BY JONATHAN MARKS Guest blogger Jonathan Marks teaches political philosophy at Ursinus College. John Villasenor, Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute is only the latest commentator to worry aloud about our college young, who don’t understand or value freedom of expression. A survey he conducted contains familiar bad news. A majority of respondents holds…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and its implementing regulations, an institution that receives federal funds must ensure that no student suffers a deprivation of her or his access to educational opportunities on the basis of sex. The Department of Education intends to engage in rulemaking on the…
BY JOHN K. WILSON The New Yorker revealed today that Laura Kipnis’ Title IX nightmare, discussed in her recent book, did not end when the book came out. In fact, six graduate students and four professors at Northwestern filed another Title IX complaint against her retaliation because of the book, and the administration investigated her for…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Multiple media reports appeared last week about the efforts by American cities, backed by their state governments, to lure the merchandizing giant Amazon’s second global headquarters to their regions. The company will entertain proposals until October 19. Amazon set general parameters and has a history in Seattle that forecasts what mix…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following op-ed was published today in the Harvard Crimson over the bylines of Jason Beckfield, Joyce E. Chaplin, and Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and signed by 159 members of the Harvard University faculty. We, the undersigned faculty, write to protest the University’s decisions to overturn Michelle Jones’s admission to the Ph.D.…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for the New York Times, Anna Dubenko has gathered reactions from the Left, Right, and Center to Betsy DeVos’ proposal to revamp Title IX enforcement. From the Right David French in the National Review: “Our campuses are not exempt from the Constitution. There is no excuse for government-mandated kangaroo courts…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Consortium News, Robert Parry provides an extended contrast between Harvard’s bowing to political pressure by withdrawing a visiting professorship offered to Chelsea Manning and its failure to reconsider a similar appointment given to former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell,who resigned his own fellowship in protest and denounced Manning as…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In a short piece for the New Yorker, Daniel A. Gross quotes extensively from a prisoner’s account of what it has been like to experience Harvey from inside a maximum-security cell in a prison in the severely affected region of Texas. Here are the opening paragraphs that provide a context for…
BY HANK REICHMAN Why are women and girls still so underrepresented in the study and teaching of STEM disciplines? The question has received a good deal of attention recently, as it should, and one common conclusion is that sexist attitudes and practices, including blatant sexual harassment and discrimination, remain far too common and are often…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH All state budget impasses do not have the same causes, but, at the risk of oversimplification, there are basically two main categories of causes. The first is fiscal irresponsibility that involves overspending on special-interest projects and underfunding of major continuing costs. The second is fiscal irresponsibility that places such a priority…