Portside

In higher education, whether as affordable land-grant state colleges, tuition-free municipal universities, grants to children of the poor or need-blind admissions, access to learning was at least prized as a right, not a privilege. As tuition and administration costs soar, the number of low-paid adjuncts explodes and financial aid collapses, college funding shifts from the public purse to student debt. Wither democracy or plutocracy?

The murder of three men and six women at a church in Charleston is a national tragedy, but in America, the killing of black people is an unending spectacle.

Congratulations to Columbia University student activists in the group, Columbia Prison Divest, who successfully launched a campaign protesting their school's investment in private prisons. Columbia University will sell its roughly 220,000 shares in G4S, the world's largest private security firm, as well as its shares in the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company in the U.S.

Bryan Stevenson has spent most of his career challenging bias against minorities and the poor in the criminal justice system. He is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery, Ala., an advocacy group that opposes mass incarceration and racial injustice. Stevenson is a member of The Marshall Project’s advisory board. He spoke with Corey Johnson. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

As part of the deep and broad reaction to the killings in Charleston, historian Chad Williams and his colleagues have put together a deeply informative and useful bibliography of essential readings on African American life and history, and on the struggle against racism. We have provided a link to the project, below, followed by a short article on it, published in The Guardian, by Marta Bausells. More links and information are available at the Guardian site.

In an upset victory, San Francisco educators have elected a new union president who promises to empower members, take on standardized testing, and back struggles for affordable housing.

The films that opened and closed the Human Rights Watch Film Festival - Marc Silver’s 3 ½ Minutes, Ten Bullets, and Stanley Nelson’s The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution - tell interlocking stories. Although more than four decades separate the events they trace, there is a connection between what happened in the 1960s, when cities exploded in the wake of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther Kiing and discord today.

And how our rush to lock up immigrants has overwhelmed the federal prison system.

We live digital lives—from the videos shared on social networks, to location-aware apps on mobile phones, to log-in data for connecting to our email, to our stored documents, to our search history. The personal, the profound, and even the absurd are all transcribed into data packets, whizzing through the fiber-optic arteries of the network. Our daily lives have upgraded to the 21st century, but law and the practice of the private sector don't offer adequate protections.

It is time for change, time for the very best efforts of all who nurture hopes for a saner world.