Your Cart is Empty
Sara Weissman
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Federal immigration authorities arrested a Tufts Ph.D. student Tuesday as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing attempts to deport pro-Palestinian activists, The Boston Globe reported.
The student, Rumeysa Ozturk, is a Turkish national in the U.S. on a student visa. Her attorney, Mahsa Khanbabai, told The Boston Globe she isn’t aware of any charges against her client. Ozturk co-wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper criticizing Tufts’ response to the campus pro-Palestinian movement, and her information had been posted on Canary Mission, a website that publicizes the identities of pro-Palestinian activists. Khanbabai initially didn’t know where Ozturk was taken and couldn’t contact her, the attorney said.
Nolan L. Cabrera
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: This is a call to my dear faculty friends and colleagues in higher education institutions. In the first months of the new presidential administration, and indeed since the election, many have been searching for answers. I have been in more meetings, gatherings and brain dump sessions than I can count, all focused on the same existential question: What does this all mean?
I am not calling for us to be lacking in strategy or unaware of our contexts. However, I am extremely concerned that a number of my fellow academics are engaging in pre-emptive self-censorship.
Nathan Honeycutt
FIRE
Excerpt: Supporters claim that requiring diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in job applications can help foster those values. But critics say it does just the opposite. Findings from a new study I conducted supports the latter position, and they come just as schools are backing away from DEI.
The University of California said last week it will stop requiring standalone DEI statements in faculty hiring. The Chronicle of Higher Education has tracked the dismantling of DEI efforts at colleges, including the 10 states passing legislation to restrict the use of DEI statements on campuses.
Hugh E. Brennan
October 12, 2023
Well, Duh! We far-right, hard-right, ultra-conservative, and now, ultra-MAGA radicals, have been yapping about this for five decades or more. If you haven’t heard from birth up that you won the lottery by being born in good old USA and that that magical place was made possible by a long, slow, grindingly difficult, and often bloody political evolution. Repeated exposure to the ideas, events, and personalities that brought to life this cornucopia of comfort and security is the only possible way to generate mass comprehension of the duties and privileges of citizenship in our federal republic.
However, we have reached the sad point that knowledge of civics is insufficient. The fundamentals of fairness, reasonableness, and comity are absent in the worldview of too many. Notions of honor, integrity, and virtue aren’t even sufficiently considered to be dismissed. They are the vocabulary of an unknown and unstudied language. The mob yowling for cancellation and executing their heckler’s veto believes that free speech is, in itself, a criminal tool of oppression and exploitation. Clearly, they would, if afforded the opportunity run the camps.
Education, faith, and the family falling apart at the same time is the greatest test the Republic has ever faced. We’ve got iconoclasm without any icons. I’ve never met a statue-killer who knows anything in particular or who has read a “whole book” about the subject of their furor.