actual body of the message indicated no such thing. In the email, Garber briefly touted academic freedom while pledging to “engage” with the administration to “combat antisemitism”, which he said he had experienced directly, and listed a series of measures the university had already taken. “We still have much work to do,” he wrote. He offered no detail about what Harvard would do to protect its independence from the Trump administration.It was “a statement of abdication”, said Kirsten Weld, a history professor and the president of the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors, a national group advocating for faculty. “It basically says: ‘Yes, we have been bad and we deserve to be punished.’”The email, along with a string of actions recently taken by Harvard against academic programmes, faculty and student groups who have been accused of being pro-Palestinian, have fueled anxieties throughout US campuses that the Ivy League school will be following in the footsteps of Columbia University, which recently bowed to a string of demands from the Trump administration in an effort to retain federal funding.On Thursday, the Trump administration wrote in a letter to Harvard that federal funding would be conditional on the university banning diversity and inclusion initiatives, restricting protests on campus, cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security, reviewing its academic programs “to address bias”, and installing leaders to implement the president’s demands.Dozens more universities are under investigation for allegedly failing to protect Jewish students from pro-Palestinian protests, with Brown University on Thursday becoming the latest to face the risk of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. They are all paying close attention to how Harvard and others weigh the financial costs of standing up to Donald Trump against the moral and academic costs that come with appeasing him.‘We have to be willing to stand up’Some signs of more muscular pushback are starting to emerge.On Tuesday, in response to the administration’s announcement that it would suspend $210m in funding to Princeton University, its president, Christopher Eisgruber, indicated that he had no intention of making concessions to the administration. At Harvard, the student newspaper reported that Rakesh Khurana, the dean of Harvard College, drew applause from his colleagues on Tuesday when he accused the Trump administration of weaponising concerns about campus antisemitism to justify its ongoing attacks against higher education. (Eisgruber and Khurana did not respond to requests for comment; several Harvard faculty only agreed to speak off the record, citing a repressive climate.)View image in fullscreenKhurana’s comments followed days of upheaval at Harvard, after 600 members of the faculty signed a letter calling on the university to publicly condemn the US president’s attacks and “legally contest and refuse to comply with unlawful demands”. The Harvard Academic Workers union, which represents non-tenure-track researchers and lecturers, wrote in a statement on Wednesday: “The Trump’s administration attack on Harvard has nothing to do with antisemitism” and called on the university to “resist this intimidation with us”.So far, Eisgruber and Christina Paxson, Brown’s president, have signaled they may take a different path and resist.“University presidents and leaders have to understand that the commitment to allow academics – including our faculty, including our students – to pursue the truth as best they see it is fundamental to what our universities do,” Eisgruber said in an interview with Bloomberg this week. “We have to be willing to stand up for that.”Brown has not announced how it plans to respond to threats it will lose more than $500m in funding, but last month, Paxson outlined how the university would respond to federal attacks on its academic freedom. “I know that many in our community have been gravely concerned about persistent media reports of some of our peers experiencing encroachments on their freedom of expression and the autonomy necessary to advance their mission, she wrote. “If Brown faced such actions directly impacting our ability to perform essential academic and operational functions, we would be compelled to vigorously exercise our legal rights to defend these freedoms.”Faculty across the country have also begun to organize. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has filed three lawsuits: over the funding cuts at Columbia, the targeting of international students by immigration authorities, and Trump’s efforts to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programmes on campuses. Meanwhile, faculty at Rutgers University have proposed a “mutual defence compact” within the “Big Ten” consortium, which includes some of the largest state universities in the country, to support one another in the face of political attacks.“The attacks that are coming from the federal government might be directed toward Columbia University last week, and Harvard University this week, and who knows which other university next week, but if we allow them to proceed, then we will be picked off one by one,” said Weld. “The only way forward for any individual institution in the higher-education sector right now is to join forces.”‘We have our voices’Harvard had tried to get ahead of the administration’s attack. The university was one of the first to come under scrutiny following 7 October 2023 and protests over Israel’s war in Gaza. Allegations that it had failed to address antisemitism on campus contributed, in part, to last year’s resignation of Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president.This year, Harvard adopted a controversial definition of antisemitism in a legal settlement over complaints brought by Jewish students. In the days leading up to Trump’s threats, it forced out two leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and suspended a public health partnership with Birzeit University, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. This week, the university also suspended a “religion, conflict and peace initiative” at the divinity school that the Jewish Alumni Association had accused of focussing “entirely on the Palestinians”, and banned the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee from hosting events on campus.View image in fullscreenBut if the repression of programmes targeting spaces sympathetic to Palestinians was meant to appease the Trump administration and avert threats of funding cuts, it didn’t work.A fraction of Harvard’s $53bn endowment – the world’s largest for a university – is liquid or free of restrictions, but several faculty said that this is the time for the university to tap into it to defend its core values. While the administration’s cuts threaten hundreds of jobs on campus, Harvard is uniquely placed to withstand the impact, they say.“We’re constantly told that the endowment is not a piggy bank, it’s not a slush fund, and that we need to protect it because it ensures the success of our initiatives over the long term and for future generations,” Maya Jasanoff, a history professor at Harvard, said. “But if we lose the independence of universities from political interference, then we’re sacrificing something for future generations that is truly priceless.”Others noted that Harvard is also in a position to forcefully defend itself in court, much like it did when affirmative action came under attack, although the US supreme court ultimately ruled against the university in that case.So far, the university administration hasn’t shown signs it will put up a fight. Several faculty members believe that Trump’s efforts have the tacit support of some university leaders and trustees.“There is a strategic alliance among segments of the professoriate and university administrations, particularly boards of trustees, who agree that pro-Palestine activism on US college campuses needs to be shut down,” said Weld. “Whether those voices understand what the collateral damage of their participation in that alliance is going to be, I don’t know.”Harvard faculty in recent months have ramped up organizing efforts, including by launching the AAUP chapter on the heels of the Gaza encampment last spring and the university’s response.“One of the perversely brighter things to come out of last year is that I saw the faculty organizing and working together to an extent that outstripped anything I had seen in my academic career,” said Jasanoff. “We have our voices, and we can use our voices together.” More

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    Harvard’s Black Student Enrollment Declines After Affirmative Action

    Defying expectations, a Supreme Court decision curtailing race-based admissions still had a relatively small impact at some highly selective schools like Harvard, even as other schools saw big changes.The predictions were dire. In the course of a bitterly contested trial six years ago, Harvard University said that if it were forced to stop considering race in admissions, the diversity of its undergraduate classes would be badly compromised.Now, a year after the Supreme Court struck down the school’s admissions system, effectively ending affirmative action in college admissions everywhere, the numbers are in for the first class to be admitted, and the picture is more nuanced and complex than predicted.The proportion of Black first-year students enrolled at Harvard this fall has declined to 14 percent from 18 percent last year, according to data released by the institution on Wednesday — a dip smaller than the school had predicted, but still significant.Asian American representation in the class of 1,647 students remained the same as last year, at 37 percent. Hispanic enrollment has gone up, to 16 percent from 14 percent. Harvard did not report the share of white students in the class, consistent with past practice, and it is hard to make inferences because the percentage of students not disclosing race or ethnicity on their applications doubled to 8 percent this year from 4 percent last year.The post-affirmative-action demographic breakdowns have been trickling out over the last three weeks, and overall Black students appear to have been most affected. The percentages of Black students declined sharply at some elite schools, although surprisingly, they held steady at others. The suit against Harvard had accused it of discriminating against Asian Americans to depress their numbers, while giving preferences to members of other minority groups. Admissions experts suggested even before the new numbers came out that the most coveted schools, like Harvard, Yale and Princeton, would be best positioned to maintain their Black enrollment because the students who were admitted to them were very likely to accept. So in that view, they are unicorns, part of a highly selective ring of schools that scooped up the top students and remained relatively unaffected by the ban on race-conscious admissions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Michael Sugrue, Whose Philosophy Lectures Were a YouTube Hit, Dies at 66

    After an academic career spent in near obscurity, he became an internet phenomenon during the pandemic by uploading talks he had given three decades earlier.The college lecturer, in a uniform of rumpled khakis and corduroy blazer, paces on a small stage, head down. “The lectures you’re about to see,” he says in introducing a series of talks, videotaped in somewhat hokey lo-fi style in 1992, “cover the last 3,000 years of Western intellectual history.”The lecturer, Michael Sugrue, would go on to teach Plato, the Bible, Kant and Kierkegaard to two generations of undergraduates, including for 12 years at Princeton, without ever publishing a book — an academic who hadn’t “really had a career,” as he told The American Conservative after retiring in 2021.But that same year, in the depths of the pandemic, Dr. Sugrue uploaded his three-decade-old philosophy lectures to YouTube, where many thousands of people whose aperture on the world had narrowed to a laptop screen discovered them. His talk on the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, in particular, seemed to fit the jittery mood of lockdown, when many people sought a sense of self-sufficiency amid the chaos of the outside world. It has now been viewed 1.5 million times.“The only matter of concern to a wise and philosophic individual is the things completely under your control,” Dr. Sugrue lectured, iterating Stoic thought. “You can’t control the weather, you can’t control other people, you can’t control the society around you.”Mr. Sugrue in an undated photo. His dozens of lectures have been viewed some 2 million times on YouTube.via Ian FletcherDr. Sugrue, who became an internet phenomenon through word of mouth — without publicity or viral links from social media — after an academic career spent in near obscurity, died on Jan. 16 in Naples, Fla. He was 66.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump’s Tax Cut Fueled Investment but Did Not Pay for Itself, Study Finds

    The most detailed research yet on corporate response to the 2017 Republican tax law shows modest gains for workers and high cost to the federal debt.The corporate tax cuts that President Donald J. Trump signed into law in 2017 have boosted investment in the U.S. economy and delivered a modest pay bump for workers, according to the most rigorous and detailed study yet of the law’s effects.Those benefits are less than Republicans promised, though, and they have come at a high cost to the federal budget. The corporate tax cuts came nowhere close to paying for themselves, as conservatives insisted they would. Instead, they are adding more than $100 billion a year to America’s $34 trillion-and-growing national debt, according to the quartet of researchers from Princeton University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University and the Treasury Department.The researchers found the cuts delivered wage gains that were “an order of magnitude below” what Trump officials predicted: about $750 per worker per year on average over the long run, compared to promises of $4,000 to $9,000 per worker.The study is the first to use vast data from corporate tax filings to draw conclusions about the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which passed with only Republican support. Its findings could help shape debate on renewing parts of the law that are set to expire or have begun to phase out.That includes a key provision targeting investment, which the authors identify as the most cost-effective corporate cut. That benefit, which allowed companies to immediately deduct investment spending from their income taxes, would be renewed as part of a bipartisan tax bill that passed the House in January.It also challenges narratives about the bill on both sides of the aisle. Democrats have claimed the tax cuts only rewarded shareholders and did not help the economy. Republicans have called them a cost-free boon to the middle class. Both appear to have been wrong.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More