The University of Chicago’s president Robert Zimmer spends much of his time traveling the country, often to discuss a favorite issue of his: academic freedom. This week, academic freedom comes to the University of Chicago in the form of a three-day symposium. The full schedule is extensive over the three-day period and includes hot-button issues on a college campus such as student journalism, the admissions process, and responsible investing.

The biggest event of the series, held on Thursday, May 5 from 2:50 to 5, is a conversation with President Zimmer, Law School Professor Geof Stone, Law School Dean Michael Schill, and Chronicle of Higher Education Editor Peter Schmidt, followed by a keynote speech by Professor Stanley Fish. Geof Stone is a legal heavyweight with an extensive body of work on the First Amendment. In addition to being a professor at Florida International University, Stanley Fish was formerly Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Fish writes extensively on the politics of the university, particularly regarding campus speech codes and political statements made by universities.

The feature in this week’s issue of the Weekly is on the Academy for Urban School Leadership, a nonprofit organization based on the Northwest Side that’s been taking over failing public schools in Chicago and replacing the entire faculty and staff over the summer. They created this model, called “turnaround,” in partnership with Arne Duncan back when he was CEO of Chicago Public Schools, and now it’s being held up as an example for other cities. An article in the February issue of Philadelphia Public School Notebook gives a brief history of turnaround in Chicago over the past six years.

Yesterday the Tribune reported that another round of school closings will hit Chicago Public Schools after this year, with four schools being shuttered outright, four being consolidated with other schools, one no longer accepting new students, and five being “turned around” by the Academy of Urban School Leadership or CPS’s Office of School Turnaround. We’ve put together a Google Map to help visualize the geographic distribution of the schools to be closed. As the map shows, the fourteen schools are mostly located on the South Side, with only three on the West Side and two on the North Side. Public schools blog District 299 has the full 54-page CPS presentation on the closings.