A New Contract With Universities?

Harvard University may have won its fight with the Trump administration over research funding, but that doesn’t mean that other campuses will. “Universities too often use taxpayer dollars to bankroll projects that don’t serve the national interest,” Cullum Clark writes.

It wasn’t always this way. In fact, since the late 1940s, when Congress first decided to support science, universities pursued research that aligned with national goals. And it worked. “U.S.-based researchers earned more than twice as many Nobel prizes as Europe-based scientists on a per capita basis between 1950 and 2010,” Clark writes. “From 1975 to 2024, the United States gave rise to some 250 new firms that were eventually valued at over $10 billion, mostly in R&D-intensive industries. Europe, by contrast, produced about 14.”

Read about how it all fell apart, and what a new contract between schools and Washington might look like.

The Second Annual People’s Conference for Palestine took place over Labor Day weekend in Detroit. “Gaza is our compass” was the conference’s “guiding principle,” and speakers included doctors, academics, and politicians. Some called on activists to “destroy the idea of America in Americans’ heads.”

“Often, those most likely to sympathize with lawbreakers and call for direct action were the professors—underscoring the need to root out such extremism in higher education,” Stu Smith writes. “Lawmakers need to focus more closely on universities that encourage illegal protests and activism.”

Read more about the conference, the speakers, and the programming here.

You’ve likely seen the headlines about a home being appraised at different values depending on whether it has a black or a white owner. Racial bias in home appraisals has become a prevalent media narrative.

But the data don’t support these claims. “Research from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where I work, has long shown that claims of widespread appraiser bias are overstated and that the methodologies used to support them are deeply flawed,” Tobias Peter writes. “Inaccurate appraisals occur, as in any profession, but courts are now rightly demanding proof of intent—not statistical shortcuts or headline-grabbing anecdotes.”

Read about some of the recent cases here.

David Betz, professor of War at King’s College London, recently argued that there’s a more than 50 percent chance of civil war breaking out in the West within the next five years. He pointed to the collapse of functional politics in European and Anglophone nations, where elites have become divorced from citizens who embrace tradition and foundational values.

“It’s hard to deny that the elites seem to have little interest in promoting the welfare of individual nations,” Jacob Howland writes. “We can’t prevent violent social combustion without cutting off the supply of emotional oxygen that fuels it. That will require broad reform across multiple institutions, especially government, the media, and academia.”

What does the Jimmy Kimmel episode reveal about free speech in America? Ilya Shapiro, Charles Fain Lehman, John Ketcham, and Rafael Mangual unpack the controversy surrounding the cancellation of Kimmel’s ABC show and explore how government influence, corporate media decisions, and public protest movements intersect in shaping the national discourse. The panel also discusses controversial figures like Woody Allen and what their continued relevance says about shifting political and cultural norms.

“While imprecise and legally questionable as phrased, I do appreciate the dedication and vigor that the Trump Administration is showing here. The Left wanted a war and it will have one. Always be very careful what you wish for. Personally, I tend not to have wishes; only mild aspirations.”

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