The Increasingly High Price of Confidentiality
The Idea of the University Today
Scholars or Spies?
Anti-Semitism After Charlottesville
As white nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017, they shouted, “Blood and soil!” (a Nazi slogan) and “Jews will not replace us!” Some carried Nazi flags and wore T-shirts with Adolf Hitler quotes. Such expressions and sentiments, wrote staff writer Emma Green in The Atlantic, are physical reflections of a white supremacist ideology, one in which Jews “hover malevolently in the background, pulling strings, controlling events, acting as an all-powerful force backing and enabling the other targets of their hate.”
Although the anti-Semitism in Charlottesville was shocking to many Americans, it was anything but for American Jews. A 2013 Pew Research study found that 43 percent of Jewish Americans agreed that Jews face a lot of discrimination, while 15 percent reported being called offensive names and facing social rejection for being Jewish in the year prior. The Anti-Defamation League reported that, in 2017, 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents took place across the United States -- a 57 percent increase from 2016. More...
How to Avoid a Federal Investigation
Kate Kennedy highlights five assumptions that universities should question themselves about in the wake of sexual abuse charges at the University of Southern California. More...
A Mind at the End of Its Tether
Whether or not madness seems like the right word for such a state of mind, Barbara K. Lipska's The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery is likely to make a certain impression on the reader approaching middle age or well into it, writes Scott McLemee. More...
The Hunger Project
You do not expect to find much good news in a book with the words “mass starvation” in the title. Dread feels appropriate, maybe obligatory. But Alex de Waal’s Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine (Polity) makes some encouraging points, and it seems appropriate to start with them, just to deprive pessimism of its home-court advantage. More...
Race and Foreign Language
Deborah Parker describes how it feels to be an Asian faculty member in Italian, a field in which there are very few minorities, and how greater diversification offers a way forward. More...
The Costly Downside to Ditching AP
While the program has its downsides, schools looking to give their students a more equal footing as college candidates shouldn’t overlook the benefits, argues Ali Lincoln. More...