time.com
BY NICHOLAS DIRKS JANUARY 11, 2024 2:02 PM EST
Dirks is currently the president of the New York Academy of Sciences and author of the new book CITY OF INTELLECT: The Uses and Abuses of the University
The end of Claudine Gay’s brief and turbulent presidency at Harvard has hardly put an end to controversies about elite university leadership and governance. Bill Ackman, the “activist” donor and Harvard graduate, is calling for further resignations from the Harvard Corporation, while baiting MIT’s President, Sally Kornbluth, with the Shakespearean query: “et tu?” Meanwhile, Mark Rowan, the board member who engineered the takedown of the University of Pennsylvania’s erstwhile president, Elizabeth McGill—the first of the Washington three to step down—has now been pressing his advantage in calling for major reforms of an academic nature at Penn. Philanthropy and academic freedom are colliding in ways that have the potential to undermine the true purpose and mission of our universities.
As much as these, and some other, donors have appeared to embody popular discontent with those at the pinnacle of higher education, it is easy to forget that not long ago the scandals around these universities had to do with donors who used their gifts as leverage to secure admission for their children, making visible the problematic relationship between some individual philanthropy and private interests. We all called for firewalls then but seem now to have forgotten those critiques of the relationship between private interests and higher education.
CVD 