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colleges and universities



  • Amid Anti-Woke Panic, Interdisciplinary Programs Inherently Vulnerable

    by Timothy Messer-Kruse

    Because standards of academic freedom like those of the AAUP tie that freedom to expertise within recognized professional communities of scholars, those doing interdisciplinary work and working in programs like ethnic studies have less institutional protection against charges that they are engaged in politics rather than scholarship. 



  • Descendants of Slaveholder Donor Denounce Law School Name Change

    T.C. Williams donated a considerable sum to the University of Richmond's law school. He also relied on slave labor in his tobacco and manufacturing businesses. The university's new policy requires them to remove his name from a building. Descendants call this hypocritical and ungrateful and demanded an inflation-adjusted refund with interest of $3.4 billion.



  • The Lost Promise of College for All

    by Jack Schneider and Jennifer C. Berkshire

    The expansion of college education—and the encouragement directed at all Americans to pursue a degree—was driven by bipartisan agreement that education could increase prosperity and alleviate inequality. Unfortunately, without a commitment to public provision, the price has been massive individual debt. 



  • When the Public University is a Corporate Landlord

    by Charmaine Chua, Desiree Fields and David Stein

    During negotiations with graduate student workers, UCLA administrators claimed that increasing stipends would effectively subsidize local landlords through higher rents and squeeze the poor in the Los Angeles housing market. The reality is that the university is an investor in a huge real estate trust that is hiking rents itself. 



  • HBCUs and the 1950s Red Scare

    by Candace Cunningham

    South Carolina officials were able to use the purse strings to coerce public HBCU administrators to expel student activists. When private HBCUs became centers of sit-in organizing, state legislators turned to accusations of Communism. 



  • Can Universities Protect Diverse Admissions and Excellence?

    by John Thelin

    The vastly improved technology available to college admissions officers means that a handful of selective institutions can serve the interest of both nominal diversity and elite reproduction, while exacerbating the divide in elementary and secondary educational quality in the nation. 



  • Higher Ed's Past is Gilded, Not Golden

    by Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

    Despite unfavorable comparisons between today's college costs and labor conditions and those prevailing in the 1960s, public higher education was never based on a deep commitment to egalitarianism, and has long financed, rather than funded, college. 



  • A New Framework of Values for Universities?

    Historians Jennifer Mittelstadt and Davarian Baldwin discuss how universities must reject the "ivory tower" model to be contributors to the well-being of the communities around them as well as to maintain their intellectual vitality.