The Week: What You Need to Know About the Past Seven Days

Giving Meaning to Stone

In today’s highly charged political climate, it can be hard enough getting along with opinionated colleagues, friends, and neighbors from one week to the next. But get along with everyone from century to century? Some weeks, though, it feels as if that’s what people increasingly expect of colleges.

One current controversy concerns statues — specifically, century-old statues of long-dead Confederates. At the University of Mississippi and elsewhere, black students want such statues, which they view as stark reminders of racism, removed from campuses — or, at the very least, denounced in accompanying signage.

At Mississippi, a committee assigned to provide a text to go with a 1906 statue of a Confederate soldier came up with two paragraphs that made no mention of slavery or a university unit that was part of the Confederate army. Last week students in the university’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People suggested a different balance: “While the current university creed advocates respect for and the dignity of all persons, this historic structure is a reminder of the central role of white supremacy in the history of the University of Mississippi and the state of Mississippi.” (Read more here.)

Meanwhile, the City Council in Charlottesville, Va., debated whether to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee astride his horse. One member of the council said some residents “have felt vaguely threatened by the monument, and by the fact that it’s in a city-owned park, and that the city then kind of gives official sanction to that Confederate glorification.”

But Coy Barefoot, an adjunct faculty member at the University of Virginia who teaches about the history of the university and hosts a radio-and-TV program called Inside Charlottesville, says he favors a different approach. Statues like the one of Lee “should be repurposed,” he says. “They should become outdoor museums to teach our children not about the ‘honor’ or courage of a domestic terrorist and traitor like R.E. Lee, but instead to teach about the Lost Cause: the network of myths created in the South following the Civil War.”

“These objects and sites are part of our shared past,” Mr. Barefoot wrote in a Facebook post. “Instead, turn them on their heads: use them as objects to teach and to warn our children how it is that people can become so deluded, how anger and hate and fear can turn a mob into an army, and how future generations can be made to venerate that hatred.”

A day later, another post of his put the challenges in perspective: The discussion about the statues, he wrote, “has truly attracted some trolls to my Facebook page.” He added: “I want people to be able to engage in a healthy discussion about ideas, even to disagree, and to passionately defend their views. But randomly tossing racist bombs into the air: nope.”

Double Negatives in Calif.

Meanwhile, the University of California is among institutions caught up in a hydra-headed debate over Zionism, anti-Semitism, and Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Last week the system’s Board of Regents rejected a proposal from supporters of Israel that would have condemned anti-Zionism as a form of discrimination. Adopting the proposal would have restricted free speech, the regents said.

Instead, the board approved a report that opposes “anti-Semitic forms” of anti-Zionism, but without specifying related sanctions.

As the Los Angeles Times explained, backers of the original proposal — including a group called the Amcha Initiative that combats anti-Semitism on college campuses — said the measure was needed to safeguard Jewish students from attacks arising out of anti-Israel demonstrations. But a letter from the system’s Academic Council said the proposal would lead to “needless and expensive litigation, embarrassing to the university,” to determine what should be considered intolerance and what was “protected debate and study of Zionism and its alternatives.”

Also last week, Sen. Ted Cruz — you know, the Texas Republican — took his presidential campaign to the big American Israel Public Affairs Committee meeting in Washington, where he pledged that “as president, I will do everything in my power to ensure that anyone who provides financial support to the BDS movement, including schools and universities, will lose any access to federal funding.” The movement, which has found some support on American campuses, advocates using boycotts, divestment, and sanctions to pressure Israel to make concessions concerning Palestinians.

Compromise?

And while we’re listing disagreements of long standing, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments last week from Roman Catholic colleges, hospitals, and other organizations that say a birth-control compromise incorporated in Obamacare violates their religious freedom.

The compromise was devised to let the colleges and organizations opt out of the health-insurance law’s requirement that employer-provided insurance plans cover birth control. Instead, by notifying their insurers or the government that they object to providing birth-control coverage, the organizations trigger a mechanism whereby the coverage is offered separately by the insurer at no cost to the organization. But the colleges and organizations say even that level of involvement makes them complicit in providing coverage they oppose on religious grounds.

Whether the court can resolve the issue with only eight justices, however, remains to be seen. If the members split 4 to 4 along liberal/conservative lines, as their questions during oral arguments suggested they might, the decision would uphold the status quo — which means the compromise would remain in effect in most of the country, but not where appeals courts have found it unconstitutional. (Read more here.)

Wait, There’s More!

A new Kansas law permits religious campus organizations to receive university funding even if they limit membership to those who adhere to the organization’s beliefs. … Turkey appears to be in the midst of a crackdown on university professors who challenge the government. Human Rights Watch says three faculty members have been jailed, 30 have been fired, and 27 have been suspended. … Connecticut’s Senate is considering a bill that would tax some of Yale’s endowment income. … Pennsylvania’s state-supported universities — Penn State, the 14 colleges in the state system of higher education, the University of Pittsburgh, and Temple University — will see 5-percent increases in appropriations now that a long-running budget stalemate has ended. … Kalamazoo College has been put on NCAA probation for three years for violating rules that forbid Division III schools to award financial aid based on athletic participation.

Lost

April is National Poetry Month, but this year one poet will be missing. Susan Montez, author of Radio Free Queens and a longtime faculty member in the English department at Norwalk Community College, died in early March.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Ms. Montez more than 20 years ago in the borough for which her first book was named. George Braziller had just published Radio Free Queens, a collection that I found “as readable as The Daily News, as open as a corner bodega’s outdoor fruit display, as frank as graffiti.” The title poem, she told me, was about a boy she’d had a crush on as a girl:

Poetry’s a ham radio
broadcasting to those
misplaced in 50 states.
If I were rich,
I’d hire a detective,
“Go find Corky Martin,
here’s money, make phone calls,
fly first class, do what
you gotta do, just find
him, last seen, 1964, red hair,
black glasses, black
turtleneck, skateboarding.”

Over the years I heard from Ms. Montez occasionally, but not lately. I’m sorry about that. Radio Free Queens sparked an interest in poetry that’s stayed with me ever since, and I wish I’d thought to tell her.