Author: Reporter

Con­sid­er­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a tru­ly pro­le­tar­i­an art, the great Eng­lish lit­er­ary crit­ic William Emp­son once wrote, “the rea­son an Eng­lish audi­ence can enjoy Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­dist films is that the pro­pa­gan­da is too remote to be annoy­ing.” Per­haps this is why Amer­i­can artists and bohemi­ans have so often tak­en to the polit­i­cal iconog­ra­phy of far-flung regimes, in ways both roman­tic and iron­ic. One nation’s tedious social­ist real­ism is another’s rad­i­cal exot­i­ca. But do U.S. cul­tur­al exports have the same effect? One need only look at the suc­cess of our most banal brand­ing over­seas to answer in the affir­ma­tive. Yet no…

Ronald Collins, a retired law professor and longtime First Amendment scholar, has joined FIRE’s Advisory Council.Collins most recently taught at the University of Washington School of Law, where he held the Harold S. Shefelman Scholar chair. Early in his career, he clerked for Justice Hans A. Linde on the Oregon Supreme Court and served as a Supreme Court fellow under Chief Justice Warren Burger. He later spent six years as a scholar at the Newseum’s First Amendment Center in Washington, D.C.In the years since, Collins has become a leading voice on free expression. He served as book editor for SCOTUSblog…

Culture wars have distracted America’s K-12 system at the expense of students, says former U.S. Ambassador and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. On this episode of The Current, Emanuel sits down with Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy, to diagnose what went wrong and how some schools are trying to get it right. EMANUEL: Democrats in my view, by abandoning standards and accountability, have abandoned our kids and our teachers. Republicans have basically said, here’s your voucher, go figure it out on yourself. And the truth is you can’t really address it that way. And they have…

Many college instructors are encountering a familiar classroom dynamic: students arrive able to discuss the “main idea” of a reading, but struggle to point to specific passages, explain how an argument develops, or engage closely with the text itself. Increasingly, that surface-level familiarity comes not from reading, but from AI-generated summaries.  Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and NotebookLM can quickly produce fluent overviews of complex texts. While these tools can be useful for review or clarification, they also make it easy for students to bypass the cognitive work that reading is meant to support. Rather than attempting to monitor or restrict AI use, we experimented with…

Rothman has led the 25-campus system for nearly four years. Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Liam Knox/Inside Higher Ed The standoff between Universities of Wisconsin president Jay Rothman and the system’s regents is over after the board voted Tuesday night to fire him at the end of a half-hour meeting. Rothman has been under pressure to resign, but he refused to do so and went public last week with the board’s campaign to get rid of him—saying he had been given no reason and that the board had threatened to fire him if he did not step…

Free speech advocates have long warned that the laws and regulations passed at the state, federal, and international level are chipping away at our ability to speak anonymously online. Now, Türkiye is threatening to gut that right directly — and asserting that social media platforms are playing along.According to Justice Minister Akın Gürlek, the Turkish government is submitting a proposal to parliament that would require people to provide a national ID number to use social media. Unregistered accounts will be removed by platforms. Gürlek also claims platforms have agreed to implement these terms — though which platforms, and which exact terms, are…

Listen to the article 3 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Dive Brief: Kansas is poised to restrict race-related classroom instruction across the state’s public colleges, and at least one free expression group is calling on Gov. Laura Kelly to intervene. Last month, Kansas lawmakers added language to the budget that would ban academic programs at public colleges from requiring students to take a “DEI-CRT course” beginning in the 2028-29 academic year. The bill does not define “DEI-CRT,” instead giving that power to the State Board of Regents, whose members are all political…

Uganda has made remarkable progress in expanding access to education, yet for many girls in post-conflict Northern Uganda, education still fails to translate into skills, dignity, or meaningful opportunities. Listening to girls’ voices reveals why a justice-oriented approach to education is urgently needed.  Government initiatives such as Universal Primary Education (UPE) and Universal Secondary Education (USE), and a handful of skills-based education programs supported by gender-responsive strategies introduced since 1997, have significantly expanded school enrollment and gender parity in primary education. These reforms reflect a strong national commitment to expanding educational opportunities. However, increased enrollment has not translated into completion…

A legendary figure in the history of academic freedom, Harry Keyishian, died on April 4, according to an announcement from Fairleigh Dickinson University, which was his academic home for 60 years. Harry came to FDU after he was fired in 1964 by the State University of New York for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. The Supreme Court case that bears his name, Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967), remains the most important legal ruling in defense of academic freedom, enshrining it (in the words of Justice Brennan) as “a special concern of the First Amendment.” Harry and four other…

I first heard about Ball State University through my host family. I came to the United States as a high school exchange student in 2021, expecting to stay for just one year. That year turned into four and counting because of the ongoing war in Ukraine. After my exchange year, I took a gap year to pause, begin the college application process, and wait for my new visa to arrive. It was the most difficult and confusing year of my life, but it taught me a great deal about myself. As an international student from a low-income family in Ukraine,…