Spotlights

Leadership and Academic Freedom

Roger Berkowitz writes about the Wall Street Journal's coverage of strong leadership and engaged debate at Bard College.

Friends of Academia

By Roger Berkowitz
Randall Kennedy writes that all “friends of academia” must sound the alarm in response to Harvard University’s decision to remove Ronald Sullivan and his wife Stephanie Robinson as Faculty Dean’s of the undergraduate college’s Winthrop House.

What Illiberal Democracy Means

By Roger Berkowitz
In the United States, terms like “academic freedom” and “free speech” have come to be scoffed at by many students and faculty. They have somehow been turned into conservative talking points.

When YouTube Overtakes Life

By Roger Berkowitz
Jesse Singal tells the story of Desh Amila, a Sri Lankan immigrant and Australian citizen who “has built a career out of facilitating intellectually oriented public events, often between people with serious disagreements.” Desh, as he is called, has specialized in organizing difficult conversations on topics like Islamic extremism.

The New Loyalty Oaths

By Roger Berkowitz
When I was a graduate student teaching at UC Berkeley I was asked to sign a statement that I would report people with suspicious immigration backgrounds. When I applied for professorships at certain traditionally religious schools, I was asked to swear that I would not promote abortion in my classes.

Hate

By Roger Berkowitz
I am a few years older than Matt Taibbi, but it turns out we both share an encounter with Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent as a formative experience in our encounter with worlds of politics and journalism.

The Microbiome

By Roger Berkowitz
Matt Richtel and Andrew Jacobs report on one of the greatest threats to our way of life, the rise of bacteria and fungi that are impervious to medications. The culprit, as with so much in our modern health and environmental crises, is the overuse of antibiotics and antifungal medications  in farming.

No Crisis, But a Danger

By Roger Berkowitz
The folks at PEN ask, is there a crisis of free speech on college campuses. And once again, they answer “no.”

Cruel Optimism

By Samantha Hill