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Jonathan Feingold
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Trump is coming for higher education. His congressional allies are already armed with measures like HR 6848, which would ban universities from inviting statements that document a professor’s “past or planned contributions to efforts involving diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Outlawing DEI statements makes sense for a president who loves to vilify America’s universities and discredit their democratic commitments. What might be less obvious is that bills like HR 6848, because they curtail university autonomy and undermine DEI initiatives, threaten one of higher education’s most sacred values: academic freedom.
J.D. Tuccille
Reason
Of all the stupid ideas that have emerged in recent years, there may be none worse than the insistence that unwelcome words are the same as violence. This false perception equates physical acts that can injure or kill people with disagreements and insults that might cause hurt feelings and potentially justifies responding to the latter with the former.
After all, if words are violence, why not rebut a verbal sparring partner with an actual punch? Unfortunately, the idea is embedded on college campuses where a majority of undergraduate students agree that words and violence can be the same thing.
Emma Whitford
Inside Higher Ed
The University of California, Berkeley, suspended lecturerPeyrin Kao without pay for the spring semester because he made pro-Palestinian political comments during class.
Kao, a lecturer in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, participated in a 38-day hunger strike this fall to protest the use of technology in what he called Israel’s genocide in Gaza. He allegedly told students during class that he was undergoing a “starvation diet” and directed them to his website to learn more about why he was striking.
EmmaWhitford
Inside Higher Ed
As promised in a memo from the chancellor earlier this month, some Texas Tech University system faculty members were asked this week to report whether any course they teach “advocates for or promotes” specific race, gender or sexual identities. It is the latest step in a sweeping curricular review focused on limiting discussion of transgender identity, racism and sexuality across the five-campus public system.
