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Katherine Knott
Inside Higher Ed
The University of California at San Diego’s medical school discriminated on the basis of race in admissions decisions over the course of three cycles, the Justice Department claimed this week.
The agency has been investigating the medical school since March and detailed its findings in an eight-page letter to the university. According to DOJ officials, the university discriminated on the basis of race by allowing applicants to share how they overcame certain disadvantages. That hardship question, the government argued, served as a way for admissions administrators to determine which students came from an underrepresented minority group and then give them a boost.
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If you’re looking for a reason to despair over the state of American education, there are many places you could start. Something that deserves more attention is damage to free expression—not in the classroom but in the public sphere of high school: the realms of student newspapers, student government, and other aspects of everyday life. School is meant to prepare students for the real world, but too many institutions are training kids to be silent.
Higher education in the United States and the faculty members central to its mission are under unprecedented, destructive, and sustained attack, part of a larger assault on democratic governance, civil society, and knowledge itself.
The debate over free speech on campus is usually framed as a persuasion problem: if only more students believed in free expression, the culture would protect it. A new study in Science Advances, by researchers at Stanford, Penn, Columbia, and the University of Colorado, suggests the problem runs deeper.
