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Writings

    To restore trust, end legacy admissions
    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"
    Raising regard for the academic enterprise

    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...

    What can universities do to protect Russian and Ukrainian academics fighting for truth?

    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...

    What Universities Owe Democracy

    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...

    Hidden college admission factors that hurt students’ chances of acceptance

    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...

    Abolish Legacy Admissions Now

    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...

    Universities Are Shunning Their Responsibility to Democracy

    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...

    Why authoritarian regimes attack independent universities

    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...

    Hopkins Bloomberg Public Health Magazine: Universities’ Vital Role in the Pandemic Response

    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...

    Baltimore Sun op-ed: Coronavirus plea from Johns Hopkins: please take social distancing seriously to save lives

    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...