Students

Eight Actions to Reduce Racism in College Classrooms

Last year, at dozens of colleges and universities across the United States, students protested institutional unresponsiveness to pervasive issues of racial inequity. Most media attention disproportionately focused on the popularity of the protests as opposed to the actual issues underlying campus unrest.

Why Standardized Tests Have Standardized Postracial Ideology

Barack Obama’s presidency will forever be connected to postracial ideology. The postracial idea that racism has been marginalized or eradicated came of age during the early years of his tenure in office. It was mortally wounded during the final years of his presidency by a rash of police shootings and Black Lives Matter protests.

Repeating the Past

Diploma Mill$: How For-Profit Colleges Stiffed Students, Taxpayers, and the American Dream by A. J. Angulo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.

Student Journalism Under Fire

It has become routine for student journalists and their advisers to experience hostility that threatens their ability to practice journalism and sometimes threatens their careers or the survival of their publications, says a report issued in December by the AAUP, the College Media Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the Student Press Law Center. The report, titled Threats to the Independence of Student Media, examines current threats and expands upon the basic principles of a free student press previously endorsed by these and other organizations.

Legal Watch: Rethinking the Standard for Discharging Student Debt

Student-loan debt—now totaling more than $1.3 trillion—has garnered increased public attention, including in the recent presidential campaign. An important aspect of policy debates over that debt is what happens to borrowers unable to repay. With most forms of consumer debt, discharge in bankruptcy provides one option for struggling borrowers. But this alternative is often unavailable in the case of student loans, as borrowers must satisfy a stringent legal test known as the undue hardship standard to qualify for discharge.

Parents and College Women's Success

Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College Women’s Success by Laura T. Hamilton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Trouble with Title IX

I used to dread grading student work in my online classes in the week we studied sexual assault. Every time, at least one student confided in her written assignment that she had been raped. Typically, students would write something like this: “Until reading this chapter, I didn’t realize that what happened to me last semester was rape.” Face-to-face classes were even worse. I used to show the 2012 film Rape Myths on Trial: Naming the Unnamed Conspirator, which features veteran sex-crime prosecutor Anne Munch exposing the fallacies of various rape myths.

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