Equal treatment makes a comeback



There is something almost touching about the astonishment with which American universities are discovering that racial discrimination is illegal.

The Justice Department announced Monday that it is investigating the College of William & Mary over scholarships and student benefits that allegedly discriminate according to race. The Civil Rights Division says it is examining whether those programs violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial discrimination by recipients of federal funding.

Universities spent years teaching America that racial discrimination could cure racial discrimination. They may now receive an expensive lesson in return.

One might have supposed that this was not a particularly difficult statute for universities to understand. These are, after all, institutions populated by people who pride themselves on detecting racism in places where ordinary mortals see friendship and community.

And yet when discrimination appears in their own programs, their racial acuity suddenly fails them. Universities have spent years building programs around concepts such as “whiteness,” “decolonizing,” privilege, and equity. The problem is not that administrators forgot the Civil Rights Act. It is that many convinced themselves they had discovered a morally superior exception to its basic rule.

The old civil-rights principle was admirably simple: Do not discriminate on the basis of race.

The newer DEI principle often works differently: Unequal treatment may be justified if it is meant to correct an earlier inequality.

The distinction is the whole game.

Under the older understanding, the injustice consisted in treating an individual differently because of his race. If a university told an applicant, “You cannot have this opportunity because you are black,” we knew what to call it. If it told another applicant, “You cannot have this opportunity because you are white,” we also knew what to call it.

The genius of DEI was to make the second sentence sound morally different from the first.

This required an impressive amount of academic labor. Entire vocabularies were constructed to explain why unequal treatment could become virtuous when practiced by the right institutions, against the right groups, for the right reasons. We learned about privilege, power, positionality, systemic racism, dominant identities, marginalized identities, intersectionality, and the rest of the lexicon.

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The result was an ethical system of remarkable convenience. It condemned racial discrimination while supplying a vocabulary for practicing it.

The trick was accomplished by shifting the unit of moral judgment from the individual to the group.

Once people are sorted into historical categories of oppressor and oppressed, equal treatment begins to look suspicious. If Group A has enjoyed advantages and Group B has suffered disadvantages, treating individual members of A and B according to the same rules can be recast as perpetuating injustice. “Equity” then becomes a justification for unequal treatment today in the name of unequal treatment yesterday.

There is only one troublesome detail: The person standing before you today is an individual human being, not an installment payment on a historical debt.

A white 18-year-old applying for a scholarship did not write the Jim Crow laws. An Asian student applying to medical school did not build the transcontinental railroad with exploited labor. A black student is not the personal embodiment of several centuries of American suffering.

The civil rights tradition understood this. That is why the law speaks in the language of persons rather than assigning inherited moral credits and debits to racial castes.

The DEI worldview has spent years trying to reverse that achievement.

And now comes the awkward part.

The law is still there.

The Civil Rights Act does not contain an asterisk reading, “Discrimination permitted when performed in the service of social justice.” Title VI does not say recipients of federal money may discriminate according to race provided that a diversity consultant has explained why it is virtuous.

Last year, the Justice Department expressly warned recipients of federal funding that antidiscrimination laws apply regardless of whether discriminatory practices are packaged under the label of DEI. Now William & Mary is discovering what that warning means.

Nor is William & Mary alone. The Justice Department has been examining race-conscious practices across higher education. My own university, Arizona State, is under investigation. The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions should already have alerted universities that the legal ground beneath racial preferences had shifted dramatically.

But something deeper than law is involved here. Universities are supposed to teach students how to reason. So let us try an elementary syllogism.

Racial discrimination is wrong. Denying someone a benefit because of his race is racial discrimination. Therefore, denying someone a benefit because of his race is wrong.

You don’t need a doctorate in critical theory to follow the argument. Indeed, a doctorate in critical theory may be an impediment.

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The great moral achievement of the civil rights movement was not to rearrange the racial hierarchy so different people could enjoy their turn at discrimination. It was to attack the hierarchy itself. The principle was equality before the law — not equality before the law except when our preferred theory of historical oppression recommends otherwise.

There is a useful lesson here for universities accustomed to believing that noble intentions confer immunity from ordinary moral rules.

They do not.

You may call discrimination “equity.” You may put it in a strategic plan. You may hire a vice president to administer it. You may surround it with the soothing language of “belonging” and “inclusion.” You may even persuade yourself that treating students differently according to ancestry is the latest advance in American civil rights.

But eventually somebody will ask the embarrassingly primitive question: Did you treat this person differently because of his race?

If the answer is yes, all the fashionable vocabulary in the world cannot make the question go away.

Universities spent years teaching America that racial discrimination could cure racial discrimination. They may now receive an expensive lesson in return.

The Civil Rights Act never learned DEI.

And the next shoe may be even more expensive: lawsuits from students who say they were denied scholarships, admissions advantages, or other benefits because of race. Once universities concede that race determined access to an opportunity, the legal question becomes much harder to explain away with the language of equity.

Warning: This college course may be bad for your brain



Every August, families spend tens of thousands of dollars on college tuition, housing, meal plans, and textbooks. They compare degree requirements, graduation rates, and campus amenities. Yet many never ask the most basic consumer question: What is actually inside the classes they are buying?

Colleges already label the price. It’s time to label the product.

Americans would not buy food without reading the ingredients or take medicine without knowing something about the possible side effects. College courses, however, are often sold by title and catalog description alone. Students register for “Introduction to History,” “Ethics,” or even a science requirement with little idea of the intellectual assumptions the professor will bring into the lecture hall.

That information can be consequential. A course may pursue knowledge through evidence and argument. It may also subordinate the subject to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, critical theory, gender ideology, Marxist assumptions, or some other political project.

Ideological activism is not confined to philosophy, literature, or religious studies. It increasingly appears across the curriculum, including in professional programs and “hard” scientific fields.

Parents and students have every right to know whether a professor intends to teach the advertised subject, examine competing arguments, and permit disagreement — or use the classroom to promote a political worldview.

The concern is especially urgent at public universities. Faculty members at state institutions are government employees paid by taxpayers. In Arizona, for example, they undertake obligations to uphold the United States and state constitutions. Taxpayers are therefore entitled to ask whether professors are educating students for citizenship in a constitutional republic or teaching theories fundamentally hostile to it.

That’s why I developed what I call the “Intellectual Nutrition Label.”

The idea is simple. A nutrition label does not order shoppers to buy or reject a product. It tells them what the product contains so they can decide for themselves. The Intellectual Nutrition Label would do the same for college professors and courses.

Using public information — university biographies, curricula vitae, books, articles, interviews, lectures, and course materials — each label would summarize the intellectual content students are likely to encounter. Families should not need graduate training or weeks of research to understand what a professor openly teaches.

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A useful label might ask:

  • Does the professor encourage the pursuit of knowledge or deny that objective truth exists?
  • Does the course cultivate virtue and self-command or treat desire as its own justification?
  • Does it direct students toward goodness, beauty, and wisdom or toward resentment, envy, and contempt?
  • Does the professor teach students how to examine arguments or tell them which political conclusions a decent person must reach?

A label could also rate qualities such as intellectual honesty, knowledge, virtue, beauty, meaningfulness, and piety. A professor might rank highly for candor and scholarship while receiving a low rating for piety because he publicly rejects belief in God. The point would not be to uncover private opinions or publish anonymous accusations. The ratings would summarize what professors already say about themselves and their work.

Owen Anderson

That distinction is essential. An Intellectual Nutrition Label should not become a blacklist, an invitation to harassment, or a substitute for reading a professor’s work. It must rely on verifiable public evidence, represent a professor’s position fairly, and provide enough sourcing for readers to check the judgment for themselves.

The concept has predecessors. David Horowitz’s 2006 book, “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America,” documented ideological activism in higher education. The David Horowitz Freedom Center continues to track left-wing activists and organizations. Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist sought to alert students to professors who brought political activism into the classroom and briefly maintained a list of recommended faculty.

The Intellectual Nutrition Label would have a narrower purpose: consumer disclosure. It would tell students and parents what intellectual ingredients a professor publicly advertises, in a format ordinary people can understand before registration day.

If a professor teaches that the United States is inherently oppressive, advocates Marxist critical theory, rejects biological sex as fixed, or treats Christianity principally as an instrument of domination, those positions should be documented in the professor’s own publications, biography, lectures, or course materials. An accurate summary of publicly stated beliefs is not censorship.

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The more serious objection may be that parents and taxpayers were never expected to notice. Academic language often conceals radical assumptions behind specialized vocabulary. Professors can signal their commitments to colleagues while students discover the course’s real content only after enrollment.

That arrangement is losing its protection. Parents increasingly ask what their children are learning. Taxpayers increasingly ask whether public universities are educating students or recruiting them into political movements. Those are legitimate questions, especially when a single semester can cost more than many families earn in months.

Throughout the coming semester, I will publish Intellectual Nutrition Labels evaluating professors from publicly available evidence. The labels will not decide which courses students may take. They will help families make that decision with their eyes open.

Readers can follow the project on my Substack and at intellectualnutritionlabel.com (coming soon).

When families spend tens of thousands of dollars on a college education, they deserve to know who is teaching, what that professor believes, and which intellectual ingredients will be placed before their children. Colleges already label the price. It’s time to label the product.

Trump’s Justice Department is shining a light on woke universities — finally



The Department of Justice has now launched an investigation into Arizona State University over its “diversity, equity, and inclusion” practices. The probe will examine whether ASU has subjected students to illegal discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin through its DEI policies in admissions, recruitment, scholarships, tutoring, and educational support.

That news did not surprise me.

Universities constantly speak the language of ‘inclusion,’ but they do not want disagreement. They want compliance.

For years, many of us who work inside higher education have watched American universities become captive to a worldview that divides human beings into permanent categories of oppressor and oppressed. These ideologies present themselves as enlightened and compassionate, but underneath the slogans is something much uglier.

They claim to fight racism, in effect, by being racist.

That is not rhetorical excess. It is the actual logic of these programs. If you are told that your moral standing is shaped by your race, if students are sorted into categories of guilt and grievance based on ancestry, if “equity” means treating people differently because of their race, then the old evil has simply been repackaged in new academic language.

I know this from experience.

The Arizona Supreme Court has now agreed to hear my case against Arizona State University and the Arizona Board of Regents over ASU’s required DEI training. My challenge began because ASU forced employees to take its “inclusive communities” training.

The training, in some cases produced by Starbucks (I kid you not), told employees how to think about race, guilt, power, and identity, and it required assent to predetermined “correct” answers. I could not in good conscience affirm teachings that judged people by skin color, ethnic identity, gender, religion, and geography.

The Arizona Supreme Court’s decision to hear my case goes to the heart of whether state universities can force employees into ideological training that violates state law and basic principles of equal treatment. Arizona law prohibits public schools, including universities, from using curriculum that engages in race blame.

The issue is technical in legal form, but simple in moral substance: When a public university imposes unlawful race-based ideology, does anyone have the right to challenge it?

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That question should never have had to be asked. But that is where our universities are.

The takeover has been so comprehensive that many campuses no longer even recognize dissent as legitimate. Faculty culture is overwhelmingly leftist (97% at ASU identify as left-wing). The ideological imbalance among professors is staggering. Conservatives, Christians, and others who reject the reigning orthodoxy are rarely hired, and when they are hired, they are often isolated or pressured into silence.

Universities constantly speak the language of “inclusion,” but they do not want disagreement. They want compliance.

When someone objects, the mask slips. The same faculty and administrators who preach compassion suddenly become contemptuous when the dissenter is someone outside the progressive fold. The slogans about empathy disappear and the sneering begins.

That is because DEI is not really about inclusion. It is about power.

Its basic framework is the old Marxist oppressor-oppressed dialectic, merely translated into race, gender, and sexuality categories. Students are taught to see the world through this lens from their first days on campus. The university no longer helps students pursue truth. It trains them to become activists for a ready-made ideology.

The ugly irony at the center of it all is that students are charged tens of thousands of dollars in tuition to sit in classrooms where they are instructed by self-appointed champions of the oppressed, many of whom enjoy comfortable salaries and taxpayer support while lecturing others about systems of injustice.

The university administrator or professor who denounces oppression does so while cashing a government-backed paycheck and enforcing ideological conformity inside a vast institutional bureaucracy.

That is not liberation. It is a racket.

The federal investigation into ASU is important not only for Arizona but for the whole country. The era of automatic deference to DEI bureaucracies may be ending.

If government investigators are asking whether ASU’s programs have crossed the line into unlawful discrimination, then other universities should be asking themselves the same question. How many scholarships, support programs, admissions initiatives, and training sessions around the country are doing precisely what civil-rights law was supposed to forbid?

The answer, I suspect, is many.

American universities have largely abandoned the idea that education is the pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness. In its place they have installed a therapeutic political religion in which redemption comes through identity confession, public denunciation, and endless activism.

The categories of the system are fixed: Someone must be blamed, someone must be oppressed, and the institution itself must always pose as the righteous mediator.

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The ideology has spread far beyond the office door. It lives in the curriculum, in hiring, in faculty trainings, and in the language administrators use to describe their mission. It is the very institutionalized bigotry that it claims to oppose.

What is needed now is moral reform and clarity.

Public universities should not be in the business of teaching students or employees to judge one another by race. They should not use tax dollars to promote theories that blame individuals for the sins of categories. And they certainly should not punish or marginalize those who object.

The Justice Department’s investigation into ASU and the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision to hear my case are both signs that resistance is possible. But much more is needed.

Americans must recover the courage to say plainly what too many in higher education have forgotten: Racism does not become justice when wrapped in the language of equity, and discrimination does not become virtue when blessed by a university bureaucracy.

Hasan Piker tests the line between dissent and enemy aid



Hasan Piker has built a lucrative career denouncing the United States from inside the United States. That arrangement has always carried a certain comic hypocrisy. But his reported subpoena over a March trip to Cuba raises a question far more serious than one streamer’s revolutionary cosplay.

When does anti-American activism become aid to America’s enemies?

The academy may discover that Americans have grown tired of funding institutions that teach students to despise the nation that sustains them.

The latest controversy surrounding Piker is not merely another internet spectacle. It touches an old constitutional question: What limits apply when political activism moves from criticism of American policy into support for regimes hostile to the United States?

Investigators with the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control have reportedly subpoenaed Piker and CodePink co-founder Medea Benjamin over their March trip to Cuba as part of the “Nuestra América Convoy.” The investigation concerns possible violations of U.S. sanctions law, including the financing, coordination, and delivery of goods to the Cuban regime.

The details remain incomplete, and a subpoena obviously is not a conviction. But the story matters because it exposes a broader issue universities, politicians, and media elites have avoided for years.

What counts as “aiding America’s enemies”?

Coordination is key

According to reports, investigators seek financial, logistical, and communications records related to the trip. The inquiry reportedly centers on whether activists coordinated with Cuban government entities or violated sanctions restrictions administered through OFAC.

Piker has framed the investigation as an attempt to silence criticism of the United States and Israel. He has defended the convoy as humanitarian relief. He has also praised communist Cuba while enjoying the freedoms and opportunities of the United States. He did not, apparently, spend much time asking Cuban-Americans why they fled the island.

Cuba is not merely a tropical backdrop for revolutionary aesthetics. It remains a communist dictatorship and a longstanding U.S. adversary. American sanctions against Cuba arose from decades of geopolitical conflict, expropriation of American property, intelligence operations, and alliance with hostile foreign powers.

That is why the law treats this area seriously.

In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court upheld restrictions on providing “material support” to designated foreign terrorist organizations, even when that support took the form of training or coordinated advocacy. The court reasoned that seemingly benign support can legitimize hostile organizations and free resources for more dangerous activities.

The key legal principle is coordination.

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Independent speech criticizing America remains constitutionally protected. Americans may denounce foreign policy, oppose wars, criticize sanctions, or defend unpopular causes. But direct coordination with hostile foreign entities belongs in a different category. Logistical support, fundraising, organized assistance, and coordinated propaganda can cross the line from protected dissent into unlawful support.

That distinction is vital. It also leads to a question much larger than Hasan Piker.

From scholarship to treason

For years, professors at publicly funded universities have argued that violence against the United States is morally justified because of colonialism, slavery, capitalism, or American support for Israel. Some have praised political violence abroad as “resistance.” Others have defended Hamas rhetoric as “decolonial struggle.” Still others have trained students to view America itself as an illegitimate regime founded on oppression.

At what point does this cease to be scholarship and become ideological assistance to America’s enemies?

The modern university loves to invoke “academic freedom” as though the phrase ends all debate. But academic freedom was never meant to shield every form of political agitation from public scrutiny. Nor does it require taxpayers to subsidize institutions that teach students to despise the constitutional order that protects them.

A professor at a public university holds a privileged position funded by taxpayers and entrusted with forming the minds of future citizens. That status does not erase his constitutional rights. But it does heighten the public’s interest in what universities reward, protect, and promote.

Can a tax-funded professor argue that Americans deserve violent retaliation? Can he encourage students to view foreign terrorist organizations as morally justified revolutionaries? Can he defend armed resistance against the United States as a legitimate response to “settler colonialism”?

Universities have spent decades pretending these questions do not exist. Many of the same institutions that warn endlessly about white supremacy tolerate faculty rhetoric that justifies violence against Americans, Israelis, and other supposed oppressors in the name of liberation.

They have built entire departments on ideological hostility to the American constitutional order. Students learn that the United States is fundamentally illegitimate, that Western Civilization is inherently oppressive, and that power — not truth or justice — determines morality. Under those assumptions, violence becomes easy to rationalize as liberation.

Campus activism has repeatedly celebrated anti-American movements abroad while denouncing America itself as uniquely evil. Faculty members increasingly blur the line between analysis and activism, between scholarship and revolutionary agitation, all from tax-funded offices under institutional protection.

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The contradiction is striking. Universities often police ordinary constitutional patriotism while tolerating rhetoric sympathetic to regimes hostile to the United States. Professors may face investigation for questioning DEI orthodoxy or praising MAGA politics, while admiration for Marxist revolutionary movements often receives the protection of “academic freedom.”

The Hasan Piker subpoena exposes this double standard.

An overdue reckoning?

The issue is not whether Americans may criticize their government. Of course they may. The First Amendment protects dissent because free societies tolerate disagreement.

But the First Amendment does not require public institutions to pretend that all forms of anti-American agitation carry the same civic meaning. A democracy may distinguish between criticism of its policies and organized sympathy for hostile regimes. It may distinguish between unpopular speech and material coordination. It may distinguish between scholarship and indoctrination.

Universities should have drawn those lines long ago.

If professors encourage students to sympathize with anti-American violence, defend revolutionary movements hostile to the United States, or justify armed resistance against the constitutional order, taxpayers may reasonably ask whether public universities are subsidizing ideological warfare against the nation itself.

For years, universities dismissed these concerns as paranoia.

Now federal subpoenas may force the country to revisit them in public.

And the academy may discover that Americans have grown tired of funding institutions that teach students to despise the nation that sustains them.

The campus isn’t ‘misunderstood.’ It’s mismanaged — on purpose.



Former Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger has produced a slender, puzzling book. It glides past the central problems facing campuses — weak leadership, weak accountability, and ideological capture — and lingers instead on nostalgia and the “community of scholars.”

It also prompts a blunt question: Why do university presidents publicly dissemble? Not in the chest-thumping manner of a cable-news partisan, but in the lubricated, bureaucratic manner that says almost everything except what matters most.

Bollinger presents a university with virtually no blemishes — blameless, well-run, noble — and then points outward, toward Trump and the federal government, as the true threat.

Bollinger was recruited by W.W. Norton editor in chief Dan Gerstle to adapt lectures delivered in spring 2025 into a book. He aims to remind readers that the American university occupies a critical place in society. In the abstract, he’s right, and parts of the argument work.

As a constitutional law scholar, he also tries to weave the First Amendment into the university’s institutional identity, suggesting the two are inseparable. That claim needs more force than this book provides. The prose reads like speech material polished for print. The ambition outruns the substance.

But the real center of gravity arrives quickly: Bollinger casts the primary threat to higher education as “outsiders,” especially the federal government and, most of all, Donald Trump. Yes, it’s another Trump-as-villain entry in the culture wars, and likely the reason this book was rushed into print. Whatever Bollinger’s hygienic tone, this is hatchet work in a gentleman’s suit.

Bollinger is no detached man of letters offering serene judgment from above the fray. He remains a prominent operator inside elite academic and political networks. His calm posture functions less as neutrality than as insulation.

The book is divided into three parts: “The University,” “The First Amendment,” and “The Fifth Branch.” If the press is the “fourth branch” of government, Bollinger argues the university deserves branch status too.

I write often about the university’s high mythology — the version parents and alumni carry around because universities actively sell it. Bollinger indulges that mythology. His university is a place of serious minds, noble purpose, and largely blameless governance, with only the occasional “organized anarchy,” the predictable messiness of complex institutions.

He offers this earnest passage:

I challenge anyone to spend a day, a week, or more in any university — sitting in on classes, attending lectures, meeting with students, visiting a laboratory, being part of a seminar — and not come away deeply impressed, indeed invigorated, about the human potential to know and to grasp something of our existence.

Many readers will want to believe it. Bollinger counts on that desire.

And here’s where the trouble begins.

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The book’s best section is its opening chapter, which promises an insider’s look at how universities actually function. Bollinger divides the institution into multiple levels of analysis — individual, university, and system — in a way that will feel familiar to anyone trained in serious political science. The intent looks analytic. The presentation sounds authoritative.

Then he leaves out the single biggest operational reality on most campuses.

Bollinger describes academic affairs — faculty, curriculum, and the traditional governance story — and effectively ignores student affairs, often rebranded as “student success.” That omission is not a minor gap. It’s the whole fight.

Modern universities are not simply faculty-driven institutions with a few administrative appendages. They are sprawling managerial systems in which student affairs bureaucracies routinely outnumber faculty and operate as an ersatz ideological faculty through what they call the co-curriculum: workshops, trainings, mandatory seminars, “wellness” programming, diversity offices, identity centers, residence-life systems, conduct regimes, orientation pipelines, and retention machinery.

This is education by parallel authority.

Student affairs is frequently staffed, trained, and ideologically shaped by external nonprofits such as ACPA, NASPA, NADOHE, and NACADA. These groups do not simply offer best practices. They often function as ideological conduits, pushing “critical pedagogy” and “critical consciousness” as an institutional mission. One of them literally advertises the goal of “boldly transforming higher education.”

That transformation is not a side story. It is the story. It’s how the modern university moved from the “shared governance” myth to a bureaucratic reality where the faculty increasingly serves as a decorative legitimacy layer.

Bollinger never deals with it. Not directly. Not honestly. Not at all.

Contemporary scholarship has already documented how student affairs increasingly designs, delivers, and assesses structured educational experiences parallel to the faculty curriculum. The same bureaucracy often serves as a channel for activism infrastructure that has helped fuel campus chaos since 2020.

Student affairs is wholly under the control of the extremist left. Yet Bollinger presents a university with virtually no blemishes — blameless, well-run, noble — and then points outward, toward Trump and the federal government, as the true threat.

It’s hard not to conclude that the nostalgia is doing work. Bollinger affirms the version of the university that parents and alumni want to believe still exists: the citadel of learning devoted to truth, stewarded by wise leaders, occasionally messy but fundamentally righteous.

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That image now functions as cover.

It shields what many universities have become: money-making and idea-laundering operations that give lip service to the people paying the bills — parents, students, donors — while empowering internal bureaucracies that answer to their own ideological class.

Bollinger’s personal position makes this posture easier to spot. He belongs to the wealthy mandarin class that runs elite higher education. His Columbia compensation reportedly topped $5 million annually. Columbia’s assets were roughly $23.5 billion at the end of 2022.

He also guards his own record with careful selection.

While he was president of the University of Michigan, the school was involved in two affirmative action cases decided by the Supreme Court in 2003. Bollinger highlights the win (Grutter v. Bollinger) but gives scant attention to the loss (Gratz v. Bollinger). In places, his wording blurs them together in a way that can leave casual readers thinking Michigan prevailed across the board.

It didn’t. In Gratz, Michigan’s admissions policy violated the Equal Protection Clause. That case foreshadowed the eventual collapse of the broader regime in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard two decades later.

At Columbia, Bollinger helped lay the groundwork for the institution’s later disorder by expanding and empowering DEI bureaucracies in response to the 2020 “racial reckoning.” Many presidents issued pro forma statements they now quietly regret. Bollinger went further: He built and strengthened the permanent infrastructure.

My view is straightforward: Bollinger represents the ascent of the new mandarins — administrators who guard prerogatives, expand PR machinery, and grow their internal empires against faculty authority, all while presenting themselves as the guardians of scholarly life. He is the living, breathing antithesis of what the university and its presidents should be in the 21st century.

In “University: A Reckoning,” Bollinger wants readers to see a university that largely no longer exists. His lack of candor ensures that readers learn little about how universities actually function — and even less about why so many are failing.

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