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.
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When university researchers started to receive notice last year that the Trump administration was canceling their grants, they often didn’t get a clear explanation why beyond that their project “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”
A new episode of the Academic Freedom Podcast has been released. The podcast is sponsored by the Academic Freedom Alliance and the Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech at Yale Law School.
The growing (though not unanimous) acknowledgement that academia has lost public trust may be increasingly uncontroversial. But identifying remedies to repair that broken trust is proving to be much more contested.