Steven Volk, March 7, 2016

What has been the most frequently assigned text at Princeton in the last 15 years? What about Harvard? Yale? For Princeton (along with Columbia), Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations was the chart-topper. At Harvard, pivoting in the opposite (ideological) direction, the most frequently assigned text was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” Yale, for its part, returned to the classics with Plato’s Republic. Much to think about there!

More? OK, any guesses on Oberlin’s most assigned text? Would you be surprised if I reported that it was the “Communist Manifesto” by Marx (a text which ranks 5^th at Brown and 3^rd at Wesleyan, behind…wait for it… Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and Hobbes’ Leviathan). Clash of the Titans! Continue reading →

Steven Volk, February 29, 2016

I was recently reading a blog post by Sharon Salzberg, a meditation teacher. She wrote about a trip she took in the 1980s down the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe on route to a teaching post. The environs were beautiful and she asked the tour guide if they could stop and walk along the shore. No way, he replied. The banks of the river had been strewn with landmines from the civil war and they still remained. The likelihood was that she would be blown up. Nor was Zimbabwe the only place in the world where talks in the countryside can carry fatal consequences. There are an estimated 110 million landmines in place around the world, and many, if not most, will remain long after hostilities have ceased since it is much more expensive to remove a landmine than to put one in.

The experience led Salzberg to think about her own emotional landmines and the ways that we often think of ourselves as inadequate. And it led me to think about the hidden “landmines” that we, and the larger society, have placed in the path of many of our students. What I want to address here are those specific “landmines” which have been studied as under the concept of “stereotype threats.” Continue reading →

Steven Volk, Feb. 22, 2016

I have thought a lot about the rolling catastrophe that has engulfed Mount Saint Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland. If you haven’t been following events there, you’ve been spending way too much time watching reruns of the Super Bowl halftime show…or preparing your classes! In either case, the Chronicle of Higher Education has prepared a handy packet of articles to help someone in your situation. Or, in case you don’t want to go there, here’s a short summary:

In December 2014, Simon Newman, a private-equity chief executive with no real higher-education experience, was named to be president of the Roman Catholic, liberal arts institution in north-central Maryland. Among Newman’s early initiatives was a plan to improve The Mount’s (as it’s called) metrics – numbers that US News & World Report pays attention to when compiling its “best colleges” edition – by addressing first-year retention. The way to do this, he reported in an email to the faculty, was to get “20-25 students to leave” at the start of the fall semester, before these new students would be counted by reporting agencies. He planned to send incoming-students a “survey” which welcomed them to make use of this “very valuable tool” to help them “discover more about” themselves. They were told that the survey was “based on some of the leading thinking in the area of personal motivation and key factors that determine motivation, success, and happiness. We will ask you some questions about yourself that we would like you to answer as honestly as possible. There are no wrong answers.”

As it turned out, there would be “wrong” answers, as the survey was not about happiness, but an attempt to find first-year students who should be “culled” before the end of September. The plan was opposed by Provost David Rehm (OC ’83), and Dr. Greg Murry, Director of the Veritas Symposium, a “first-year seminar” course designed to initiate students into a “Catholic liberal arts community dedicated to the pursuit of truth,” and where the “survey” would be distributed. Murry conveyed his concerns to President Newman, and it was during their discussion that President Newman delivered his by-now infamous sentiments:

This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t.  You just have to drown the bunnies…put a Glock to their heads.

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Steven Volk, February 15, 2016

London is a city of museums, and I have had the good fortune to take my students to quite a few in my (still) short time here. Last week, for example, in class we studied the so-called “Glorious Revolution” (1688-89) in England (more on its glories, real or imagined, in another post!). And then on Friday we traveled up river to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich to see an exhibit on Samuel Pepys, the garrulous diarist who chronicled so much of the second half of the 17th century.

There’s only so much I could say in class about Charles II, the man who restored the monarchy to England after a brief flirt with republicanism, without spiraling my students into a deep slumber. But, on entering the Pepys exhibition, the visitor is almost immediately confronted by a portrait of the monarch in his coronation robes painted by John Michael Wright (c. 1687). What the spectacular painting could say was infinitely more informative (not to mention entertaining) than anything I could cobble together.

Supporting the cliché that a picture is worth a thousand word, we know that images are remarkably generative texts. Perhaps this is because, as John Berger has argued in his hugely popular book, Ways of Seeing, published in 1972, and based on a BBC series of the same name, seeing and recognition come before words. We see, and then explain what we see with words. But, he continues, at the same time what we know or believe affects how we see. Our past knowledge or experience changes the way we see.

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Steve Volk, February 8, 2016

The struggle for a greater representation of student, faculty, and staff of color in higher education has been a continual theme in protests of at least the past two years. Response to the protests have varied from place to place: at some universities, administrators have lost their jobs; at some, generous earmarked funds have been made available to spur diversity hiring, many new conversations have begun about how to create the conversations and the actions that can carry us forward. But, in general, the issues of race, racism, and growing inequality in higher education has been (and is being) brought to our doorsteps and our classrooms by students.

All of this was on my mind when my eyes fell on an op-ed in the January 31, 2016 Sunday Times (London) titled “Watch out, universities; I’m bringing the fight for equality in Britain to you.” It was by David Cameron… the Prime Minster…the Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Not only was Cameron in a sense standing in for the students and their protests (co-opting is a word that also comes to mind), but this was the same David Cameron who jacked tuitions to their current level (which, at £9,000 [$13,000] a year are now higher than in-state rates at public universities in the United States ($9,139) and considerably higher than the £0 (!) which students paid prior to 1998). Regardless, in the article, Cameron relentlessly takes the universities to task for excluding BME (black and minority ethnic) students. “Consider this,” he wrote. “If you’re a young black man, you’re more likely to be in a prison cell than studying at a top university. Only one in 10 of the poorest white boys go into higher education at all.” Well yes, and the same is true in the United States. But who is the messenger of this information? We are in a strange world when the politician most responsible for policies that have led to growing inequality speaks as the person who will bring “the fight for equality” to the university.

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Steven Volk, December 13, 2015

Much has been written, including in this space, about what I have called a “culture of safety” that seems to have taken root on college and university campuses. As Judith Shulevitz wrote in a much-cited ­ New York Times article, “Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being ‘bombarded’ by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints.” It has proven considerably easier for many in the media to ridicule students as “coddled” and “self-infantilizing” than to ponder why so many of their grievances are located in the discourse of “safety.”

I have suggested before that we shouldn’t be surprised at the rise of a “safety” narrative in a time of a recognized high-level of sexual violence on campus or at a moment when gun violence, terrorism, and police killing of blacks, among other acts of brutality, are endemic. A lot of triggers are, indeed, being pulled.

I’ve also become more aware, in conversations with students, about how social media, in its most addictive aspects, impacts their feelings of safety. Yik Yak may be the contemporary equivalent of graffiti on the bathroom wall in the 1990s (a practice that is still around, by the way), but now you don’t have to go to the bathroom to read the nastiness and threats; you can just pull out your phone, as students do in compulsive fashion, and this can increase a student’s sense of fear and isolation. Even if the vicious comments are a minority of the posts, the things people say on Yik Yak “are real thoughts,” according to Francesca Tripodi, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Virginia who is completing a dissertation on this particular social media outlet. Students can feel more vulnerable because “[t]here are people on campus with those thoughts.” And one obvious remedy – don’t use the ap – is not a solution for those who either use it to stay “in the loop” or who, like most of us, can’t turn away from a car crash. Continue reading →

Steven Volk, December 6, 2015

The debate over the value of Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs) is a long one, which I have reported on a number of times (see here and here, among others). As we move into the last week of the semester, I’d like to suggest two additional approaches to end-of-semester evaluations that can help both you and your students think about the learning that occurred in your classes. I’ll also include a “guide” I wrote in 2010 for reading your SETs when they are returned to you after grades are in.

What Helped Your Learning?

SETs are largely about how students experienced your course, and so the questions focus on issues of organization, pacing, clarity, grading, etc. As numerous articles have pointed out, Student Evaluations of Teaching don’t tell you about student learning, and they provide very little information to suggest what it is you are doing to support (or hinder) the leaning that goes on in the class. Linda Shadiow and Maryellen Weimer, writing in Faculty Focus on Nov. 23, suggest a series of questions that can help foreground student learning issues. They offer a series of fairly simple sentence stems for students to complete. For example,

• It most helped my learning of the content when…because…
• It would have helped my learning of the content if…because…
• The assignment that contributed most to my learning was…because…
• The reading that contributed the most to my learning was…because…
• The kinds of homework problems that contributed most to my learning were…because…
• The approach I took to my own learning that contributed the most for me was…because…
• The biggest obstacle for me in my learning the material was…because…
• A resource I know about that you might consider using is…because…
• I was most willing to take risks with learning new material when…because…
• During the first day, I remember thinking…because…
• What I think I will remember five years from now is…because…

Shadiow and Weimer recommend that faculty also complete the same sentences. Having (almost) completed the semester, we probably have a good idea which assignments worked from our point of view and which didn’t; what readings brought out the most in discussion, and what didn’t; what homework assignments stretched student learning and what brought basically “meh” responses. Comparing our answers to the students can be revealing (or, perhaps, horrifying!).

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Steven Volk, November 30, 2015

Some people find this moment of  ferment on our nation’s campuses confusing, particularly as important principles that have defined the academic community are seemingly under assault. Safe space competes with academic freedom, intellectual diversity with political orthodoxy, and so on and so forth. It will take some time to sort it all out, particularly as not every protest seems well thought out and students, like all of us, are learning from their mistakes. But tumultuous moments such as the present also provide a way to hear things that, previously, we might have ignored. This week’s “Article of the Week” offers two such learning moments, one arising from the protest demands and the second, from a teacher’s reflections on her own practice.

Renaming: The Case of Woodrow Wilson

I am no longer surprised with how quickly protests have jumped from one one campus to another, for the underlying causes of concern and anger have been present – and unheard – for a long time. Student protests that recently have called our attention to the stubborn persistence of racial injustice both on campus and off have hopscotched from Yale to Ithaca,  Occidental to Princeton, Amherst to Brandeis, Lewis and Clark, and Western Washington. What started at the University of Missouri did not stay at Mizzou, as students, faculty and staff seized on potentially the most promising opening for change in a generation. Among demands that have been raised by students of color are for the renaming of buildings that honor individuals who were particularly notable in their defense of slavery or, after the Civil War, segregation and racism. Continue reading →

Steven Volk, November 22, 2015

Where would we be without Wikipedia? The online, crowd-sourced encyclopedia which faculty have found to be at the root of many an honor code violation, can also inform us about the origins of the honor code. So here it is, duly cited, even though it is actually incorrect. (Memo to students: Just because the internet says it doesn’t mean it’s true!)

John Davis, the dean of the faculty and a law professor at the University of Virginia, was shot on campus on November 12, 1840, the culmination of some “contentious relations” between students and faculty. He would succumb to his wounds two days later, but before he shuffled off this mortal coil, authorities asked him to name his (presumably undergraduate) assailant. He refused, arguing that if the man in question were honorable, he would step forward of his own accord. (Cribbing from the student sitting next to you at an exam seems small beer in comparison! Davis’ murderer, in case you’re wondering, was later identified as eighteen-year-old Joseph Semmes, a member of a wealthy Georgia family. Semmes posted a huge bail, skipped town, and never stood trial.)

Henry St. George Tucker, Sr., Davis’ replacement, recommended the institutionalization of a code of “honorable” behavior in 1842, arguing that, in the future, students be required to sign the following statement on their exams: “I, [name], do hereby certify on my honour that I have derived no assistance during the time of this examination from any source whatsoever.” The students, for their part, seemed to like the idea. But the linking of Davis’ murder and the creation of the UVA honor code seems to have been a nice, if imaginative, 20^th century addition. As Coy Barefoot, the author of “The Evolution of Honor” wrote in 2008, “It can be argued that the beginning of the Honor System at the University dates rather to March 1825, when the first student had his name entered in the matriculation book. By entering his name, the student pledged to support the University’s principles, ideals and regulations—rules that forbade lying to professors and cheating on tests.”

In any case, the Honor Code became a part of UVA’s undergraduate life, and was soon expanded to cover a myriad of issues both there and at different institutions: rules about smoking, cheating at card games, honor within relationships, etc.

A quick look through Robert Samuel Fletcher’s A History of Oberlin College from its Foundation through the Civil War has not disclosed any evidence of an Oberlin honor code that predates UVA’s, so I’ll assume that Oberlin’s adoption of such a code came later. (Help me out, colleagues: any information on when it originated?) What we do know is that, according to the Honor Code Charter, “The student body of Oberlin College, with the approval of the General Faculty, originated and adopted the Honor System, which places full responsibility for academic integrity on students.”

In a discussion of the Honor Code at a 1997 faculty meeting, one student proudly noted that “The Oberlin honor code is a really special and rare thing. Only a few small liberal arts colleges have something like this.” Which is nice, even if it isn’t accurate. Quite a few liberal arts colleges have honor codes, and at some, like Haverford or Bryn Mawr, the honor system is an more integral part of campus identity. Haverford, for example, highlights its Honor Code, created in 1896, as “one of [its] oldest and greatest traditions.” Students at Haverford, gathered in a “Plenary” meeting, debate, revise, and vote on their honor code every year. Haverford credits it Honor Code with helping students “enjoy a bond of trust and mutual respect that shapes all aspects of their academic and community lives.”

Furthermore, the Haverford Honor Code

“encompasses both the academic and social spheres of life, influencing everything from the spirit of intellectual inquiry to personal interactions. The Honor Code is not a set of rules, but rather an articulation of ideals and expectations emphasizing genuine connection and engagement with one another, and the creation of an atmosphere of trust, concern, and respect. The Honor Code is also completely student-run — one of the clearest demonstrations of this trust.”

The Honor Code at Oberlin

Oberlin’s Honor Code, while an important part of our academic and student life culture, nevertheless does not reach such Haverfordian heights. The charter, last revised in 2008, calls for the creation of a Student Honor Committee (SHC) which, in turn, “allows for the student body to be accountable to each other based on the principles of academic integrity. The SHC ensures that trust and academic freedom are maintained for the scholarly pursuits of the Oberlin College community.” The purposes of the system, as stated in the Charter, are “to maintain a high standard of academic integrity in all curricular work, to respect students’ ability to adhere to this standard, and to encourage further development of this ability through the efforts of faculty, administration, and students.” Finally, the Honor Code

“provides the foundation for the intellectual freedom that is encouraged and shared by all members of the academic community and embodies the belief that true academic freedom and discourse can only exist within a framework of honesty, integrity, and responsibility. With the privilege of pursuing an Oberlin education comes the responsibility of supporting both the expectations and the spirit of the Honor Code. This requires each individual to respect all fellow members of the Oberlin community and to vigorously support the protected nature of intellectual property.”

In sum, the Honor Code operates with the three following expectations, responsibilities and requirements:

1. Students signal their adherence to this set of principles by signing “honor code” pledges on all their work: “I have adhered to the Honor Code in this assignment.” Furthermore, students also
2. Take responsibility for the “maintenance of academic freedom in the community” by pledging to “report possible infractions potentially harming the community.” Thus the responsibilities of the Honor Code, while shared by faculty and students, are by design mostly the responsibility of students, since
3. Faculty, based on these presumptions, “do not proctor exams, but trust that students adhere to the Honor Code.”

Questions, anyone?

A few weeks ago, a number of faculty members, including many newer members of our community, met in a Brown Bag Pedagogy session to discuss the Honor Code, its operations, potential short comings, and steps that might be taken to strengthen it. What became clear is that, unlike their counterparts at Haverford, for example, new faculty are rarely socialized into the workings of the Honor Code at Oberlin, either in terms of how it operates or what its underlying assumptions are. Thus, to cite just one example, newer faculty might find out about the “no-proctoring” rule when they give their first exam and are told, in no uncertain terms, to leave the room. Not a good way to find out about it.

Still, in the course of the Brown Bag session, it became clear that there are a number of aspects of the Honor Code that need to be discussed among the faculty (and perhaps among students as well), if not updated.

Underlying assumptions. The primary reason that the Honor Code exists is to place students in the position of responsibility for upholding the integrity needed for an academic institution to thrive… and to recognize that, since this will not always happen, rules and regulations are necessary. (I often ask students in my colonial Latin American history class why they think laws were written in 17^th century Lima that dealt with children of nuns.) As the Honor Code charter states, students are a part of the College’s “community of scholars” and, as such, they need to be “accountable to each other based on the principles of academic integrity.”

I have no doubt that the vast majority of our students adhere to this, that the responsibility we give them by leaving the room during exams is well placed. But, of course, rules are most often written for a tiny minority of individuals who do not adhere to our aspirational goals. Of the 10 pages of the Honor Code Charter, a little more than 9 pages are devoted what happens in the relatively few reported Honor Code violations that arise every year.

Four questions have come up in this regard: (1) Is it fair or reasonable to expect students to “police,” monitor or otherwise be responsible for each others’ behavior. Isn’t it enough for them just to take their own exams without looking around to see who is consulting his smart phone? (2) Are the actual procedures of the Honor Code working? What are faculty to make of the fact that many Honor Code violations are not resolved before they have to give assignment or final grades? (3) As pedagogy shifts increasingly toward student collaboration, peer study groups, peer work-shopping of papers, and other elements of constructivist pedagogy that encourage student-to-student learning, are the rules of what is allowable within the terms of the Honor Code clear? And, (4) as more international students join our community, can we expect that everyone has the same preparation and understanding of what integrity in academic work means?

Let’s take these one at a time. My purpose here is not to answer the questions that have arisen, but to suggest that if the basic rules of the Honor Code are unclear to faculty (and perhaps students), the time is ripe for a broader discussion. [Added Nov. 23: Faculty should also be aware that further information on many of these points is available here. Of particular interest are clarifications on grading of student work when an Honor Code violation is under review.]

1. Student responsibility under the Honor Code. The basic principle of the Honor Code couldn’t be clearer: students have asked to be the most responsible agents of their own academic integrity. This is not a burden that the faculty have placed on the students, and my guess would be that if the students wanted to be relieved of this responsibility, we would accept it as a faculty. Therefore, if we think that there are problems with how the system is run, it is incumbent on us to raise these.

At the same time, to quote a former U.S. president (oh, how it pains me to say it!): as faculty, we both trust and verify. When papers come in that have all the hallmarks of plagiarism, we will follow up to the extent of our time and abilities. It is harder to do this on in-class exams, and even harder if a student has been given an accommodation to take an exam in another room.

Technology has changed some of our assumptions here. We can state clearly what the rules of a closed-book exam are, but short of frisking students to remove their smart phones, we will have to rely on, well, their honor. The new question is whether technology, specifically the ubiquitous presence of smart phones, requires us to reexamine any assumptions here, particular in terms of in-class exams and accommodations for students to take an exam in a room unmonitored by either students or faculty. Perhaps, at the end of the day, we will agree that technology has not changed anything and that we expect all our students to hold themselves to required standards of integrity; but we do need to have the conversation.

2. Procedures. Faculty have complained that, as currently run, the Student Honor Code Committee is slow, does not report back on suspected infractions of the Honor Code that have been filed, and most often comes to a conclusion long after faculty have had to give a student a final grade in a course. Certainly steps should be taken to expedite and improve communications in the system.

But other issues have been raised with the operations of the Honor Code that suggest some limitations as it is currently written. Section F.1. of the Code states that “All members of the Oberlin College community are required to report potential violations of the Honor Code when they suspect one has occurred.” Perhaps I am putting myself in violation of the Honor Code by suggesting that this is a rule that is more honored in the breach. (Always the pedant, I note that the phrase “honour’d in the breach,” which comes from Hamlet, meant just the opposite of what we now mean by it.) In point of fact and based on my own behavior, I suspect many faculty (and probably many students) have observed “potential” violations of the Code and did not report them. Faculty often use those opportunities to talk personally to students who we think either don’t understand that what they have done is a violation of the Honor Code or who we think would get more out of a one-to-one discussion with us than being entered into a formal proceeding. In either case, to have a requirement that is more often than not ignored does not make for a good legislation.

I’m not unaware of the other side of the argument, which is that if no report is filed, students who are repeat offenders cannot be identified. Still, and in particular reference to many international students who are still learning about the principles of academic integrity in a U.S. setting, the requirement that all members of the community report all potential violations seems in need of further clarification.

3. Pedagogical shifts towards collaborative learning. Most of the aspects of the Honor Code are quite clear: plagiarism, falsification of sources, copying from your neighbor’s exam paper, using outside sources in a closed-book examination, etc. While some (plagiarism) might require further explanation, particularly for international students, most are fairly obvious. Still, others seem to be open to interpretation or, at the very least, could serve as the basis of an interesting discussion. I refer in particular to the following “example of cheating”: “Collaborating on a project that was to be completed individually.” Obviously this doesn’t apply to projects that are expected to be completed with other students. But, at the same time, many of us routinely encourage students to speak to each other about their projects, to share drafts of a paper, to work with writing tutors or get help from the OWLs. Where does “cheating” start?

The Honor Code has taken this into account:

“The default assumption covering all academic exercises is that students are required to do their own work only utilizing the help and resources considered appropriate for each academic exercise, including sources of assistance routinely offered by the college to students, such as reference librarians and writing tutors. Notwithstanding, in all cases, the professor in a specific course may further restrict or expand what resources are approved or not approved for use in a particular course or assignment.”

But confusions abound and one way to deal with this is to be explicit in your own instructions about what is allowed and what isn’t. For example: “I expect you to take your draft to the Writing Center, but you are not allowed to send it to your mother or elsewhere off campus.”

Will we know if said mother had a hand in the final draft? Probably not, but at least we can be clear in our expectations. On the other hand, many of us have gotten papers with WTMI (way too much information), footnoting every conversation with a classmate or pearl of wisdom that we have dropped in an off-handed manner in class.

What I would suggest is that these can all be teachable moments. Our ideas are always grounded in other ideas. As faculty, we have learned to collaborate widely; we wouldn’t think of sending an article to a journal or a manuscript to a press without having friends and colleagues read it first and give us their feedback (and which, if all goes well, we will acknowledge in the article or book). To talk about the value of collaboration in scholarly work is to engage our students in the heart of how knowledge is created and can move any discussion of the Honor Code away from its disciplinary moorings and towards a more engaging conversation about epistemology, creativity, and the values of collaboration.

4. International students and the Honor Code. In “Teaching International Students: Opportunities and Challenges,” an “Article of the Week” from a few weeks ago, I raised some particular concerns about how the Honor Code works for our growing number of international students: “International students may come from academic cultures that have different standards for citation of sources, different expectations for when collaboration is permitted, and a different sense of the limits of what kind of collaboration is permissible.” I suggested, and will repeat here, that thinking about how we approach the Honor Code with international students can only help us to think about how we apply the Honor Code in general. “The more we can be clear and explicit about citation practices,” I argued, “how certain kinds of paraphrasing can be the equivalent of copying, what materials should carry citations, etc., the more we will help not only our international students, but all our students.”

But I also raised the issue of the very term we use to talk about expected academic conduct, “honor,” and how we need to be aware of different meanings the word holds in different cultures. If our intent is to build a culturally responsive environment at Oberlin, we need to think about these issues. Since the Honor Code is essentially about both “integrity” and “accountability,” perhaps we could devise a new name for it that is not as freighted as our current one.

In all, even if we see no reason to update our Honor Code system, with many new faculty coming on board every year (not to mention a quarter of our students), this would be a good time to engage a discussion of its meaning, principles, and functioning.

Steven Volk, November 15, 2015

From the University of Missouri to Yale to Ithaca College and campuses beyond, this has been a momentous week of protest. While many of us are still processing these events, it’s not too early to ask: What have we learned from them? What are the lessons of Mizzou?

For this week’s “Article of the Week,” I’ve curated a number of articles and other resources to provide context and framing for a few of the issues that surfaced in the past few days and weeks. While far from exhaustive – and I encourage you to add others via the “comment” function below – hopefully these can inform and encourage a broader conversation.

The lessons to be learned from Missouri and elsewhere are broadly applicable on all our campuses. Resources aren’t actions, but they can frame and inform actions.

Diversity: Racial Disparities in Higher Education

Race and racism were at the center of the uprising at the University of Missouri-Columbia and other campuses. Protests by students, faculty, and staff of color highlighted not only the fact that stark disparities persist at white-majority colleges and universities decades after the formal end of Jim Crow, but that, as Faulkner reminded in Requiem for a Nun, “The past isn’t over. It isn’t even past.” Will black students feel truly a part of Yale when they walk by Calhoun College every day? To suggest that no college would imagine hosting a “Himmler Hall,” as one writer cited below has argued, is a fair analogy and underscores the nature of the protests.

Each fall, the Chronicle of Higher Education publishes a special report on “Diversity in Academe.” The latest, which includes a searchable data base on “Race, Ethnicity, and Gender of Full-Time Faculty at More Than 4,000 Institutions” can be found here. For data on students, see: “Student Diversity at 4,725 Institutions,” Chronicle of Higher Education (Oct. 27, 2014).

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