To President Frederick, the Board of Trustees, faculty and staff, fellow recipients of honorary degrees, thank you for the honor of spending this day with you. And congratulations to the Class of 2016! (Applause.) Four years ago, back when you were just freshmen, I understand many of you came by my house the night…
The graphic below comes from the website of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. At the risk of offending both the Gates Foundation and those who can’t stand its work on education, I thought I’d post it since it displays well the great diversity of the higher education student body in the U.S., even if…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…