A pre-med student is suing the University of Cincinnati over a practice of prohibiting male and female students from working in the same group in a physics lab. The lawsuit alleges that the university is violating Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment by engaging in gender-based discrimination.

Casey Helmicki, a rising junior, says a teaching assistant instructed her to work in groups with solely female students on the first day of a physics lab. The teaching assistant told her, “Women shouldn’t be working with men in science,” according to the lawsuit.

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In a year when presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has spouted anti-immigrant rhetoric and black men have died at the hands of the police, college freshmen are reading works that reflect the current turmoil. Many colleges and universities are asking incoming students to read books that treat themes of immigration and racial injustice.

Colleges have increasingly come to rely on reading assignments as a way of providing a common intellectual experience for the incoming freshman class. Students typically read the same book over the summer and discuss the work during their first week on campus.

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Campus activism is typically less active in the summer, but recent shooting deaths in Louisiana, Minnesota and Texas have led to campus protests, college vigils and statements from academic organizations.

Some student events have focused on the killings of black men by police officers — incidents that led to the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has been embraced by many students. Other events focused on or included the shooting deaths of police officers in Dallas.

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Conventional wisdom holds that American society is and has long been pervasively anti-intellectual, with only elite academics embracing the life of the mind. Kelly Susan Bradbury challenges that view, arguing that there have long been institutions outside of elite intellectual circles that have in fact nurtured intellectual life. She outlines this view in her new book, Reimagining Popular Notions of American Intellectualism: Literacy, Education and Class (Southern Illinois University Press). Bradbury, who teaches writing and rhetoric at the University of Colorado at Boulder, responded via email to questions about her book.

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A few months ago, one or more anonymous students wrote a note to their law professor, complaining that she had been spotted at least once on campus wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt. The letter said wearing the shirt was “inappropriate” and “highly offensive.” Further, it said “we do not spend three years of our lives and tens of thousands of dollars to be subjected to indoctrination or personal opinions of our professors,” and urged the professor to avoid “mindless actions” that might distract students at a law school where not everyone is passing the bar.

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Finding new ways to teach the digital generation, bringing down the cost of a college education and ensuring that more students graduate are among the biggest challenges facing institutions of higher learning today — and meeting those challenges has never been more crucial than it is now.

That was the clear consensus among some of the nation’s top educational leaders who gathered at a two-day conference sponsored by The New York Times on Monday and Tuesday.

The Higher Ed Leaders Forum was among a series of conferences organized by The Times throughout the year. It convened some of the nation’s top educators to discuss the future of higher education.

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The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, June 23, that race can be a consideration in college admissions.

Just not in California.

Since the state passed Prop. 209 in 1996, it has been illegal for public schools such as the California State University and the University of California to use race as a factor when considering acceptance (the UC system actually implemented such a policy a year before Prop. 209 passed).

So the Supreme Court decision – which has become a little rare these days with only eight justices on the court – will have virtually no impact on the state.

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When Catharine Bond Hill walked the campus of Williams College as an undergraduate in the mid-1970s, the “whiteness” of the campus was apparent.

“It was certainly clear that there weren’t a lot of students of color there,” said Ms. Hill, who graduated from Williams, a liberal arts college in Williamstown, Mass., in 1976.

“I was well aware that I was with other kids who had a fairly privileged upbringing,” she said. “I do remember running into kids on the Williams campus back then who didn’t have a car parked in the lot; but that was unusual.”

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There’s good news and bad for colleges wanting to enhance undergraduate education, based on a new book on the subject: you’ve already got everything you need and you’ve already got everything you need. The Undergraduate Experience: Focusing Institutions on What Matters Most(Jossey-Bass) contains no quick fixes, no gimmicks and, well, nothing really new. But its five authors draw upon their decades of experience studying successful undergraduate programs to distill their common features into six themes — themes that the book argues can be applied across all manner of institutions working toward excellence.

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