One of the biggest downsides of online learning, in my personal opinion, is the loss of community and the severely diminished level of engagement that comes from no longer having a physical classroom. Regardless of our content area or our students’ age group, there is something about being in the same physical learning space that conjures up a special type of magic. Personalities […]
FIRE
The Eternally Radical Idea
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part 12 of a multi-part series updating developments since the publication of “
.
When I talk to people about FIRE’s work they’re often surprised when I say that a lot of FIRE’s cases involving students are not your stereotypical examples of right-on-left or left-on-right censorship of political or “politically incorrect” speech. While those kinds of cases certainly do exist, it’s extremely common for a case to involve speech with little political valence so common that I call this the “big middle” of FIRE cases.
This dovetails directly from what I discussed in my tenth CUWC installment on the “Strong Corporatism Theory:” that “[h]igher education is harmed any time universities choose concerns like ranking, donations, staff morale, tuition dollars, federal grants, fear of liability, etc, over teaching and research goals.” In the following examples from FIRE’s case history and