Section
Higher Education
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Shoptalk: Overheard at ASA 2025 or MLA 2026?
This edition of Shoptalk asks: Can you guess which of the following was overheard at ASA 2025 and which was overheard at MLA 2026?
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Toward a University of Repair
What was so unique about Haverford College that it was worth mocking in a Congressional hearing?
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Toward the Higher- and Secondary-Ed Alliance!
The influence of K-12 policy and pedagogy on higher ed can perhaps be seen best in the trickle-up effect of the standards of the Common Core.
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This Is Not a Choice—It Is a Charge: How HBCUs Must Embrace Black Radical Love & Empower Queer and Trans* Students
This essay calls in HBCUs to recommit to Black queer and trans* inclusion.
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To Save Public Higher Ed, Stop Revering California’s Tiered System
Open admissions to all state-funded public universities could break the competitive concentration of prestige, increase affordability, and restore Americans’ faith in higher education.
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To Save Higher Ed, Seek Our Black and Hispanic Men
Policymakers and institutional leaders seeking to preserve higher education’s functionality should consider the enrollment and completion rates of Black and Hispanic men.
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Our Right to Our Union: Graduate Student Workers Under Threat
University leaders may make a show of opposing Trump when funding is under threat, but they will happily align themselves with him in confronting graduate student workers.
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Toward the Next American University: A Roundtable Discussion on the Future of Higher Ed
The path higher education was on before Trump’s reelection was neither certain nor stable. There is not much to go back to now.
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The History of Women’s Studies Is a History of Conflict
Women’s studies programs in the United States are threatened by authoritarian pressure. For example, the Ohio legislature restricts how marriage and abortion can be presented in the college classroom, while the Florida state government took over a public college and abolished its gender studies program. At the federal level, words including “gender” and “women” are…
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What Future for College Football?
To reduce the manifold harms of college football, fiery calls for abolition pointed at university decision makers and public health officials won’t get the job done.
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When Universities Are Agents of the State
The story of Israeli universities serves as a warning for what US academia could become.
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“It’s Just Scary”: Abuse and Power in College Football
“I was very much harassed and coerced by [Coach] and the staff for the better part of my time [in the program]. [Coach] would spread rumors to other members of the staff and players about me in an effort to get me freezed out.” This is what a recent former Power Four college football player—who…
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Care Work is Necessary for Anti-Imperialist Struggle
As a means of disrupting the university’s predominant ways of being and relating, the encampment’s ethic of care was not extinguished by the raid.
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Can You Predict What You’ll Need? Talking Time, Space, and Disability with Margaret Price
“The experience of disability has this curious hard-to-see quality, even while also being weirdly out in the open, garishly apparent.”
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Beyond Rank Ambition: Can Colleges Save Democracy?
Do college rankings have anything to offer a hoped-for democracy renaissance?
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A Public Art College in Crisis: Art, Activism, and Solidarity After October 7
SERCs serve as both artistic gestures and practical solutions, aiming to balance the two while addressing critical questions such as: How will we feed people—and their hunger for justice?
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Cheap Speech
By the time the tear gas came we were ready for it. The police had already been gathering for hours along the university’s serpentine walls, forming ranks and donning battle gear.
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What Is a “Student” Politics?
To risk enfranchisement, suffer its penalties, apologetically—on behalf of a political sympathy with others—is revolutionary. This is the kind of action to which humanist knowledge must be bound.
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Leaving a Mark
I found myself constantly asking other participants their thoughts and reflections, to the point where I simply decided to sit down and record these conversations as a sort of informal oral history project.
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Being Columbia
This article was born as critique, but has grown into an elaboration of emotion, reflection, and reaction.
