The recent flap over Elizabeth Warren's claimed Cherokeeness has both raised and obscured a question at the core of debates over affirmative action: just who should receive the preferential treatment it bestows?

The standard answer to that question preferred by those who support the current regime of racial preference is "underrepresented minority," or URM, a term they think has the benefit of disguising their determination to award privileged treatment based squarely on race and ethnicity. New demographic data, however, now calls that designation into question and suggests that the preferentialists may need to devise a new dissimulation.

Continue reading "What's an URM and Who Is One?" »

(from City Journal, summer 1998)

Like many people, I can deliver a competent public speech without much fuss. But a commencement address is different. I can't recall stewing about a speech as much as I did before donning academic garb and talking at the St. John's College graduation in Santa Fe on May 17.

After all, student tolerance for these speeches is at an all-time low. It was low enough in our day. Nobody my age seems to remember a single thought expressed at his or her own graduation--or even the name of the speaker. But in our time, the residue of traditional formality seemed to protect even the most pedestrian speakers, who seemed unembarrassed about doling out 15 or 20 minutes of solemn advice on the proper way to chart one's life course.

Continue reading "If You Must Give a Commencement Speech..." »

(reprinted from Joe Asch's Dartblog)

While the College takes pride in extending generous financial aid to 57.4% of the student body, the other 42.6% pays full whack. That's an amazing thing when you think about it. The average American family income is $49,445, yet a great many Dartmouth families can pull together $62,125 (according to the recent estimate below by the College) to send a son or daughter to Hanover for three terms.

Continue reading "Dartmouth Costs $62,125 a Year" »

A central mantra of the PSC--the City University of New York's hapless faculty union--is a complaint about defunding CUNY, as part of an alleged plot (by whom and for what reason we never learn) to "defund" public higher education. Yet over the past several months, the most aggressive advocates of "defunding" CUNY have been none other than union activists, who have piggy-backed on sporadic student protests against mild tuition increases in an attempt to embarrass the CUNY administration.

Continue reading "A Stage-Managed, Occupy-Like Protest at CUNY" »

Philip W. Semas, president and editor in chief of the Chronicle of Higher Education, is irritated at the Wall Street Journal. On May 9, the Journal ran an editorial castigating the Chronicle for "craven-ness" in firing conservative blogger (and former Wall Street Journal editor) Naomi Schaefer Riley. She had argued in the Chronicle that college black-studies programs are little more than 60'-style radical advocacy and ought to be eliminated. What is fascinating about Semas's complaint, expressed in a four-paragraph letter published yesterday in the Journal, is that it continues a process of quietly shifting the reason for the firing away from Riley's supposed failure to meet "the Chronicle's basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles" (as a statement by Chronicle editor Liz McMillen declared). The likely reason for this shift: the Chronicle had never communicated any standards to its bloggers, as several media reporters have pointed out.

Continue reading "The Chronicle Can't Seem to Get its Story Straight" »

A new report from Demos, a policy and advocacy center, titled The Great Cost Shift: How Higher Education Cuts Undermine the Future Middle Class "examines how state disinvestment in public higher education over the past two decades has shifted costs to students and their families."

Continue reading "What Cost Shift to College Students and Parents?" »

Why did the Chronicle of Higher Education fire Naomi Schaefer Riley? Writing on the American Thinker site, Abraham Miller offers a deft and elegantly phrased explanation: "for revealing what almost everyone on any campus knows, but is reluctant to say, about black studies: it is a political cause masquerading as an academic discipline, and if there were real intellectual, and not political, standards on campus, it would be shut down."

Continue reading "Why She Was Fired" »