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By Jacob Blane, Annabelle Garland, and Sam Gross
The Atlantic
If you’re looking for a reason to despair over the state of American education, there are many places you could start. You could, for example, worry about the all-consuming phones—or the gambling and TikTok addictions that come with them. You could worry about the free fall in literacy, the decline in math fluency, the rise of AI, the insanity of college-obsessed parents, the sharp increase in truancy, the teen mental-health crisis, and on and on.
Yet 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.
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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 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 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.
