A New Survey about Supporting Free Speech on Campus
BY JOHN K. WILSON A new Gallup survey released today, sponsored by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Newseum Institute, shows that college students support free speech and open debate more than other adults in America, but they often make exceptions to their support for 1st Amendment rights. In the survey’s…
Raising the Bar: Empowering Students to Change the World
BY ZACHARY R. WOOD Guest blogger Zachary R. Wood is a student at Williams College. Yesterday, Ferentz Lafargue wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post, arguing that student objection to bringing speakers with offensive views to campus is a sign of strength. In the piece, Lafargue makes several points with which I concur: “Students whose families…
Electing A President Without Facts
BY KELLY WILZ “We need media literacy as much as we need to learn to read.”- Jennifer Pozner “The world will not be a better place when these fact-based news organizations die. We will be propelled into a culture where facts and opinions will be interchangeable, where lies will become true and where fantasy will…
Hillary Clinton’s Race Problem
BY PETER N. KIRSTEIN In 2008, then Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (Dem. NY)–she avoids using her family name and prefers the title “Mrs.” to garner presumably the anti-feminist vote-was engaged in one of the most epic contests in American history for the Democratic-presidential nomination. In May 2008, her first presidential bid was stagnating having lost BOTH the Indiana…
Confessions of a White Professor
This very nuanced reflection on race and its impact on faculty-student assumptions, communication, and effectiveness is sub-titled “How Ferguson, John Roberts, and an Anonymous Student Helped Me Understand Diversity in the Classroom.” The author of the essay is Margaret Williamson, an Associate Professor Emerita of Classics and Associate Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth…
A Feminist’s Guide to Critiquing Hillary Clinton
On the Firing of a Tenured Professor
BY AARON BARLOW On January 20, the University of California Board of Regents took the incredibly rare step of dismissing a tenured professor for cause, a sanction that has occurred only a handful of times in the University’s history. Rob Latham, Professor of English at UC Riverside, was dismissed, over the recommendation of the UCR…
Overcoming Unconscious Bias on Campus
Protests by and on behalf of students of color on campuses such as Yale University and the University of Missouri have highlighted the need for greater diversity among faculty. While some colleges and universities, including Yale, have committed millions of dollars to diversity initiatives, the obstacles to recruiting and retaining faculty from historically underrepresented…
How Not to Fix Higher Education
National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood has a column at Minding the Campus today arguing for an 7-point plan for what he calls “a real program for reform” of American higher education that would “take back the campus from those who are intent on making it a 24-7 taxpayer-subsidized indoctrination camp.” The notion that…