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Emma Whitford
Inside Higher Ed
University of Oklahoma officials placed a graduate teaching assistant on leave Sunday after a student who was given a failing grade on a written assignment claimed she was discriminated against due to her religious beliefs.
Samantha Fulnecky, a junior psychology major at the university, submitted an essay response to an assigned article in a psychology class about how people are perceived based on societal expectations of gender. Her response focused on her interpretations of the Bible and the ways in which she disagreed with the article.
There is a growth sector in American higher education. The number of “Civics Centers” has exploded in the last decade, and especially since 2021.
What are these civics centers, and what explains their proliferation now?
Heterodox Academy (HxA), the leading non-partisan higher education reform organization in the US for faculty, staff and students, championing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement, has decided to provide some answers.
In February of this year, a few colleagues and I co-founded a group called Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff (CJFS), which now has more than 200 members on more than two dozen campuses. Our group, which is predominantly made up of academics at Massachusetts colleges and universities but includes members from across New England, is one of several such efforts nationwide that have coalesced into a new National Campus Jewish Alliance.
We recognize that Jewish safety is inseparable from the safety of all people, and we work to foster academic environments that reduce antisemitism by treating educators as partners, not as suspects.
