Universities Appease China, Ignore Human Rights Abuses
Long the vanguard of liberal change, the American university now leads the appeasement of a hardened authoritarian China. The interest in promoting a broader community of scholars has given way…
Across Colleges of All Types, Student Anxiety Is a Growing Issue
College admissions is a different field than it was 20 or even 10 years ago. High school guidance counselors still help hundreds of students make a plan for after graduation.…
UCLA’s Discrimination Office Targeting Professor Threatens Academic Freedom
When a political science lecturer at UCLA read to his class Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and showed clips from a documentary on racism, he found…
Did You Know? Without Foreign Students, NC Schools Would Take a Big Hit
On July 6, the Trump administration announced new guidelines that would revoke the F-1 visas of international college students if their schools did not hold in-person classes in the fall.…
If All Men are Created Equal, Why Do We Need Grades?
I just finished a fascinating book, The Recovery of the West, by polymath Englishman Michael Roberts. Roberts became famous as a poet, but was trained as a scientist and spent…
Fall Uncertainty: College Leaders Have Left Students, Professors in the Dark
Colleges across the country are preparing for potential spikes in coronavirus cases in the fall. As some students return to campus, schools are making plans to protect the health of…
Higher Ed Is Stoking the Flames of the War on History
On July 4 at Mt. Rushmore, President Trump praised Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Louis Armstrong; it was a significant political and cultural speech, comparable to Trump’s speech extolling Western…
Did You Know? The Fight Over Renaming Buildings at North Carolina Colleges
On June 17, the Board of Trustees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill voted to end the moratorium on renaming campus buildings associated with white supremacy or…
Misusing Editorial Power to Censor Unpopular Research
Academic freedom is under assault by people who want to control research and speech. One of their strategies exploits the gatekeeping functions of journal editors to censor unpopular ideas. The…
Fall 2020: The Semester of Isolation
Universities’ frantic struggles to create fall semester plans that bring students back to campus often hinge on social distancing. While students are excited about the promise of an on-campus fall,…