Higher Ed Now

ACTA's Steve McGuire sits down with Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of several books, including Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities; Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth; The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America; and The Orange Order. He is co-editor, among others, of Political Demography and editor of Rethinking Ethnicity: Majority Groups and Dominant Minorities. He has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Times of London, Newsweek, National Review, New Statesman, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and other outlets. 

ACTA’s president Michael Poliakoff interviews John Agresto, author of The Death of Learning, published last year by Encounter Press. Agresto is a graduate of Boston College and holds a PhD in Government from Cornell University.  Before becoming President of St. John’s College in 1989, he taught at the University of Toronto, Kenyon College, Duke University, Wabash College and the New School University. He also served as acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the 1980’s and went to Iraq in 2003 as senior advisor for higher education for the new Iraqi Government.  Between 2006 and 2010 he served, variously, as trustee, president, chancellor, provost and dean at the American University of Iraq in the Kurdish region.  After returning from Iraq, Agresto was appointed member and chair of the New Mexico Advisory Committee on Civil Rights (2010-2018) followed by his appointment as Probate Court Judge in Santa Fe, NM. He currently serves on the board of the Jack Miller Center.

ACTA’s president Michael Poliakoff is joined by Chuck Davis, the newly elected chair and president of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance. Recently he has been serving as board chair and president of the MIT Free Speech Alliance (MFSA), one of AFSA’s member groups. Mr. Davis’s new leadership position at AFSA comes at an exciting juncture for the national alumni movement. With generous funding from the Stanton Foundation, AFSA will continue its collaboration with various organizations, including ACTA, to mobilize alumni across the country and educate the public on free speech issues affecting higher education.  

In this episode, ACTA's Gabrielle Anglin and Steve McGuire interview Jered Cooper, a rising senior at the University of Virginia. Mr. Cooper is majoring in government at UVA and carries a strong passion for understanding the inner workings of politics and public policy. His love for American history has been a driving force throughout his academic journey, as he finds solace and inspiration in exploring the narratives of the past. He is a writer for the Virginia Undergraduate Law Review and a member of the new organization Middle Grounds, a discussion-based group that seeks to build consensus and understanding in regard to political issues. Committed to his studies, he aspires to pursue a law degree following graduation to help make a meaningful impact in the realm of politics and public service. A gifted speaker and thinker, Jered Cooper recently won the second annual UVA Oratory competition with his speech titled “A Remedy to Save America.” 

Higher Ed Now continues its series of conversations with leading lights in the surging national movement to foster viewpoint diversity and free expression on college campuses. Today’s episode spotlights two leaders at the University of Delaware – a major institutional partner in the college debates and discourse work that ACTA is doing with Braver Angels and BridgeUSA. On April 18 Higher Ed Now's producer Doug Sprei traveled to the University of Delaware to chair a Braver Angels debate for a classroom of 25 students led by Lindsay Hoffman, an associate professor of communication who serves as the research leader for ACTA's two-year Braver Angels project funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Afterward he sat down for a conversation with Dr. Hoffman, along with another stellar leader in the discourse space, Timothy Shaffer, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Chair of Civil Discourse at U Delaware’s Biden School of Public Policy and Administration. Shaffer is also director of Civic Engagement and Deliberative Democracy with the National Institute for Civil Discourse at the University of Arizona. Both guests are highly accomplished, have extensive resumes and publication credits, and carry great passion around helping students engage in dialogue, discourse, and democracy.

Dr. Tabia Lee joins ACTA's Michael Poliakoff and Steve McGuire to unpack her shocking story of being fired from her position as the faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education at De Anza College in California. As Erec Smith (another recent guest on Higher Ed Now) stated on the Cato Institute's website, Dr. Lee's transgression was "asking questions about DEI initiatives, fighting for viewpoint diversity, and upholding classical liberal values." Smith went on to write, "For these alleged transgressions, Dr. Lee, a black female academic. . . was denied tenure and relieved of her duties. As I’ve similarly experienced, Dr. Lee is being punished for being 'the wrong kind of black person:' one dedicated to classical liberal understandings of equality, individualism, reason, and free speech. The fact that a black person can be accused of perpetuating white supremacy for upholding these tenets and basically abiding by the same understanding of diversity indicative of the Civil Rights Movement should be the last straw for those discouraged and disquieted by contemporary diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and a wake up call for those encouraged to implement such initiatives."    

In Fall 2022, at ACTA's ATHENA Roundtable in Washington DC, a remarkable morning panel was hosted by Doug Sprei, Higher Ed Now producer and ACTA's Vice President of Campus Partnerships and Multimedia. The session, titled "How Civil Discourse Can Change Campus Culture," was graced by a cohort of panelists who are truly leading lights in the national movement to bring respectful discourse to college campuses and classrooms. All are cherished colleagues and allies of ACTA, and they included April Lawson, Managing Director of Debates and Public Discourse at Braver Angels, who co-founded and co-directs the national College Debates and Discourse Program; Manu Meel, CEO of BridgeUSA; as well as Deondra Rose, the Kevin D. Gorter Associate Professor of Public Policy, at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy; and Karrin Taylor Robson, who served on the Arizona Board of Regents from 2017–2021, and who also founded the Regents’ Cup, a remarkable student debate competition in her home state.  The session was designed to take on some of the format and tone of an actual Braver Angels debate, and invited lively audience participation.

In October 2022, ACTA's ATHENA Roundtable Conference in Washington, DC was highlighted by two panels featuring extraordinary higher education thought leaders. Today we present the first of those panels – headlined as DIVERSITY DONE RIGHT, and hosted by our good friend Jonathan Rauch – Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Joining Jonathan are panelists Glenn Loury, Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University; John Chisholm, former member of the MIT Corporation; Dorian Abbot, Associate Professor of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago; and Amna Khalid, Associate Professor of History, Carleton College. Together, they drill into the impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies on higher education, discussing how this trend has had an outsized influence on the courses that universities teach, the professors they hire, and the shared understanding of our nation’s history.

Steve McGuire, ACTA’s Paul & Karen Levy Fellow in Campus Freedom, hosts a conversation on modern liberal education with Jennifer Frey, who is set to begin a new appointment as inaugural dean of the honors college at the University of Tulsa in July 2023. Dr. Frey is currently Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, where she is also a Peter and Bonnie McCausland faculty fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is a faculty fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America, and holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. Her academic research is primarily in moral psychology and virtue, and she frequently writes popular essays and book reviews in places like  First Things, The Hedgehog Review, Image, The Point,and The Wall Street Journal. She hosts a popular philosophy, theology, and literature podcast called Sacred and Profane Love.  

Across the nation, states are stepping up to reform higher education—in effect performing their intended role as laboratories of federalism and democratic governance. ACTA is seeing good progress on this front in North Carolina. While no state has achieved perfect academic accountability, academic freedom, or academic excellence in higher ed, recent developments in the UNC system in particular demonstrate crucial steps taken in the right direction.  ACTA's Emily Koons Jae and Bryan Paul recently sat down with Jenna Robinson, president of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a nonprofit institute dedicated to improving higher education in North Carolina and the nation, to discuss the successes and shortcomings of higher ed reform in North Carolina. At the time of this conversation, the UNC Board of Governors had scheduled a vote for February 23 on a resolution to ban compelled speech in admission, hiring, promotion and tenure decisions. That vote has since taken place, with the resolution passing.