By Steven S. Volk. The last weeks of the fall semester were uneasy ones on many campuses as students angrily protested the police killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice. We can pretend that we didn’t really know what happened in these cases: parse the Ferguson, Mo., grand-jury testimony, ignore the video of Staten Island police taking Garner down in a choke hold, or speculate on what happened in the two seconds that elapsed between the arrival of police at a Cleveland playground and the shooting of 12-year-old Rice. More...

By Patricia McGuire. The battle over who should lead colleges and universities has been raging since the inception of higher education. It is most often, and stereotypically, cast as a fight between administrators and faculty members. Supposedly both interested in what students need, those parties are alternately said to be effective governors of higher education and major impediments to effective leadership. More...

By Sean Wilentz. In the very first paragraph of The New Republic’s very first issue, the founding editors proclaimed their belief that there was a place in America for what they called "a journal of interpretation and opinion." These men—Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, and Walter Lippmann—were eminences of the Progressive Era, who were repulsed by what had become of the nation’s business civilization. They aimed, as Croly later put it, a bit grandly, to help "mould social life in the light of the best available knowledge and in the interest of a humane ideal." More...