Excerpt: Wherever you get your news, whether it is Twitter or The New York Times, you might reasonably imagine that higher education is awash in political conflict. You might see with dismay that progressive students are intolerant, hysterical, and fragile; or, depending on your sources, that right-wing students platform the vilest, most bigoted media personalities in the name of free speech.
Excerpt: A psychologist spoke out this week about what critics see as a job offer gone awry over an ideological spat about diversity statements.
Yoel Inbar, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, was up for a job at the University of California at Los Angeles. But the psychology department there decided not to proceed after more than 60 graduate students in the department signed an open letter urging the university not to hire him. At issue, the students wrote, were Inbar’s comments on his podcast expressing skepticism about the use of diversity statements in hiring, as well as about other efforts intended to make the academy more inclusive.
Excerpt: An adjunct professor who is also an associate pastor says a Texas community college fired him after it claimed to have received complaints of “religious preaching, discriminatory comments about homosexuals and transgender individuals, anti-abortion rhetoric and misogynistic banter.”
Excerpt: According to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), textbook publishers are attempting to indoctrinate Florida students by incorporating "woke" concepts into social studies textbooks — in violation of state laws prohibiting certain kinds of instruction on race and gender.
Excerpt: A Georgia elementary school teacher has been fired after allegedly violating the state’s educational gag order. Passed in 2022, Georgia’s HB 1084 prohibits teachers from “espousing” certain “divisive concepts” related to race and sex. Katie Rinderle says she read her fifth grade students “My Shadow Is Purple,” by bestselling author-illustrator Scott Stuart, a 2022 book that promotes inclusivity, after purchasing it at the school book fair and having her students vote on what they wanted to read.
