Anger and violent protests on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley in 2017 over a planned visit by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos inspired then-freshman Manu Meel to establish BridgeCal, the third chapter (after Notre Dame and the University of Colorado-Boulder) of a nationwide 501(c)3 movement on college campuses that aims to promote democracy, not partisanship. After graduation, Meel became the national lead of San Francisco-based BridgeUSA as it expanded to 43 chapters in 19 states. Meel currently serves as CEO of BridgeUSA. You can also hear him speak on our podcast, Higher Ed Now.
April leads Braver Angels’ national program of community debates, and is co-director of the College Debates and Discourse alliance between Braver Angels, ACTA, and BridgeUSA. April designed Braver Angels Debates and has grown the program from its first debate to serving over 1,000 participants per month.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) is delighted to welcome the Institute for Advancing American Values at Boise State University, the Center for Free Enterprise & Entrepreneurship at Florida Southern College, the Humanities Center at Miami University, and the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage at the University of Oklahoma into the Oases of Excellence network.
“Affirm and guarantee . . . that the institution will not use a diversity statement or any other assessment of an applicant’s commitment to specified concepts in any hiring, promotions, or admissions process or decision.” So reads Senate Bill 83, recently introduced in the Ohio Legislature. Its sponsor, Senator Jerry Cirino, remarked in our interview: “This bill is about what is best for students. It is about the quality of their education and about enabling them to become independent thinkers, ready for citizenship in a free society.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has unequivocally made clear that being a college trustee is a serious job for serious people. Some may say he is engineering a “hostile takeover” of New College of Florida (NCF); others will say he is saving higher education from “woke indoctrination” and wasteful spending through his new appointees to the […]
The desire to make a difference is embedded in the human psyche. The effective altruism movement, recently made famous by the exploits of one of its most prominent advocates, taps into this aspect of our nature and offers a clearly defined, logical answer to the core question of which causes and organizations to support. While this […]
When Dictionary.com announced “woman” as its word of the year, it cited a spike in searches after Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson declined to define the word during her confirmation hearing. “It was a rare case of not just a word in the spotlight, but a definition,” the site observed. The dictionary was slammed on Twitter for being “ambivalent about […]
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