Penn event highlights how politics are shaping leading universities. But higher ed deserves blame, too, leaders said.
Experts addressed a changing, and challenging, political climate while pointing to issues closer to home.
The University of Pennsylvania last academic year found itself at ground zero for the controversy over the handling of antisemitism on college campuses, even seeing the resignation of its president.
Now, the Ivy League university is making itself ground zero for conversation on the challenges threatening higher education — from politics to overreaching board members to cost and concerns about the worth of a degree.
In the first of three forums established by Penn’s faculty senate, higher education leaders talked in bold and chilling terms about the impact of the new presidential administration, academia’s own failures, and what to do about both.
“We are on the front lines of a war against civil society by the new administration,” Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, said during the 90-minute event Thursday on Penn’s campus. “These are rich guys trying to have their way. You know something about that at Penn. You have billionaires who are used to throwing their weight around, and they’ve done it here. And now they are doing it throughout the whole country.”
‘A witch hunt’
His comments came the same week that President Donald Trump issued executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, funding for university research, international students who engage in pro-Palestinian protests, and undocumented students.
Irene Mulvey, immediate past president of the American Association of University Professors, warned about increasing government intrusion into the classroom and censorship, noting the “witch hunt” that occurred in 2023 when several college presidents, including then-Penn president Liz Magill, were called to testify before a congressional committee about the handling of antisemitism on campus. Magill resigned days later after an uproar over her testimony and a campaign of criticism led by private equity giant and leading Wharton donor Marc Rowan.
“Although the intrusions are not new, these attacks are at a new level, and they are ideological,” said Mulvey, a mathematician. “Before, it was often individual professors singled out. Now, it’s entire fields of study singled out based on ideology preferred by the party in power. This is un-American.”
Roth, Mulvey, and John Sexton, president emeritus of New York University ― a private research university ― and the third panelist, said educators must form relationships and coalitions, and faculty and administrations must work together despite differences and fight for academic freedom and open expression.
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“It’s trans people and immigrants today, and that’s horrible,” said Roth, a history scholar who has led Wesleyan, a private liberal arts college, since 2007. “But they’ll need someone else. Physicists won’t be first. … The people studying gender and feminist studies will go first. But they will go after them, us, if we don’t defend ourselves.”
And that also means standing up to board members who want to overreach, panelists said.
Sexton, a legal scholar who led NYU from 2002 to 2015, said that early in his tenure, a donor threatened to withdraw a $500 million donation if he allowed former President Bill Clinton on campus.
“I said, ‘I’m very sorry, we’ll manage without the $500 million,‘” Sexton said. “If you’re not willing to do that … it’s over.”
» READ MORE: Penn’s donor backlash raises questions about how much influence philanthropists should have
Mulvey called the Trump administration’s attack on DEI “heartbreaking.”
“DEI efforts are an attempt to enact racial justice,” she said. “The efforts to get rid of DEI efforts are attempts to revive the prejudices of the past and erase any progress we’ve made toward becoming a multiracial democracy.”
She said colleges must continue the work, “whether it says DEI on the door or not.”
Mulvey also underscored the importance of having international students on campuses, enriching and advancing the nation’s science.
“It would be a tremendous loss if they weren’t here,” she said.
‘An atmosphere of condescension’
But the panelists, who addressed an audience that included Penn’s interim president, J. Larry Jameson, and president emeritus Amy Gutmann, also said that there’s plenty of room for criticism of higher education, and that academia needs to acknowledge and address it.
“Higher education,” Roth said, “has allowed itself, especially at elite institutions like this one and mine, to foster an atmosphere of condescension and a monoculture of political homogeneity that is an enormous disservice to our students and our research.”
Mulvey called out the cost, saying higher education has for too long been underfunded and needs to be accessible.
“We have to find a way to communicate more effectively what we do well, while also being responsive to criticisms that indicate ways we can self-improve,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communication professor and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, who moderated the panel.
Eric Feldman, chair of the faculty senate, said the idea behind the series of events — the second will be Feb. 26 on cost and the third April 9 on the future of higher education — was to look at the decline in public confidence in colleges and universities and see what could be done. It was planned well before the presidential election, he said.
“The election has just put a heavy underscore and exclamation point around the importance of the issue,” he said in an interview before the event.
But that slide in confidence started long before the election, he noted. Educators, he said, have to “think long and hard about the criticisms, where they came from, and if and how they can help us do better at some of the things we’re doing.”