BY TALIA SCHAFFER Several years ago, I witnessed Malcolm Gladwell fearlessly tell a Cambridge audience that nobody should give a cent to Harvard. Whenever I read someone criticizing Gladwell’s tendency to cherry-pick data, I remember that moment. Two of Gladwell’s recent “Revisionist History” podcast episodes (season 6, episodes 2 and 3) do reveal his characteristic…
BY KELLI PYRON ALVAREZ In June, a colleague who did not attend my University of Oklahoma workshop “Anti-Racist Rhetoric & Pedagogies” decided to download the video and send it to off-campus parties. I cannot speak to his intent, but the result was that several organizations, including FIRE, misinterpreted and misconstrued the goal and purpose of…
BY JAY M. SMITH At UNC–Chapel Hill, one of the biggest frustrations arising from the entire Nikole Hannah-Jones affair has been the obstinate refusal of UNC Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and Provost Robert Blouin to tell the campus community what happened and why. Thanks to the candid statement Hannah-Jones released after deciding to refuse UNC’s job…
BY MARK JAMES Two days after news broke that the board of trustees of the University of North Carolina voted to offer Nikole Hannah-Jones the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism without the protections of tenure, Inside Higher Ed published my article in which I described being called into a meeting because a parent had…
BY CAROLYN BETENSKY Faculty members who would have been Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones’s colleagues at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina have written a powerful statement voicing support for her decision not to accept the tenured position she was offered last week at their school. After a demeaning and…
BY SYDNEY FREEMAN, JR., AND DEBORAH THORNE Results from student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are biased; the evidence is irrefutable. Students more harshly assess female instructors and instructors of color. Despite that, in the professional lives of instructors, SETs are extremely consequential—they are used to guide very high stakes personnel decisions such as whether one…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The tenured appointment of Nikole Hannah-Jones was approved by the University of North Carolina trustees a few minutes ago. This is a victory for academic freedom and for shared governance. The academic freedom victory is about the importance of tenure to academic freedom. Some people argued that Hannah-Jones didn’t need tenure,…
BY HANK REICHMAN Greg Lukianoff, executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and three co-authors have written a piece, “13 important points in the campus & K-12 ‘critical race theory’ debate,” discussing the avalanche of proposed and, in some cases, already enacted legislation governing classroom instruction in both higher ed and…