We should all stop celebrating Ivy League presidents resigning.
Last December, Liz Magill, then president of my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, resigned. This was the result of a public relations nightmare for the school, brought on by a rise in antisemitism on campus, widespread protests, and, of course, her disastrous performance in front of the House Education and Workforce Committee. While the right celebrated, I wrote a cautionary tale about their excitement. Now, as Ivy League presidents keep dropping like flies, the latest victim being Columbia’s chief administrator, Minouche Shafik, we should all remember that new management doesn’t fix a broken business model.
As was evident by Liz Magill and Claudine Gay’s viral appearances in front of Congress, the Ivies are plagued by a vacuous type of moral relativism. For decades, failing to prioritize intellectual diversity in the hiring of faculty and admission of students has led to declining quality in curriculum and campus discourse. Choosing to ignore warnings of long-time heterodox academics, the administrators hid behind lengthy “statements of open expression,” as ours was called at Penn. These sent free speech monitors to right-wing events where locations were decided based on the safety considerations of expected protestors and looked the other way as action was taken against faculty and students accused of “hate speech.” What they lacked was any real commitment to First Amendment principles.
One should certainly acknowledge these presidents have failed to do their jobs of maintaining their university’s image and securing donations, thus making a strong argument that they should be pushed out. Nevertheless, despite “three presidents down,” we have seen little to no substantive change at these universities. Less controversial interim presidents have followed, and with them fruitless committees investigating “hate” on campus like the task forces at Penn.
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Lexi Boccuzzi is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute.
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