To the students, faculty, staff, and administrators at the University of Kentucky: you deserve honesty about why the pressure now building in Frankfort around higher education is not accidental, and why so much of it begins here at the commonwealth’s flagship university.
My work on free speech, due process, ending DEI mandates, challenging performance funding for race-based metrics, fighting for unweighted metrics in funding, and supporting measures such as HB 490 to strengthen accountability for tenured professors did not begin as an abstract policy exercise. It started at UK. It started by watching, firsthand, how an institution entrusted with the future of Kentucky students too often came to believe it was accountable only to itself. The culture that took root here — elitism, moral certainty, and administrative hubris — has shaped much of the legislative response now taking place.
The campus community has a right to understand that these initiatives are not born out of hostility toward higher education. They are the result of years of frustration from Kentuckians who increasingly feel dismissed by the very institution they fund. Too often, the interests of students, faculty, staff, and administration align. Just as often, they do not. And when those interests diverge, it is taxpayers, families, and donors across this Commonwealth who are left carrying the cost…