By Jeffrey J. Kripal. It was an odd but invigorating media cycle for me last week. The week began with The Chronicle’s publication of my essay on why the “impossible” experiences of precognition, clairvoyance, and mystical experience may well be keys to unlocking the nature of consciousness and the mind-brain relationship and why the sciences and the humanities need one another to address those questions. The piece quickly became the object of a materialist screed in The New Republic by Jerry A. Coyne entitled “Science Is Being Bashed by Academics Who Should Know Better.” More...

By Richard D. Kahlenberg. Opponents of affirmative action have leveled a new three-pronged attack on affirmative action in higher education that could significantly change admissions at selective universities and colleges for the better. The Project on Fair Representation, which was behind the recent Supreme Court litigation in Fisher v. University of Texas, has launched websites soliciting white and Asian plaintiffs who believe they were discriminated against by racial-preference policies at three institutions: Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. More...

By Noliwe M. Rooks. Recently two black male high-school students made news when they each earned impressive numbers of acceptances to Ivy League Universities. Kwasi Enin is a first-generation American from Long Island, whose parents, who are nurses, emigrated from Ghana. He was accepted into all eight Ivy League colleges: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Penn. More...

By William G. Bowen. As most of us are well aware, important challenges to today’s existing order in athletics are under way, from the court system and through the widely discussed National Labor Relations Board ruling that Northwestern football players are employees of the university and have the right to unionize. Regardless of their final outcomes, these challenges are long overdue. I believe they represent an inevitable recognition that the oft-acclaimed “amateur” status of big-time college sports is a sham. More...