AKA Review - 04.19.2024

From The New York Times
Who Would Want to Go to a College Like This?
Tressie Mcmillan Cottom

While “Moral panic about ‘woke’ campuses” has spawned a flood of legislation aimed at purging liberal ideas from classrooms, it does not reflect what most college students care about. A recent Lumina report indicates students favor more gun restrictions, fewer limits on curricula, and less restrictive reproductive health care laws—in that order. Given how much public institutions need tuition dollars, the writer argues, students wield tremendous power to combat reactionary laws by going elsewhere or skipping college entirely. Read this article

From The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chaos of Compliance
By Erin Gretzinger and Maggie Hicks

To assess how colleges have responded to anti-DEI laws, The Chronicle surveyed public colleges in Texas and Florida, the two states enacting them. An inconsistent picture emerges. Some campuses have taken sweeping action, yet one-third say they’ve made no changes at all. Administrators wrestle with what is permissible. DEI opponents accuse colleges of subverting the laws. What’s clear is that their rollout has left no one satisfied, and vague and differing interpretations of the laws are having chilling effect. Read this article

From Bloomberg.com
If You Didn’t Get Into Princeton, a Public School Is the Better Investment
By Paulina Cachero, Francesca Maglione, Cedric Sam, and Denise Lu

You’re not entirely off base if you rolled your eyes at this clickbait title, anticipating another plaint on the shrinking value of a college degree. Per this analysis, the 10-year ROI “at many elite private institutions outside the Ivies is no better than far less selective public universities.” But to their credit, the authors acknowledge the limits of their definition of ROI—limits they capture well in statements from two college representatives: “future earnings are just one part of ROI” that “don’t begin to capture ROI to the world.” Read this article

From The Atlantic

The AI Revolution Is Crushing Thousands of Languages
By Matteo Wong

More than half of all websites are in English, yet more than 80% of the world’s people don’t speak the language, cutting them off from digital life. Because generative AI “learns” from information scraped from the web, its boom has the potential to entrench the dominance of English despite promises to bridge languages and cultures. The author describes efforts to build AI models for languages lacking sufficient text on which to train AI, cautioning that the process is slow going even as AI is speedily overtaking the web. Read this article

The Dean of New Things: Bringing Change to CUNY and New York City
By John Mogulescu

A former senior Dean of City University of New York, the nation’s largest urban public university system, John Mogulescu has written a thoughtful and thought-provoking book that describes how he and his team created two innovative colleges and dozens of programs at CUNY that dramatically increased student success. It is a remarkable story about how to effectively foster, develop, and embed transformative innovation within higher education and the conditions necessary for doing so. Read this book