In 2013, he withdrew from a planned speech at the convocation for the Hopkins medical school amid comments he had made about gay marriage. In an appearance on Fox News, he said at the time, "Marriage is between a man and a woman. No group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA, be they people who believe in bestiality, it doesn't matter what they are. Read more...

Rudolph Giuliani remains the planned graduation speaker at St. John Fisher College, despite faculty opposition to the invitation, The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle reported. Dozens of faculty members signed a letter saying that the invitation was inappropriate. Read more...

By Gleb Tsipursky. These are the kinds of anxious thoughts racing through my mind whenever a student walks up to me after the end of a class session. Such thoughts are not pleasant, functional or rational. They result from my mood disorder, characterized by high anxiety. Read more...

By Kerry Ann Rockquemore. I’ve heard from lots of faculty members expressing this exact sentiment (so much so, this is a composite letter so as to not identify any individual). While I wrote last year after the Ferguson protests about how and why it’s important to stay productive (No Justice, No Peace, No Writing?), I feel like there’s a deeper concern I hear in your letter. Read more...

By Thomas Magaldi. What do my living room, the Ronald McDonald House in New Haven and the New York City subway have in common? They are all places where I have conducted professional development on a tight schedule. Professional development is the process of developing skills and gaining experience that will help advance your career. Read more...

By Rob Zaretsky. My employer, the University of Houston, has been in the news: after much hemming and hawing, UH confessed it has forked over $135,000 (as well as $20,000 to the agency representing him) to the actor Matthew McConaughey to speak at next week’s graduation. Read more...

By Five Superintendents of Federal Service Academies. Sexual assault on college campuses is a national problem. No campus is immune. It is a challenge at public and private institutions, it plagues small colleges as well as universities with tens of thousands of students, it happens at highly selective colleges and institutions that cater to a local demographic. It also happens at our federal service academies (FSAs). Read more...

By Scott McLemee. You can’t judge a book by its neologisms, but the coinages appearing in the first chapter or two of Carl Cederström and André Spicer’s The Wellness Syndrome (Polity) serve as pretty reliable landmarks for the ground its argument covers. We might start with “orthorexia,” which spell-check regards with suspicion, unlike “anorexia,” its older and better-established cousin. Read more...

By Jeff Rice. A colleague from another department passed me on campus the other day, a week before the end of classes. “Hi,” I said as we approached one another. Read more...

By Robert Matz. On William Shakespeare’s birthday this year, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) issued a report, “The Unkindest Cut: Shakespeare in Exile in 2015,” which warned that “less than 8 percent of the nation’s top universities require English majors to take even a single course that focuses on Shakespeare.” Warnings about the decline of a traditional literary canon are familiar from conservative academic organizations such as ACTA and the National Association of Scholars. What increasingly strikes me, however, is how frozen in amber these warning are. Read more...