Differing Portraits of American Campuses

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Credit…Sophie Park for The New York Times

To the Editor:

“‘It Is Facing a Campaign of Annihilation’: Three Columnists on Trump’s War Against Academia” (Opinion, nytimes.com, March 15) seems to perpetuate a caricature of higher education as left-leaning, politically one-sided and obsessed with issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. Yet these institutions are run by boards of trustees disproportionately drawn from the worlds of business and technology.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, four of the most common undergraduate majors nationwide lately have been business, the health professions, the biological and biomedical sciences, and engineering — hardly bastions of leftist thought, and certainly fields that have historically been mainly white and male.

The number of students in the humanities and the social sciences (other than economics) has greatly declined, because of students’ financial anxieties and because of American priorities that extend far beyond academia.

If departments in these under-resourced fields, and the women and minorities and their allies within them, have pressed for greater acknowledgment in recent decades, that has at best served as a marginal counterweight to the overwhelming conservatism of the institutions in which they sit.

Victor Luftig
Crozet, Va.

To the Editor:

The Trump administration’s targeting of higher education violates constitutional tenets and democratic norms, but it’s also true that colleges and universities themselves have not acted legally and democratically at times.

Allowing encampments and building takeovers reflects poor leadership. Incidents involving speech prohibition and contracts making faculty hiring political are antidemocratic.