AKA Review - 07.17.2026

From Inside Higher Ed
How a Few Foundations Shape American Higher Ed

By Tao Tan and Howard Husock

Some 57,339 private foundations give to higher ed, yet just 165 supply half the dollars. By pouring 71% of their money into specific research and academic disciplines, they raise the risk that the ideological views of a few givers will have an outsize influence on what is studied and taught. While foundations have every right to fund what they believe matters, the authors assert, this market structure invites scrutiny of their choices. A new database, SOURCE, makes the foundation giving record reviewable at the level of detail necessary for such scrutiny. Read this article

From The New York Times
A Great University Undermines Its Mission

By The New York Times Editorial Board
The University of California’s decision seven years ago to end the use of SAT and ACT scores in admission has been an abject failure, argues the Times, citing data showing a steep decline in the academic preparation of new students. The tragedy is that UC’s tiered system of higher ed—once a proven engine of social mobility via transfer admission—now throws more students into classes for which they are unprepared. This look at UC’s decision and the cases for and against testing should inform how other elite colleges evaluate student readiness. Read this article

From The Atlantic
The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age

By David Brooks

AI will differentiate people not by how smart they are but by mental effort—the degree to which they enjoy thinking hard. The author describes people on a spectrum from low to high need for cognition and the very different AI experiences they will have—leading to a cognitively polarized society with a small, productive, happy class and a large mental underclass. Yet this polarization is not inevitable, he tells us, showing how we can use our institutions to cultivate people’s hunger for cognitive complexity, “the mental effort to do hard things.” Read this article

From The Renovator
What is Civic Education For?

By Scott Warren
Bipartisan consensus on the need for more civic education obscures disagreement over its purpose. In today’s political environment, the author argues, civic education has become “shorthand for producing better citizens according to one political vision or another." More than teaching how our government works, civic education should equip students to think and participate, “expos[ing them] to competing traditions of American political thought…focusing on the disagreements that have always defined American democracy, and always will.” Read this article

From Two Ditches
Academic Freedom is Not a Synonym of Freedom of Expression

By Don Taylor
Knowing that he wants his undergraduates to “express opinions…without fear of being cancelled, ostracized or given a bad grade based on a heterodox view [or] misspoken word,” a Duke professor struggles with what to call this right. Neither academic freedom, which is for faculty, nor freedom of expression, which is for everyone, fits. Paradoxically, he draws on rules governing research to describe a teaching approach he calls “beneficence” that articulates compellingly what undergrads have the right to expect from him and his classroom. Read this article