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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 10h

You can’t blame faculty for declining trust in universities. It’s the policymakers - trustees, high level administrators - at fault. www.cornellsun.com/article/2026...

Screenshot of Cornell Daily Sun survey of degree of trust/distrust in Cornell to handle sexual assault reports fairly.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 05/10/2026

Look at the external advisory board for the Cornell Committee on the Future of the American University. Why is the American Enterprise Institute involved? Why is David Brooks involved? provost.cornell.edu/initiatives/...

Screenshot of the External Advisory Board for the Cornell Committee on the Future of the American University

Danielle Allen, James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University; Director, Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard Kennedy School; Director, Democratic Knowledge Project-Learn at Harvard Graduate School of Education
David Brooks, Presidential Senior Fellow at Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs; Staff Writer at The Atlantic
Francis Collins, Former Director of the National Institutes of Health; Founder & Senior Fellow at BioLogos
Yuval Levin, Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute; Founding Editor of National Affairs

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 04/10/2026

I find this claim, which is now common in right-wing ed discourse, really astonishing. It rests at the core of the post-truth vision of "viewpoint diversity": we should not teach the conclusions that research shows to be correct; rather, we should validate empirically discredited ideas just because.

Fostering this civic orientation does not mean teaching students the “right” way to think or act
according to a preferred political or moral perspective. A transformative education is premised
on developing sound judgment, not on delivering correct conclusions.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 04/10/2026

The Cornell report on the Future of the American University is a disaster, mainstreaming and endorsing profoundly reactionary right-wing diagnoses of higher education that have no business in a serious report on what higher ed is or should become.

Compare, for example, the Progressive Policy Institute’s report on The Distortion of American Studies
with a similar study of American political science from the Goldwater Institute: Richard D. Kahlenberg
and Lief Lin, “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a
Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s,” Progressive Policy Institute, January 22, 2026,
https://www.progressivepolicy.org/the-distortion-of-american-studies; Timothy K. Minella, “Peer Review
Gone Wild: Flagship Political Science Journal Shows How Academic Gatekeepers Promote Ideology Over
Scholarship,” Goldwater Institute, December 2, 2025, https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/policy-
report/peer-review-gone-wild/.

12 Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey, “Five Reasons Viewpoint Diversity Makes Academic Sense,”
American Enterprise Institute, January 26, 2026, https://cfau.aei.org/five-reasons-viewpoint-diversity-
makes-academic-sense.
13 Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin, “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading
Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s,” Progressive Policy Institute, January
22, 2026, https://www.progressivepolicy.org/the-distortion-of-american-studies

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 03/10/2026

Crucial point about the effect of denigrating, defunding, and attacking critical humanistic and social-scientific scholarship in gender and sexuality as 'woke,' 'biased/not objective,' and 'useless' www.chronicle.com/article/at-c...

But it’s not just the toxic echo chambers of the “manosphere” or the darkest corners of internet porn sending the message that women are subordinate, experts on gender and culture say. Institutions of higher learning are being systematically stripped of the disciplines and programs that for decades have countered that message.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 02/10/2026

An endowed chair in the humanities at CUNY is going to be about $3 million. I would argue that endowing faculty lines in the history of democratic socialism, theories and practices of political organizing would be a better use of $ policy.cuny.edu/general-poli...

A named Professorship (also known as a Chair) may be established to support disciplines or areas of study which are included in the existing academic offerings of the School or College, or consistent with its mission. It can also be established to enhance teaching and research by attracting and/or retaining outstanding faculty. The endowed funds would supplement the salary and fringe benefits of the professor and provide funds for office and technical support or auxiliary support staff.

Minimum endowed amount for:
a) Senior Colleges: $1.5 million – $2 million
b) Community Colleges: $1 million
c) Professional, Graduate and Specialty Schools: $2 million – $3 million

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 02/10/2026

The right-wing is correct: it does not take a lot of money, if you are a billionaire or a right-wing legislature, to buy influence in the academy (whether you're using your money or taxpayer dollars). The difference is that the right is doing this; the left is not. sapirjournal.org/influence/20...

American higher education received roughly $23 billion in private grants, gifts, and contracts in 2023. To match the largest player’s annual footprint in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, a coordinated donor vehicle would need to redirect less than 1 percent of that flow. The obstacle is not resources but absence of a shared table where donors who care about the same problem can pool their knowledge, align their grant-making, and hold one another accountable to the discipline the work requires.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 02/10/2026

There’s a lot of good things that the party was proposing in 1976 including taxpayer funded basic research, not just in STEM but also humanities

Finally, government must systematically support basic and applied research in the liberal arts, the sciences, education and the professions—without political interference or bureaucratic restraint.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 02/10/2026

Don't forget their "Featured Interviews"!

Screenshot of "Featured Interviews" on website of Chronicle of Higher Education with interviews with Neil Gross, Ron Daniels, and Tyler Austin Harper

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 02/10/2026

Checking in on how things are going over at the Chronicle Against Higher Education:

Screenshot of Chronicle of Higher Education website showing featured articles: "Anthropology Has a Truth Problem"; "The Social Sciences Have a Politics Problem"; "Could AI Be Better at Peer Review Than Humans?"; "Colleges Should Take Linda McMahon's Call to Action Seriously."

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 01/10/2026

Interesting to see what Provost Manning is able to find money for amid this supposed "hiring freeze": AI and "viewpoint diversity."

The new hiring focus comes amid broader pushes to reshape faculty hiring at Harvard. Though the AI searches emerged at the FAS divisional level, Harvard Provost John F. Manning ’82 has taken an active role in establishing hiring lines amid the freeze and led an effort to ask donors for $10 million endowed professorships flagged for “viewpoint diversity.”
Faculty have remained divided over those efforts. Not all science faculty fully welcomed the AI focus either.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 29/09/2026

Democrats have been very bad on this issue since the 1980s, unable to escape the terms of neoliberalism or propose a viable alternative asheeshksi.substack.com/p/why-the-de...

“We must begin to think of federal expenditures as capital investments, favoring those which are productive and which reduce future costs,” the Party wrote; and it was “in this context, education must be one of our highest priorities.” Democracy as an end for education appears in the 1980 platform as quite literally an afterthought: “Education is also the indispensable prerequisite for effective democracy.”

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 28/09/2026

“It’s really obvious, so why do we not do it!" www.nytimes.com/2026/09/28/u...

Screenshot of an idea for fixing U.S. Schools: "Require full books: Require students to read a minimum number of full books each year, which has become less common in many schools. Some experts saw this as common sense, though there is little existing research." Robert Maranto of the University of Arkansas comments, "It's really obvious, so why do we not do it!"

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 28/09/2026

I think students should read full books.

Norman Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech," from "The Four Freedoms," 1943
https://prints.nrm.org/detail/260937/rockwell-freedom-of-speech-1943?srsltid=AU7gw4V4FH-u5tF-MWC6kxNw8lDeOazTP-7MNiQoCo3kEiIMRLgK7l7-

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 24/09/2026

I think it's safe to assume that everyone who follows me here regards the US News College rankings as bogus, which they are, but I was not prepared for how bogus their variable of "peer assessment" is calculated: it's just the opinions of administrators who don't do any teaching or research.

Peer assessment: This is a measure of how a school is regarded by top administrators at other institutions and accounts for qualitative attributes of schools that may not be fully captured by the other ranking factors. A school's peer assessment score is calculated from the weighted, rolling average of ratings on academic quality it received by presidents, provosts and deans of admissions – or officials in equivalent positions – at institutions submitting a peer assessment survey administered by U.S. News.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 23/09/2026

Somehow don't think many business leaders will be attending . . .

Screenshot of spam email written by AI offering the "Latest list of Registrants / Attendees for the upcoming: AI and History Conference 2026"

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 21/09/2026

I mean, come on man, April fool's isn't until next year

Schnell’s Sept. 18 email statement to The Dartmouth was itself “100% AI-written,” according to a Pangram test.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 21/09/2026

I think this is a performance piece:

“Who Wrote This? Turing, Total Variation and the Mathematics of AI-Text Detection,” an academic article published on Sept. 12, came back as “99% AI-written.”

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 19/09/2026

”The constitutional question of who authorised this war and the legal question of whether this strike constitutes a war crime were displaced by a technical question that is easier to ask and impossible to answer in the terms it set.” www.theguardian.com/news/2026/ma...

In the days after the strike, the charisma of AI organised the entire political conversation around the technology: whether Claude hallucinated, whether the model was aligned, whether Anthropic bore responsibility for its deployment. The constitutional question of who authorised this war and the legal question of whether this strike constitutes a war crime were displaced by a technical question that is easier to ask and impossible to answer in the terms it set. The Claude debate absorbed the energy. That is what charisma does.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 16/09/2026

You almost have to admire AEI’s determination to platform and promote the thoughts of the absolute worst people, the people we absolutely do not need to hear from, like Gordon Gee, on the future of higher ed. Serious commitment to the bit.

Screenshot of AEI email advertising podcast interview with Gordon Gee

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 15/09/2026

Shot : chaser sustainable.harvard.edu/our-plan/how... www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

"Harvard’s holistic Sustainability Action Plan includes our climate goals: Goal Zero, to be Fossil Fuel Free by 2050, as well as Fossil Fuel-Neutral by 2026 — and a focus on reducing supply chain (or Scope 3) emissions. Together, these goals and priorities encompass the University’s direct and indirect emissions."

https://sustainable.harvard.edu/our-plan/how-we-power/

"Berg and Zhao campaigned on securing $1,000 in Claude credits for every student, a pledge the College outpaced on its own. Undergraduates can now request one of two license tiers: a standard account, which comes with $750 worth of tokens each month for use across Claude’s models and Claude Code, or a premium account, which comes with $2,500 worth per month."

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/9/14/first-hua-meeting/

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 14/09/2026

We must, of course, note the irony that the Chronicle itself is very much part of the problem here, what with the relentless reporting/opining on elite higher ed, as if what happened at Chicago 60 odd years ago should have any bearing on universities today: www.chronicle.com/article/facu...

"Faculty Hiring Has Problems. That's Nothing New. A almost-forgotten 1970s report from the University of Chicago remains relevant."

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 10/09/2026

The insulation is routinely coming out of the ceiling in the History Department building, which has not been refurbished since 1969

UMass Amherst Celebrates Opening of $125M Computer Science Laboratories Building

The Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences building is designed to train talent to fuel business growth and foster research collaborations that benefit the entire commonwealth.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 10/09/2026

I think there is something wrong with the media in this country.

Screenshot of New York Times interview with Tilly Norwood

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 08/09/2026

But probably not this much compute and probably not with this level of carbon footprint www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/s...

OpenAI said that it solved the Navier-Stokes problem using as many as 10,000 “A.I. agents” working in concert. Running such a large number of A.I. systems is likely to have cost millions of dollars, a result of the enormous amounts of electrical power needed to operate the specialized chips that drive A.I. technologies.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 07/09/2026

The World Humanities Report is a powerful, insightful document, but it has basically been ignored by the media, including the higher ed media. The Chronicle is giving endless free PR to the Vanderbilt Report. Meanwhile, here's how much coverage they gave to the World Humanities Report:

Screenshot of search results for "world humanities report" on Chronicle of Higher Education website. The text reads "There are no results that match 'world humanities report.'

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 06/09/2026

hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-f...

The best schools won’t be consigning most of their teaching to AI anytime soon: The expectation of quality, or at least of its appearance, is still too strong among their students. A totally bifurcated educational system, in which the vast majority of students pretend to learn while a computer pretends to teach them while an anointed few command the endless ministrations of attentive pedagogues, isn’t really a system of education at all. Or, it’s not a system of mass education, and it’s not going to save the industry.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 06/09/2026

www.hildrethinstitute.org/blog/massach...

Since 2001, MA higher education spending has decreased by 32 percentper student

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 04/09/2026

They’re calling it the Chronicle of Free Media Exposure For Opponents of Higher Ed:

Screenshot of a Chronicle of Higher Ed interview with Neil Gross

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 03/09/2026

At some level you have to admire higher ed media's subscription strategy, which seems to boil down to, yes we ARE going to piss on your foot and tell you it's raining.

Screenshot of ad selling a subscription to Inside Higher Ed for $119/year. The pitch states: "Higher ed needs rigorous, independent reporting. We deliver it."

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 02/09/2026

This very good piece gives two compelling answers to the question but overlooks a third, which is that Yale administrators see a deal as an opportunity to further undermine faculty, staff, and student autonomy/governance, which they view as a greater threat to their interests than Trump.

So why is it that McInnis and her fellow elites crumbled so instantaneously, and seem to bear little awareness of how immensely unpopular the president and his crusade is? Why, in short, are they not only callow and lacking in moral strength, but also such poor strategists?

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 02/09/2026

Tech companies don’t understand scholarship. ‘Quickness’ and ‘efficiency‘ are not always the right values. Sometimes you don’t want to “answer your research queries faster” and when you do, existing search technology is more than adequate to help you do scholar.googleblog.com/2026/08/quic...

Answering a research question often requires reading through several papers and figuring out how each of them might be useful. You need to track down what each paper says about your question, what methods the authors used to arrive at the relevant results, and what caveats to keep in mind to understand the boundaries.

Today, we are introducing Scholar Quick Read, to help you answer your research queries faster. Search results in Scholar Labs and Scholar search that discuss your question in depth now include a “Quick read” link.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 28/08/2026

asheeshksi.substack.com/p/introducti...

Last year, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a wealthy and influential center-right think tank in Washington, DC, established a Center for the Future of the American University (CFAU). If you’re a millennial like me, you might remember the AEI from the early 2000s as one of the cheerleaders for the Iraq War; a staunch opponent of marriage equality; vociferously hostile to Obamacare; and a big fan of war criminals like Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Surely an excellent track record; let’s see how AEI will take their tendency to be wrong about everything to ruining another institution.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 27/08/2026

Meanwhile at NEH, which remains underfunded, Trump will not allow research on any topic that does not conform to his definition of "American history and culture and Western civilization" or on any of the following subjects: www.neh.gov/grants/resea...

Screenshot of Trump NEH Notice of Funding Opportunity, detailing that Trump will not allow funding for any research on, among other things, "gender ideology," "discriminatory equity ideology," DEI, DEIA, or "environmental justice"

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 27/08/2026

What AEI/CFAU get that mainstream humanities institutions and departments don't (or can't actualize) is that you only build up the kind of humanities infrastructure that you want by investing in it. Most of the $ in hum is flowing from the right-wing. The center-left has no response.

But changing the makeup of the professoriate is a generational endeavor. It must involve encouraging more young people who seriously entertain questions and hypotheses that are typically at home on the political right to see themselves as potential faculty.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 26/08/2026

Diving in to Thorn Run's report to the AHA, it's incredibly insulting as a member to see the portrayal of a democratic, member-driven resolution as a "threat" to the organization equivalent to Trump's attacks on government funding and academic freedom. www.chronicle.com/article/a-sc... 🗃️

Screenshot from Thorn Run Partners, p. 4, of a table in which the firm lists various "critical risks"to the AHA, including the Gaza resolution, which is circled by me

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 26/08/2026

Kind of hard for a professional organization to argue that history is integral to democracy when it goes to lengths to quash democracy within its own membership. And this isn't what I want my members dues to be used for. I suspect many will feel the same. 🗃️

If the AHA leadership continues to heed that advice, its members can expect further silencing of their voices within the organization. In addition to recommending that the AHA frame the historical profession as an arm of the “national security” apparatus, Thorn Run has told its leadership that it should reroute “all future requests for public statements,” “all member concerns regarding conflict zones,” and “all concerns regarding historians in conflict zones” to a leadership committee, so that it can contain and control “out-of-scope debates.” The aim, in other words, is to “utilize the January 2026 veto as a safe harbor precedent to prevent future mission-creep” by shifting from vetoes to a place where institutional silence ensures that there is nothing to veto.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 25/08/2026

To be clear, “MOAR CONSERVATIVES” is literally how the formulators of “viewpoint diversity” define the concept: www.aei.org/commentary/f...

We focus here on what might be called the “thick” version of viewpoint diversity: the inclusion of areas and approaches to study that may be said to reflect a politically conservative disposition.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 25/08/2026

Viewpoint diversity is the opposite of peer review. You should not be leading a university if you don’t believe in peer review asheeshksi.substack.com/p/producing-...

The fact that conservative scholarship is underrepresented in our institutions ultimately means that the left gets flabbier because it’s not being tested and challenged in the way it ought to be. At the same time, the right, to the extent that it moves outside the university and finds itself in think tanks and is not subject to challenges or critiques from the center and the left, becomes more radicalized. This is not just a problem for our institutions. It’s a problem for America. So I do feel urgency in trying to remedy this issue. It was my colleague Steve Teles, who wrote in The Chronicle about this, who said he was hard pressed to identify a single tenured conservative scholar in the social sciences and humanities at Hopkins. I took that as a very serious critique

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 25/08/2026

The Chronicle of We Want to Destroy Higher Education:

Screenshot of Chronicle of Higher Education interview with President Ron Daniels of JHU. The headline reads: “Johns Hopkins Wants More Conservative Scholars”

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 24/08/2026

Ultimately, it’s hard to take any conversation around AI in the classroom seriously unless it’s about increasing the number of faculty with job security to provide the type of pedagogy we all want. generativehistory.substack.com/p/no-more-mu...

Assessing process means smaller classes and more contact hours, and outside of a few well-resourced programs we are not set up to provide them. That is a resourcing and collective action problem more than a pedagogical one, and we should conceptualize it in those terms.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 24/08/2026

“Blue” states are not safe havens for higher ed. On the crisis In Massachusetts: www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/18/b...

Higher education employment accounts for a larger share of total wages in the Commonwealth than in any state but Rhode Island, federal data show. But after three years in the 3 percent range, job growth in the sector slowed to 0.5 percent in 2025. Layoffs, once rare, are becoming more common, with at least 400 university jobs cut over six months last year. After two college closures this spring, another 350 or so university employees lost their jobs. Many other vacant staff and professorship positions have been eliminated.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 22/08/2026

Cofnas was not doing the thing he was hired to do. Academic freedom does not cover ”not doing your job.”

Your employment contract (article 1) and the va cy for which you were recruited (ref. LWC define your research mandate as a study of 'the
future of liberalism'
', specifically focusing on liberalism as a political doctrine emphasizing individual freedom and equality. The projects you publicly and repeatedly associate with your
affiliation at Ghent University, most notably your 'Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution' which advocates for racial barriers and segregation, fall entirely outside the scope of your official research
mandate.

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