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Samuel J. Abrams
RealClear Education
In a move that I find completely and utterly shocking, but not truly unexpected, the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education staff list is now offline. Try to access it and you get a simple message: “You are not authorized to access this page.”
While this is hugely important to me as a professor, it wouldn’t be odd to ask why should anyone in America care that the faculty directory of an education school at a British university has disappeared? My answer is that what is going on with a former professor at the University of Cambridge represents a much bigger problem that has gone wrong in higher education.
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When news of Iván Chaar López’s tenure denial broke last month, the scholar’s supporters pointed to what they believed was the University of Texas at Austin’s unstated reason: politics.
The American Association of University Professors sued Texas A&M University officials and the system Board of Regents last week to block a policy that limits discussion of “race or gender ideology” in class unless preapproved by the institution’s president.
In retrospect, it is no coincidence that wokeness blossomed at prestigious American colleges at the very moment when those schools were facing rising discontent over student debt and tuition costs. For the academic aristocracy, touting fealty to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, trans rights, and other progressive movements served as a convenient distraction from the intractable economic and social issues that the colleges themselves were perpetuating.
