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The Editorial Board writes:  If you’ve heard that the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda is going away, don’t believe it. An emerging practice at elite medical schools segregates students by race to teach them about alleged structural racism in healthcare. The University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine requires that first year students take a class called “Structural Racism and Health Equity” as part of the standard curriculum. In one exercise for the course, students divide by racial group and retreat to different areas to discuss antiracist prompts.

Harvey C. Mansfield, professor of government at Harvard University (MA), writes:  Claudine Gay herself best stated the issue of her brief presidency of Harvard. When her appointment was announced, she declared that “the idea of the Ivory Tower, that is the past, not the future, of academia.” We must be a “part” of society, not outside it. What is the difference she invokes? The Ivory Tower is often used to dismiss academia, and the metaphor is rarely examined for its virtue. 

As chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on any given day Kevin M. Guskiewicz was reporting to at least a dozen important constituencies on campus. He used to tell people if he could keep 70 percent of the people happy 70 percent of the time, he’d consider it a victory. But with all the challenges our society has been through in the last five years, he said half-jokingly the bar for success might have slipped — 50-50, or 40-40? And his next job could be even harder. 

Some of the nation’s top universities are scrambling to hire heavyweight communications firms as their campuses become consumed by cultural and political proxy fights stemming from the Israel-Hamas war.
Among the schools that have turned to firms for help in recent months: New York University, Harvard University, Columbia University, The Cooper Union and the University of California. Those academic institutions sought help from trained PR or communications professionals in navigating student protests, unrest from donors or government inquiries borne from how the schools have handled the conflict in the Middle East, according to six people familiar with the arrangements.

Congressional leaders have clinched a deal on overall budget totals that could pave the way for a broader government funding compromise in the coming weeks — further enraging Speaker Mike Johnson’s right flank.
The long-stalled agreement, announced Sunday afternoon, establishes funding limits for the military and domestic programs for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1, allowing House and Senate appropriators to begin hashing out their differences between a dozen annual spending bills. A partial government shutdown looms 12 days away.