BY HANK REICHMAN So now it’s come to burning books! The following account comes from The George-Anne, an independent student newspaper at Georgia Southern University, in Statesboro, Georgia: Students at Georgia Southern University burned a book, written by a New York Times contributor, after a Q&A session at her lecture became heated. Jennine Capó Crucet…
BY HANK REICHMAN Despite the presence of the verb “ban” in my headline, this post does not uncover yet another censorious outrage committed by a university administration — well, at least not a very major one. Still, a recent decision by the administration of Columbia University to prohibit its university marching band from performing at…
BY AARON BARLOW Two posts on Facebook recently focused my attention to how we see ourselves in the classroom. In one, the teacher bragged that a student had shouted out that she was the most wonderful teacher ever. In the other, the teacher entered the classroom to find a student sitting at her desk and…
BY JOHN K. WILSON [Updated with statement from Camille Paglia at the end, and a second update about it.] The Wall Street Journal last week published a profile of Camille Paglia, the University of the Arts professor who is basking in publicity she hasn’t seen in decades because some dumb students said she should be…
BY AARON BARLOW Yale is not college. What goes on there has little relevance to life on the majority of American campuses. Pundits across the country who write on education need to put this on little notecards and place them by their bedsides so that they can read them when they wake each morning. That…
BY HANK REICHMAN Commencement season has come to a close for another year, so perhaps it is a good time to reflect on the sometimes thorny issue of the extent to which challenges to commencement speakers, especially those invited to receive an honorary degree, represent a threat to free speech or academic freedom. As Princeton…
BY BENJAMIN BALTHASER I didn’t think it could happen to a student of mine. I know the statistics: the United States incarcerates more people than any other country on the planet, both per capita and in total numbers. There are nearly two and half million people behind bars in our country; currently 65 million Americans…
BY EVA SWIDLER Although the media frenzy is already fading, public attention this spring was recently focused yet again in deeply unflattering ways on higher education as admissions scandals rocked elite universities in the US. Predictably, observers noted that, problematic though it might be to nakedly buy one’s way into competitive institutions with cash payments,…
BY AARON R. HANLON Aaron R. Hanlon is Assistant Professor of English at Colby College The public is right to care about what kinds of values our institutions of higher education are (and are not) imparting to students. People are likely to disagree over which particular values they think colleges and universities ought to emphasize—in…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH I came across the following two stories over the last several weeks: Nearly 5,000 Students Get Shots at Temple University amid Mumps Outbreak A mumps outbreak on the campus of Temple University in Philadelphia has reached the triple digits. The city health department said the number of confirmed and probable cases…