José Cabranes: The Present Danger at our Leading Universities: What is to be Don [27:34-32:35]

University Council, of which I was one. We should insist that state officials actually enforce the restrictions on charitable gifts that now cannot be enforced by a donor's lawsuit. You will be astonished to learn, but you might as well learn it now, that in fact under a famous, long-standing common law principle, the donor of a gift to a charitable institution, including universities, does not have the right to bring a lawsuit to comply with the terms of the donation. Next, concerned trustees and alumni should focus their efforts on the administrative, on the admissions processes. Some concrete suggestions include these, the elimination of the narcissistic personal essay, greater faculty involvement in admissions decisions, and the requirement that admissions directors publicly announce heavens a reduced emphasis on leadership and activism in favor of increased focus on intellectual virtues, even such relatively modest steps would transform the expectations and priorities of incoming students and thus help to reshape the culture of the campus. Above all, concerned trustees and alumni must get over their inferiority complexes, when dealing with academic leaders. They should not shy away from using all available levers, including financial and political incentives and pressure to reassert the university's true mission. Universities have long enjoyed a somewhat rarefied position in American social and political life. Invoking principles of academic freedom, academic leaders, misapplying the principles of academic freedom, have tended to successfully resist attempts by governments, courts, and even trustees to influence their internal affairs. It all seems rather obvious, or it seems to be obvious, into one reflex on what the game is. But as the university wanders from its mission, this deference will evaporate, and it has begun to evaporate. In a series of recent rulings, for instance, courts have declined to defer to politicize university disciplinary decisions and employment decisions. At the same moment, legislative deference to our universities is also rapidly dissipating, as reflected, for example, in new proposals to tax university endowments. To be clear, I comment on these legal developments simply as a descriptive matter. I intimate no views on any particular case. But as a citizen, I cannot help but draw a lesson from these legal trends. The father universities venture from their traditional role, as incubators of knowledge, the less deference they will be shown, whether by legislators, by judges, or by trustees, and alumni. Now then is the time for those who once hesitated the second guest's decisions of academic leaders to recover their voices and to speak with confidence. After all, the reforms I have suggested today are not an infringement on the rights and responsibilities of the faculty, quite the opposite. They are aimed at supporting faculty by clearing out the mass of activism and bureaucracy that threatened to overwhelm the intellectual mission of the university. In essence, I suggest that we begin with tenacity and appropriate circumspection to remove the barnacles and to allow this ship to sail. Allow me to end up to wrap up by noting what isn't many ways the central target of the new bureaucrats and the new student activists. That target my friends is America itself. Those who seek to politicize the university to collapse the distinction between inquiry and action are undermining a foundational principle of our democracy and they are doing so in the service of dismantling the American project, turning scholars into soldiers to advance their cause. They claim of course that America and America's institutions are simply irrevocably tainted and so we must abandon all that we have inherited. The tainted so great my friends