“Sunlight,” Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote, “is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” Few aspects of the contemporary academy more need enhanced sunlight … Continue reading “Using ‘Transparency’ to Obscure: The Daily Tar Heel and UNC’s Title IX Records”
When the University of Chicago English Department announced over the summer that, in response to the protests after the death of George Floyd, they would only admit graduate students willing … Continue reading “The BlackLivesMattering of Higher Ed: Some Notes from the Field”
Since the pandemic, many colleges have gone from giving letter grades to offering students a pass/fail grading option for their courses. Letter grades become a passing (P), which gives students … Continue reading “Did You Know? Grad School Can Affect Whether Students Take a Class Pass/Fail”
For ten years I served on the GRE Literature Exam committee. The exam is one of the special subject matter exams separate from the regular GRE (with math, verbal, analytical … Continue reading “They’ve Got to Get Rid of Western Civ—They Have To “
In spring 2020, when universities went online due to COVID-19, few of them expected to be online in the fall as well. After a failed reopening of schools, courses again … Continue reading “Without Lab Time or Facilities, Students Get Lower-Quality Education”
On August 3, the Executive Committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication approved a position statement on “Black Linguistic Justice.” The statement was crafted as a set of … Continue reading “Disadvantaging Black Students with a Demand for ‘Linguistic Justice’”
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) came out with the largest survey of students and campus life, showing the predictable divisions along class, political beliefs, and gender. However, … Continue reading “Did You Know? Survey Finds Trouble in Campus Support for Free Speech”
Nowhere is “cancel culture” more deeply entrenched than in academia; it was commonplace there long before the actual phrase was coined to describe the current social media phenomenon. The gears … Continue reading “We Need to Talk About Bruce”
For college campuses across North Carolina, the fall ushered in a less-than-ideal reality. The coronavirus, although under greater control than in the spring, was—and is—widely circulating. Within the first few … Continue reading “How Many Students Are Hospitalized with COVID-19? NC Colleges Don’t Know”
I have worked in academic science my entire life and I have never seen any sign of racism, systemic or otherwise. On the contrary, I have seen people go to … Continue reading “Diversity Über Alles: Science Is Threatened by Identity Politics”