With June marking LGBT Pride Month, one university is paying particular attention to the T in LGBT. The University of Arizona is planning to host an international transgender studies conference this fall and launch a transgender studies master’s program as early as fall 2017.
The university’s efforts — many of which fall under its Transgender Studies Initiative — come as transgender people have become more visible in society and transgender issues have attracted more national attention.
Monmouth University has decided to keep Woodrow Wilson’s name on a campus building that honors him, following discussions on the New Jersey campus of his segregationist views, the Asbury Park Press reported.
The university said in a written statement that its board had required that “significant steps” be taken to foster a “comprehensive and balanced understanding” of the former president’s legacy.
The alarming rate of bullying, homelessness, HIV and suicide among LGBT youth should be an outrage: Nearly a fifth of students are physically assaulted because they are LGBT; among homeless children, 25 to 50 percent are LGBT; the CDC reports among youth aged 13 to 24 diagnosed with HIV in 2014, 80 percent were gay and bisexual males; and gay teens are also eight times more likely to report having attempted suicide.
Instead, the outrage swirls around who gets to use whose bathroom. Sparked by North Carolina’s “bathroom bill”, the legal battle over transgender rights recently escalated to include over a dozen states suing the federal government in response to the Obama administration’s transgender bathroom policy. What if all the time, energy and taxpayer money spent on litigation were invested toward providing comprehensive LGBT inclusive health education for all children?
The Obama administration has chosen 67 colleges and universities for a pilot program that will offer Pell Grants to incarcerated students.
The program, called Second Chance Pell, will enroll 12,000 prisoners at more than 100 correctional institutions across the country. It’s geared toward prisoners likely to be released within the next five years.
“This belief in second chances is fundamental to who we are as Americans,” John King Jr., the education secretary, said in a call with reporters Thursday.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the University of Texas at Austin’s consideration of race and ethnicity in college admissions. Some parts of the decision in the case, Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, related to features unique to that university.
But other parts of the case will likely apply to admissions and financial aid policies in most of American higher education.
The court ruled that the primary reason that the plaintiff in the case was denied admission to the university was not its consideration of race in admissions, but its “10 percent plan,” in which the top 10 percent of high school graduates are admitted to the public college or university of their choice.
It was right before Thanksgiving in 2014 that the St. Louis County grand jury declined to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the death of Michael Brown. Students at universities across the country were either at home with their families or preparing to leave for the Thanksgiving break.
At Dartmouth, the winter break starts with Thanksgiving. By the time students returned to campus in January 2015 from their winter break, the controversy would have blown over, Dartmouth professor Aimee S. Bahng realized.
The tragic events of Ferguson, Missouri, were already far removed from life at Dartmouth College, situated as it is in the quiet reaches of Upper Valley on the border between New Hampshire and Vermont. Given the physical distance, and the timing, the conversation on campus about the justice of the grand jury’s decision would never have the chance to begin.
“My singular goal was to keep the conversation going,” Bahng tells Diverse.
Spoiler alert: Traditional students are no longer the majority in higher education. Today’s student body is older and busier. Meeting their needs will require increased collaboration between often disparate departments.
According to recent figures, only one-quarter of college attendees are what we would call “traditional students.” Most students in higher education today have full-time jobs, families or other characteristics that make them part of the new “post-traditional” majority who attend school online or part time. While overall postsecondary enrollment drops, online enrollments continue to grow, as do enrollments by students over age 25 and those working full time.
Along with the shifting demographics come shifting student support needs. In order to ensure the success of modern college students, three administrative groups in particular must join forces.
No great universities exist in the world without a deep institutional commitment to academic freedom, free inquiry, and free expression. For the past 60 years, American research universities have been vigilant against external and internal attempts to limit or destroy these values. The First Amendment scholar Geoffrey Stone has noted that free expression, in one form or another, has been continually under attack on campuses for the past 100 years. Today, these core university values are being questioned again, but from a new source: the students who are being educated at them.
What explains this recent outcry against free expression on campus? Multiple possible explanations exist, of course, including the hypothesis that parents have coddled a generation of youngsters to the point where students feel that they should not be exposed to anything harmful to their psyches or beliefs. Whether or not these psychological narratives are valid, there are, I believe, additional cultural, institutional, and societal explanations for what is going on. And the overarching theme is that today’s youngsters, beginning in preschool, are responding to living in a contrived culture of fear and distrust.
Black lives in the United States are surrounded by memorials to people who did not think that black lives mattered. That is a fact of black life in America. That is a fact of black life in American academe.
I have walked past these statues, breathed inside these buildings. Growing up in New York, I would, from time to time, pass the stately statue in Central Park of Dr. J. Marion Sims, who pioneered American gynecology through experimenting — save the anesthesia — on the genitalia of enslaved women writhing in pain. After moving to Manassas, Va., I attended Stonewall Jackson High School and recoiled at being indelibly connected to the famous Confederate general who warred for the slavery he thought God had ordained. While attending graduate school in Philadelphia, I paced by Thomas Jefferson University several times, remembering his other declaration: of “never” finding “that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.”
Although society is becoming more tolerant of members of sexual-minority groups, many of those who are academics continue to feel pressure to remain closeted to safeguard their careers. They fear being open at all types of colleges, and not just at institutions affiliated with religions that frown on homosexuality.
That’s one of the chief conclusions reached by C. Sean Robinson, an associate professor of higher education and student affairs at Morgan State University, based on a study involving more than 60 faculty members around the nation who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer. He spent an average of about 90 minutes interviewing each subject, who represented 33 disciplines at nearly 50 colleges and universities.