Writings

Johns Hopkins University President Ron Daniels and Occidental College President Tom Stritikus write that universities must "pull every lever we can to renew faith in our founding promise of equity and opportunity—especially in the year after the Supreme Court rendered race-conscious admissions unconstitutional"

Published in Times Higher Education This September, I spoke at a conference commemorating the anniversary of the Magna Charta Universitatum. This stirring document, first affirmed by hundreds of universities in 1988 and revised...

Published in Times Higher Education For the past month, Vladimir Putin’s horrific, inhumane and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has cost thousands of lives and devastated a sovereign nation. It has also accelerated the suppression of...

Published in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas It is almost axiomatic that authoritarian (or “would be” authoritarian) leaders are innately hostile to free and open universities. Consider, for instance, the obsessive preoccupation over...

Published in New York Post Across the country, millions of high school seniors are already preparing college applications for next fall. Those who apply to highly selective universities will be engaged in a struggle for very few spots. Last...

Published in Chronicle of Higher Education In the late 1990s, I served as dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. As Canada’s most selective law school, the competition for admission was fierce. Applicants were always in...

Published in The Atlantic I was born in Canada, and my sense of national identity, like that of many Canadians, was formed in direct relation—perhaps in opposition—to the great colossus to the south. We were a country that aspired not to...

Published in Washington Post One of the first institutions to fall when the Taliban entered Kabul in mid-August was the American University of Afghanistan. For a time the country’s only private, nonprofit, independent university...

In 1915, a year before the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health launched, William T. Sedgwick—one of Hopkins’ earliest PhDs and an elder statesman of epidemiology—wrote that if the new school was to distinguish itself...

Over the past few weeks, the coronavirus pandemic has transformed life for all of us. As a country, we have taken a series of steps that would have been unimaginable a few weeks ago. Millions of Americans are working from home. Colleges, schools...