This is the best explainer ever about social class in universities. Please read and share, especially with the graduate admissions committee.
Don’t teach students the hard way first.
It’s time for elite universities to lead in non-elite ways
How fake news turned a small town upside down
In PNAS, an opinion piece entitled, “Finding the plot in science storytelling in hopes of enhancing science communication”
Facing poverty, US academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
A systematic review of food insecurity in higher education
The repressive, authoritarian soul of Thomas the Tank Engine.
The polar expedition that went berserk.
The “Free Speech Year” at Berkeley, as implemented, is a gift to right nationalists.
Especially in light of the first link in this list, this article about recruitment strategies of prestigious universities makes me a little sick in my stomach. This describes how Pomona College — just down the road from me — is going to all of this trouble to recruit students from underrepresented minorities who rank as “top” — who have an academic record that can look impressive to people on admissions committees who lack a URM background. Meanwhile, there are students just nextdoor to Pomona who have the academic chops to excel there, but, well, they don’t look so good on paper so they just get wholly overlooked. This whole “quality URM students are hard to find” bullshit is so tiring.
Can prep schools fight the class war?
How to write a lot: a door that shuts
Protests about Cornell, about lack of action to address racism on campus
AGU just said that sexual harassment is a form of sexual misconduct. No duh.
The New York Times writes up a new harassment case at the University of Rochester.
Also, a professor who was convicted for soliciting sex from a minor was put on leave at RIT.
“Education, love and exemplary black people will not deliver America from racism…Racist ideas grow out of discriminatory policies…not the other way around.”
“‘Diversity'” has become a shorthand for the insertion of minority students into predominantly white academic spaces, while at the same time leaving untouched the historical enforcement of exclusion inherent from the inception of these institutions.
The text of the letter sent by a group of ecologists about their concerns about some incidents at this year’s ESA meeting is back online, along with the text of the responses from ESA.
A Texas showdown about Sharia law.
Who Goes Nazi? (this was written in 1941)
An obituary for The Man Who Saved The World.
I hope you have a nice weekend!
Thank you for sharing the article about class expectations in Academia. I went from Colton High School, a large public school with a couple thousand URM students—where 50% of the students dropped out before graduating—to Stanford University. Although both of my parents were college educated (first at community college then UCR), and I was by no means underprivileged, it was a class shock to arrive on campus and not have known how to ski, or to play piano or violin or to have a car or my own personal computer and to have no plans to go on vacation anywhere for Spring Break. My parents did not spend any money on these extras because they had grown up poor. I was often confused by the care-free, partying culture of my classmates, when I felt that I always needed to stay in my room and study. This self-isolation, and the fact that I had never received extras in high school, like after school tutoring, also meant that I didn’t know how to ask for help in classes where I was struggling, such as Calculus.