Nov. 14, 2015
Social media posts expressing dismay that the tragedy in Paris is diverting media attention from events at the University of Missouri are being made by individuals from outside the Mizzou community in an attempt to create conflict. Our hearts go out to the citizens of Paris and all those affected by the tragic events of last night. While our community has faced difficulties over the past week, we express our sincere sympathy to those who have been affected by the events in Paris and remain committed to making Mizzou stronger and more inclusive.

Yale's controversy tapped into a national debate on college culture

The "I don't want to debate" line spoke to a growing trend worrying some observers of higher education, and beyond just Yale: in the balance between sensitivity versus critical thinking and academic freedom, students are increasingly emphasizing the former over the latter.

On college campuses around the country, students, particularly students of color, are forcing white students and administrators to confront the pernicious effects of racial bias.

At the same time, students are demanding that colleges be more sensitive to their mental health and well-being. They're feeling empowered to make requests that professors sometimes feel interfere with their long-cherished right to research freely and to speak their mind in public.

The question facing campuses, then, is how to weigh those issues of sensitivity and mental health against sometimes-competing values of free speech and academic freedom.

Students have called for graduation speakers who have done things they consider offensive to be disinvited from commencement. Some have requested "trigger warnings" for material on syllabuses that could exacerbate mental health issues. At Northwestern University, a professor who wrote an essay about a dispute involving a professor accused of sexual assault ended up facing a Title IX complaint due to her comments about the students involved.

Even President Obama weighed in on the debate in September, criticizing college students who want to be "coddled." "Anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em," he said. "But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, 'You can’t come because I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say.' That’s not the way we learn."

The debate over how colleges should weigh these requests is complicated by the contradictions at the heart of colleges' relationship with their students. College students are supposed to act like mature adults, but they're subject to the authority of administrators in a way that 18- and 19-year-olds not in college are not. As the price of college has risen, students are increasingly considered paying customers. At the same time, the goal of college is not simply to be happy and comfortable, but to be challenged and grow intellectually.

These are the tensions that Erika Christakis was trying to address in her e-mail. In it, she asked, "What does this debate about Halloween costumes say about our view of young adults, of their strength and judgment?" It's clear that the students in Sillman college want the university to take a more active role in their lives than some faculty would prefer.

Black Lives Matter protesters interrupted presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Friday while she spoke at the historically Black university, Clark Atlanta University.

Protesters chanting “Black lives matter” and “Hell You Talm Bout” disrupted Clinton’s speech, with Clinton backers responding with chants of “Hillary, Hillary” and “Let her talk” to drown them out.

The action was organized by members of #AUCShutItDown, a coalition of students from the Atlanta University Center, which includes Spelman, Morehouse, and Clark Atlanta. The organization posted a statement on social media calling out law enforcement and university administrators for “multiple offenses committed against Black and brown lives.”

PONTIAC, Mich. -

Plans are in the works to have the Silverdome in Pontiac demolished, said a spokesman for Triple Investment Group.

The former home of the Detroit Lions went on sale earlier this year for $30 million. However, there was never any reported interest from prospective buyers.

The owners instead will demolish the Silverdome and sell the land. The owners don't have a time frame right now for when the demolition will begin.
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The stadium, which at its peak seated more than 90,000 fans for NFL games, has not had a regular tenant since 2002.

Azealia Banks has gone on yet another homophobic rant – claiming she wants to “spray a gay man in the face with pepper spray”.

The 212 rapper, who has repeatedly dismissed claims she is anti-gay in the past, was caught on camera branding a flight attendant a “f**king faggot” during an on-flight meltdown.

Amid the controversy, the rapper has not sought to smooth over relations with her gay fanbase, going on a bizarre and vile rant on Instagram.

Responding to a self-pitying post from the star reacting to the coverage, a fan wrote: “Imagine the pain young gay fans feel when they hear the vile things you say @azealiabanks.”

However, Banks hit back: “oh well imagine how I wanna spray a gay man in the face with pepper spray everytime he calls me a bitch a slut or a hoe. Kiss my ass. Goodnight.””

When the fan challenged her ‘evil’ comment, she added: “Keep f**king with me if you f**king want to. One day your hemmroids [sic] are going to burst and you’ll bleed to death bitch.'”

In a since-deleted post, she continued: “Yea keep trolling for d**k on grindr. You’ll be murdered and stuffed under a truck somewhere soon.”

The rapper has used gay slurs on a number of occasions, regularly branding gay men “faggots” on social media.

DES MOINES, Iowa — People concerned about liberal political correctness on college campuses have a powerful ally: President Obama.

At a town hall here on college affordability on Monday afternoon, one student asked Obama to respond to Republican presidential contender Ben Carson's proposal to cut off funding to colleges that demonstrate political bias.

Unsurprisingly, Obama didn't like it much. "I have no idea what that means, and I suspect he doesn’t either," he said, then continued: "The idea that you’d have somebody in government making a decision about what you should think ahead of time or what you should be taught, and if it’s not the right thought, or idea, or perspective or philosophy, that person would be — they wouldn’t get funding, runs contrary to everything we believe about education," he said. "That might work in the Soviet Union, but that doesn’t work here. That's not who we are."

After that criticism, he went on to give his opinion about what's been called the "new political correctness" on college campuses:

It’s not just sometimes folks who are mad that colleges are too liberal that have a problem. Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal, and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues, who sometimes aren’t listening to the other side, and that’s a problem too. I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, "You can’t come because I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say." That’s not the way we learn either.

Although college grads across the board make more money than their less-educated peers, the report found that whites and Asians with four-year degrees not only tend to outearn their black and Latino counterparts, but they also better withstood the impact of the Great Recession. “Based on two decades of detailed wealth data, we conclude that education does not, however, protect the wealth of all racial and ethnic groups equally,” the report’s authors wrote.

According to the study, white and Asian American families with four-year college degrees were more likely to have accumulated much more wealth over the longer term than their less-well-educated counterparts. Ditto for African American and Latino families, although their earnings and wealth were typically lower than that of whites and Asian Americans.

“This is certainly partially a story about intergenerational inequality,” S. Michael Gaddis, an associate professor of sociology and demography at Penn State University, wrote in an email to TakePart.

One factor: “Research shows that minority and low [socioeconomic status] students don’t attend the best possible colleges they could (based on grades, etc.) and that lack of the best degrees translates into a substantial workforce that is underutilized,” wrote Gaddis, who authored a study released in March that found minority students who attend elite schools such as Harvard don’t fare better in the job market compared with less-well-educated whites.

Enough.

Let Jamyla’s death touch a region’s heart. Let her be memorialized in the conversations about inequality in the greater St. Louis region that have been taking place in the past year. Let it not end with conversation. Let conversation become conversion.

Change is happening, but not nearly quickly enough.

We may never know who killed Jamyla, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find justice for a 9-year-old child who wanted to do better than her best.

A year after #Ferguson, the schools that serve its children are still underfunded and failing. The housing is still unequal and unsafe. Guns are rampant. Jobs are few. In a community where blindly fired bullets can kill a little girl in the safety of her home, hope is scarce. Justice is only a word.

Until St. Louis invests in its children — and it’s going to take a whole lot more than $26 million — the promise of a positive future will be trapped in the casket of a child.

It’s not good enough to go home and hug our own 9-year-old daughters a little tighter, to let that kiss goodnight on the top of the forehead linger. It’s not good enough to march and light another candle, to go to church and temple and mosque, holding hands and calling for calm and peace and healing.

Those actions get us through the day. But what about tomorrow?

Tomorrow, Jamyla’s classmates, those innocent children left behind in the Riverview Gardens School District, will go to school and before the bell rings be eons behind 9-year-olds in other parts of the city. Their chance at success, and a long life, is limited by their ZIP code.

The For the Sake of All report published by Washington University last year under the direction of assistant professor Jason Purnell tells us they will die a full 15 years earlier than people who live just one or two ZIP codes to the south, just because of where they live. The same report tells us that Jamyla’s friends, those who graduate high school, at least, will earn about half what their white counterparts in St. Louis will earn. They’ll be more than twice as likely to be unemployed. They will be more likely to have heart disease or cancer. Their ability to move out of the social strata into which they were born is severely limited, Harvard University’s recent study on social mobility tells us.

They are stuck in a community in which dying of a gunshot wound is not an unusual event.

This is the reality that too many St. Louisans of color, particularly on the north side of the city and county, have been living for too long. It’s costing us more than lost lives; it’s costing the entire region billions of dollars in economic opportunity. We continue to allow an entire region, one generation of people after another, to suffer because in a divided St. Louis, some people have theirs and that’s just the way it’s going to be.

Enough.

Let Jamyla’s death touch a region’s heart. Let her be memorialized in the conversations about inequality in the greater St. Louis region that have been taking place in the past year. Let it not end with conversation. Let conversation become conversion.

Change is happening, but not nearly quickly enough.

We may never know who killed Jamyla, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find justice for a 9-year-old child who wanted to do better than her best.

A year after #Ferguson, the schools that serve its children are still underfunded and failing. The housing is still unequal and unsafe. Guns are rampant. Jobs are few. In a community where blindly fired bullets can kill a little girl in the safety of her home, hope is scarce. Justice is only a word.

Until St. Louis invests in its children — and it’s going to take a whole lot more than $26 million — the promise of a positive future will be trapped in the casket of a child.