Archive for April 2025

In the face of accelerating attacks on academic freedom, shared governance, and higher education as a public good, the defense of knowledge, wisdom, and justice is of vital importance. We join with faculty colleagues throughout higher education in a call for unity to preserve the central role higher education plays in civic society. Together we stand; divided we fall.

State regulations for the age of starting school vary across Australia, and between public, Catholic and independent schools. Typically, however, children born in the first part of the year can be sent to school in either the year they turn five or the year they turn six. This can lead to big age caps in a school year level.

‘Organisations across the country deserve better from politicians, as do the vulnerable people whose needs they were set up to meet.’

Research projects that are deemed to focus on diversity, equity and inclusion or that aim to combat mis- and disinformation will no longer receive funding from the National Science Foundation.

American universities spent $60 billion in federal money on research and development in fiscal year 2023 alone. That’s more than 30 times as much as what they spent in the early 1950s, adjusted for inflation, when the research university system was just beginning to grow into the vast industry it is today. There is no other system like it in the world, in part because of the sprawling, decentralized nature of American higher education.

But it is vital to be cognizant of what kinds of harm—by whom, against whom, in which moments, and to what end—are treated as “news.” The news about public safety is a social and political creation that contains judgment calls at every turn, one that creates winners and losers and that could look different if we wanted it to.

Anne LaFrinier-Ritchie… is a social worker helping victims of human trafficking and raising awareness of the issue in western Minnesota. She says some of the highest rates of sexual exploitation are in rural areas.