On Saturday, May 24, at 8:30am, at the Study at Yale (1157 Chapel Street, New Haven), the Buckley Institute is hosting a reunion weekend panel titled, “Sledgehammer or Scalpel: Can Trump's Higher Ed Reform Go Too Far?” The panel will feature Yale University Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science Akhil Reed Amar, Ethics and Public Policy Center Senior Fellow Stanley Kurtz, and Yale School of Medicine Associate Professor of Psychiatry Michael Strambler.
In recent months, the Trump Administration has cut off billions of dollars in funding from universities over their responses to antisemitism on campus and their handling of gender in sports. President Trump has threatened billions more and even begun the process of reviewing Harvard University’s tax-exempt status. This panel will look at President Trump’s efforts to reform higher education and discuss which policies go too far and which provide universities with a long overdue correction.
The event will begin at 8:30am with breakfast, followed by the panel at 9:00am.
This event is free and open to the public.
Space is limited. RSVP to Isabelle Hargrove at 203-745-0571 or Isabelle@BuckleyInstitute.com.
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Akhil Reed Amar is Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he teaches constitutional law in both Yale College and Yale Law School. After graduating from Yale College, summa cum laude, in 1980 and from Yale Law School in 1984, and clerking for Judge (later Justice) Stephen Breyer, Amar joined the Yale faculty in 1985 at the age of 26. He is Yale’s only living professor to have won the University’s unofficial triple crown — the Sterling Chair for scholarship, the DeVane Medal for teaching, and the Lamar Award for alumni service.
Amar’s work has won awards from both the American Bar Association and the Federalist Society, and he has been cited by Supreme Court justices across the spectrum in more than fifty cases — tops among non-emeritus scholars. He regularly testifies before Congress at the invitation of both parties; and in surveys of judicial citations and/or scholarly citations, he typically ranks among America’s five most-cited mid-career legal scholars. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has written widely for popular publications, including
The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and
The Atlantic. He was an informal consultant to the popular TV show
The West Wing and his scholarship has been showcased on many broadcasts, including
The Colbert Report, Morning Joe, AC360, 11th Hour with Brian Williams, Fox News @ Night with Shannon Bream, Fareed Zakaria GPS, Erin Burnett Outfront, and
Constitution USA with Peter Sagal.
He is the author of more than a hundred law review articles and several books, most notably
The Bill of Rights (1998 — winner of the Yale University Press Governors’ Award),
America’s Constitution (2005 — winner of the ABA’s Silver Gavel Award),
America’s Unwritten Constitution(2012 — named one of the year’s 100 best nonfiction books by
The Washington Post), and
The Constitution Today (2016 — named one of the year’s top ten nonfiction books by
Time magazine). The first volume of his ambitious trilogy on American constitutional history from the Founding to the present,
The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840, came out in May 2021. The second volume,
Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840-1920, will be published in September 2025 and is already available for pre-order. Along with Andy Lipka, he co-hosts a popular and free weekly podcast,
Amarica’s Constitution, whose listeners are eligible for CLE credit in most American jurisdictions. A wide assortment of his articles and op-eds and video links to many of his public lectures and free online courses may be found at
akhilamar.com.
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Stanley Kurtz is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. On a wide range of issues, from K–12 and higher education reform, to the challenges of democratization abroad, to urban-suburban policies, to the shaping of the American left’s agenda, Mr. Kurtz is a key contributor to American public debates. Mr. Kurtz has written on these and other issues for various journals, particularly
National Review Online (where he is a contributing editor).
Mr. Kurtz has published two influential books on President Obama’s political history and policy agenda:
Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism (Threshold) and
Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities (Sentinel). He has also led the campaign to reform federal subsidies to academic programs of “area studies” under Title VI of the Higher Education Act, and has co-authored model campus free speech legislation adopted by several states.
Mr. Kurtz’s latest book,
The Lost History of Western Civilization (National Association of Scholars), offers both a critique of deconstructionist history and a new way of looking at America’s cultural conflicts.
Mr. Kurtz received his undergraduate degree from Haverford College and his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University. He later taught at Harvard, winning several teaching awards for his work in a Great Books Program. He was also Dewey Prize Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Chicago.
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Michael Strambler directs Child Wellbeing and Education Research at The Consultation Center at Yale, where he also serves as a Senior Evaluation Consultant for YaleEval. His work encompasses three main themes. The first theme focuses on
early childhood care and learning, examining factors and practices in childcare, educational, and home settings that impact young children’s development, learning, and pre-academic outcomes.
The second theme centers on
psychosocial wellbeing, particularly social and emotional learning (SEL), which involves acquiring intrapersonal and interpersonal life skills such as self-control and managing interpersonal conflict.
The third theme addresses the
sociopolitics of health and education, aiming to understand how sociopolitical factors shape the delivery of healthcare and education, and how these dynamics can both benefit and hinder positive outcomes for patients and students.
Much of his work occurs in the context of partnerships between researchers and practitioners. One such project he directs is the Partnership for Early Education Research (PEER;
http://peer.yale.edu), a research-practice partnership between three Connecticut communities.
Strambler received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from University of California at Berkeley and conducted his predoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Juvenile Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Upon completing this fellowship, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Rush Neurobehavioral Center with funding from the William T. Grant Foundation. Strambler completed his postdoctoral training at The Consultation Center at Yale within the Division of Prevention and Community Research at Yale School of Medicine with support from the Ford Foundation.
