universities

Education

Can We Talk About Sex? Please?

A review of Jennifer Hirsch’s and Shamus Khan’s Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus

September 10, 2020 • by
------------- A decade ago, I was a resident adviser in a residential college at a highly selective university. My colleagues and I used to roll our eyes at the highly legalistic "affirmative consent" model of sexual education that we were asked to teach first-year students. Focused on the idea that sexual ...
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Can We Talk About Sex? Please?
Higher Ed

The Pandemic Has Revealed the Driving Values of American Higher Education

Universities like UNC are going online for the public good, while other universities persist in reopening for perceived prestige and elite branding

August 24, 2020 • by and
Yet despite the rapidly escalating numbers of COVID-19 cases on campus, this elite private Catholic research university has kept its undergraduates in the dormitories at full capacity, and expressed its intention to reopen its campus again by Labor Day weekend for in-person classes, work, and other activities including Division I ...
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The Pandemic Has Revealed the Driving Values of American Higher Education
Migration

The Fight for International Students is a Blow to Racism

The Trump administration’s hostility towards international students is only one chapter of a longer history

July 30, 2020 • by , and
But the short episode achieved its purpose: intensifying the discomfort on international students and workers by throwing international students, college administrators, and faculty into needless turmoil. While many understood the move as intended to coerce universities to open up their campuses at a time when COVID-19 cases are soaring in ...
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The Fight for International Students is a Blow to Racism
Higher Ed

Don’t Let Campuses Become Plague Dystopias

College and university presidents should have the courage to halt their reopening

July 30, 2020 • by
In late May, the President of Notre Dame and Thomist philosopher Fr. John I. Jenkins defended his decision to reopen its campus in terms of the university’s religious and moral values, including the virtue of having soldierly “courage” in the face of death. This, he insisted, was a virtuous Aristotelian “mean” between ...
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Don’t Let Campuses Become Plague Dystopias
Education

The Enigma of Rescue

On a recent history of The New School for Social Research

July 30, 2020 • by
The New School for Social Research holds a story of rescue dear. This is the tale of how its co-founder and first president, the economist Alvin Johnson, climbed a mountain of correspondence and paperwork to save scores of German scholars after Nazism’s rise to power in the early 1930s. Johnson ...
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The Enigma of Rescue
Activism

Trojan Horse

Misusing Greek mythology on a college campus sneaks white supremacy in the back door

July 23, 2020 • by and
These cultural forms act as “Trojan horses,” sneaking offensive, even racist and sexist ideas into the fabric of the university where they lie in wait to do harm. In our case, one has to begin, of course, with the hyper-masculine bronze statue of Tommy Trojan (erected in 1930) at the center ...
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Trojan Horse
Activism

On Our Revolutionary Moment

Putting today’s revolt against institutional racism into historical context

July 22, 2020 • by
Protestors, who had been staging increasingly violent strikes, had assailed City College, CUNY’s flagship school, located in the middle of Harlem, as a racist institution that used academic standards to deny admission to all but a handful of Black and Puerto Rican students. They demanded that CUNY abandon those standards ...
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On Our Revolutionary Moment
Announcements

The Pros and Cons of U.S. Universities Operating Campuses in Countries with Authoritarian Regimes

A Center for Public Scholarship Public Voices event

November 24, 2019 • by
 What are the goals these offshore US campuses and centers in such countries aim to achieve? Can they be achieved? Must the curricula in the courses taught be altered to comply with the limits on free inquiry either implicitly or explicitly imposed?  If US students attend these campuses ,are they free to travel and talk ...
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