Writings

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 in 2020, asserts the core principles of the academic enterprise. Held in Bologna and attended by university rectors from around the globe, the conference was a moving reminder of...

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 the few remaining mechanisms in Russia for checking the excesses of autocratic power. Russian military and political leaders have been compelled into obeisance on national...

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 much of the last decade of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán with Central European University, an institution founded and funded by Hungarian-American financier George Soros. Not...

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 year, my university, Johns Hopkins, admitted 2,477 students from a pool of 38,513 applications.  An offer of admission can be transformational, especially for students...

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 search of anything they could do to secure an advantage in the application process. In my position as dean, it was not uncommon for alumni whose children were applying to the school...

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 the lofty abstractions of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” but to the more prosaic benefits of “peace, order, and good government.” I have always been proud...

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, AUAF opened in 2006 with international support and was intended to serve as a linchpin of Afghanistan’s nascent democracy. Taliban militants had attacked AUAF twice in...

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 in the firmament of higher education and public health, it had to “keep in vital contact with the traditions, customs and spirit of American Democracy.” Three years later, Johns...

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, churches, gyms, libraries, stores and other public places have all suspended operations or gone virtual. This massive transformation of everyday life has one goal: to decrease...

When I served as the dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto—Canada’s most selective law school—I would be asked every so often by one of our alumni what preference their children would enjoy when applying. The answer I gave was always the same: none whatsoever. When I became president of Johns Hopkins University 10 years ago, I found that one in eight newly admitted students benefited from preferences...