On Friday the AAUP joined the American Council of Education and 36 other higher education groups in filing an amicus curiae brief with the U.S. Supreme Court the right of colleges to consider race in admissions. The case is Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, over which the court will hear oral argument on…
This is the second of our reviews of this book. The first one, published earlier today, can be found here. From dead infants in Gaza to Israeli students killed on the West Bank, from fragile undergraduates to childish administrators and trustees, from his own early years to the those of his son, Steven Salaita, in…
This is a guest post by Donald Earl Collins. He is adjunct associate professor of history at University of Maryland University College. He previously taught at Howard University in the Department of Afro-American Studies and has written on topics such as multiculturalism, education, and African American identity. I come at the issue of the future of HBCUs, the topic of my article “Three Things…
In their September-October 2015 Academe article, “Increasing Access and Making Practice More Inclusive through Disability Awareness Training,” Carrie E. Rood and Michelle L. Damiani share their experience with creating a training module for new graduate teaching assistants at Syracuse University. They designed the module, called “Disability Awareness and Culture,” in order to educate teaching assistants…
By Stephen Kuusisto We are living in the age of autocracy, a matter that’s clear, as every conceivable matter of public concern is about who controls what. It is hard to derive solace from the assertion America was always an oligarchy, that our founders were aristocrats, wealthy, and privileged. The second President of the…
The following news item has appeared in this week’s digital newsletter from the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education: “A Google search for the term ‘chief diversity officer’ delivers 5.6 million results. Many colleges and universities across the world have added an administrative post with the title of chief diversity officer in recent years. At…
These are dark days for conservatives: 7 years of President Obama, gay marriage spreading across the land, health insurance coverage growing every day, and a collection of mediocre Republican candidates that make the words “President Clinton” seem like the future rather than the past. It’s enough to make a conservative blurt out “Jiggery-pokery” and bemoan…
Andrew Delbanco, writing in The New York Review of Books, looks over the state of American universities, noting the promise they once represented but writing that: Today this story is stalled. At the top of the prestige pyramid, in highly selective colleges like those of the Ivy League, students from the bottom income quartile in our…
I rarely post items to this site that don’t deal pretty directly with higher education, leaving such posts to my entertaining friend Marty Kich and others perhaps more worldly than I. But today I thought I might post something about the case of Rachel Dolezal, the NAACP leader from Spokane, Washington, who stepped down after…
