UNC’s Free-Expression Survey Elicits Both Fear and Hope
North Carolina’s public universities have a problem with free expression, and it mostly doesn’t come from censorious administrators or biased faculty members. Instead, it’s the students themselves who muzzle free…
A Popular Fiction Genre is Unreadable Garbage. Blame Colleges.
Over the last several years, a burgeoning new genre has put the book-watching world on notice. “New Adult,” a coinage first used by St. Martin’s Press in 2009, refers to…
Tenure’s False Promise
Although tenure has been hotly debated over the years, it is still widely misunderstood as guaranteeing a professor a lifetime position. What happened in May to Joshua Katz, a classics…
Did You Know? New College to Launch in Wake Forest This Fall
Thales College, a new undergraduate institution launching this fall in Wake Forest, N.C., is eagerly preparing to open its doors to its inaugural class. Thales College is a unique institution…
The Limits of Expertise
As a professor devoted to his college’s “pre-disciplinary” core curriculum, I was hooked by David Epstein’s title, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. The book is chock-full of…
Birds of Paradise: The Moral Poverty of Faculty Freedom Fighters
Carl Dobsky’s brilliant, fiery painting “Birds of Paradise” has been the focus of attention at his recent exhibitions, because it accurately and effectively captures the zeitgeist of contemporary American life.…
The Public Discourse Program at UNC-Chapel Hill: Expanding Students’ Minds
Since the rise of social media, many students have gotten used to discussing difficult topics within the protection of their own echo chambers. Students are often not expected to defend…
Why Johnny Can’t Relax
Alarming rates of depression and anxiety in college students are drawing headlines. A recent study reports that 41% of college students show symptoms of depression, and nearly three-fourths have experienced…
Self-Identified “Compelling Interests” are Not a License to Discriminate
To what extent can a selective educational institution advantage certain racial groups in admissions decisions without discriminating against other groups simultaneously? How can said institutions balance external demands for fairness…
Did You Know? COVID-19 Relief Funds and Campus Mental Health
Did you know that the U.S. Department of Education is encouraging colleges and universities to use their COVID-19 relief funds for student mental health programs? Over the past two years,…