McConnell on Ivy League Hiring: Less Ideological Dogma, More Free Exchange of Ideas

Floor Speech

"This year, two of America's most elite universities are in the market for new chief executives.

What makes for good leadership in higher education might once have been common sense. But if the past three months have taught us anything, it's that the virtues of a college president might need to be spelled out in a bit more detail.

For starters, a prerequisite for campus leadership should be a personal scholarly record that models academic rigor -- prolific writing, publication, and excellence in one's field.

I'm no Ivy Leaguer, but it would seem to me that someone who had produced fewer than a dozen peer-reviewed articles might not usually meet this standard at a place like Harvard.

It may once have gone without saying that university presidents should also model the codes of academic conduct and integrity to which they should hold their students.

An academic record riddled with plagiarism should disqualify any candidate.

And perhaps more importantly, a university president must be committed to ensuring that the culture of speech on their campus -- however far it might diverge from the protections enshrined in our First Amendment -- is administered fairly. Suffice it to say that Harvard did not wind up dead last in a watchdog ranking of free speech on American campuses for nothing, which made its former president's free-speech justifications for antisemitic hate laughable.

Over the past several decades, our country's most elite universities have let intolerant leftist dogmas like DEI replace the robust exchange of ideas as ordering principles on campus.

One Harvard professor and former dean recently noted that the words "white supremacy,' and "intersectionality,' appear more frequently in the Harvard course catalog than the term "scientific revolution.'

These course offerings seem to indicate a drift from Harvard's stated motto, "Veritas' -- Latin for "truth.'

Of course, it doesn't have to be this way. Hundreds of American universities outside the dusty confines of the Ivy League aren't showing any signs of abandoning the rigorous pursuit of truth for woke madness.

Places like Harvard and Penn would be well served by a leader who takes an approach like our former colleague, Ben Sasse, has taken as President of the University of Florida. As he put it recently, quote:

'Universities must reject victimology, celebrate individual agency, and engage the truth with epistemological modesty. Institutions ought to embrace open inquiry…More Curiosity, less orthodoxy…Engage the ideas. Pull apart the best arguments with the best questions.'

By all accounts, the heads of the leading universities in my home state of Kentucky -- President Kim Schatzel of the University of Louisville and President Eli Capilouto of the University of Kentucky -- aren't finding it especially difficult to foster campus climates of integrity and academic rigor.

I don't envy those tasked with finding new leaders to right the ship of the Ivy League.

Restoring the tarnished reputations of our nation's most elite universities will be no small task.

But maybe they'll have some luck if they look beyond their northeastern bubble and trade in the meaningless jargon of postmodernism for the simple wisdom of their mottos."

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