Universities and democracies

 Universities and democracies are neither entirely the same nor entirely different.

Here's the New Yorker story on Harvard:

Will Harvard Bend or Break?  Free-speech battles and pressure from Washington threaten America’s oldest university—and the soul of higher education. By Nathan Heller  March 3, 2025 

“There is a nearly impossible choice being put to university leaders at this point,” Andrew Crespo, a professor at Harvard Law School, told me. “On the one hand, you have outside funders, including the federal government, who have the ability to threaten the university’s ability to operate. On the other, you have the mission of the institution.” Caught in the middle is the influence of universities on fields as disparate as medicine and art. “This is not about any one institution,” Crespo said. “It’s about higher education in the United States, and whether it is going to survive and thrive or fade away.”

...

"Incisive writers about higher education have pointed out that the American university is a bundle of contradictions held in an uneasy balance that miraculously works. And yet, in marvelling at the miracle, it is possible to overlook how fragile even an uneasy balance is. Last year’s struggles over speech—among protesters and counter-protesters, scholars and administrators—seemed to show a system falling out of equilibrium. This year’s ideological pressure, from government officials and donors, has made higher education, one of the greatest achievements of American culture, vulnerable. Universities are the reason that this country has been able to attract talent, chase breakthroughs, and respond to change. If the American university survives the twenty-first century, that resilience will probably have to do not just with rules and standards but with a certain magic flexibility and eclecticism being upheld.