AKA Review - 05.31.2024

From The Boston Globe
The Problem with Campus Protests is not Cruelty but Ignorance
By Alexandra Styron
Reflecting on ad hoc teach-ins by individual professors dropping by campus protests over the war in Gaza, the author wonders why colleges themselves are not leading such initiatives. While the actions of student protesters have been destructive, insensitive, and inflammatory, they are less a function of cruelty than ignorance about an exceptionally complex issue. “All kids who find themselves in one way or another affected by the turmoil need an education. And what better place to get it than at school?”

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From Inside Higher Education
Rethinking Respect
By Jeff Spinner-Halev and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse

Civic respect offers a way out of the moralizing, paralyzing conflicts that are warping colleges’ academic missions and the nation’s political climate. Colleges can teach civic respect by helping students recognize that political disagreements stem from divergent, deeply held but often inconsistent world views and moral convictions. The authors also describe three ways of thinking colleges can encourage to overcome the tendency to see those with opposing views as not just wrong but fundamentally bad or immoral. Read this article

From The Atlantic
This is Helicopter Protesting
By Ian Bogost

Faculty members have been regular participants in recent student demonstrations. However, unlike their role as mediators in decades past, when they negotiated with campus leaders and students to restore order and business as usual, their goal today, the author tells us, is protection of students—their well-being and right to protest. But safeguarding student welfare is both protective and infantilizing. When faculty do so they risk failing to protect an important aspect of students’ intellectual, political, and personal development: their independence. Read this article

From The New York Times
The Nobel Winner Who Liked to Collaborate With His Adversaries
By Cass R. Sunstein

The most lasting impact of Nobelist Daniel Kahneman, the grandfather of behavioral economics, may be his advocacy for “adversarial collaboration,” where disputing parties test a hypothesis together, “not to win but to figure out what’s true”—an alternative to the “angry science” of many scholarly exchanges. In today’s era of “angry democracy,” this article argues, adversarial collaboration has never been more important as a way “to turn enemies, focused on winning and losing, into teammates, focused on truth.”

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From The Economist

Reasons to Be Cheerful About Generation Z

The narrative describing members of Gen Z as anxious and likely to be worse off than their parents ignores numerous measures that suggest they are doing rather well. The four fifths globally who live in emerging economies are richer, healthier, and better educated than their parents—a result of the spread of technology. In the U.S., demand for workers has led Gen Z’s wages to rise faster than those of older workers, and their intense concern about climate change will benefit society. We should celebrate their resourcefulness and successes. Read this article