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Sunday, August 30, 2015

Memory Loss Issues in the News

There are two memory-related pieces in the LA Times today. One is a follow up on the lawsuit and controversy between USC and UC-San Diego over the recruitment of a UC-SD faculty member by USC who headed a project on Alzheimer's disease. Blog readers will recall that UC-SD was initially successful in court in retaining the project, but apparently has been losing contracts its program had to USC. The piece is essentially an update:

http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-alzheimers-20150830-story.html

The other piece is (yet another) op ed on microaggressions, trigger warnings, etc. This one, however, is co-authored by Northwestern U president Morton Schapiro. The theme of the op ed is maybe such things have their place. See http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0830-glassner-schapiro-square-generation-20150830-story.html What is remarkable is president Schapiro's apparent memory loss when it comes to events on his own campus, notably the infamous case of Prof. Laura Kipnis. Kipnis wrote an op ed which led some students to demand she be investigated by campus authorities because her views offended them. The investigation that followed turned into an Orwellian review which came to an abrupt halt when Kipnis exposed what was going on. Once exposed, Northwestern quickly retreated and shut down the investigation. Had Dr. Schapiro consulted this blog, he might have been reminded of these events:

http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2015/05/cautionary-tale.html
http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2015/05/a-cautionary-tale-follow-up.html

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