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Emma Pettit
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Whether college students are confronted with the proper texts, ideas, and arguments is the subject of intense, often politicized debate. Critics on the right think the average undergrad is fed a steady diet of progressive fare and is starved of anything more moderate or conservative. But many professors say that’s an exaggeration, and that their classrooms are the site of constructive intellectual conflict.
Yet for all the disagreement about college teaching, what texts students actually engage with is something of a black box. A new working paper from professors at Claremont McKenna and Scripps Colleges attempted to peer inside it, by examining how three political and moral controversies — racial bias in the criminal-justice system, the ethics of abortion, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — are taught.
Tyler Tone
FIRE
Excerpt: “A cold wind just blew through every newsroom this morning.” These were the words of my colleague Bob Corn-Revere upon hearing that Paramount Global had agreed to settle President Donald Trump’s 60 Minutes lawsuit — to the tune of $16 million.
Trump filed the lawsuit in November, demanding $10 billion over what he alleged was the “deceptive editing” of a 60 Minutes interview featuring then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris. The lawsuit claimed CBS’s “substantial news distortion” was calculated to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” of last year’s election in her favor. But despite legal experts widely labeling the lawsuit baseless, Paramount opted to settle. Why?
Johanna Alonso
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: More than three months after a federal court struck down an Education Department directive that barred any practices that consider race at colleges across the country, the Department of Justice declared Wednesday that diversity, equity and inclusion practices are unlawful and “discriminatory.”
But the agency’s memo goes even further than ED’s guidance, suggesting that programs that rely on what they describe as stand-ins for race, like recruitment efforts that focus on majority-minority geographic areas, could violate federal civil rights laws. The directive applies to any organization that receives federal funds, and DOJ officials warned that engaging in potentially unlawful practices could lead to a loss in grant funding.
Jessica Blake
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Before James Ryan stepped down as president of the University of Virginia last month, the Department of Justice accused him and other leaders of actively attempting to “defy and evade federal antidiscrimination laws.” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s civil rights division, said that needed to change.
In a series of seven letters obtained by Inside Higher Ed via an open records request, Dhillon and other Department of Justice officials laid out their increasingly aggressive case that the university was at risk of losing federal funding, just as Ivy League institutions like Harvard and Columbia Universities had in the months prior for allegations of antisemitism.
