It is perhaps the first time in the history of Stanford, UCLA, and UC Berkeley that all are simultaneously searching for new leaders. Many assume that the recent resignations of Liz Magill from the University of Pennsylvania, following her congressional testimony regarding anti-Semitic speech at Penn, and Claudine Gay from Harvard, for her testimony at the same hearing and for charges of plagiarism, make the three California university searches more politicized and complicated.

I hope this isn’t the case, because if there is one thing that post–October 7 events reveal about higher education is that politics must be eschewed in the search for new leadership and, more broadly, in the management and governance of these institutions. Stanford, UCLA, and Berkeley, which have fostered the creation of enormous new bodies of knowledge in the arts, literature, the sciences, law, commerce, and medicine, and which have cumulatively educated more than one million students, can and should reverse course on the disastrous rise in the politization and capture of universities by agenda-driven interest groups. The events leading up to the resignations of Magill and Gay show just how far US higher education institutions have........

© Hoover Institution