July 2025 Archives

A follow-up to my previous post to capture reaction to ousted University of Tulsa Honors College dean Jennifer Frey's New York Times op-ed and her conversation on the Classic Learning Test's Anchored podcast, plus a few other notes of interest.

Here are the X quote-tweets commenting on Frey's tweet announcing her op-ed.

St. John's College tutor Zena Hitz, founder of the Catherine Project, writes:

Everyone in higher ed -- the higher the position the better-- should be asking themselves two questions:

1. Why did Tulsa eliminate a very successful program?
2. Why were such programs rare to begin with?

Hitz also writes:

Jennifer is not the first victim of powerful morons who wreck excellent programs of study. We are lucky she has the freedom to speak openly about it!

"Powerful morons" is an apt description of Tulsa's ruling class.

Ollie Lash-Williams writes:

Hiring managers also want [students educated in the liberal arts]. In the age of GenAI and GPTs I need team members who have a training in logic, evidentiary analysis, and argumentative discourse.

Christopher Frey, chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Tulsa and husband of ousted dean Jennifer Frey, spells out in an X thread what TU administration has done to the Honors College (full thread, PDF):

1. Honors class sizes have already been increased by at least 33%. This vitiates the seminar format that was essential to these classes being successful.

2. It is not just the dean position that is gone. There is no longer an assistant dean, a service learning coordinator, a program officer, a director of admissions... The admins made these changes without a succession plan in place and now need to find a new director by the summer's end that will have to do the work of multiple full time employees.

3. The admins' choices led directly to the honors college losing access to major gifts and grants. These gifts and grants funded programs that will no longer be available to students.

4. At least 5 of the most experienced and beloved honors professors will not be teaching in the college next year.

It is important--for students, parents, and the public at large--for the facts to be plainly stated.

A word about the seminar format, from our family's experience with St. John's College, the university that pioneered the seminar-based Great Books curriculum: Rather than a professor lecturing from the front of the class, a dozen-and-a-half students will sit around a table, having read the text before the seminar, with two faculty members, called tutors. One tutor will ask an opening question, and the students carry the conversation from there, with tutors intervening at times to keep the conversation on topic or to elicit a response from more reticent students.

The conversation is required to stay within the "four corners" of the text, which is a primary source, a classic text of Western Civilization; that restriction excludes modern commentaries and critiques, attempts to dismiss the text entirely based on the author's race or sex or class. The conversation takes the author and the text at face value.

The seminar format does not allow a student to hide behind test-taking or AI-prompting skills. Your preparation or lack thereof, your engagement with the text is exposed for all to see in seminar. Nearly all of a St. John's education is conducted in seminar form with great books as source material. For example, freshman math begins with Euclid's Elements, and students must come to class prepared to go to the chalkboard and work through and explain one of the proofs from that session's assignment. Students are evaluated on written work, and there's a major paper due annually, but at the end of each year, a student's tutors all meet and talk about her performance, with the student present. I tell people that I considered St. John's when I was in high school, but it seemed too intimidating (so I went to MIT instead).

What TU Honors was offering was a four-course sequence (ancient, medieval, renaissance, modern) of Great Books seminars spanning "from Homer to Hannah Arendt," to be taken alongside a standard major, with a residential element (two floors of Hardesty Hall) and a community service requirement. Here's the description from the Honors College website at the beginning of the 2024-2025 academic year:

UTulsa's Honors Program invites students to join a centuries-old conversation about what makes for a meaningful and well-lived life. Through participation in our Socratic-style seminars, you will become exceptional in the arts of communication and dialectic, learn to respectfully challenge yourself and others, and become more discerning with respect to the most important intellectual and ethical issues that confront us as human beings and citizens today. Key Features

• Four classic text-based seminars engaging the greatest thinkers, writers, and artists who have contributed to the "great conversation."
• Disciplinary Honors courses that deepen your understanding of the foundations of that discipline, whether in STEM, health sciences, business, or the humanities.
• Honors electives that allow you to go deeper with a perennial question, genre, thinker, etc.
• A minimum of 80 hours of service, in which you put into practice what you have learned about human nature and community, contributing meaningfully to the common good.
• An Honors Senior Project that may complement your major, in which you explore the questions that have moved you most deeply as a student of classic texts.
• Rich study abroad experiences, in which you will walk in the very places where the people you read lived and created their works.
• Complements any major at The University of Tulsa.

It was also possible to take a full major in the Honors College, called Humane Letters, which added two more required seminars, "The Foundations of Natural Science" and "Aesthetic and Ethical Foundations of Music," which correspond to the classical quadrivium (astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, music), and a senior thesis "in which you explore the questions that have moved you most deeply during your time studying the classic texts."

As an aside: In taking my three children on campus tours over the last decade, I'm struck by how common honors programs had become. It seems to me that American universities have tried to re-create a pre-World War II college experience with a smaller group of serious students in community, surrounded by what has become the typical American college experience where large numbers of students are there just because it was the next step or for the social life or for vocational training. They can't dismantle the larger institution that is no longer serious about learning or thinking, but they can use it to create and subsidize a small intellectual community, and in turn the small honors community lends academic respectability to the university as a whole, particularly in statistics like median test scores and National Merit scholars attending.

What was the TU board's part in all this? In January, TU's Board of Trustees was one of five institutions that received the 2025 Nason Award for Board Leadership by Association of Governing Boards. The self-congratulatory press release cites the Honors College and the new president (Carson) as part of the foundation for a positive future.

Amid profound challenges, The University of Tulsa Board of Trustees redefined itself as a model of strategic leadership in higher education. Facing accreditation warnings, financial instability, and campus unrest, they conducted a self-assessment to create a smaller, more active body with diverse skills and a commitment to shared governance....

Bold decisions, such as appointing interim and permanent presidents aligned with the university's strategic goals, and fostering faculty collaboration, drove reforms, including revitalizing academic programs, launching an Honors College, and achieving record-breaking National Merit scholar enrollment. A unified strategic plan led to a clean accreditation report, stronger finances, and a boosted national reputation, ensuring a vibrant and sustainable future.

It would be interesting to compare the lists of board members from, say, April 2019, when "True Commitment" blew up, September 2023 when Jennifer Frey arrived, February 2024 to January 2025, when the board won its award, to the present, to see if there were any notable additions or deletions that might suggest an explanation to the board's pendulum swings between hating and loving the liberal arts.

(Robert Thomas Jr. is listed as Chief Investment Officer, but his affiliation is not listed. He appears to be CIO of West River Group, a venture capital firm based in Seattle, but he was previously a portfolio manager for the Bill Gates Investment Office (10 years) and Chief Investment Officer for the George Kaiser Family Foundation (15 years).)

MORE:

Peter Biles, a Ph.D. student at Oklahoma State University, can't shed any light on what's happening at TU, but says that the liberal arts are worth pursuing even if you make your living in a different field:

Recently, as I was debating whether to pursue a PhD in creative writing, a friend told me about a man he knows who got his doctorate in the humanities and went on to be a firefighter. Did he regret it? To the contrary. He was grateful for the education. He learned, grew, and deepened his knowledge and character. And now he protects his community by fighting fires. My friend's anecdote encouraged me to pursue the PhD.

If you attend a liberal arts college only to go back to your hometown and inherit your father's auto shop, does that make you a failure? Not by the liberal arts standards. If you came into contact with great books, grew in virtue and character, and experienced a vision of the good life, you can translate such intrinsic value into just about any life situation or career track.

Biles notes that assistant dean Matthew Post is listed as interim director of the Honors College, but Dr. Post will be leaving TU for a new opportunity later this year.

RELATED:

In September 2020, former TU philosophy Professor Jacob Howland, a leader of the revolt against the 2019 effort to dismantle the liberal arts, noted the coming demographic and financial tsunami threatening higher ed, and outlined the characteristics of new universities that should take the place of those that are closing. He was confident that a new university founded in this way would attract faculty, students, and donors:

Newman famously described the university as "an Alma Mater, knowing its children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill." The university that lives up to this forgotten standard, nourishing its children on knowledge painstakingly preserved, cultivated, and transmitted from generation to generation, will not fail to attract excellent faculty and students and to produce grateful and generous alumni.

Indeed: any prestigious university that stuck entirely to sound education would be such an anomaly today that it would become a beacon for serious students and teachers.

For higher education, as for the nation as a whole, no future good can grow without turning the rich soil of the past. We still have the tools to do what is necessary, and it would be supremely foolish to let them rust from disuse. Let's get to work.

UPDATE 2025/07/17: Fired Dean Jennifer Frey has published an op-ed in today's New York Times and is interviewed in today's episode of the Classic Learning Test's Anchored podcast. "Students voted with their feet, and no one cared."

In the podcast, Frey mentions that the University released a statement falsely saying that she had resigned. She is "deeply skeptical" that the student experience would remain the same, as the University claimed in a response to the Times: "I hope that's true, but I'm deeply skeptical because, one, we don't have seminars anymore, so the student experience will not remain the same.... but also all the staff and structure that I built is gone. It's gone. All that's left of the 'Honors College' is an as-of-yet-unnamed director and two faculty, both of whom are on one year contracts. We don't have a full-time service learning coordinator, and that truly was a full-time job. We no longer have a program officer, which was a very demanding full-time job, running events. Putting on events for 500 students is a full-time job.... If you expect one person to do the work of an entire college, OK, but really, I think the main thing is the loss of the seminars, because everything grew out of that. And also, all the money I brought in is gone."

The University of Tulsa is giving me whiplash. In 2019, they gut the liberal arts. In 2023, they trumpet the creation of a new Great Books-focused Honors College led by a philosopher who is a devout Christian. Now in 2025, the president who re-launched the Honors College and hired the dean has departed, the Dean of the Honors College has been demoted, and the program has been downsized.

(A discussion of TU whiplash could go back to 2012 to the bizarrely brief tenure of President Geoffrey Orsak; my article on the topic prompted a nice letter from his mother-in-law on Mr. Orsak's character and the hardships induced by TU's inconstancy.)

I was encouraged and amazed by TU's hiring of Jennifer Frey in 2023 to head the Honors College and to expand and deepen its offerings. It was unexpected after the "True Commitment" upheaval of 2019 (see below), and I had assumed that the 2021 hiring of Democrat former Congressman Brad Carson was a move to consolidate those changes and continue the transformation of TU into a glorified vo-tech. Instead we suddenly had a classical, Great Books, seminar-based education available in Tulsa, similar (if not as intense) to that offered by St. John's College in Annapolis and Santa Fe, the University of Dallas, New Saint Andrews College, and Christendom College. A couple of the students we'd known through our Classical Conversations homeschool community chose TU because of the Honors College.

Frey left behind a tenured, endowed faculty position at the University of South Carolina to launch the TU Honors College. She left put her intellectual projects on hold to become an administrator, a role she did not covet but took on to advance the return of the liberal arts to American higher education.

I was wowed by the Honors College conference in February 2025 on the late Roman / early medieval philosopher Boethius and was hopeful for the role TU Honors might play in the flourishing of Tulsa as a center of classical education.

I enjoyed myself tremendously at the Boethius 1500 conference and had some great conversations. A large group of blazer-wearing students from Holy Family Classical School were present for some of Friday's sessions. I had a couple of brief conversations with Dean Jennifer Frey. The presence of the Honors College at TU under her leadership should produce great synergy with the city's growing number of classical schools. I imagine TU graduates becoming teachers in our classical schools, and graduates of the schools heading to TU's Honors College to study classics alongside their chosen majors.

An X thread by Dean Frey on June 30, 2025 (compiled thread here, PDF here) reviewed the successes of the two-year-old college:

We:

• grew enrollment by over 500%
• raised retention rates to 85%
• created a standardized great books curriculum from Homer to Hannah Arendt with small, Socratic seminars
• revitalized study of Greek and Latin
• centered character and civic education throughout the college
• created civic engagement requirement, with the cooperation of over 100 community partners
• created Humane Letters major
• brought in multiple major grants and gifts
• brought theatre back to TU with Greek tragedies
• created two summer programs for high school students
• created honors residential college with faculty in residence & program officer
• created study abroad programs in Rome, Greece, & Vienna
• raised endowment for study abroad
• created culture of viewpoint diversity through civil exchange of ideas
• created multiple leadership roles for our students
• assembled an academic advisory board to help with leading voices for liberal education like @McCormickProf [Robert P. George] @CornelWest @zenahitz @rooseveltmontas @JohnInazu @DavidDecosimo @AngelParham
• named a "Hidden Gem" by @goACTA

And then she announced an end to that dream.

Now for some personal news: today is my last day as Dean. I was stunned to be informed by our new provost there will no longer be a Dean of Honors, period. Nor an Assistant Dean. Rather, I was told there will be a "director" of honors--but that person will not be me.

I was told my performance was exemplary but honors needed to "go in a different direction." So I have no idea what the future vision for it will be. I know the seminar format has been removed/class sizes increased. I know my wonderful Asst. Dean, Matt Post, has resigned.

Frey's X bio still lists her affiliation with TU as a philosopher. Her thread mentions a six-month research leave.

I can't imagine anyone wanting to come to Tulsa to work for or study at TU, given all the sudden and drastic changes of direction. University of Tulsa already blew up their reputation once just a few years ago by sacking their humanities programs. Why would students, parents, professors entrust themselves to the inconsistent nincompoops running the university behind the scenes?

Comments on Frey's dismissal as dean:

Prof. Robert P. George, Princeton:

Even if I live to be 120 years old, I will never understand why academic leaders make the bad decisions they sometimes make. This one takes the cake. After the University of Tulsa succeeded in recruiting the excellent Jennifer Frey to lead and build its new Honors College, and after Dr. Frey built it into an intellectual mecca--indeed, one of the most exciting initiatives in American higher education--the leadership of the University dismissed her as Dean. You've heard of someone "shooting himself in the foot." This move could be characterized as "shooting yourself in the head." Tulsa had a great thing going. It was attracting outstanding students and receiving national attention--and accolades. Then ... it threw it all away. Spectacular, breathtaking foolishness. Another black eye for American higher education.

Jeremy Tate, CEO of the Classic Learning Test:

For those of you outside of academia, this would be like the Chiefs letting go of Mahomes after taking the team to the AFC Championship every year. If that sounds unbelievably brain dead, you haven't met the bureaucrats who run some of these universities.

Tate again:

It is simple to understand what went down here. The rest of the humanities at UTulsa were going to suffer because the students were flocking to Jenn's program. She was a threat because she was offering the genuine article instead of the woke nonsense.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat:

Truly bizarre arc for the University of Tulsa: From trashing its humanities program (https://city-journal.org/article/storm-clouds-over-tulsa) to embracing a revivalist program under @jennfrey to abandoning the new effort, all in just six years

Kevin Watson, Ph.D., scholar-in-residence at Tulsa's Asbury Church and Director of Academic Growth & Formation at Kentucky's Asbury Theological Seminary, represents many comments from the parents of prospective students here:

I am really sorry to hear this. We were seriously considering the University of Tulsa because of @jennfrey's leadership, Honors, and the National Merit scholarship. This eliminates TU from our consideration. I'll continue to root for TU. But this is a bad look.

Steve McGuire, a fellow of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a college reform organization illustrated his tweet with a GIF of a floating dumpster on fire, and his comments that suggest that wokesters within TU are behind this:

University of Tulsa:

• Name the co-director of the "Institute of Trauma, Adversity, and Injustice" to provost.
• Keep and rename DEI as the "Office for Resilience and Belonging."
• Fire @jennfrey as dean of the hugely successful honors college that offers a solid liberal education.

Prof. Jennifer Hooten Wilson, Pepperdine:

Dr. Jennifer Frey is one of the top educators in the country. Her vision for the Honors at Tulsa was INSPIRING! Exactly what education should look like.... We need to find a way for these goods to bloom where they are planted! [Prayer emoji]

Deacon Harrison Garlick, chancellor of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa:

Absolutely unbelievable.

Dr. Frey starts an incredibly successful great books Honors College rooted in what is true, good, and beautiful... and then she's terminated.

Reminds me of John Senior.

That's a reference to the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, a wildly successful and influential Great Books program that was dismantled by the university administration after a nine-year run. Some of its graduates were instrumental in the establishment of Oklahoma's Clear Creek Abbey.

Prof. Christian Miller, Wake Forest:

Shame on @utulsa and especially their new Provost Airey for terminating Jennifer Frey's position after she uprooted her family and has worked tirelessly and very successfully to build the honors college for the past two years. I hope philosophy departments and other honors colleges are already reaching out to Professor Frey. @jennfrey

Brennan VanderVeen, TU alumnus and Program Counsel, Public Advocacy, for the Federation for Independent Rights in Education wrote that he ceased giving to TU after the True Commitment upheaval but changed his mind:

Seeing what Frey was doing with the new Honors College helped convince me the university really was committed to liberal education. It was a big reason why I became a donor this year. I was happy, eager in fact, to support the types of programs that benefitted me as a student. Now, with the university removing Frey, abolishing the dean position entirely, and apparently wanting to "go in a different direction" (including, it seems, by removing the seminar format and increasing class sizes), I can't help but wonder if I made a mistake.

Prof. Joshua Hochschild, Mount St. Mary's University:

This is a major rug-pull for a lot of students. Jen's leadership of the Honors College recruited a lot of young people, gave confidence to a lot of families. The Provost and President are likely to be hearing from angry parents

John LePine, TU alumnus:

The creation of the Honors College under Jenn Frey's leadership was the most exciting academic development at @utulsa in my time as a student/alum. I have friends who have sent or planned to send their kids to TU specifically for Honors. This is an enormous disappointment.

Prof. Yuan Yi Zhu, Leiden University, University of British Columbia:

Remarkably enough, this will be the second time in a decade the University of Tulsa management decides to nuke a successful and unique humanities program for no good reason.

Matthew Loftus:

I hope @utulsa is ready to be famous because every thinkpiece about the decline of university education for the next two decades is going to mention this boneheaded move.

Here are direct links to quote-tweets on Frey's thread and on the tweet announcing her demotion.

John Carney asks why:

I read this. What it didn't do was explain why the university had made this decision, which everyone in my feed (admittedly, full of right-of-center and great books types) regards as lamentable. I don't understand the university's position or what critics think really happened.

That this happened so soon after Brad Carson announced his departure does not seem coincidental. I have heard two conflicting explanations of Carson's resignation: (1) He is anxious to get back to Washington and public policy. (2) The board forced him out because he was better at spending money than raising it.

A private X account pointed to the resume of recently appointed Provost Jennifer L. Airey, who wielded the axe: "editor of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature and co-director of The University of Tulsa Institute of Trauma, Adversity, and Injustice." So we have a provost representing the "studies" departments and the corruption of the liberal arts stifling a successful effort to restore the liberal arts.

The Tulsa Institute of Trauma Adversity and iNjustice (TITAN) appears to be a classic example of a Grievance Studies program. The photo of Institute staff appears to be all-female, although it's hard to know for sure these days. A 2020 capture of TITAN's webpage announces the institute's mission: "TITAN promotes social justice and reduces trauma and adversity through interdisciplinary research, education and service." TITAN's Facebook page dates back to 2011. In 2012, TITAN got a classroom in Lorton Hall as office space.

In 2021, TITAN copresented a 12-hour continuing education program for public school teachers, "From Trauma to Resilience":

This teacher institute facilitated by Gilcrease Museum in partnership with the Tri-City Collective and the University of Tulsa's Institute of Trauma, Adversity and Injustice is a 12-hour professional development opportunity for Tulsa Public Schools educators that will provide tools to support pedagogical experiences surrounding historical trauma and trauma-informed classroom practices focusing on empathy, equity, resilience and healing. Participants will work closely with Gilcrease collections related to the forced removal of Southeastern tribes, freedmen and Afro-Indigenous histories in Oklahoma, and the Tulsa Race Massacre. Hear talks by inspiring speakers, learn in cohorts, develop practical tools to support teaching difficult histories including self-care and arts integration activities for educators and students, and leave with useful curricular resources.

In 2023, TU used a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to launch a minor in Historical Trauma and Transformation: "Students will learn about the (white/colonial) historical assumptions that ground so much of society today, and when those assumptions are based on exploitation and harm, they will challenge them and work to make corrections."

It makes sense that someone from the dominant "Western Civilization is evil and must be destroyed" wing of academia would want to destroy a successful program that celebrates Western Civilization.

A look back: The old honors program

An alumna pointed out that a highly regarded Honors Program existed before Jennifer Frey's arrival. In April 2019 in City Journal, Jacob Howland, then a professor of philosophy at TU, described the Honors Program that was in the process of being dismantled by then-Provost Janet Levit:

I arrived at TU in 1988, the same year Thomas Staley left to head the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. As TU's provost, Staley had aggressively recruited serious scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Programs in English, history, and politics were particularly robust; Harvard's Department of Government devoted a regular column in its newsletter to the activities of our political theorists. Professors critiqued their colleagues' work, audited one another's courses, and hosted informal lectures on subjects like pre-Raphaelite painting, medieval monasticism, and the economy of the Italian city-states. Faculty reading groups--some with 15 or more participants, including members of the wider Tulsa community--studied Heidegger's Being and Time, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, Montaigne's Essays, and Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. Undergraduates in our Honors Program studied literary, philosophical, religious, and historical classics from ancient Greece to the twentieth century and capped off their education with serious, substantial senior theses. My first decades at TU were a time of intellectual ferment and growth for faculty and students alike....

No program in the university is as central to the liberal arts as Honors, one of TU's greatest attractions for prospective students. (According to the dean of admissions, no program in the university has a higher yield of applicants.) Incoming Honors students, half of whom are enrolled in the engineering college, read the Iliad in the summer before they matriculate; in their first semester, they read the Odyssey along with Greek tragedy, comedy, history, and philosophy. They go on to study classic books from the medieval period to the present. Honors alumni do some remarkable things; most recently, Jennifer Croft (BA '01) won the 2018 Man Booker Prize for her translation of Polish author Olga Tokarczuk's novel Flights.

Enrollment in Honors has skyrocketed in recent years, thanks mostly to the extraordinary efforts of the program's director, Denise Dutton (herself an Honors graduate). Between 2012 and 2017, Dutton increased the size of the program fourfold, from 65 to 255 enrolled students--but the yearly budget for Honors decreased by 70 percent over the same period. This meant that the program could no longer host visiting speakers, support dinner or lunch conversations between students and faculty, or even pay for snacks at shared events; Dutton took to baking cookies and purchasing refreshments on her own dime. More than 400 students applied for admission to Honors this year. Levit nevertheless slashed its budget, effectively reducing the number of incoming Honors students in the fall of 2019 by 50 percent. Dutton was furthermore forbidden from seeking external funding on the grounds that the university was not prepared to guarantee the program's existence beyond the 2019-2020 academic year. And though she is herself an assistant provost, Dutton was told that she could no longer email Levit directly; petitions would have to go through her boss.

Around this time, Dutton began removing books and personal possessions from her cozy eyrie in the library. Other TU employees had been escorted from their offices upon being fired, and she didn't want to leave anything behind when the same thing happened to her.

A look back: The 2019 True Commitment downsizing of Liberal Arts at TU:

Six years ago in the spring of 2019 faculty, students, and community were up in arms over the gutting of the humanities at TU, in the "New Commitment" plan pushed by President Gerry Clancy and Provost Janet Levit and a board dominated by members affiliated with the Kaiser System. Here are several articles by then-TU philosophy professor Jacob Howland on the controversy:

• April 17, 2019, City Journal: Storm Clouds Over Tulsa: Inside the academic destruction of a proud private university
• May 8, 2019, James G. Martin Center: Administrative Hardball at the University of Tulsa
• June 18, 2019, The Nation: Corporate Wolves in Academic Sheepskins, or, a Billionaire's Raid on the University of Tulsa: This article goes into great detail regarding the financial and organizational connections between the George Kaiser Family Foundation and related organizations, the Chapman Trust, and the University of Tulsa.
• October 23, 2019, James G. Martin Center: The Intimidation Game: Bullying and Retaliation at the University of Tulsa
• March 25, 2020, James G. Martin Center: How Tulsa University Was Turned into Toxic University

In February 2020, Howland gave a speech at Hillsdale College linking the curricular changes at TU to the dominance of the George Kaiser Family Foundation, the development of the electronic surveillance state, and admiration for Communist China's oppressive policy in Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang).

A summary of True Commitment from Howland's May 2019 article:

On April 11, the administration of the University of Tulsa shocked faculty, students, and alumni by announcing the elimination of 40 percent of the school's academic programs. Undergraduate and graduate programs in theater, musical theater, dance, vocal and instrumental music, English, history, philosophy, religion, chemistry, French, German, Russian, Chinese, Greek, Latin, anthropology, mathematics, and many others were axed. The administration has eliminated all academic departments and dumped professors, now stripped of disciplinary protections and powers, into big new divisions, including one called "Humanities and Social Justice."

tuplan.org was a website (now available only through the Internet Archive) put together by opponents of True Commitment in 2019 with considerable detail and perspective from many faculty members and students.

Here's the change.org petition protesting New Commitment, which goes into considerable detail about the changes. A September 10, 2019, a Collegian story describes the administration's shenanigans that preceded the Faculty Senate's vote that True Commitment violated the faculty constitution and its principle of shared governance.

And here's a brief article by Logan Guthrie published in TU's Collegian in April 2022, on the 3rd anniversary of True Commitment. (For some reason, the Collegian does not include years in the article dates displayed on their website. I had to look at metadata in the HTML source to find the year of publication for this article and the one linked above.)

TU and Tulsa:

When I returned to Tulsa after graduating from MIT, I paid for annual access to TU's library and enjoyed having a connection to this center of learning. As I got involved with the Midtown Coalition of Neighborhood Associations, I learned about the City of Tulsa's use of eminent domain to benefit the expansion plans of TU, a private university, in violation of the Oklahoma constitution. I wrote this in 2012, after Orsak's sudden departure:

Some will say that what happens at TU is none of our business. I will point out that TU has been the beneficiary of the City of Tulsa's power of eminent domain in expanding its campus over the last 20 years [since the early 1990s]. Just 7 years ago [2005[, there were businesses along the northside of 11th Street, where now a "grand entrance" is surrounded by new but tacky apartment buildings. Property owners were given the choice of selling to TU or being condemned by the city in the name of "urban renewal." Whole chunks of the Kendall-Whittier neighborhood have disappeared. If you went to Roughnecks games in the late '70s and early '80s you'll remember the neighborhood of attractive Tudor Revival houses where the Reynolds Center now stands.

Like the Tulsa Metro Chamber, TU seems to have this dual nature: Virtually a public utility when it wants something out of city government, but strictly private when it comes to scrutiny of its internal affairs. That might have been a justifiable position when TU was the only higher ed game in town, but that hasn't been true for nearly a half century. I'd be happy to ignore TU's internal affairs if they never again ask for more land to be added to the urban renewal plan and otherwise get the university's fingers out of local government. I'm sure I'm not the only Tulsan somewhat nervous that the City of Tulsa's priceless Gilcrease collection of art and artifacts is now in the hands of an institution with no public accountability.

Re-linking a few articles about the relationship between TU and the City of Tulsa:

• G. W. Schulz's 2005 UTW story on Starship Records being forced by TU-driven urban renewal to relocate
• Jamie Pierson's 2007 UTW column on TU as The Thing That Ate 11th Street, and how TU's expanding campus isolates students from the community.
• From BatesLine, 2009: Comments and some historical perspective on a TU student's op-ed: "TU has lost a sense of belonging to Tulsa"

News stories several years ago about an Oklahoma City businessman named Joe Tippens (interviewed here on KOCO in 2019) attracted my attention to the use of repurposed drugs in fighting cancer. Tippens recovered from Stage 4 small-cell lung cancer with the help of fenbendazole, an anti-parasitic drug. Tippens tells his full story on his website, mycancerstory.rocks. Tippens steadfastly refuses to monetize his experience, preferring simply to share what seems to have worked for him.

The potential of fenbendazole as an anti-cancer agent was discovered accidentally: Lab rats were given cancer to test a drug, but one group didn't develop cancer as expected; it turned out the rats who had been treated with fenbendazole as a preventative for worms did not develop cancer. A veterinary pharmaceutical researcher aware of this was diagnosed with glioblastoma and decided to treat herself with the drug and was successful. Word reached Tippens through social media, and given little hope of recovery otherwise, he decided to give it a try. Although he was part of a cancer drug trial at the same time, he was the only patient on the trial to improve significantly and reach NED, suggesting that the fenbendazole protocol made the difference. That was 9 years ago, and Joe Tippens is still with us.

That introduced me to the broader world of treating cancer by attacking the metabolism of cancer cells. Jane McLelland, a multiple-cancer survivor in the UK, wrote a book called How to Starve Cancer without Killing Yourself. This Life Extension story is a good overview of McLelland's three battles with cancer and her approach. Every cell needs energy to survive, and cancer cells use different sources of energy than healthy cells. Different cancers draw on different energy sources and can switch sources when one source is blocked. McLelland uses a "metro map" metaphor: In the London Underground, many stations can be reached by multiple lines, so to block access completely to, say, Piccadilly, you'd have to block three different lines (if memory serves). Similarly, you may need multiple approaches to block all the ways a particular kind of cancer gets energy.

The high-level description of McLelland's approach is to identify the kind of cancer you have (as genetically specific as possible), to search medical research databases for studies describing the metabolism of that cancer, and then to build a treatment protocol using medications (often inexpensive, repurposed, off-patent drugs), nutritional supplements, and diet (e.g., ketogenic) to close off those metabolic pathways. McLelland has an online course ($125) explaining the theory and its application.

Independent Medical Alliance began as the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance, investigating the use of off-label drugs, including ivermectin, to treat respiratory viruses, but they've broadened their scope to include metabolic strategies against cancer. The 2nd edition of a book on the topic,Cancer Care: Repurposed Drugs & Metabolic Interventions in Treating Cancer by Paul E. Marik, MD, FCCM, FCCP, is available for free download along with some short videos on the metabolic approach. They also have free webinars on cancer as a metabolic disease and cancer care and the role of repurposed drugs.

Generally, these approaches can be used alongside conventional treatment. Most of the drugs and supplements that have been identified are well-known and well-tolerated, but of course drug interactions and side effects have to be considered. It's thought that attacking cancer metabolism may also attack the cancer stem cells which survive conventional treatment and mutate to become treatment-resistant cancers.

While research is being done in this area, it's a slow process. There's a long path between finding that a medication affects cancer cells in vitro and determining what dose by what route, how often, for how long will deliver the necessary effect to the cancer. In the meantime, cancer patients who are out of conventional options or who want to boost the effectiveness of conventional treatments are willing to try, even if all the science hasn't been done to nail down a metabolic treatment standard-of-care for a particular cancer.

There are a number of Facebook groups on the topic, where people discuss what they are trying and how it's working. You can find groups officially connected with Joe Tippens and Jane McLelland through their website links above. Their groups are a more disciplined and seem to have more useful information than others I've found, and you have to watch out for imposter groups and hucksters, so I'd urge you to go through their websites to find community on this issue.

There are so many opinions and so many variations and adaptations of protocols, I'd be inclined, were I facing a cancer diagnosis, to find advice from someone studying this area full-time, as they're more likely to be developing clinical experience in what works and what doesn't. Clinics have arisen to help patients sift through all the research and build a protocol that has at least a theoretical chance of working. Having someone to order and track diagnostic tests would be important, too. I don't know enough to make any endorsements, but through Jane McLelland's website, I'm aware of Care Oncology Clinic which has a presence in the UK and the US. Canadian oncologist William Makis does telemedicine consultation and has a presence on Substack and X/Twitter, where he can be contacted. I'll add others here as I become aware of them.

There does seem to be a prerequisite level of constitutional health needed to make use of this approach. If you've already lost your appetite and your strength, you'll have a hard time following a protocol that involves coordinating medications and diet. If your liver is already significantly compromised, you may not be able to tolerate the protocol. I've had loved ones who were too far gone when the cancer was discovered or too far gone when they learned about this possibility to be able to make use of this approach. One of my motivations in posting this is to raise awareness so that more people have the opportunity to pursue metabolic treatment as soon as they learn they have cancer.

Prevention is important, too: Get the rest, exercise, and nutrition (especially Vitamin D) you need to keep your immune system in good shape, maintain a healthy weight, and be watchful for early signs of cancer.

MORE: Epoch Times recently spoke to Joe Tippens and Dr. William Makis on the use of repurposed anti-parasitic drugs against cancer. The article lists four mechanisms which may explain how these drugs are effective against cancer:

• Boosting Protein Called p53: The tumor suppressor protein p53 helps kill cancer cells.
• Blocking Glucose Uptake: Cancer cells depend on sugar for energy and growth.
• Disrupting Microtubules: These cellular structures are crucial for cell division of cancer cells.
• Affecting Mitochondrial Function: Depletes cellular energy, increases oxidative stress, and blocks a critical pathway that regulates cell growth of cancer cells.