Presidential Opinion

Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, wrote: On Tuesday, I made the wrenching but necessary decision to resign as Harvard’s president. For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.

Patricia A. McGuire, President, Trinity Washington University, writes:  Genocide is pure evil.
Advocacy for genocide is complicit with evil. Advocacy for genocide is not protected speech. Fight me.
Three university presidents went up to the Hill and fell into a trap.  They took books to a knife fight.  Confronted by the worst forms of anti-intellectual bullying by manipulative politicians, they responded as intellectuals, much to their sorrow.  The result was a debacle for them, for their universities, for higher education and for our nation.

Irma Becerra, president of Marymount University, and Christopher K. Peace, president of Virginia Private Colleges, write:  Virginia's educational landscape is hampered by not having private universities classified as R1 or R2, designations indicating high levels of research activity. This situation places the responsibility for advanced research and the production of doctorates solely on its public universities, creating the need for a balanced approach that includes private research universities.Private colleges and universities in Virginia, each with unique educational attributes, play vital roles in the state's workforce development and talent creation. 

John E. Jones III, president of Dickinson College (PA) and the former chief judge of the U.S. Middle District Court of Pennsylvania, writes:  I am a college president. And I am afraid. The mass killing last week in the college town of Lewiston, Maine, is the 36th this year in the United States, according to an AP/USA Today/Northeastern University mass killings database. The 18 who were murdered bring us to a total of nearly 200 victims of these ghastly events.  Sadly, it is easy to predict that there will be more of them before the year is out. Which community — college town or not — will bear the weight of the next tragedy?

Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University (DC), writes: When we teach students to raise their voices, we have to be willing to live with the noise. We talk a lot in higher education today about making students feel safe, and safety is an important objective to make learning possible. But real higher learning cannot occur in comfort; our work requires us to make students feel uncomfortable and uncertain and, yes, even angry. Our responsibility is to teach our students how to channel their passions, their demands, their anger, and their sense of purpose into persuasive expression that leads to action. When we teach our students how to exercise their freedom of speech well, we are teaching them how to be leaders for social change.