Tag: public universities
Claudine Gay Is Not the Real Story
Claudine Gay is gone. The Harvard president’s slow-burning plagiarism scandal was finally fanned into a full-blown conflagration that neither she nor the university could stamp out. After weeks of mounting accusations, several new instances of alleged plagiarism uncovered Monday night—added to about 40 earlier examples—appear to have been the final straw. Her resignation was tendered yesterday afternoon.
The conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who helped kick off this controversy when he and fellow conservative Christopher Brunet leveled a round of
The Class War at West Virginia University
Three years ago, President E. Gordon Gee of West Virginia University had a terrific idea—a career capper. As he neared retirement, he would embrace the “academic transformation” of public higher education and streamline his university.
For too long, as Gee told anyone who would listen, public universities had tried to be everything to everyone and keep up with elite private colleges. When the coronavirus pandemic shut down American universities in 2020, Gee embraced its disruptions as a gift—a “black swan
Here Comes the Second Year of AI College
When ChatGPT entered the world last fall, the faculty at SUNY Buffalo freaked out. Kelly Ahuna, the university’s director of academic integrity, was inundated by panicked emails. “It has me thinking about retiring,” one English professor confessed. He had typed a prompt into ChatGPT and watched in horror as an essay unfurled on-screen. There were errors, sure: incorrect citations, weird transitions. But he would have given it a B-minus. He anticipated an onslaught of undetectable AI plagiarism. Ahuna found
The Progressive Case Against Race-Based Affirmative Action
The dirty secret of higher education in the United States is that racial preferences for Black, Latino, and Native American college students provide cover for an admissions system that mostly benefits the wealthy. The current framework of race-based preferences—which goes before the Supreme Court on Monday—is broadly unpopular, has been highly vulnerable to legal challenges under federal civil-rights laws, disproportionately helps upper-middle-class students of color, and pits working-class people of different races against one another. Major public and private
Why Republicans Are Turning Against Free Speech
The American right has lost the plot on free speech. The passage of Florida’s House Bill 1557, which bans “classroom instruction” on “sexual orientation and gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade and in a manner that isn’t “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate” in all grades, K–12, is merely the latest in a string of what the free-speech-advocacy organization PEN America has called “education gag orders” that have been proposed by Republicans and passed by red-state legislatures from coast to
The Casteism I See in America
Indians and Indian Americans are often held up as a “model minority” in the United States. Members of this community are more likely to be highly educated and to have health insurance, make more money, work in more senior positions, and have lower rates of poverty than both the average immigrant and the average American. They are well represented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—the so-called STEM subjects—and more and more of them occupy roles of political and social influence,