News

Assistant professor of Africana studies Chipo Dendere writes for The Conversation about the Zimbabwe election: Can Nelson Chamisa win? He appeals to young voters but the odds are stacked against him.

Ifeanyi Menkiti, poet, philosopher, and longtime professor at Wellesley College, bought the Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Harvard Square in 2006, saving the storied spot from closure, and he ran it until his death in 2019. His family keeps the place running now, with its high shelves lined with poetry collections, and the ghosts of poets past hovering in the air. On Thursday, Aug. 24, the Grolier is hosting the third annual Ifeanyi Menkiti Memorial Reading, taking place on what would’ve been Menkiti’s 83rd birthday.

A group of 13 college presidents has begun a campaign to bring attention to the importance of free expression, critical inquiry and civil discourse on college campuses. Wellesley College is a member of this group.

A group of 13 college presidents announced the formation of a group to “champion free expression” at their institutions as higher education grapples with free speech issues nationwide, from speakers being shouted down to professors losing jobs over their perceived politics. The group—known as the Campus Call for Free Expression—is launching a coordinated effort across their campuses to support free speech, according to a press release from The Institute for Citizens & Scholars and the James L. Knight Foundation. The Institute for Citizens & Scholars, a nonprofit, is the coordinating body while the Knight Foundation is providing $250,000 in funding. The 13 participating institutions are: Benedict College; Claremont McKenna College; Cornell University; DePauw University; Duke University; James Madison University; Rollins College; Rutgers University; University of Notre Dame; University of Pittsburgh; University of Richmond; Wellesley College; and Wesleyan University.

Wellesley police took a boat out into Lake Waban at Wellesley College to rescue a disoriented dog that ran into trouble during a swim. The dog was scooped from the water by the Wellesley Fire Department boat and returned safely to its family.

For some families, particularly those with incomes and assets between $75,000 and $200,000, the impact of removing the sibling discount could be large. Their eligibility for financial aid could be cut by thousands of dollars, explained Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley College.

One year ago, the Inflation Reduction Act marked the most significant action on climate change to date from the federal government with hundreds of billions of dollars to support new and existing tech... In total, there have been 62 announced projects with a combined $53 billion in planned private funding just for EV and battery projects since the IRA became law, as tallied by another tracker run by Wellesley College energy researcher Jay Turner. So many multibillion-dollar battery projects have been announced across the Midwest and Southeast that a region stretching from Michigan to Georgia has earned a new nickname, the Battery Belt.

"The 2021 Boston mayoral election was historic, with 95 percent of voters casting their ballots for a woman of color in the preliminary for the city’s highest office. But even this contest could not escape plurality’s systemic flaws," writes mathetmatics professor Ismar Volić for CommonWealth magazine on why Boston needs ranked choice voting.

More than a dozen college presidents have signed on to a new campaign to bolster free speech on their campuses. The 13 leaders — hailing from Cornell, Duke, Rutgers Universities, and Wellesley College, to name a few — are pledging to “urgently spotlight, uplift, and re-emphasize” free speech and academic freedom over the next academic year, they announced Tuesday. The presidents, who are planning what they call “urgent action,” are mostly from private colleges.