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After the election, the president of the Student Advisory Committee of Harvard’s Institute of Politics insinuated that the IOP’s longstanding commitment to non-partisan civic engagement would be put aside to stand against the “threat” of Trump.
The Director of the IOP quickly rebuked the student, as did alumni. The original op-ed was modified to clarify that this was a student proposal, and not an official act of the IOP that could potentially endanger its tax status as a nonprofit in association with the school.
I was more shocked by the quick response than by the student’s comments; it’s taken for granted that the academy is the stronghold of Democrats. As friends and I contemplate government service, we’ve talked often about what doors we’d be closing off entirely by entering the administration now, and how that would impact our trajectory. Mentors have suggested waiting until certain milestones to provide easier routes back into the private sector, but we all agree that academia is DOA outside of like Hillsdale.
Part of these discussions included off-handed references to China’s “loyalty pledges” for students attending plum universities or receiving scholarships to study abroad. Given the academy’s existence as another wing of the Democratic Party, is there a possibility of colleges or universities ensuring students meet certain political beliefs in order to attend their institution? Would it impact their tax status to do so, and if yes, is that the only thing stopping them?
Private non-profit Christian institutions make their students sign statements of faith in order to attend. BYU is an example, although their agreement is slightly more complicated than faith, per se (as TracingWoodgrains has spoken about before). Patrick Henry College includes a bit about the number of books in the Bible to keep out Catholics. It’s not a stretch to thing secular colleges could have students sign statements about their culture war/social beliefs in order to attend. Will the privileges of Ivy League degrees be gatekept for the “woke?”
Is that, in a way, what diversity statements have been doing for years? Maybe diversity statements weren’t about meeting racial categories, but instead to ensure a certain level of “buy-in” to DEI ideology. As an aside, in the post-SFFA world, the number of students interested in the Federalist Society doubled at my law school. It could just be an “election year” thing (the last data point we are able to access easily is 2020, which doesn’t count due to the remote education) or it could be a “freeing” of conservatives entering the upper echelons of professional education. More data is needed here to support this anecdata.
Purity testing at schools is, of course, nothing new. For instance, we had a professor banned from teaching first-year mandatory courses because he donated to the Republican party in 2012, a thing that still doesn’t sit quite right to me. Why are people looking through their professor’s donation records? As people uninvite family members to Thanksgiving due to who they voted for, can universities deny students on the same grounds? Would some universities feel inclined to?
I’m not entirely sure. The demographic cliff means that universities have to start making themselves more enticing somehow. Degrees are too expensive for their value, nowadays, and many are choosing to forego higher education in favor of the trades or other endeavors. Schools like America University saw their acceptance rate almost double and yet still didn’t hit their enrollment targets. Can schools (even elite schools) afford to have an ideological purity test for entry?
Do you have a link for this? I want to use it next time the "there's no discrimination, conservatives are just too stupid for academia" card gets played.
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What happened was that the mainstream and legal press published a bunch of snarky articles saying that the Federalist society was easy mode because 80%+ of students are libs, so when it comes to clerking for federal judges FedSoc membership + clerking for conservative justices was much easier than trying to be Kagan or Sotomayor’s clerk (or their circuit peers). This was not even false, really.
The consequence was that a bunch of striving students, including many Indians and Chinese but of course also ambitious whites, who had no connection to conservatism and don’t really care about ideology, are now joining fedsocs for the career boost.
This is still a good thing, most of those people will probably end up earnestly believing those things eventually.
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I’m honestly not surprised other than that it’s taken this long for schools to make it official that only right-thinking people will be granted access to the prestige of high end universities. I suspect it’s been there informally for a while and gleaned from student essays (don’t talk too much about traditional Christianity, and certainly don’t ever mention working for a GOP campaign). It’s just too easy for schools to use that influence culture and to weaken their enemies by making support for them a career limiting choice. I’m not even sure it’s safe to be openly GOP in “polite” PMC type jobs.
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The Ivy League will never run out of applicants.
They do, of course, need a good mix of genuine merit admits/connections admits/diversity admits. That might be slightly harder to manage, but plausibly deniable different rules for different people ain’t that hard to manage.
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The key here is "after the election". The Director now realizes that the power of the state might actually be wielded against him and his organization, so he's quickly moving to protect it.
They are to a large degree already, of course. But as long as they're dependent on the government (for student loans and research grants and likely other things), and there's a government that's both hostile to that sort of thing and willing to act on it -- which Trump certainly appears to be -- there's limits. We will not see new loyalty pledges like those diversity statements for faculty at the University of California system, and we will likely see some rolled back. The schools see which way the wind is blowing, and while they are unlikely to bend with it, they will hunker down and try to just withstand it.
Sure; the Ivy League is TINY. Even if you add on the so-called West Coast Ivies and Public Ivies, there will be plenty of students for the top schools. Demographics will definitely hurt the down-level schools, but it's not dire enough to hurt the top. But they probably can't do it with the active hostility of a Trump administration, and they certainly couldn't do it if someone as competent as Chris Rufo got involved.
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