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      Is This the End for Mandatory D.E.I. Statements?

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      Harvard and M.I.T. no longer require applicants for teaching jobs to explain how they would serve underrepresented groups. Other schools may follow.For years, conservatives condemned the use of diversity statements by universities, which ask job applicants to detail their commitment to improving opportunities for marginalized and underrepresented groups.Critics called such statements dogmatic, coercive and, in one lawsuit seeking to end the practice in California, “a modern day loyalty oath” that recalled when professors were required to denounce the Communist Party.But the use of diversity statements continued to grow, and eventually became a requisite when applying for a teaching job at many of the country’s most selective universities. That seems to be changing.Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each recently announced that they will no longer require diversity statements as a part of their hiring process for faculty posts.The decisions by two of the nation’s leading institutions of higher learning could influence others to follow suit.“The switch has flipped as of now,” said Jeffrey S. Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School. Many professors on hiring committees, he said, may have been reluctant to voice their concerns about mandatory diversity statements before now. “But I think the large, silent majority of faculty who question the implementation of these programs and, in particular, these diversity statements — these people are being heard.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Philadelphia’s University of the Arts Announces Sudden Closing

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      The institution’s financial woes were widely known, but the announcement surprised students and faculty members.The nearly 150-year-old University of the Arts in Philadelphia will close its doors June 7. Many of its 1,149 students and about 700 faculty and staff members got the news from an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Friday or on social media, only later getting official word from the school.“The situation came to light very suddenly,” an announcement on its website said. It noted that “UArts has been in a fragile financial state, with many years of declining enrollments, declining revenues and increasing expenses.”Enrollment is down from 2,038 in 2013. In an interview with the Inquirer, the institution’s president, Kerry Walk, said that revenue, including grants and gifts, failed to arrive in time to bolster the school’s finances. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which accredited the institution, indicated on Friday that it had revoked the University’s accreditation immediately, leaving no option for the school but to close. Town halls are planned on Monday.“At 2:47 p.m. on Friday I got an email asking me to apply for graduation, and at 6:03 the Inquirer posted the story that my school was closing,” Natalie DeFruscio, an illustration major who first took classes there in the sixth grade and would have started her senior year in the fall, told The New York Times. “If you spent five minutes there, you could tell it was oozing with talented students. And there were amazing professors I adore who were also blindsided by this,” she said.The closing was the result of a mix of cash flow constraints that are typical of schools like UArts, which depend on tuition dollars. In addition, UArts faced significant unanticipated costs, including major infrastructure repairs. The escalation of the costs significantly increased and could not be covered by revenue, according to a statement from the board of trustees on Sunday. “Despite our best efforts, we could not ultimately identify a viable path for the institution to remain open and in the service of its mission,” the statement said.The email on Friday, from Walk, who had been in the position less than a year, and Judson Aaron, chair of the board of trustees, pledged to assist students in transferring to area institutions. The school did not make its leadership available for interviews.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      PTSD Has Surged Among College Students

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      The prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder among college students rose to 7.5 percent in 2022, more than double the rate five years earlier, researchers found.Post-traumatic stress disorder diagnoses among college students more than doubled between 2017 and 2022, climbing most sharply as the coronavirus pandemic shut down campuses and upended young adults’ lives, according to new research published on Thursday.The prevalence of PTSD rose to 7.5 percent from 3.4 percent during that period, according to the findings. Researchers analyzed responses from more than 390,000 participants in the Healthy Minds Study, an annual web-based survey.“The magnitude of this rise is indeed shocking,” said Yusen Zhai, the paper’s lead author, who heads the community counseling clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His clinic had seen more young people struggling in the aftermath of traumatic events. So he expected an increase, but not such a large one.Dr. Zhai, an assistant professor in the Department of Human Studies, attributed the rise to “broader societal stressors” on college students, such as campus shootings, social unrest and the sudden loss of loved ones from the coronavirus.PTSD is a mental health disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts, flashbacks and heightened sensitivity to reminders of an event, continuing more than a month after it occurs.It is a relatively common disorder, with an estimated 5 percent of adults in the United States experiencing it in any given year, according to the most recent epidemiological survey conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services. Lifetime prevalence is 8 percent in women and 4 percent in men, the survey found.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      There’s a Program to Cancel Private Student Debt. Most Don’t Know About It.

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      More than a million borrowers who were defrauded by for-profit schools have had billions of dollars in federal student loans eliminated through a government aid program. But people with private loans have generally been excluded from any relief — until recently.Navient, a large owner of private student loan debt, has created, but not publicized, a program that allows borrowers to apply to have their loans forgiven. Some who succeeded have jubilantly shared their stories in chat groups and other forums.“I cried, a lot,” said Danielle Maynard, who recently received notice from Navient that nearly $40,000 in private loans she owed for her studies at the New England Institute of Art in Brookline, Mass., would be wiped out.Navient, based in Wilmington, Del., has not publicized the discharge program that helped Ms. Maynard. Other borrowers have complained on social media about difficulties getting an application form. When asked about the program and the criticisms, a company spokesman said, “Borrowers may contact us at any time, and our advocates can assist.”So a nonprofit group of lawyers has stepped in ease the process: On Thursday, the Project on Predatory Student Lending, an advocacy group in Boston, published Navient’s application form and an instruction guide for borrowers with private loans who are seeking relief on the grounds that their school lied to them.“We want to level the playing field and let people know, instead of having it be this closely held secret,” said Eileen Connor, the group’s director.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Michael Sugrue, Whose Philosophy Lectures Were a YouTube Hit, Dies at 66

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      After an academic career spent in near obscurity, he became an internet phenomenon during the pandemic by uploading talks he had given three decades earlier.The college lecturer, in a uniform of rumpled khakis and corduroy blazer, paces on a small stage, head down. “The lectures you’re about to see,” he says in introducing a series of talks, videotaped in somewhat hokey lo-fi style in 1992, “cover the last 3,000 years of Western intellectual history.”The lecturer, Michael Sugrue, would go on to teach Plato, the Bible, Kant and Kierkegaard to two generations of undergraduates, including for 12 years at Princeton, without ever publishing a book — an academic who hadn’t “really had a career,” as he told The American Conservative after retiring in 2021.But that same year, in the depths of the pandemic, Dr. Sugrue uploaded his three-decade-old philosophy lectures to YouTube, where many thousands of people whose aperture on the world had narrowed to a laptop screen discovered them. His talk on the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, in particular, seemed to fit the jittery mood of lockdown, when many people sought a sense of self-sufficiency amid the chaos of the outside world. It has now been viewed 1.5 million times.“The only matter of concern to a wise and philosophic individual is the things completely under your control,” Dr. Sugrue lectured, iterating Stoic thought. “You can’t control the weather, you can’t control other people, you can’t control the society around you.”Mr. Sugrue in an undated photo. His dozens of lectures have been viewed some 2 million times on YouTube.via Ian FletcherDr. Sugrue, who became an internet phenomenon through word of mouth — without publicity or viral links from social media — after an academic career spent in near obscurity, died on Jan. 16 in Naples, Fla. He was 66.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      N.C.A.A. Athletes’ Pay Deal Raises Questions About Future of College Sports

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      The landmark settlement made many wonder what the reality — and impact — of revenue-sharing plans with college athletes would look like.Brent Jacquette knows a thing or two about college sports. A former collegiate soccer player and coach in Pennsylvania who is now an executive at a consulting firm for athletic recruiting, he’s well aware of issues surrounding pay for college athletes.But even for an industry veteran like Mr. Jacquette, the news of the N.C.A.A.’s staggering settlement in a class-action antitrust lawsuit on Thursday came as a surprise, with more than a little anxiety. The first words that came to mind, he said, were “trepidation” and “confusion.”And he was not alone in feeling unsettled. Interviews, statements and social media posts mere hours after the settlement was announced showed that many were uncertain and concerned about what the future of collegiate sports holds. “These are unprecedented times, and these decisions will have a seismic effect on the permanent landscape of collegiate athletics,” Phil DiStefano, chancellor of the University of Colorado Boulder, and Rick George, the school’s athletic director, said in a statement. If the $2.8 billion settlement is approved by a judge, it would allow for a revenue-sharing plan through which Division I athletes can be paid directly by their schools for playing sports — a first in the nearly 120-year history of the N.C.A.A. Division 1 schools would be allowed to use about $20 million a year to pay their athletes as soon as the 2025 football season.Mr. Jacquette thought of the word “trepidation” because of the impact that the settlement, shaped by the biggest and wealthiest universities with robust football programs, could have on coaches and athletes at smaller institutions and in low-profile sports.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Even With No Speakers, Pro-Palestinian Activism Marks CUNY Law Ceremony

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      With speeches canceled, students at the CUNY School of Law ceremony chanted, carried signs and walked out.In some ways, a walkout by pro-Palestinian students at the City University of New York School of Law’s commencement on Thursday was part of the unique political moment that has marked the Class of 2024’s graduation season at so many universities.But CUNY law students were also carrying on something of a graduation tradition at their school.Students chanted pro-Palestinian messages, waved painted banners as they walked across the stage and turned their backs to the law school’s dean, Sudha Setty, during her remarks onstage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Then, after the last degrees had been conferred, dozens of students rose from their seats and walked out, joined by a handful of professors and guests.“It reminded me so much of why I came to CUNY Law,” Ale Humano, one of the graduates who walked out of the ceremony, said.The walkout on Thursday is not the first time that tensions over Israel have taken center stage during a commencement ceremony for the New York City public law school. The school, which is known for fostering public interest lawyers, has been a hot spot for pro-Palestinian activism for years, and its graduation ceremonies have recently become the site of conflict over politics related to Israel.For the past two years, law school commencement speakers have made support for Palestinians and opposition to Israel a focus of their speeches, eliciting criticism from public officials, who called the speeches antisemitic.In 2023, Fatima Mousa Mohammed, a Yemeni immigrant and an activist devoted to the Palestinian cause, denounced “Israeli settler colonialism” in her address. The speech set off furious coverage and a wave of public criticism, including from Mayor Eric Adams, who spoke at the same ceremony and condemned the speech’s “divisiveness.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elise Stefanik Has Gained Widespread Attention in Antisemitism Hearings

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      Representative Elise Stefanik of New York may not be a committee chair, but perhaps no single Republican lawmaker has more forcefully clashed with elite university leaders over how they are handling antisemitism on campus.Her line of questioning at a December hearing helped push the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania out of their jobs. Last month, she put Columbia’s president in the uncomfortable position of negotiating faculty administrative decisions from the witness stand.If past patterns hold, Ms. Stefanik will now have a chance to question the leaders of a fresh batch of major universities.Ms. Stefanik, 39, was already a rising star within her party before the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war turbocharged concerns about antisemitic incidents in American education. A Harvard graduate herself, she is the top-ranking woman in Republican House leadership and is considered a potential presidential running mate.But her exchanges with the leaders of Harvard and Penn attracted enormous attention and won some rare plaudits from grudging liberals. In April, she was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people of 2024.Ms. Stefanik struggled to land a clear blow in a hearing with the president of Columbia, Nemat Shafik, in April. But she still elicited some of the most memorable testimony, demanding that Dr. Shafik remove from an academic leadership position a professor who used the word “awesome” when describing Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7 attack.Ms. Stefanik later called for Dr. Shafik to resign anyway.When Ms. Stefanik first won her seat in 2014, she was the youngest woman ever elected to the House. She beat a centrist Democrat, and in the early days of her career, she took on more moderate stances.These days, she describes herself as “ultra MAGA” and “proud of it.” Democrats particularly detest her close embrace of former President Donald J. Trump and his lies about the 2020 election. More