BY JONATHAN FEINGOLD Earlier this month, President Biden delivered the COVID-19 speech we needed. As the Delta variant surges, Biden offered concrete policy and commanding leadership. He announced wide-ranging initiatives to maximize vaccinations, curb transmission, and protect our kids. He was also unifying but blunt, calling out “elected officials actively working to undermine the fight…
BY PRANAV JANI 1984 meets Professor Umbridge. That’s what came to my mind when I heard of two bills currently being debated in the Ohio legislature, HB 322 and 327. Seeking to define a category of “divisive concepts” that Ohio children and adult students in college need to be protected from, these bills legitimize the…
BY KEVIN MCGRUDER In 2021, the movement against the purported teaching of Critical Race Theory in K-12 schools and public colleges dominated public discussions in many communities and has now resulted in legislation against the teaching of “divisive concepts” in many states. It is a matter of public record, as Jennifer Ruth noted here, that…
BY JULIA SCHLECK The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so…
BY JENNIFER RUTH The far right has made critical race theory (CRT) one of the most polarizing issues in a deeply polarized country. And this is precisely what the architect of the anti-CRT media campaign Christopher Rufo intended. In March, he tweeted: We have successfully frozen their brand—’critical race theory’—into the public conversation and…
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 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…
BY IRENE MULVEY At this time, when our nation is confronting deep-rooted racial inequity and having honest and long-overdue conversations about our history, legislators in a number of states have moved to shut down the conversation by restricting teaching about oppression, race, and gender. The details vary, but generally the bills prohibit teaching or training…
BY IRENE MULVEY AAUP president Irene Mulvey issued the following statement yesterday. On June 1, my predecessor, Rudy Fichtenbaum, issued a statement on protests that occurred in response to the murder of George Floyd. He acknowledged that “institutions of higher education have been part of the problem” of systemic racism, but said that “they can…