Back to school; back to … losing our religion? Christian colleges that challenge faith, secular colleges that challenge ideas, Rosa Parks Barbie and, of course, Professor Matthew McConaughey all made this week’s list of must-read stories from around the interwebs:

So…now there’s a Rosa Parks Barbie. A triumph for Civil Rights history? Not exactly, at HNN.

The problem is that the more in-depth narrative that historians have worked hard to reconstruct is continually lost in public consumption.

How does Barbie tie in to Newt Gingrich, Bertie Forbes, and the history of racism in the US? The ILYBYGTH take.

How can colleges foster true intellectual diversity? At NYT.

Is the point of a university education simply to provide students a forum in which they can air their political views, no matter how poorly informed? Of course not — and one reason that some students are reluctant to speak in class is because they are confronted, for the first time, by information that undermines their pre-existing assumptions. So how can professors keep exposing students to uncomfortable facts — because that’s our job — while encouraging them to speak their minds and hear out arguments they find outrageous?

Losing your faith at an evangelical college? Don’t worry; it’s always been part of the process. At CT.

At some evangelical schools, religious crisis is provoked by design. Nyack College in New York City offers a slate of first-year classes coordinated with chapel talks meant to challenge students’ beliefs.

“It’s almost that we have to deconstruct their faith, but in a nice way,” said Wanda Walborn, associate professor of spiritual formation at Nyack. “We have to carefully and lovingly get you back to Jesus, get you back to the grace of God, outside of performance.”

Mayor Pete Buttigieg on Queen Betsy DeVost at EdWeek:

There are no shortage of cabinet appointees to take issue with. But I think there’s something particularly egregious with what’s happening with Betsy DeVos in the Department of Education because it’s not just somebody who’s taking the department in a direction I disagree with. She’s somebody who, in my view, is actively undermining the very purpose of the department.

Recruiting top faculty:

• From the NFL: Andrew Luck: “I think I could be very happy teaching high school history.” At WaPo.
• From Hollywood: Matthew McConaughey is UT’s newest professor. At CNN.

From the Big Surprise file: Turns out better pay can attract more teachers. At FP.

Alumni sue NY Jewish school for sexual abuse, at CNN.

The lawsuit accuses former principal George Finkelstein of targeting the children of Holocaust survivors and then imploring them “to not add to their parents’ suffering by telling them about his assaults.”

She’s not racist, but…this Michigan city council candidate wanted to keep her community white. Because the Bible. At FA.

Why do 55% of teachers hope their kids won’t become teachers? At Curmudgucation. The issues are

tied together with the single thread of distrust and disrespect for teachers. . . . we’ve had decades of federal and state programs meant to force teachers to do a better job. In the classroom, much of these “reforms” have sounded like “You can’t do a good job unless you are threatened, micromanaged, and stripped of your autonomy.” There is a special kind of stress that comes from working for someone who says, in effect, “You have a big important job to do, and we do not trust you to do it.”

Teachers do not experience disrespect only on a national level. Talk to individual teachers about their own work circumstances and you will often hear about district and building administrators who treat teachers like children.

“Gifted & Talented” program is out in NYC. What comes next? At Chalkbeat.

“The label is something that people really crave,” said James Borland, a Teachers College professor who studies “gifted” education. “The fact that the curriculum is very weak in lots of gifted programs — or the fact that it’s not that different — it’s a problematic situation,” he added.

What’s it like to be a progressive Christian in a conservative state? A review of American Heretics at R&P.

we hear Walke describe something of a conversion narrative. She transformed from a Southern Baptist in the pews of a church whose pastor was teaching that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for sin into a different sort of Christian—one who now leads in the charge of Mayflower UCC’s vote to denounce racism and become a sanctuary church.

The most touching moment in the film gives us a glimpse of the toll of Walke’s conversion. We sit in the passenger seat of her truck as she drives away from her grandmother’s home, where we’ve just seen the two women reflecting awkwardly (but with great compassion) on their connection as Christians, despite their current theological and political divide. The two women sang together an old-time hymn about heaven. But the voices in unison could not cover up the palpable tension, as her grandma, Novella Lore, appeared to struggle to find something to say about her granddaughter’s making headlines in the local paper for public LGBTQ advocacy. In the truck afterward, Walke confides that Lore is worried about her granddaughter’s eternal salvation. “I just want to know one thing. Are you going to go to heaven when you die?” she says Lore asked her.

Liberty U.’s president gives another big $$$ gift to an attractive young man, at Reuters.

“The concern is whether the university’s president wanted to do his personal trainer a favor and used Liberty assets to do it,” said Douglas Anderson, a governance specialist and former internal audit chief at Dow Chemical Co, who reviewed both the transaction and Liberty’s explanation of it at Reuters’ request. That would be bad governance, he said. “At a minimum, the terms suggest the buyer got a great deal and Liberty got very little.”

Hellfire in the Amazon: fires split Brazilian evangelicals from other faiths, at RNS.

“Due to their alliance with Bolsonaro, the evangelicals started to oppose the protection of the environment. They assimilated the idea that environmentalism is a disguise for communists and for international leaders who want to take the Amazon from Brazil,” said Renan William dos Santos, a researcher at the University of São Paulo who investigates the relations of Christians with environmentalism.

Evangelicals…support it?

Christian colleges watch SCOTUS nervously about LGBTQ cases, at DN.

“Student housing standards would face new pressure. Affiliated clinics and hospitals could be compelled to provide religiously objectionable medical procedures. A religious university’s tax-exempt status could be challenged or revoked,” the brief explains.

• Is this really the end of evangelical higher ed as we’ve known it? Could be, but not because of student housing, medical procedures, or tax exemptions. The SCOTUS decision could possibly spell doom for a different necessary aspect of evangelical higher ed. Here at ILYBYGTH.

The new Gallup poll on creationism is out. The upshot: Lots more people seem okay with evolution this year.

The problem with ed reform at EdNext:

Why am I able to anticipate these failures in education reform initiatives, while the people devoting fortunes to these efforts and their staff have such a hard time avoiding strategies that result in failure? I’m not that smart and they aren’t that dumb. I suspect the answer is that foundations have organizational interests and cultures that tend to draw them to a mistaken theory about education policy. In its essence, that theory holds that there are policy interventions that could improve outcomes for large numbers of students if only we could discover them and get policymakers and practitioners to adopt them at scale.

I begin with a different theory. I suspect that there are relatively few educational practices that would produce uniformly positive results. Instead, I’m inclined to think of education as similar to parenting, in which the correct approaches are highly context-specific.

• The ILYBYGTH version: scaling up ed reform is like trying to tow an iceberg.