Author: Reporter

Schools are dealing with record-high rates of depression and anxiety in students, along with declining academic performance.Recent studies have linked high levels of social media use during adolescence with lower cognitive performance and poorer mental health outcomes.Hundreds of school districts have sued major social media companies, claiming their products are eroding students’ mental health and ability to learn, as well as forcing schools to devote significant resources to managing the academic and behavioral fallout.More schools and districts are also curtailing students’ access to cellphones during the school day—a policy that educators and lawmakers argue will benefit students’ mental health and…

I’ve been teaching long enough to recognize when something fundamental is shifting in the classroom. Lately, that shift sounds like a single word echoing through my courses: why.Why are we doing this? Why does it matter? Why should I care?At first, it can sound like pushback, the kind of challenge that might once have been mistaken for defiance. But I don’t see it that way. When Gen Z students ask “why,” they’re not questioning authority; they’re questioning meaning. They’re trying to understand whether what they’re being asked to learn aligns with a world that already feels crowded with information, competition…

We did­n’t have civ­i­liza­tion until we had cities, and we did­n’t have cities until we had agri­cul­ture. So, at least, goes a wide­ly accept­ed nar­ra­tive in “big his­to­ry” — a nar­ra­tive some­what trou­bled by the dis­cov­ery of ruins on Göbek­li Tepe, or “Pot­bel­ly Hill,” in south­east­ern Turkey. Appar­ent­ly inhab­it­ed from around 9500 to 8000 BC, the ancient set­tle­ment pre­dates the Pyra­mids of Giza by near­ly 8,000 years, and Stone­henge by about 6,000 years. Though it was once believed to be a site used for rit­u­al pur­pos­es only, lat­er research unearthed evi­dence that sug­gests it was host to a vari­ety of…

Officials also announced that the center will hone its primary focus to children’s health. John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe/Getty Images The director of Harvard University’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights will step down in January after seven years at the helm, dean of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health Andrea Baccarelli announced Tuesday. News of her departure follows months of criticism of the center’s Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights. Mary Bassett’s last day as director will be Jan. 9, 2026, after which she will remain a professor of practice in the Social and Behavioral…

Barely a third of social scientists believe their university would promote them based on the strength of their research impact, a global poll of researchers has found. Asked whether their institution would promote or give tenure to a scholar for their efforts to apply research outside academia, only 37 percent of 1,805 social scientists surveyed by Sage agreed. Only 28 percent of respondents said their efforts to make a difference outside academia would lead to additional research funding from their institution, while just 35 percent said their university offered awards or prizes to recognize impact. Thirty percent of the survey’s respondents, who came from…

Drag shows are inherently expressive and protected under the First Amendment. That’s what a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held back in August, reversing a district court’s decision that had upheld West Texas A&M University’s campus-wide drag show ban. Yet several weeks later, the Fifth Circuit elected to vacate the panel’s decision and rehear the case en banc, meaning the full Court will consider whether the First Amendment permits government officials to ban a drag show because they disagree with the show’s message. As FIRE fights to preserve the panel’s decision upholding the right of public…

Listen to the article 4 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Dive Brief: Willamette University and Pacific University are looking to merge after their leaders signed a letter of intent to negotiate a definitive agreement, the Oregon institutions announced Thursday. Under the plan, the two private nonprofits would operate as a single institution under a shared administrative structure but maintain “their character, identities, and historic campuses.” They would also run separate academic and athletics programs and set their own admissions requirements. Willamette and Pacific officials expect to announce details about the operational and…

Friday Fragments Sara Brady Fri, 12/12/2025 – 03:00 AM Sans-serif fonts, passing along great literature, Middle States. Byline(s) Matt Reed

In a major broadside against the First Amendment, public university systems in Texas are ordering faculty to watch what they say in the classroom, as state authorities have outlined ideas they want universities to stay away from when teaching their courses. The Texas Tech University System ordered its five member-universities to comb through faculty materials to root out any of the state’s disfavored viewpoints, and Texas A&M ordered its faculty not to “advocate” for “race or gender ideology,” or topics concerning sexual orientation or gender identity in the classroom, without getting approval for whatever they’re teaching first. On Dec. 1, the Texas…

Listen to the article 3 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Dive Brief:  College operating costs increased 3.6% in fiscal 2025, according to the latest Higher Education Price Index, which tracks the sector’s inflation. “HEPI inflation rates are again elevated above what many consider the norm, set by expectations from prior decades,” according to a report from Commonfund Institute, which is responsible for the index. For the past five years, the HEPI rate has been above the prior decade’s annual average of 2.2%.  HEPI’s latest inflation rate continues a period of elevated cost…