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Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed
Two years after protests over the Israel-Hamas war roiled college campuses, resulting in the arrests of more than 3,000 students and faculty, a new study finds that students generally oppose punishing “objectionable speech,” unless they consider it “highly harmful.”
The study, conducted by researchers from the Universities of Pennsylvania and Colorado and Stanford and Columbia Universities and published in April in Science Advances, also found that students’ views of objectionable speech depend largely on whom it is targeted at.
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Sociology has long taken on society's biggest questions — inequality, social movements, declining birth rates — questions Pamela Paul notes shape political and cultural fault lines. But according to one sociologist quoted in the piece, the field has drifted from producing "intellectuals who think deeply and insightfully about the world" toward producing technicians and activists instead — prompting him to wonder aloud whether the discipline should simply be liquidated. The essay ties this to a critical spring report from Vanderbilt and Washington University describing a pattern of politicization across the social sciences.
Johns Hopkins University is undertaking an ambitious push toward ideological pluralism, most visibly through its new School of Government and Policy, opening in Washington, D.C. around 2027-28 under dean William Howell, who has recruited heterodox scholars like economist Peter Arcidiacono, whose empirical findings on affirmative action provided evidence in the 2023 Supreme Court ruling against Harvard.
One year after Columbia signed its resolution agreement, the university remains something of an example, for others in the sector and for the Trump administration. But what many have called Columbia’s capitulation hasn’t been a full win for either side.
