AKA Review - 04.05.2024

From The New York Times
Colleges are Putting Their Futures at Risk
By Pamela Paul
By issuing public statements on the nation’s most polarized social-justice topics, university leaders attract political and economic meddling that imperils their longstanding academic freedom. Drawing on a recent Stanford conference on civil discourse, this article argues that the benefits of university position taking are nonexistent. Moreover, when they issue strong statements, institutions deny students and faculty the open-ended inquiry and knowledge-seeking that has long been the basis of American higher education’s success. Read this article

From The Atlantic

Universities Have a Computer Science Problem

From Ian Bogost

The struggle to find the best organizational structure for computing education—diffusion across different academic departments or consolidation into a separate computing college—mirrors a struggle in computing at large. Long used as tools for efficiency, computers have now become the way we work and live—our culture. Yet computing schools lack a vision of CS as “a superordinate realm of scholarship” like arts or engineering—of how to “make computer people care about everything else as much as they care about computers.” Read this article

From The New Yorker
Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?
By Emma Green

With its focus on the traditional liberal-arts and Western canon, the classical education movement is praised by the right as “anti-woke” and criticized by progressives for privileging Christianity and excluding non-white students. This wide-ranging article highlights the movement’s diverse forms and rapid growth—fueled by parents who think their local schools are not very good and demonstrating the potential of classical education for cultivating academic excellence in underserved populations. Read this article

From The Hechinger Report

Should Schools Teach Climate Activism?

By Anya Kamenetz

Political polarization has chilled civics education; two-thirds of K-12 teachers nationally say they limit discussion of social and political issues in class. Yet research shows that guiding students to take action locally on issues they choose improves their knowledge, civic skills, and political and community involvement. Collective activism has also been shown to ameliorate widespread climate anxiety by giving students agency as they learn what is happening to the planet and how it affects them personally. Read this article

From The New York Times

Walter Massey, a Physicist With a Higher Calling

By Katrina Miller

Long before DEI was even a concept, there was Walter Massey. Born and raised in the Jim Crow South, he was the first Black physicist in nearly every role of his storied career, from faculty member to Director of the Argonne National Lab to the President of Morehouse College. In this engaging piece, Times writer Katrina Miller paints a powerful profile of a man who struggled to balance groundbreaking research with advocacy and support for aspiring Black science students yet along the way accumulated awards and accolades for both. Read this article