Is There a Right to (Tuition-Free) Higher Ed? – By Sonia Cardenas, Interim Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Political Science, Trinity College, Hartford, CT
The Huffington Post
Bernie Sanders is correct that higher education is a right, but he is fundamentally wrong about what that implies. According to Sanders, public colleges and universities should provide universal, tuition-free education for all. This is a noble aspiration, especially for a country in which just over 30 percent of the population has a four-year college degree. The right to higher education, Sanders says, is a basic entitlement owed to all, even those who can pay tuition. Ironically, for a politician driven by social ideals, this is an individualistic way of conceiving of rights. It assigns the right to each person regardless of his or her position in society. Alternatively, rights are standards that empower more than entitle people. A right is not just something people have: It’s a means of claiming or accessing something a person may not have. Rights always speak to the needs of the most marginalized. A right to higher education doesn’t mean that college has to be free for everyone, at public or private institutions. College has to be affordable precisely for those who cannot afford it…

4 Ed-Tech Ideas Face The Chronicle’s Version of ‘Shark Tank’
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Four innovators with four very different ideas for improving higher education brought their pitches to The Chronicle’s second-annual Shark Tank: Edu Edition during the South by Southwest Edu conference in March. … Our objective — with fast-paced pitches and some friendly grilling from the sharks and the audience — was to showcase and probe a set of ideas that tackle key issues in higher education today. Our sharks were Jason Jones, an editor of the ProfHacker blog and director of educational technology at Trinity College, in Connecticut…

R.I.P. religious right, and other Super Tuesday takeaways
CNN
… “Religious right R.I.P,” Mark Silk, a professor of religion and public life at Trinity College, wrote on Wednesday morning.  The movement died of “natural causes,” Silk said. Its founding leaders, like the Rev. Jerry Falwell, have died or retired; its organizational weight has withered; its crusades, such as the push against same-sex marriage, appear to be lost causes.  But the religious right’s fatal wounds were self-inflicted, said David Campbell, an expert on religion and politics at the University of Notre Dame.  “The religious right is reaping what they have sown: By drawing religious people into politics, people began to put their political preferences ahead of their religious values.”…

Celebrating a Multidisciplinary Milestone
West Hartford Life
Trinity College is marking its neuroscience program’s 25th anniversary during the 2015-16 academic year, celebrating the accomplishments of its students and faculty. The program began in the early 1990s, making Trinity one of the first liberal arts institutions to explore neuroscience teaching and research. Sarah Raskin, a West Hartford resident and director of the neuroscience program, said that back then, psychobiologist Priscilla Kehoe found students lining up outside her door, looking to create a new major…

Does Love Have a Politics? – By Lida Maxwell, Associate Professor of Political Science at Trinity College
Los Angeles Review of Books
If friendship pulls us into the world, love tends to pull us out of it. We socialize with friends in public and semipublic settings, while love seems to demand that the world be kept at bay. In love, we focus, in a kind of tunnel vision, on the one who has become the beloved — taking in, even devouring, every detail of their person and life. This “worldlessness” of love, in Hannah Arendt’s words, has led thinkers like Arendt and Michael Warner to cast love as antipolitical. Love, Arendt says in The Human Condition, “is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.” Arendt does not mean that people in love cannot be in public, but rather that the attempt to bring love’s power to bear on politics (in public) kills the unique and intimate experience that is love…