By Mukesh 
To the Editor:
Re “How to Save Academia,” by Bret Stephens (column, April 22):
Mr. Stephens notes that the Yale-commissioned report on trust in academia found that “registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 36 to 1 across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Law School and the School of Management” at Yale. I expect these numbers would be roughly the same at Columbia University, where I have worked for four decades.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, though, there were many conservatives and Republicans in the earth sciences institute where I work. They are hard to find now. What happened was the shift of the conservative movement and the Republican Party away from a belief in evidence-based policy, scientific inquiry and following the facts.
The nation’s most powerful Republicans once acted decisively on matters of science in the public interest. In 1970 President Richard Nixon signed into law the Clean Air Act. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan ushered in the Montreal Protocol, a multinational treaty that saved the planet from the dire consequences of ozone depletion. Since then, beginning with President George W. Bush, who withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, the Republican Party and conservatives have become ever more hostile to scientific facts, evidence-based policy and the research that underpins them.
Now we have a Republican president who lies regularly, supported by an administration that has no respect for even the most basic facts, all rubber-stamped by a supine Republican Congress. Republicans have used this power to conduct an assault on scientific research in both universities and the federal government that has disrupted or ended countless important studies. They continue to aggressively set and promote dangerous environmental and health policies. A scientist who votes Republican risks handing power to people determined to ignore and undermine science.
That said, I know that many of my colleagues in academia have views of social and economic policy that do not align easily with the Democratic Party. If the Republican Party were to once again embrace the value of science, research and facts, then I am sure some of my colleagues would drift back to them. Until then, scientists in academia will overwhelmingly lean Democratic.
Richard Seager
New York
The writer is a research professor studying ocean, atmosphere and climate sciences at Columbia University.
To the Editor:
Bret Stephens simultaneously bemoans the lax academic standards of undergraduate institutions and decries “the indentured servitude of graduate-school education” as stodgy and arcane. There is an obvious contradiction here: The process of obtaining a doctoral degree is exactly what Mr. Stephens supports. It is academically rigorous and centered around the “genuine contest of ideas” that he claims is lacking.
I imagine, though, that many would be disappointed to learn that this contest entails bickering about statistical tests more than forcefully injecting political screeds into research talks with all the grace and tact of fracking.
A healthy knowledge-seeking enterprise is often boring. It sometimes produces the “unread (and frequently unreadable) dissertation” that Mr. Stephens so clearly disdains, yet in many cases it also serves as proof of a student’s ability to engage in the exact intellectual enterprise he supports.
While I agree wholeheartedly that grade inflation is a problem that needs solving and that open academic debate is essential to the health of a college ecosystem, I believe that it is hypocritical to lampoon graduate education while claiming to care about the two virtues — academic rigor and independent thought — that it mostly successfully inculcates.
Griffin Light
New Haven, Conn.
To the Editor:
Having taught at a liberal arts university for 35 years, I found Bret Stephens’s views on how to save academia useful but ultimately frustrating. His emphasis on the “rigor of a difficult education” anchored in sustained cross-disciplinary engagement resonated with me. Universities clearly need to do a better job of establishing rigorous standards and helping students to navigate difficult ideas and tasks.
But Mr. Stephens’s lofty vision fails to recognize a particularly important role of universities and the difficulty of fulfilling this role in today’s political context.
Today’s university needs to help students understand the difference between facts and values, and the nature of empirical evidence, even if that evidence runs counter to their values. It is precisely through the challenge of reconciling values and evidence that students develop the capacity for the “mature independent thought” lauded by Mr. Stephens.
Unfortunately, this effort is being seriously undermined by the Trump administration. By portraying many of those prosecuted for their involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol assault as “mere trespassers or peaceful protesters,” calling the impact of climate change on public health a scam or questioning the value and safety of childhood vaccines, the president and his party have made achieving these important goals for higher education that much harder.
Rick Doner
Atlanta
The writer is a professor emeritus in the department of political science at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.
To the Editor:
Bret Stephens doubts that the Yale committee’s suggestions for reform go far enough. I share his sentiment, but for a different reason.
To its credit, the committee named problems most elite universities avoid confronting. Yet it treats campus self-censorship as a symptom of a broken student culture. As a recent graduate and researcher who has spent the past few months interviewing undergraduates about campus speech, I have come to understand that silence differently.
Students are not lacking the vocabulary for disagreement. They are gripped by a shared, unspoken sense that the consequences of speaking could outweigh the value of being heard. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression counted 958 attempts to censor campus speech in 2025. Students do not need to experience these consequences firsthand; they see peers elsewhere face disciplinary action for speaking up and recalibrate accordingly.
Universities are pouring resources into teaching students how to disagree — and students keep showing up. They are also, reasonably, watching whether the institutions inviting them into the room will stand behind them once the conversation turns difficult. The silence on our campuses does not reflect a generation unable to speak. It reflects a generation watching, very carefully, what happens to those who do.
Arushi Saxena
Cambridge, Mass.