ReportWire

Tag: Diversity Equity & Inclusion

  • Professors Are Sharply Divided on DEI Statements in Hiring, Survey Finds

    Professors Are Sharply Divided on DEI Statements in Hiring, Survey Finds

    [ad_1]

    As diversity statements in faculty hiring are increasingly scrutinized by Republican-controlled state legislatures, a new survey suggests that faculty members themselves are sharply divided on the issue.

    The survey, the results of which were released Tuesday by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, asked about 1,500 faculty members which description of diversity statements more closely aligned with their view: “a justifiable requirement for a job at a university” or “an ideological litmus test that violates academic freedom.” Half of respondents endorsed the first option, and half identified with the second.

    Colleges often require or request diversity statements as part of applications for faculty jobs; candidates typically must explain how they have contributed to supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion in their academic careers. Supporters say the statements can help increase faculty diversity, ensure that the extra service work done by scholars of color — often called “invisible labor” — is recognized, and assist institutions in hiring professors who are ready to work with a diverse student population. Critics say the statements force academics to agree with progressive beliefs.

    Political ideology influences faculty members’ views on mandatory DEI statements, according to the FIRE survey results. Three-fourths of liberal faculty said they were a justifiable requirement, while 56 percent of moderate faculty and 90 percent of conservative faculty considered them an ideological litmus test.

    While politics is a factor, it’s not the only driver, said Nathan Honeycutt, a research fellow at FIRE who helped author a report on the survey results. While there’s a narrative that most professors support diversity statements, Honeycutt said, some faculty might be afraid to share their real opinions on the statements publicly.

    “Given the context and the conversations we hear surrounding DEI, it seems like many faculty are on board,” he said. “That’s why so many universities are instituting these things, but as the numbers from our study suggest, it’s even hotly contested among faculty.”

    As the use of DEI statements has become increasingly common among colleges over the past five years, the debate about them has become more heated. Some states, including Utah, West Virginia, Florida, and Texas have introduced legislation in the last two months that would ban mandatory DEI statements.

    FIRE has publicly opposed DEI statements. The organization released model legislation aimed at banning such requirements on February 16.

    The report noted that FIRE’s involvement with the faculty survey could have affected the results. Faculty members who identified as conservative made up 26 percent of respondents and thus were slightly overrepresented in the sample compared to other recent faculty surveys, according to the report. The survey was designed by FIRE and conducted by a market-research firm; faculty respondents came equally from a FIRE database and an education consulting firm’s database. The 1,500 professors all worked at four-year public and private colleges. The survey was conducted from July to August 2022.

    The survey also found that 52 percent of faculty are afraid of losing their jobs or reputation due to a misunderstanding of their words or actions, their words or actions being taken out of context, or something from their past being posted online.

    Honeycutt said it’s disheartening that faculty are so scared of losing their jobs, since academics should be able to study and discuss any topic. He worried that faculty members’ job-security fears could chill the advancement of research, with scholars afraid to challenge the established canon.

    “We seem to have a climate today which is also reflected in the data, where a lot of faculty don’t feel comfortable speaking up about things,” he said.

    The survey also asked faculty members whether they would support a college conducting a formal investigation into a professor, based on several hypothetical scenarios. Thirty-six percent of respondents said they’d support an investigation if a professor told a class that “all white people are racist.” Twenty percent said they’d support an investigation if a professor told a class that “it’s racist to say that all white people are racist.”

    Honeycutt said he hopes faculty who feel they have to self-censor their work realize they aren’t alone after reading the report.

    “We really need courageous faculty, faculty who can dissent even when it might be uncomfortable, who can ask difficult questions, who can confront those who are censoring others, or who have the courage to publicly support colleagues who are speaking up,” he said.

    [ad_2]

    Kate Marijolovic

    Source link

  • A College’s Controversial Fundraiser Led a Dean to Quit. Now the President Faces Calls to Resign.

    A College’s Controversial Fundraiser Led a Dean to Quit. Now the President Faces Calls to Resign.

    [ad_1]

    Students are calling for the president of Connecticut College to resign over her handling of a fundraising event that had been scheduled for last week at a Florida social club with a history of racism and antisemitism.

    Katherine Bergeron, who has been president since 2014, canceled the event after facing criticism, but that wasn’t the end of the story. The college’s dean of institutional equity and inclusion resigned a day later. Over the past week, broader concerns have emerged about diversity, equity, and inclusion at the small liberal-arts institution, as well as about Bergeron’s leadership.

    A fiery letter from the now-former dean, Rodmon Cedric King, described a “toxic administrative culture of fear and intimidation” at the college. Students and alumni have started organizing on social media. Meanwhile, the Board of Trustees affirmed its support for Bergeron over the weekend and promised to commission an outside review of the college’s DEI efforts.

    Leo Saperstein, a sophomore at Connecticut College, said that many students want Bergeron to resign. He said they are concerned that DEI staff aren’t being supported by college leaders.

    “The staffers are not being paid enough, they’re not given the respect they deserve, and they are completely and almost always overlooked,” he said.

    A student group called Black Voices Conn Coll is planning a lock-in protest, writing in an Instagram post that Bergeron’s commitment to DEI “is nothing but performative.” An alumni group, CC Alums Against Hate, created an online petition, which as of Wednesday had collected over 90 signatures demanding Bergeron’s resignation.

    Connecticut College’s choice of location for the fundraiser — the Everglades Club in Palm Beach, Fla. — and the criticism that followed from students was first reported by The College Voice, the campus newspaper. The club has a history of excluding Black and Jewish individuals from its membership. Singer Sammy Davis Jr. was denied entry to the building.

    Bergeron canceled the event on February 6 when she was already in Florida preparing for it, according to the newspaper. King resigned from his position as dean on February 7, having held the position for just over a year.

    Bergeron issued an apology to the campus community on February 8, and described King’s resignation as a loss to the college. She also said that diversity, equity, and inclusion work is “fundamental” to the institution.

    “Full participation is a core value at Conn, which is why I regret our decision to schedule an event at a location whose history and reputation suggest otherwise,” she wrote. “We made that decision believing that our values were clear.”

    Before her role as president, Bergeron was dean of the College at Brown University for seven years. A spokesperson for Connecticut College declined to make Bergeron available for an interview.

    In his letter to the chair and vice chair of the college’s Board of Trustees, King wrote that Bergeron had bullied senior administrators, behavior that he concluded had been a fixture of her time as president. He also wrote that employees’ fear of angering Bergeron had created a “toxic administrative culture of fear and intimidation.”

    Administrators are in the midst of creating a five-year financial plan for the college, one that King described as “compromised” by that very culture, keeping campus officials from being honest about financial projections.

    “I am taking on significant personal and professional risk in writing to you. I fully expect some form of retaliation against me for sharing the information in this letter and in my letter of resignation,” King wrote.

    Since 2021, at least six other DEI staff members have left the college, including four program directors, a Title IX coordinator, and King’s predecessor, John F. McKnight Jr., who was dean of institutional equity and inclusion from 2016 until 2021.

    Debo P. Adegbile, chair of the college’s board, sent a letter to the campus community on Sunday, reaffirming the college’s commitment to DEI initiatives and expressing support for Bergeron’s leadership.

    Adegbile also said that the board would be making further investments in the college’s Equity and Inclusion Action Plan based on feedback from the community and an outside review’s findings. Trustees are also planning to meet with faculty, staff, students, and alumni this week to begin conversations about DEI at the college.

    Saperstein said he has noticed one positive development over the past few days: Students from all backgrounds have rallied together, which has had a positive impact on the campus.

    “I’m really happy about the fact that people are coming together,” he said. “That this issue is bringing people together and not pitting us apart is something really beautiful.”

    [ad_2]

    Kate Marijolovic

    Source link

  • 5 Qualities of Black Excellence Overlooked in the Workplace

    5 Qualities of Black Excellence Overlooked in the Workplace

    [ad_1]

    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    We live in a world where Black excellence is everywhere. Entrepreneurs like Oprah, Rihanna, Michael Jordan, Jay-Z and Beyonce dominate the airways, TV stations and retail outlets. Each of these stars entered the arena in different ways and all managed to embody Black excellence to grow their businesses to unimaginable heights.

    But why is it that excellent qualities revered in celebrities are so often overlooked — and sometimes even stifled — within everyday white and eurocentric workspaces? It doesn’t take a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) expert like myself to tell you that Black employees get a bad rap at work. Racism, stereotypes, inequity and cultural clashes make it so that employers and coworkers alike may exclude, diminish and at times target Black workers while downplaying their excellent qualities.

    Despite the systemic reasons why some Black workers may retreat and lose their shine in the workplace, there are others who hone in on their excellent qualities, break through barriers and shoot for the moon. Today, we’ll discuss five qualities of Black excellence, how they are cultivated in Black communities and the myriad of ways they manifest in the workplace.

    Related: It’s Black History Month. Here’s How to Show Black Employees You Care.

    1. Black culture encourages building meaningful connections

    In many Black households, family and community are one and the same. One person’s grandmother is everyone’s grandmother and often holds the role of making sure no one is left behind, alone or without guidance. Black entrepreneurs coming from traditional Black households understand that building meaningful connections and looking out for one another is essential to survival.

    This shows up in the workplace as Black employees seeking to connect with individuals at varying levels of the organization, networking across departments, social statuses, races, genders and nationalities to build connections that feel reciprocal, meaningful and welcoming. Lifting others up, checking on them and making sure they’re included is a quality of Black excellence that eurocentric workplaces would be wise to recognize and value in their Black employees.

    2. Black culture cultivates creativity

    When all Black folks had was each other and the hope they would surpass the confines of slavery, Jim Crow and now the prison industrial complex, many folks cultivated a sense of creativity. Whether inventively using food scraps left by white plantation owners during the slavery era or making music and art during segregation, Black folks had to be creative to find upward mobility, bypass restrictions from the wider society and most importantly, survive.

    Black culture encourages us to see obstacles and find ways around them. We’re encouraged to find new opportunities, think outside of the box, and innovate on new solutions–even if the existing culture tries to stop us. Creativity could be the secret sauce to why so many Black entrepreneurs experience success.

    Related: Managing a Black Woman? Here’s How to Become Her Success Partner and Ally.

    3. Black culture invites joy and humor as resistance

    Despite all that’s happened to the Black diaspora, many people still find a reason to smile and find joy. Instead of weeping and retreating into sadness, many of us had to find a way through the most difficult parts of our lives and cultivate an inner strength that showed up as joy, humor, and wit.

    This isn’t simply a sign of someone who enjoys humor, but someone who is resilient in the face of difficulty and who can turn a hard situation into something joyful. Some who experience trauma in the workplace may exemplify anger, hatred or sadness. But facing triggers and difficulties with satire, improvisation or wordplay to create a humor-filled moment and create something positive is a soft skill that should be recognized in more Black employees.

    4. Black culture calls for fairness

    The vast majority of folks calling out workplace racism or inequality are people of color, in particular Black folks. Many Black individuals have had to collectively fight for their rights which produced a sense of righteousness and justice-mindedness that’s pervasive throughout the Black culture.

    In the workplace, a passion for fairness can look like speaking up when a biased comment is spoken. It can also look like holding leadership accountable for implementing programming and initiatives equally amongst all employees.

    Black workers are often passionate and vocal about fairness because it was a necessity in our families and communities. This quality helps us advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) across communities, companies and workplaces.

    5. Black culture encourages people to project confidence

    “Keep your chin up” is a common phrase heard in Black households. The idea is to never let the dominant culture see you sweat. The goal was to work hard and project confidence even if you were feeling low. Freedom, safety, jobs and other opportunities may not always be available, but Black culture tells us to project confidence, stand tall and keep moving forward.

    At all levels of the organization, Black folks attempt to show pride in their work. They can strive for excellence in their corner of influence even if it’s not the most powerful position in the company. It can show up as being strong at work even if things in one’s personal life are not in great shape. Demonstrating resiliency and projecting confidence are qualities of Black excellence passed down through the generations and are deserving of recognition.

    Final thoughts

    Whether it’s Beyonce, Jay-Z, Michael Jordan or Oprah, all of the Black entrepreneurs we know and love have qualities rooted in Black culture. While all Black entrepreneurs are inherently gifted with qualities of Black excellence to one degree or another, some have yet to reach their full potential, while others have truly embraced and embodied them to break through barriers and skyrocket to success. Now is the time for conventional, white, and eurocentric workplaces to finally recognize the unique qualities that come from Black culture and lift up employees who exemplify these qualities.

    [ad_2]

    Nika White

    Source link

  • DeSantis’s Higher-Ed Push Just Got Bigger. Fresh Resistance Is Starting to Bubble Up.

    DeSantis’s Higher-Ed Push Just Got Bigger. Fresh Resistance Is Starting to Bubble Up.

    [ad_1]

    Standing at a podium labeled “Higher Education Reform,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Tuesday announced a wide-ranging plan to shake up the state’s colleges. The plan includes a Western-civilizations-based core curriculum; greater authority for boards and college presidents to hire and fire even tenured faculty members; and other proposals that would, if enacted, encroach on the autonomy of the state’s public colleges.

    We are going to “eliminate all DEI and CRT bureaucracies in the state of Florida.”

    “We’re centering higher education on integrity of the academics, excellence, pursuit of truth, teaching kids to think for themselves, not trying to impose an orthodoxy,” DeSantis said during a news conference to announce the plan.

    “It’s re-establishing public control and public authority over the public universities,” Christopher F. Rufo, a conservative activist whom DeSantis recently appointed to one Florida college’s board, said during the same conference.

    DeSantis’s proposed higher-ed legislative package adds to his already aggressive posture toward higher education, which he has escalated in the new year. His actions in recent weeks, coupled with Tuesday’s announcement, stake out an expansive vision for state intervention at public colleges. If realized, it would leave few areas of the enterprise untouched by government regulation or scrutiny.

    Meanwhile, evidence of resistance is arising at at least one university after a month during which Florida’s Republican leaders suggested they might strip public campuses of their diversity efforts, curriculum on certain topics such as critical race theory, and health care for transgender students.

    DeSantis’s proposals include requiring that students at the colleges take certain core courses “grounded in actual history, the actual philosophy that has shaped Western civilization.” He also wants to allow certain recently established research centers at Florida International University, Florida State University, and the University of Florida to operate more independently. The centers were modeled after Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, DeSantis said, and he wants at least two of them to create K-12 curricula.

    Last year, the state passed a bill that allowed Florida’s Board of Governors to require professors to go through post-tenure review every five years. On Tuesday, DeSantis proposed giving college presidents more power over faculty hiring and allowing presidents and boards of trustees to call for a post-tenure review of a faculty member “at any time with cause.”

    The governor said he would recommend the legislature set aside $100 million for the state universities to hire and retain faculty members. He recommended $15 million for recruiting students and faculty members to the New College of Florida, a small, public liberal-arts college whose governing board DeSantis recently overhauled with the appointment of six new members. One of the new trustees then wrote that he intended to see if it would be legally possible to fire everyone at the college and rehire only “those faculty, staff, and administration who fit in the new financial and business model.”

    “We are also going to eliminate all DEI and CRT bureaucracies in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said without specifying what “DEI and CRT bureaucracies” were. “No funding, and that will wither on the vine.”

    DeSantis presented eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion projects as a way of saving wasted money, although a previous Chronicle analysis found that such projects make up 1 percent or less of the state universities’ budgets.

    Some evidence of fresh opposition to DeSantis’s broader agenda is emerging on Florida campuses.

    Last week, faculty-union leaders at four Florida universities criticized the governor’s recent maneuvers in a press release put out by the United Faculty of Florida, the umbrella union organization. DEI policies, programs, and courses help make campuses a place where everyone belongs, Liz Brown, president of the University of North Florida chapter, said in the release. “Because of the escalating attacks on these programs,” she said, “our best and brightest students are approaching faculty and asking if the classes they have elected to take will be canceled.”

    In January, Paul Renner, Florida’s Republican House Speaker, asked Florida colleges for a laundry list of DEI-related documents, including communications to or from DEI faculty committees regarding various topics. Renner defined communications expansively as “all written or electronic communications, including but not limited to emails, text messages, and social-media messages.”

    On Monday, the United Faculty of Florida told Florida Atlantic University’s interim provost that, in an attempt to comply with Renner’s directive, the university has asked some faculty members to turn over materials that go beyond the House speaker’s scope. FAU has also caused “confusion and panic” by telling professors that, “All records related to university business are public records, even if they are transmitted through personal devices, personal emails, or personal social-media accounts,” Cami Acceus, a UFF staff member, wrote to Michele Hawkins, the interim provost, in a letter obtained by The Chronicle.

    The applicable standard is not whether communications are “loosely, tangentially, or even closely related to university business,” Acceus wrote. It’s if those communications actually “transact” FAU business. She cited Florida statute and the state attorney general’s “Government-in-the-Sunshine” manual.

    Education is too important to our students, to the people of Florida, and to the future of our nation to be put at risk by political whim.

    “Understandably, FAU has an interest in protecting itself from legislative attacks and may even fear retribution if it does not respond zealously to the House,” Acceus said. “For these reasons, the university has cast its net wide to err on the side of overproducing records to the House of Representatives. Yet, it is not fair or just to faculty when FAU intrudes into their private lives, going beyond the scope of the record request at issue.”

    FAU must do a number of things to dispel the “hysteria” it has caused, Acceus wrote, including telling professors that the university is not seeking their personal communications “beyond the parameters articulated above.”

    The union is prepared to take legal action to prevent FAU from accessing faculty members’ personal information and documents in a way that’s prohibited by the Fourth Amendment, Acceus wrote.

    Hawkins did not reply to a request for comment from The Chronicle.

    Florida Atlantic’s faculty senate also adopted a full-throated defense of DEI efforts. These programs “are not the product of a ‘woke’ ideology,” reads the statement. Rather, “DEI is a student-success strategy. Moreover, it is a strategy that responds to student demand and expectation.” The document urges Florida’s elected leaders to “realize the damage these mischaracterizations and scare tactics” have wrought, both to the reputation of state institutions and to the morale of its educators. It calls on donors, business leaders, alumni, and citizens for their support.

    “Our message is clear: Education is too important to our students, to the people of Florida, and to the future of our nation to be put at risk by political whim.”

    The broad effort to expose diversity spending at the state’s universities is a marked shift. In October 2020, the state university system’s chancellor at the time co-authored a memo laying out the governing board’s commitments to DEI and its expectations that its universities would support that work. For one thing, the importance of having a senior-level university administrator who leads DEI-efforts “cannot be overstated,” says the memo. For another, universities should consider integrating DEI best practices into their curriculum, when appropriate.

    “Work on diversity, equity, and inclusion as strategic priorities must not be a ‘check the box and move on’ activity,” reads the memo. “To produce meaningful and sustainable outcomes, this challenging work will need to continue long after our urgent responses to the crises of 2020 are completed.”

    In an email on Tuesday, Michael V. Martin, president of Florida Gulf Coast University, told The Chronicle, “We intend to continue to follow that directive.”

    [ad_2]

    Francie Diep and Emma Pettit

    Source link

  • Want to Close Gaps in College Enrollment? Improve Academic Preparation, a New Study Says.

    Want to Close Gaps in College Enrollment? Improve Academic Preparation, a New Study Says.

    [ad_1]

    Racial and gender-based disparities in college-going rates disappear when students receive similar levels of academic preparation in high school, according to a new study by the Brookings Institution. The findings highlight a potential path forward for college leaders who are eager for solutions to their enrollment problems.

    Over all, Black students typically enroll in college at lower rates than Asian, white, and Hispanic students. But Black students enroll at higher rates than all of those groups when they receive the same level of academic preparation, with Hispanic students second highest.

    Socioeconomic status is also a major factor influencing the likelihood that students will go to college. According to the analysis, though, socioeconomic status isn’t the primary driver; academic preparation is.

    Although college-enrollment gaps for students in different socioeconomic brackets are alleviated when they receive the same level of academic preparation, wide disparities still exist.

    The analysis also looked at gender disparities; it’s been well documented that women are more likely than men to go to college. Among students with similar levels of academic preparation, men and women enrolled in college at similar rates.

    The study comes from Brookings’s Center on Children and Families , which analyzed data from the High School Longitudinal Survey of 2009 , a survey of over 23,000 students who were in ninth grade that year. Students were surveyed several times during high school and early adulthood, and took a standardized math exam in their expected ninth- and 11th-grade years.

    The survey records were linked to data from high-school transcripts and college enrollment records, as well as surveys completed by the students’ parents or guardians, school administrators, counselors, and teachers, according to the report.

    Sarah Reber , a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and one of the authors of the report, said that the report’s findings show that closing gaps in academic preparation during high school is key to making progress on college-enrollment disparities.

    “Public discussions about inequality in access to college often center around admissions and cost,” Reber wrote in the report. “While these issues are important, our findings suggest that policy makers should also pay careful attention to disparities in academic preparation earlier in students’ educational careers, which are important determinants of college enrollment.”

    For students from different economic backgrounds, improving academic preparation is a key way to tackle college-enrollment gaps, Reber said, as is reducing the cost of attendance and making the admissions process less confusing.

    Reber said in an interview that Brookings determined “academic preparation” using factors including overall grade-point average from high school, separate grade-point averages for math and English, the number of Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses taken, the highest-level math course taken, and the math score students received on the standardized test administered as a part of the survey.

    Overall grade-point average was the most important factor in predicting college enrollment, Reber said.

    Reber emphasized that the report is silent about the source of the gaps in academic preparation. But other research has shown that students’ academic-preparation levels are determined by factors outside of school as well as within it, she said.

    “From a policy perspective, it’s not clear whether you want to be focused on in-school or out-of-school factors,” Reber said. “Things like family income, violence, racism, environmental toxins in the community — all of these things could be contributing. So it’s important to keep that in mind.”

    Nathan Grawe , a professor of economics at Carleton College who studies the connections between family background and educational outcomes, said the Brookings report is important because it reveals information about the causes of racial and gender enrollment disparities.

    “If we’re going to make progress on mitigating those gaps, we need to fully understand where they occur,” Grawe said. “This research, for instance, makes clear that it’s not that the differences emerge at the very last moment in the process, when students are age 18.”

    College leaders shouldn’t draw the conclusion that these academic gaps are K-12 problems, Grawe said. In order to reduce enrollment disparities, he said, college administrators should collaborate with primary and secondary educators to expand access to academic preparation earlier on.

    “A better conclusion would be one that underscores the importance of higher education collaborating with K-12 in all sorts of ways,” Grawe said.

    Colleges have to focus on adapting and meeting students where they are, Grawe said, “so that even if they don’t have the preparation that we might ideally hope for, they nevertheless can find a path into and through higher education.”

    [ad_2]

    Julian Roberts-Grmela

    Source link

  • How Heterodox Academy Hopes to Change the Campus Conversation

    How Heterodox Academy Hopes to Change the Campus Conversation

    [ad_1]

    Heterodox Academy is starting a new program that will provide support for a network of groups on college campuses to further the organization’s mission of promoting “open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.” The first 23 campuses in the program, called Campus Communities, will receive funding over the next three years to host events and bring in speakers with the goal of affecting “campus culture and policy.”

    What exactly that means, and what influence those groups will have, remains to be seen, but the program is an attempt by Heterodox to exert its influence at a more grass-roots level. Founded in 2015, Heterodox — which now has more than 5,000 members, including professors, educators, administrators, and students — began as a response to what its founders saw as a growing tendency on campuses to quash dissent and shy away from controversial topics. In the years since, the conversation about how to navigate potentially offensive topics — and how to balance the concerns of students with a commitment to academic freedom — has, if anything, only become more combustible.

    One of Heterodox’s co-founders, Jonathan Haidt, detailed what he believes is the sorry state of American higher education at a much-talked-about Stanford conference on academic freedom last November. Haidt told those assembled that presidents have in recent years endeavored to “convert the university over from a truth-seeking institution to a social justice institution.” He pointed to how readily some administrators have acceded to student demands to have, say, a professor fired or a course cancelled. Haidt, who is chairman of Heterodox’s board of directors, also referred to the organization’s new program: “We’ll be working a lot more on campuses and helping our members to create groups that will directly influence policy.”

    If you’re a college administrator, that might be cause for worry. Do you really want another organization complaining about your policies and actions? But John Tomasi, who became the first president of Heterodox last year after a quarter-century as a political philosopher at Brown University, sees the mission of Campus Communities as more collaborative than confrontational. “We’re not critics who are from the outside. We’re insiders who love our universities and are trying to make them better,” he told me. “Our mission is to improve the culture of teaching and research, and I think to improve that culture, you really need to be working on the campuses where that culture exists.”

    Michael Regnier, who took over as Heterodox’s executive director in August, hopes Campus Communities will provide a better model for dealing with the inevitable conflicts that arise at any college. “We can show what disagreement in constructive ways can look like, and then hopefully that can be the new normal,” Regnier says. “I think so many people in academia are tired of shout-downs and other kinds of efforts to stop expression instead of engaging with it.”

    The Johns Hopkins University is among the campuses that will host a Campus Communities group in this initial phase. One of the leaders of that group, Dylan Selterman, an associate professor of psychology, notes that Johns Hopkins did poorly on the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s free speech rating (its current rating is yellow, which means it has a policy that “too easily encourages administrative abuse.”) Selterman, who describes himself politically as “very left of center,” says he’s concerned about the anxieties some students have about expressing themselves. “The goal is diversity of thought,” he says. “I hope that it will be received as ‘Oh, this is a place that is receptive to my needs and concerns and includes me in the conversation.’” Selterman wants to hear from students and faculty members to see what their concerns are, to determine if there are common threads, and then to “translate those into things that are actionable.”

    The mission, as Regnier sees it, is to nudge higher education in a direction that’s more tolerant of opposing views, less quick to condemn others, and more willing to embrace difficult conversations: “I think it opens up an opportunity to do some course correction, because the faculty, the students, and sometimes the leadership all agree that the status quo of walking on eggshells is not really serving the university’s purpose.”

    [ad_2]

    Tom Bartlett

    Source link