Oxford’s and Cambridge’s Competing Narratives on Start-Ups

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Business Insider, Sam Shead has been tracking an escalating dust-up between Oxford and Cambridge Universities over which elite institution provides a better environment for digital start-ups. The two institutions have obviously been competing in academics, athletics, and many other areas for centuries, and this competition over digital start-ups existed…

Government Decrees Dismiss 5,717 Turkish Academics

BY HANK REICHMAN According to a report on the website turkeypurge.com, 5,717 teachers at 117 universities have been dismissed from their jobs in Turkey due to government decrees issued under a state of emergency following the failed coup of July 2016.  A total of nine government decrees issued between September 2016 and August 2017 dismissed…

Open Letter from an American Dreamer

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following open letter first appeared on Dreamer Hugo Diaz’s Facebook page. It has subsequently been disseminated by several national and international news sources. After our month of hurricanes, some of the details especially resonate. More broadly, Hugo Diaz presents a very personalized and authentic account of his experience that both…

Speech Is an Acquired Taste

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…

New DoE Guidelines on Campus Sexual Misconduct

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…

We Are Educators, Not Prosecutors

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.…