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FIRE Intern
FIRE
Excerpt: After a news story last week that the University of Michigan was paying private investigators to spy on pro-Palestinian student protesters, the school quickly ended its contracts with the surveillance firm.
Now the university says this Orwellian practice has ended, but the chill on student speech will likely remain for some time.
One of the central justifications for universities is that they are needed to form citizens. Citizens need not just a fluency with the ideas that are contending for dominance in our democracy, but also an ability to assess them critically. This is especially true for the next generation of elites who will go on to exercise an outsized influence over national and international affairs.
This crucial role for academia raises some fundamental questions: How well are colleges and universities preparing the young to assume such powers? Are students being exposed to a broad range of intellectual perspectives that give shape to these controversies and illuminate the complexity of the issues at stake? To shine a light on these questions, we draw on a unique database of college syllabi collected by the "Open Syllabus" (OS) database.
A federal appeals court is keeping in place the ban on the National Institutes of Health’s attempt to cap indirect research cost reimbursement rates for universities and researchers who receive its grant money.
The decision preserves institutions’ access to billions of dollars for annual expenses, such as lab costs and patient safety, which are not easily connected to specific projects. The NIH negotiates individual reimbursement rates with each institution, but a cap would change that and limit funding. U.S. District Court of Massachusetts judge Angel Kelley first blocked the rate cap last February, and it has remained blocked since.
On paper, freshly hired University of Virginia president Scott C. Beardsley appears to have all the bona fides of a qualified higher ed leader: multiple advanced degrees and more than a decade of experience leading a top business school. But that has not stymied outrage about his selection.
Last month the Virginia Board of Visitors voted to elevate him from business school dean to the top job, filling a vacancy left by former president James Ryan, who resigned under pressure as board leadership negotiated an agreement with the Department of Justice to close investigations into alleged civil rights infractions. Ryan has since accused the board of being complicit in his ouster.
