Daily Lumina News 122123

Last spring, Beloit College found itself at a crossroads. Prospective students and their parents were growing increasingly skeptical that a liberal-arts education, the core academic offering at this private college in Wisconsin, was worth the investment. Enrollment had dropped by nearly 25 percent over a decade.
Beloit's new president, Eric Boynton, had some big decisions to make. But instead of cutting programs, he decided to repackage the college’s curriculum—and bet big on liberal arts and the humanities.

For public colleges and universities in Texas, Jan. 1 isn’t just the start of the new year. It’s also the day the state’s anti–diversity, equity, and inclusion bill, SB 17, will go into effect—a development that many institutions have spent months preparing for.
But that preparation varies greatly depending on the institution. The result is a messy patchwork of campus policies, procedures, and approaches designed to ensure compliance with the new bill signed by Governor Greg Abbott in June.

The war in Gaza has fueled debate about free speech on campuses, leading to protests, a congressional hearing, and high-profile resignations. But in her class on free speech and censorship at the University of Pennsylvania, Sophia Rosenfeld has found students with strong opinions who are eager to disagree with one another without doing harm.
In this audio essay, Rosenfeld shares a model for engaging in tough conversations for anyone looking to have thoughtful discussions about some of the most fraught issues of our era.

As 2023 comes to a close, higher education has witnessed a series of transformational changes. A decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to end race-conscious admissions. The setback to President Joe Biden's student debt forgiveness program. Increasing tensions on college campuses in response to the Israel-Hamas War.
This episode of Future U provides a "midterm report" on the landscape of higher education, recapping the big headlines and topics from fall 2023.

Are higher learning institutions places of learning or political battlegrounds? Or both?
From the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June on affirmative action to the now-infamous congressional hearing that led the University of Pennsylvania's president to resign and put the heads of Harvard and MIT under fire, colleges and universities have become the center of attention for what they represent—and what some believe they should represent.

A year into the artificial intelligence boom that began with ChatGPT, there’s no shortage of bold predictions about how the technology will change lives.
Young people in particular are being bombarded with declarations about AI and its impact on their future. Too often, though, their voices are left out of the conversation. In this interview, college students and others describe how they see the technology affecting what they do and how they learn.