[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 5 (Wednesday, January 10, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Page S52]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                         University Presidents

  Mr. President, on a different matter, 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 3 months have taught us anything, it 
is that the virtues of a college president might need to be spelled out 
in a bit more detail.
  For starters, the prerequisite for campus leadership should be a 
personal scholarly record that models academic rigor--prolific writing, 
publication, and an excellence in one's field.
  I am not an 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 administrated fairly.
  Suffice it to say that Harvard did not wind up dead-last in a 
watchdog ranking of free speech of American campuses for nothing, which 
made its former president's free-speech justifications for anti-Semitic 
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 their 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:

       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 will 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.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Democratic whip.