Tag: University of North Carolina
The Unraveling of American Universities
When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed six new members to the board of New College of Florida earlier this year, giving the oversight panel of the public liberal-arts college in Sarasota a decidedly right-wing bent, there was no ambiguity in the message he was sending. But in case anyone had doubts, one of his appointees, Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who led the push to redefine critical race theory, quickly eliminated them.
“We are recapturing higher education,” he wrote
How Will Hospitals Decide When to Mask Up This Fall?
Back in the spring, around the end of the COVID-19 public-health emergency, hospitals around the country underwent a change in dress code. The masks that staff had been wearing at work for more than three years vanished, in some places overnight. At UChicago Medicine, where masking policies softened at the end of May, Emily Landon, the executive medical director of infection prevention and control, fielded hate mail from colleagues, some chiding her for waiting too long to lift the requirement,
The End of the U.S. Women’s Soccer Dominance
The U.S. Women’s National Team suffers by comparison to its old glories. At the previous World Cup, in 2019, it channeled the best of the American character: magnetic self-confidence that verged on arrogance, individualism that flamboyantly flouted archaic norms. In the press, players jawboned about the president of the United States as they waged war against their own employer in the name of equal pay. On the pitch, they were a hegemonic power: adventurous, righteous, justifiably certain of their destiny.
The End of Affirmative Action. For Real This Time.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule next week on a pair of decisions about affirmative action in higher education. Both were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative group dedicated to eliminating “race and ethnicity from college admissions.” One case is against Harvard, likely because anything involving Harvard guarantees some attention. The other is against the University of North Carolina, one of the most prestigious public university systems that hasn’t banned affirmative action yet. Both cases involve Asian
America’s Crisis of the Intellectual
In 2017, I was trying to write How to Be an Antiracist. Words came onto the page slower than ever. On some days, no words came at all. Clearly, I was in crisis.
I don’t believe in writer’s block. When words aren’t flowing onto the page, I know why: I haven’t researched enough, organized the material enough, thought enough to exhume clarity, meticulously outlined my thoughts enough. I haven’t prepared myself to write.
But no matter how much I
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
The Meat Allergy That Spreads Through Ticks
A few months ago, Candice Matthis and Debbie Nichols sat down with their husbands to have some bacon. It was an unremarkable scene, except for two details.
First, there were the EpiPens, which Matthis and Nichols both had ready in case of emergency. The two women can’t eat red meat, not after they were each diagnosed with a dangerous red-meat allergy that develops, oddly enough, after tick bites. They had bonded as friends over their strange shared fate, where a
What Are Friendship Researchers Like With Their Friends?
Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.
This week she talks with two friends who also happen to study friendship. They met at a conference back when very few relationship scholars were focusing on the topic, and became both friends and professional collaborators. They talk about what they’ve learned from their research and how they’ve applied those