Tag: students
Laurie Santos on Why Her Yale Students Have so Much Anxiety
Since the Yale cognitive scientist Laurie Santos began teaching her class Psychology and the Good Life in 2018, it has become one of the school’s most popular courses. The first year the class was offered, nearly a quarter of the undergraduate student body enrolled. You could see that as a positive: all these young high-achievers looking to learn scientifically corroborated techniques for living a happier life. But you could also see something melancholy in the course’s popularity: all these
What College Students Really Think About Cancel Culture
Every couple of months it seems the news features another college-campus free-speech incident. In 2021, for instance, a University of Rochester professor was suspended after quoting texts that contained a racial slur; MIT canceled a lecture by a speaker who’d criticized diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; and a handful of students across the country felt they were kept out of campus leadership positions due to their conservative beliefs.
Because of events like these, many political commentators write about the threat
What COVID Burnout Is Doing to New York City’s Schools
M. told me that her school’s rate of staff absences is markedly higher than in years past. “We have people who’ve had deaths in the family, and the effect is compounded by the multiple deaths they experienced during COVID. We have people with small children who have to quarantine, so they need to stay home. We have people who are exhausted, overworked, not feeling well.” She went on, “COVID has created crises in people’s lives that extend far
Math Is Personal – The Atlantic
The mathematician Federico Ardila-Mantilla grew up in Colombia, an indifferent student but gifted in math. He was failing most of his classes at his high school in Bogotá when someone suggested he apply to MIT. He had not heard of the school. To his surprise, he got in, and he went on scholarship. Mathematically, he did well. One of his professors—an acid-tongued theoretician known to compare his audience to a herd of cows—routinely tucked “open” math problems into homework assignments,
As the Pandemic Continues, College Students Return to a Different Campus
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was produced for Student Nation, a program of The Nation Fund for Independent Journalism dedicated to highlighting the best of student journalism. For more Student Nation, check out our archive or learn more about the program here.
Penn State’s Pandemic Denialism – The Atlantic
As the fall 2021 semester approaches, nearly 700 college campuses across the United States are requiring proof of vaccination for students or employees. If you plot these colleges on a map, the image bears a striking resemblance to one depicting the results of the 2020 presidential election. And that image resembles a map of current COVID-19 hot spots, which mirrors a map of vaccination rates. In other words, vaccination rates lag behind in the areas where vaccinations are needed
The Rise of the Disneyfied Public University
Weeks into his freshman year at the Marion Military Institute, a public two-year college in Alabama, Thomas was bored. The campus, in the sleepy, hard-luck town of Marion, lacked the glitzy amenities of modern-day universities. To escape the institute’s starchy military uniforms and rigid schedule, Thomas would jump in his truck on weekends and head to Tuscaloosa, home of the University of Alabama.
The University of Alabama had a meticulously groomed campus and stately redbrick buildings whose white colonnades