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Category: Education

Why conservatives want to cancel the 1619 Project

Why conservatives want to cancel the 1619 Project

Adam Serwer writes: Nikole Hannah-Jones is an award-winning Black journalist. She is also one of the developers of the 1619 Project, a journalistic examination of slavery’s role in shaping the American present. Last year, that work won her a Pulitzer Prize. Now it appears to have cost her a tenured chair at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism. The news outlet NC Policy Watch reported on Monday that the university’s dean, chancellor, and faculty had backed Hannah-Jones’s…

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The race to curb the spread of Covid vaccine disinformation

The race to curb the spread of Covid vaccine disinformation

Nature reports: In March, Twitter put its foot down: users who repeatedly spread false information about COVID-19 vaccines will have their accounts suspended or shut down. It was a new front in a high-stakes battle over misinformation that could help to determine how many people get vaccinated, and how swiftly the pandemic ends. The battle is also being fought in computer-science and sociology labs across the United States, where scientists who track the spread of false information on social media…

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Disdain for the less educated is the last acceptable prejudice

Disdain for the less educated is the last acceptable prejudice

Michael J. Sandel writes: Joe Biden has a secret weapon in his bid for the presidency: He is the first Democratic nominee in 36 years without a degree from an Ivy League university. This is a potential strength. One of the sources of Donald Trump’s political appeal has been his ability to tap into resentment against meritocratic elites. By the time of Mr. Trump’s election, the Democratic Party had become a party of technocratic liberalism more congenial to the professional…

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Some academics fear for their career because they don’t believe progressive orthodoxies

Some academics fear for their career because they don’t believe progressive orthodoxies

John McWhorter writes: Our national reckoning on race has brought to the fore a loose but committed assemblage of people given to the idea that social justice must be pursued via attempts to banish from the public sphere, as much as possible, all opinions that they interpret as insufficiently opposed to power differentials. Valid intellectual and artistic endeavor must hold the battle against white supremacy front and center, white people are to identify and expunge their complicity in this white…

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The coronavirus pandemic shows us it’s time to rethink everything. Let’s start with education

The coronavirus pandemic shows us it’s time to rethink everything. Let’s start with education

George Monbiot writes: Imagine mentioning William Shakespeare to a university graduate and discovering they had never heard of him. You would be incredulous. But it’s common and acceptable not to know what an arthropod is, or a vertebrate, or to be unable to explain the difference between an insect and spider. No one is embarrassed when a “well-educated” person cannot provide even a rough explanation of the greenhouse effect, the carbon cycle or the water cycle, or of how soils…

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Coronavirus conspiracy theorists infecting academia

Coronavirus conspiracy theorists infecting academia

The Times reports: Prominent British academics have been sharing conspiracy theories about the coronavirus online, The Times can disclose. They included suggestions from other social media users that Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) that meets in Davos may be involved in plots to exploit the illness and speculation that it was a biological weapon. The academics include Tim Hayward, a professor of environmental political theory at the University of Edinburgh, and Piers Robinson, co-founder…

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First Amendment rights prevent bigoted professor being fired, but university says no student need attend his classes

First Amendment rights prevent bigoted professor being fired, but university says no student need attend his classes

CNN reports: Indiana University has received hundreds of requests calling for a controversial professor to be fired, and a provost has called his views “racist, sexist and homophobic.” But the school says that, while the professor does not represent its values, he is protected by the First Amendment. Eric Rasmusen is a professor of business economics and public policy at Indiana University, where he’s been teaching since 1992. He recently came under fire after he tweeted an article from Unz.com…

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The right’s latest attack on academic freedom might succeed

The right’s latest attack on academic freedom might succeed

Mark Joseph Stern writes: The Trump administration has threatened to withdraw federal funding from the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies because it does not portray Christianity or Judaism in a sufficiently “positive” light. A letter from the Department of Education—sent on Tuesday and reported by the New York Times on Thursday—directed the program to emphasize “positive aspects” of these and other non-Islamic religions in the Middle East. If it refuses, the department may strip the program of hundreds of…

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Trump’s Education Dept. threatens academic freedom through witch-hunt against ‘anti-Israel’ bias

Trump’s Education Dept. threatens academic freedom through witch-hunt against ‘anti-Israel’ bias

The New York Times reports: The Education Department has ordered Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to remake the Middle East studies program run jointly by the two schools after concluding that it was offering students a biased curriculum that, among other complaints, did not present enough “positive” imagery of Judaism and Christianity in the region. In a rare instance of federal intervention in the details of higher education academic content, the department asserted that…

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Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds. One in four are taking action

Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds. One in four are taking action

The Washington Post reports: A solid majority of American teenagers are convinced that humans are changing the Earth’s climate and believe that it will cause harm to them personally and to other members of their generation, according to a new Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Roughly 1 in 4 have participated in a walkout, attended a rally or written to a public official to express their views on global warming — remarkable levels of activism for a group that has…

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Jerry Falwell’s aides describe a culture of fear and self-dealing at Liberty University

Jerry Falwell’s aides describe a culture of fear and self-dealing at Liberty University

Brandon Ambrosino writes: At Liberty University, all anyone can talk about is Jerry Falwell Jr. Just not in public. “When he does stupid stuff, people will mention it to others they consider confidants and not keep it totally secret,” a trusted adviser to Falwell, the school’s president and chancellor, told me. “But they won’t rat him out.” That’s beginning to change. Over the past year, Falwell, a prominent evangelical leader and supporter of President Donald Trump, has come under increasing…

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The moral rot of the MIT Media Lab

The moral rot of the MIT Media Lab

Justin Peters writes: Founded in 1985, the Media Lab cultivated an image as a haven for misfit geniuses, for academics who, as the Lab’s most recent director put it, “don’t fit in any existing discipline either because they are between—or simply beyond—disciplines.”. These thinkers were the latest inheritors of MIT’s famed “hacker ethic”: iconoclastic engineers who used applied science to try and make the world a better place. Yet the money came from modern-day robber barons, whose main interest in…

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How an MIT research center concealed its relationship with Jeffrey Epstein

How an MIT research center concealed its relationship with Jeffrey Epstein

Ronan Farrow reports: The M.I.T. Media Lab, which has been embroiled in a scandal over accepting donations from the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, had a deeper fund-raising relationship with Epstein than it has previously acknowledged, and it attempted to conceal the extent of its contacts with him. Dozens of pages of e-mails and other documents obtained by The New Yorker reveal that, although Epstein was listed as “disqualified” in M.I.T.’s official donor database, the Media Lab continued…

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Educators must join students in demanding climate justice

Educators must join students in demanding climate justice

Jonathan Isham and Lee Smithey write: Sometimes it’s the students who teach. This week, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg arrived in New York City in a zero-emissions yacht, en route to the United Nations climate change summit. The purpose of the trip? Let’s call it a teachable moment. Over the past year, Greta and more than 2 million teens around the world have led school strikes for climate justice, demanding that their leaders end the age of fossil fuels. Now these young…

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Steven Pinker’s aid in Jeffrey Epstein’s legal defense

Steven Pinker’s aid in Jeffrey Epstein’s legal defense

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Inside Higher Ed reports: That convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had help in avoiding federal or state prison is unsurprising: money and power often buy what they shouldn’t. But the recent revelation that Epstein found aid from star psychologist Steven Pinker in the form of a 2007 legal document surprised both Pinker’s fans and critics. At least at first. Then came the analysis: to supporters of Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, his ties to Epstein are…

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Merkel takes aim at Trump in ‘tear down walls’ speech at Harvard

Merkel takes aim at Trump in ‘tear down walls’ speech at Harvard

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“I want to leave this wish with you: Tear down walls of ignorance and narrow-mindedness, for nothing has to stay as it is”. – Angela Merkel’s speech to students after receiving an Honorary Doctorate of Law Degree from Harvard University. pic.twitter.com/r144M2Qb6K — James Melville (@JamesMelville) May 31, 2019 Politico reports: Angela Merkel urged Harvard graduates Thursday to “tear down walls of ignorance and narrow-mindedness” in a speech laced with apparent jibes at Donald Trump and his policies. Though she did…

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