Donors, Alumni Helped Take Down an Ivy League President. Is This a Moment or a Movement?
The recent resignation of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill was a rarity in higher education—outside forces had stormed up the ivory tower and dethroned a leader. It was an uprising years in the making. The events that unfolded were, on their face, about inconsistently applied free-speech protections and antisemitism, after the presidents of Penn, Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology failed to say unequivocally that calls for genocide of Jews would violate their school’s harassment policies during disastrous congressional testimony.
The skirmishes were part of a wider battle between academia and its critics that has been simmering for a half-century as scholarship and teaching have broadened beyond classical Western thought and shifted leftward. Conservatives, many situated outside academia, contend schools indoctrinate students in echo chambers. That environment discourages freedom of thought and embraces a view of the world that ignores the successes of Western civilization and capitalism, they argue.
The seeds of the debate were planted in the 1960s and 1970s, when antiestablishment faculty and more racially diverse students flooded into colleges and ushered in the rise of critical theory, the predecessor to critical race theory. Generations of students began deconstructing the systems of power largely controlled by white, European men. Faculty launched departments in subjects like gender studies and African-American studies to focus on the history and experiences of marginalized communities.
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