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 … Continue reading “UCLA’s Discrimination Office Targeting Professor Threatens Academic Freedom”
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 … Continue reading “Did You Know? The Fight Over Renaming Buildings at North Carolina Colleges”
When the University of North Carolina leadership and the state’s legislators capitulated to the frenzied mob that toppled a statue of a Confederate Army soldier at the entrance to the … Continue reading “UNC-Chapel Hill Officially Teaches What to Think, Not How to Think”
The COVID-19 pandemic probably won’t kill the SAT, but will no doubt leave it in a badly weakened condition. Both the SAT (and its close competitor, the ACT) have had … Continue reading “If We Jettison Standardized Testing, What’s Its Replacement?”
To say that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has experienced racial tensions in the last few years would be an understatement. The most visible source of conflict … Continue reading “UNC-Chapel Hill Creates Commission to Battle ‘Invisible Racism’”
Scholars gathered October 24 and 25 at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro to discuss free speech—and focused on its alleged pernicious effects. The conference’s takeaway was that the … Continue reading “An Anti-Free Speech Conference in Greensboro”
When college officials violate people’s rights, they run the risk of bringing on lawsuits that can cost their schools a lot of money. The most common instance has been hyper-aggressive … Continue reading “The Oberlin Case Gives College Leaders a Teachable Moment”
The end of the spring semester marks the 20th anniversary of my professorship at Duke, first as an assistant professor and then as an associate professor of the practice at … Continue reading “The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Education”
Like most Americans, I have always assumed that color blindness is our ideal. Not any more: color blindness is now become the new racism. So much for a 70-year struggle … Continue reading “The New Racism, Part I: How ‘Race and Ethnic Studies’ Made Color Blindness a Bad Thing”
The chickens have come home to roost at Duke’s Divinity School. Protesting students claim the school is insufficiently diverse. More needs to be done, they say, to combat racism, transphobia, … Continue reading “Duke Divinity School’s Race to the Bottom”