By John Ellis

All across the country there were demonstrations on March 4 by students (and some faculty) against cuts in higher education funding, but inevitably attention focused on California, where the modern genre originated in 1964. I joined the University of California faculty in 1966 and so have watched a good many of them, but have never seen one less impressive that this year's. In 1964 there was focus and clarity. This one was brain-dead. The former idealism and sense of purpose had degenerated into a self-serving demand for more money at a time when both state and university are broke, and one in eight California workers is unemployed. The elite intellectuals of the university community might have been expected to offer us insight into how this problem arose, and realistic measures for dealing with it. But all that was on offer was this: get more money and give it to us. Californians witnessing this must have wondered whether the money they were already providing was well spent where there was so little evidence of productive thought.

The content vacuum with filled with the standby language of past demonstrations, and so there was much talk of "the struggle," and of "oppression," and---of course---of racism. "We are all students of color now" said Berkeley's Professor Ananya Roy, and a student proclaimed that this crisis represented "structural racism." (Why not global warming too?) Berkeley's Chancellor Birgeneau called the demonstrations "the best of our tradition of effective civil action." Neither Chancellors nor demonstrations are what they used to be. The nostalgia for the good old days surfaced again in efforts to shut the campus down by blocking the entrance of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that the old "shut it down" cry was somewhat misplaced when keeping it fully open was what the present demonstration was about, but then this was not an occasion when anyone seemed to have any idea of what they were trying to achieve.

One group at UCLA stumbled into the truth, though it was a truth they did not understand. At Bruin Plaza a crowd chanted "Who's got the power? We've got the power." In its context this was just another slogan of a mindless day, but the reality is that those people do indeed have the power, and routinely use it in a way that makes them the author of their own troubles. Let me explain.

Continue reading "How the Campuses Helped Ruin California's Economy" »

By Charflotte Allen

It's back: the "campus rape crisis." The latest all-hands-on-deck alarm comes from the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), a nonprofit foundation based in Washington and specializing in what it describes as "investigative journalism about issues of public interest," which teamed up with the investigative unit of National Public Radio (NPR) to issue a report in late February pointing out---yet again--that "roughly one in five women who attend college" can expect to be a victim of rape or attempted rape by the time she graduates.

This extraordinarily high number, which translates into about 240,000 out of the 6 million or so women enrolled in four-year colleges during any given year, has been knocking around since 1987 (as Heather Mac Donald pointed out in a 2008 article for City Journal), when a University of Arizona Health professor, Mary Koss, first published a version of the statistic that was picked up in a Department of Justice study filed during the waning months of the Clinton administration. In other words, as KC Johnson pointed out in a post for Minding the Campus this past December, the average college campus is supposedly 45 times as dangerous for women as the city of Detroit, the highest-crime city in America, where the rape rate is only .06 percent.

Another problem with the CPI-NPR numbers: No police department or local prosecutor's office has reported a two-decade-long epidemic of rapes or attempted rapes on nearby college campuses. The rape-crisis people's explanation for this is simple: The vast majority of rapes and attempted rapes at colleges are never reported even to campus authorities, much less law enforcement---because the victims themselves are unaware that what happened to them was rape. The Justice Department's 2000 report maintained that 65 percent of college women who suffered sexual assault remain silent, a figure that the CPI inflated to "more than 95 percent" in its report. The CPI---and NPR---attributed the low reporting rates to the "failure" (as NPR writer Joseph Shapiro wrote) of schools and the U.S. Education Department to take significant steps to prevent, ferret out, or punish campus rape.

Continue reading "Is the Campus 45 Times as Dangerous as Detroit?" »

By Daniel Bennett

Thousands of students on more than a hundred college campuses joined together symbolically yesterday to protest sharp tuition hikes. The students pointed the finger at hard-pressed state and local governments. That was a mistake. State and local subsidies to public colleges and universities increased by 44% in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars during the 25-year period between 1982 and 2007. Had colleges managed to hold their cost increases to the level of inflation over this period, real tuition prices would be slightly less today than they were 25 years ago.

Why weren't the colleges able to do this? First, colleges are rewarded for fiscal irresponsibility and punished for not keeping up with Joneses. Because we collect very little information from colleges about student learning and educational outcomes, we know nothing about the actual value of the education taking place. So we are left to rely on arbitrary indicators such as price and prestige to decide which institutions are of the highest quality. College administrators understand this and are known to make decisions based on how it will impact their institution's prestige. The things that boost prestige (fancy dorms, state-of-the-art fitness centers, elaborate student centers, etc.) cost lots of money and do little or nothing to increase the quality of education. The colleges that avoid such elaborate upgrades in lieu of keeping costs down are perceived to be lower -class institutions. Call this the college arms race.

Next, there has been very little, if any, gain in productivity in higher education over the past few decades. Some evidence suggests that there has actually been a drop in productivity, while the information technology age has boosted productivity in nearly every other economic sector. Part of this is explained by the bureaucratic bloat on college campuses. Between 1987 and 2007, the number of senior administrators and professional support staff at public two- and four-year colleges increased by 84 percent, while student enrollment grew by only 37 percent. In this sense, administrative productivity dropped by more than 25 percent during this 20 year period, as the student-to-administrator ratio dropped from 24:1 to 18:1. Meanwhile, faculty teaching loads have diminished by a factor of up to two over the past two decades, while salaries have increased by at least the rate of inflation, not accounting for rising health care costs, retirement contributions and other forms of non-wage compensation. Rather than using technology to cut labor costs and improve employee productivity, colleges have expanded their staffs and seemingly ask less of each employee. Call this diminishing productivity.

Continue reading "Why The Student Protesters Are Wrong" »

Growing Anti-Semitism On The Campus

By Ron Radosh

The sad evidence that American campuses have been the site of rising anti-Semitism is truly an alarming phenomenon. Anti-Semitism has come from various sources: African-American student organizations; the Muslim Student Association at various colleges and universities, and the widespread movement on behalf of disinvestment in Israel, whose sponsors regularly compares Israel to South Africa, and advocate treating Israel today as the anti-apartheid movement treated South Africa decades ago.

But even more disturbing is the growing evidence that Jewish students are having a most confused response to this development. One has to look only at the announcement by J-Street- the self-described left of center antidote to AIPAC- that it would not call its campus chapters "pro-Israel" because that would limit their ability to gain members among Jewish students, as proof for how support of Israel is seen by many campus Jews as a position they do not wish to be identified with. The question that arises is what has happened to produce such sentiment?

Jewish students, like their non-Jewish counterparts, have grown up in a largely left-wing culture, in which the education they have received in high schools throughout the country, especially in the area of history or what used to be called civics, has been taught to them by teachers whose degrees are from left-leaning education schools. Or, perhaps, their teachers have been influenced by the view that the United States is the most evil nation in the world, which they in turn learned from people like Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky. It is therefore not surprising to find the names of familiar left-wing Jewish figures on the nation's campuses playing a prominent part especially in the disinvestment campaign. As Dennis MacShane, A Labour member of Parliament, put it in a 2007 Washington Post op-ed, "American universities have provided a base for Noam Chomsky and the late Edward Said, among others, to launch campaigns of criticism against Israel, and the bulk of the West's university intelligentsia remains hostile to the Jewish state."

Continue reading "Anti-Apartheid Week - 2" »

How About A Real Campaign Against Abuses?

By Alan M. Dershowitz

Every year at about this time, radical Islamic students---aided by radical anti-Israel professors---hold an event they call "Israel Apartheid Week." During this week, they try to persuade students on campuses around the world to demonize Israel as an apartheid regime. Most students seem to ignore the rantings of these extremists, but some naive students seem to take them seriously. Some pro-Israel and Jewish students claim that they are intimidated when they try to respond to these untruths. As one who strongly opposes any censorship, my solution is to fight bad speech with good speech, lies with truth and educational malpractice with real education.

Accordingly, I support a "Middle East Apartheid Education Week" to be held at universities throughout the world. It would be based on the universally accepted human rights principle of "the worst first." In other words, the worst forms of apartheid being practiced by Middle East nations and entities would be studied and exposed first. Then the apartheid practices of other countries would be studied in order of their seriousness and impact on vulnerable minorities.

Under this principle, the first country studied would be Saudi Arabia. That tyrannical kingdom practices gender apartheid to an extreme, relegating women to an extremely low status. Indeed, a prominent Saudi Imam recently issued a fatwa declaring that anyone who advocates women working alongside men or otherwise compromises with absolute gender apartheid is subject to execution. The Saudis also practice apartheid based on sexual orientation, executing and imprisoning gay and lesbian Saudis. Finally, Saudi Arabia openly practices religious apartheid. It has special roads for "Muslims only." It discriminates against Christians, refusing them the right to practice their religion openly. And needless to say, it doesn't allow Jews the right to live in Saudi Arabia, to own property or even (with limited exceptions) to enter the country. Now that's apartheid with a vengeance.

Continue reading "Anti-Apartheid Week - 1" »

By Charlotte Allen

Alan Michael Collinge is back in his gadfly role agitating against the student loan industry. Collinge is the author of last year's The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History---and How We Can Fight Back (Beacon Press) and founder of the website studentloanjustice.org, dedicated to, among other things restoring the bankruptcy protection for student loans that Congress removed for all but the most hardship-hit borrowers in 2005. Writing for the New York Times blog "The Choice," which deals with college admissions and financial aid, Collinge calls the federally guaranteed student-loan system "a predatory lending scheme" and argues that Congress should curb the Education Department's power (also granted in a 2005 law) to "extort not just the original principal and interest from borrowers, but also a massive amount in penalties fees and collection costs."

Collinge wrote his book from his own 20-odd years of disastrous experiences with student loans. He graduated from the University of Southern California in 1988 with three degrees in engineering and $38,000 in loan debt, an amount that ballooned to $100,000---still mostly unpaid two decades later---when he fell behind on monthly repayments after consolidating his loans with Sallie Mae (the nation's leading buyer of student debt) and penalties, back interest, and collection fees began to accrue with lightening speed. Loan consolidation often (although not always) means that graduates can lock in lower interest rates than they might otherwise pay, but it can also entail stretching out the life of the loan to as long as 30 years (the tradeoff is lower monthly payments). Collinge's New York Times blog dovetails with the Obama administration's goal of eliminating private lenders (banks, credit unions, and Sallie Mae) from the federal student-loan system and requiring all student borrowing to come directly from the government itself.

It's difficult to say whether Collinge, who, with his engineering degrees could expect decently paying employment, actually got a bad deal from the federally guaranteed system. For one thing, he took out his loans long before the 2005 law went into effect, although as early as 1976 Congress had placed some limits on using bankruptcy to get rid of student debt. One might also ask whether it was prudent for Collinge, if he was strapped for college money, to choose to attend an expensive private university such as USC rather than a cheaper state school where he would not incur so much debt. Furthermore, students who borrow from private financial institutions under the federally guaranteed system enjoy below-market interest rates (the Department of Education sets annual caps), a nine-month grace period after graduaton during which no payments are due, and an array of forgiveness and deferment arrangements if economic hardship forces borrowers to fall behind. For example, the going interest rate (according to Sallie Mae) on Stafford loans, products of one of the most widely used federal loan programs, is 6.8 percent, and the going rate for PLUS loans (products of another popular program) is 9 percent (the rates are even lower for students whose income qualifies them for a federal interest subsidy). Compare that to the 17.28 percent annual rate on credit-card debt, and the interest rate that Collinge agreed to pay on his consolidated loans (it's currently capped at 8.25 percent) could hardly be considered "predatory." It should be remembered, too, that student loans are unsecured loans (no mortgaged house, no car or other collateral) to unemployed or partially employed people who can be as young as 18. In other words, the loans are ipso facto risky, which is why government guarantees are an integral part of private student lending. A government guarantee means that taxpayers pick up the tab when a loan goes into default---so it is perhaps not surprising that Congress has made it difficult to cancel the loans in bankruptcy court.

Continue reading "Those Disastrous Student Loans" »

By Anthony Paletta

Should the American Anthropological Association "denounce the current human rights violations in Honduras" and "support Hondurans that... continue to resist the June 28, 2009 military coup in their country"? This question, put to a vote of AAA members, passed by a margin of 656-166 in online voting that ended last Friday. Taking a stand on a Central American coup may seem like an odd topic of concern for an academic organization. Increasingly it seems that no such organization is complete without a foreign policy of is own; from Iraq to Afghanistan to nuclear disarmament.

Organizations based on academic disciplines, traditionally balanced and detached from politics, have been sliding toward political advocacy since the 1960s. The American Anthropological Association was founded in 1902 to "promote the science of anthropology, to stimulate and coordinate the efforts of American anthropologists, to foster local and other societies devoted to anthropology, to serve as a bond among American anthropologists and anthropologic[al] organizations present and prospective, and to publish and encourage the publication of matter pertaining to anthropology". The relation of Honduran policy to this purpose remains unclear.

In 2006 the American Historical Association passed a resolution urging members to "do whatever they can to bring the Iraq was to a speedy conclusion." The resolution declared that "interrogation techniques at Guantanamo," "the re-classification of government documents" and other practices, were "inextricably linked to the war." It passed by a margin of 75% to 24%. The resolution flatly identified the war as a danger to the historical profession itself, asserting that the conflict and the Bush administration's related policies imperiled "the unfettered intellectual inquiry essential to the practice of historical research, writing, and teaching." On questions from the Iraq war to affirmative action to statehood for the District of Columbia and same-sex marriage, academic associations now regularly issue partisan resolutions that present opinions on contentious political issues as professional certainties.

Continue reading "Why Do Anthropologists Have Their Own Foreign Policy?" »

By Harvey A. Silverglate

In some quarters I'm viewed as a lawyer with a professional identity problem: I've spent half of my time representing students and professors struggling with administrators over issues like free speech, academic freedom, due process and fair disciplinary procedures. The other half I've spent representing individuals (and on occasion organizations and companies) in the criminal justice system.

These two seemingly disparate halves of my professional life are, in fact, quite closely related: The respective cultures of the college campus and of the federal government have each thrived on the notion that language is meant not to express one's true thoughts, intentions and expectations, but, instead, to cover them up. As a result, the tyrannies that I began to encounter in the mid-1980s in both academia and the federal criminal courts shared this major characteristic: It was impossible to know when one was transgressing the rules, because the rules were suddenly being expressed in language that no one could understand.

In his 1946 linguistic critique, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote that one must "let meaning choose the word, not the other way around." By largely ignoring this truism, administrators and legislators who craft imprecise regulations have given their particular enforcement arms---campus disciplinary staff and federal government prosecutors---enormous and grotesquely unfair power.

Continue reading " How Corrupted Language Moved from Campus to the Real World" »

By Richard Vedder

Middlebury College is expected to announce a plan to hold the annual rise of tuition to one percentage point above the inflation rate. This announcement will likely be greeted with praise. But why? Costs may be held down in comparison with other colleges, but the bedrock assumption here is a familiar one: tuition must go up each year; it's just a matter of how much. In hard times, other businesses cut costs and live within their means. Colleges and universities don't? And now we hear more calls for government to do something about it.

Like most economists, I do not like attempts of politicians and government bureaucrats to interfere in decisions of buyers and sellers by limiting changes in market-determined prices --minimum wage laws, rent controls and other intrusions into market processes inevitably lead to unintended consequences: higher unemployment, less housing and housing of poorer quality, etc. Thus I start out predisposed to oppose tuition fee caps such as introduced in many states. But my opposition to these caps has been reduced by the fact that higher education markets are hardly free of interferences to begin with, and government has contributed to tuition price explosion through its numerous ways of increasing the demand and reducing the supply for higher education services. Tuition caps at least temporarily force some universities to slow down a bit their inexorable tendency to increase spending, much of it on things at best tangentially related to the true mission of universities---disseminating and creating knowledge (e.g., the number of sustainability coordinators, public relations specialists, associate provosts for international affairs, etc. has grown dramatically in recent years).

Even these legally imposed temporary restraints on university desires to raise prices are often thwarted by various strategies - requiring kids to eat and sleep in university facilities and then raising room and board rates dramatically, or creating new fees (technology fees, lab fees, recreational center fees, parking fees, even charging more to buy soft drinks out of campus machines, etc.) But a recent article on "Inside Higher Education" suggests that tuition caps themselves are at best temporary----after periods of capping tuition, deals are cut to end the cap, and then fees tend to explode, reaching levels equal to what they would have been had there never been a tuition freeze. It is almost as if tuition fees are going to rise 3 percentage points more than the inflation rate, and nothing can change that. Call it the natural rate of higher education inflation.

Continue reading "Why Tuition Goes Up Every Year" »

By Charlotte Allen

President Obama has made reforming federal assistance to college students---with the aim of making it financially easier for more of them to obtain their degrees----a centerpiece of his administration's goals. In his State of the Union address on Jan. 27 he called for expanding the Pell grant program that currently serves about 7 million low-income college students, both by raising the maximum annual amount of the grants, currently $5,500, to $6,900 by 2019, and by turning the Pell program into a Social Security-style entitlement that would require Congress to allocate funds automatically to cover every student who qualified.

The rationale that Obama gave to Congress for the huge proposed boost in the size of Pell grants, outstripping inflation and accounting for a major portion of the president's proposed $77.8 billion in Education Department spending for fiscal 2011 (a 31 percent increase over fiscal 2010) is that "no one should go broke because they choose to go to college." That's a worthy sentiment, but it raises an important question: What exactly will a massive additional transfer of federal funds to college students accomplish? The Pell program already costs the government $18 billion a year (Obama's proposed changes would raise that amount to $30 billion), and another $92 billion goes to support the federal student loan program. Yet there's evidence that, while the cash infusions from the government, which date back to President Johnson's Great Society initiatives of the 1960s, have certainly boosted college enrollments, they have also contributed to skyrocketing college tuitions (a 500 percent increase since 1980, far outpacing inflation), along with generally dismal graduation rates indicating that for nearly half of all young people who enroll in college these days, the years they spend there are a waste of time and money, much of it taxpayers' money in the form of grants and loan assistance.

Yet the Obama administration seems determined to throw good higher-education money after bad, so to speak. In his State of the Union address, Obama also proposed making it easier for college graduates with low-paying jobs to pay off their federal loans. Their monthly payments would be limited to no more than 10 percent of their "discretionary income" (adjusted gross income that exceeds 150 percent of the poverty line), and after 20 years (10 years if they work in public service), all federal loan balances would be forgiven. Under current law (enacted by Congress in 2007) student borrowers already have a pretty good repayment deal in the federal loan system: Monthly payments can't total more than 15 percent of discretionary income, and loan balances are forgiven after 25 years. Obama's proposals would make the deal even sweeter, and also more expensive for taxpayers.

Continue reading "Should Pell Grants Be Entitlements?" »

By Ruth R. Wisse

On 2 December 2009 the curtain of Harvard's famed Agassiz Theater rose on a production of Avrom Goldfaden's Shulamis, one of the most famous plays in the Yiddish repertoire. An operetta set in the Land of Israel in late biblical times, it was last performed in Warsaw in 1939, and forcibly shut down by the German invasion of September 1. To stage the current production its co-directors, Debra Caplan, a Harvard graduate student of Yiddish and Cecilia Raker, an undergraduate concentrator in drama, assembled a cast willing to learn their parts in a language most of them had never heard. The directors kept all the musical numbers in the original Yiddish and used a new English translation for the dialogue, adding dancers to the production to compensate for the verbal delights an English audience would miss.

Of the dozen plays I had studied with these students in a course on Yiddish drama, Shulamis was by no means the most obviously appealing to contemporary taste. Its theme is trustworthiness: a young man Absolom neglects the vow of marriage he made to the rustic Shulamis, who endures bitter years of waiting until he repents the alliance he made instead and returns to her. Beneath the intricacies of the love story throbs the Jewish national motif of keeping faith with covenant. What most intrigued the student-directors was the moral and psychological fallout of such faithfulness: How do we account for the suffering of the woman Absolom marries, and for the death of their two infant children in apparent retribution for his sin? When Absolom leaves his wife and fulfils his promise, can an audience forgive him as fully as Shulamis does, and is the reconciliation at the final curtain really meant to erase the effects of those intervening years? The excitement generated by such questions among cast, musicians, technical crew, and among scholars and graduate students invited to participate in an intercollegiate symposium on the play seemed to bear out the website's claim for "a resurgence of interest in Yiddish among young people."

Much of that interest is currently stimulated by institutions of higher learning, like Columbia, NYU, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Stanford, Emory, Brandeis, and universities of Indiana, Michigan, Albany, and Texas, all of which offer programs in Yiddish. Harvard's current cohort of eight PhD candidates in Yiddish is its largest and liveliest since the inception of the program in 1993. Yet the field of Yiddish is hardly stable. The University of Maryland has just announced that it may drop its Yiddish position as a cost-saving device, sacrificing an apparently marginal subject---one unlikely to figure prominently in the college ratings of US News and World Report. The news from Baltimore generated anxiety in what had until recently been the expanding sphere of Yiddish studies. Comings and goings of faculty sometimes determine the status of the language, since many university positions in Jewish Studies are open ended, and shift their priorities according to the specialty of the person hired.

Continue reading "How Is Yiddish Doing?" »

By Frank Macchiarola

When talking with prospective students who are thinking about attending college, I often engage in a bit of "bait and switch." Many of them are interested in jobs that will come for them after college and so they look at what college is about in almost functional terms. "What job will I be able to get, and how much money will I be able to make?"

More than 45 years of teaching at the college and graduate school levels have taught me that they are really asking questions that are less important to them than questions they should be asking. Getting them jobs is not going to be the principal function of their college education. They need to obtain more than "training." They need to secure an education. And the job they work at after graduation is less important than the things they will learn about life itself during their course of study.

At one point in time the distinction between the question they asked and the response I gave was well understood by those of us in the academy. The good life that the students were seeking had to have room in it for reflection and understanding about themselves. The liberal arts provided that framework for their study. Now during this so called "jobless" recovery, with jobs being lost at an accelerating pace, the prospect of failure confronts these graduates who have believed that their worth has to be measured in terms of their capacity to work and to earn a livelihood. Jobs are not unimportant things, but they are not the complete picture. They do not tell the story of what the college graduates need to be successful. And if the capacity to obtain work is critical to their sense of self, then we are going to see many unhappy people in the country during what will be a protracted period of massive unemployment.

Continue reading "Is Education Just Training?" »

By Jackson Toby

This is an excerpt from Professor Toby's new book,
The Lowering of Higher Education in America (Praeger).

The balance between the pursuit of education and the pursuit of fun varies from college to college. Students in selective colleges and universities are less likely to goof off than in unselective institutions for at least two reasons. First, the selective colleges admit high-achieving high school graduates, the bulk of whom have the ability to meet high standards of academic performance. Second, a large proportion of their students are not content merely to graduate; they intend to pursue graduate work in academic disciplines or in professional schools.

When students in an undergraduate course are not motivated to do their reading assignments, whether it is a selective college or not, their professor can do little about it. Theoretically he could flunk half the class. In practice, however, the professor would fail only a few of them. (Failing half of the students in a class would be a public-relations disaster for the professor.) Thus, even in selective colleges, standards depend on what students are willing to learn as well as on what professors believe they ought to learn. The students in a class and the professor set the standards of academic performance by an implicit process of collective negotiation.

In the unselective colleges there is an additional complication: some students are so badly underprepared for college-level work that they cannot perform well even if they were motivated to do so. Here the negotiation process is affected by professorial resignation to the limitations of their clientele. Furthermore, some professors have ideological objections to failing students who have performed very poorly. Some believe that positive and negative sanctions (grades) do not work.

Continue reading "Goofing Off At College" »

By Charlotte Allen

College investments dropped 23 percent in 2009, the most disastrous year since the National Association of College and University Business Officers began compiling investment statistics in 1971. Two observations can be made about NACUBO's report, issued last week:

One is: The richer the institution, the harder the fall, generally speaking. Harvard, the nation's wealthiest university ($26 billion at the end of fiscal year 2009), lost the most: nearly 30 percent. Yale, second wealthiest ($16 billion), lost almost as much as Harvard: almost 29 percent. It was a dreadful investing year for nearly every college endowment manager in the country, what with the deep recession and the twin collapses of the stock market and credit markets in the fall of 2008. According to the NACUBO study, co-sponsored by Commonfund, U.S. colleges and universities lost a total of $93 billion in endowment value during fiscal year 2009. The average loss was 18.7 percent; in 1974, the second-worst year, endowments lost only 11.4 percent. Not one of the nation's five wealthiest universities, a group that included, besides Harvard and Yale, Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Texas System, bested that 18.7 percent figure (Princeton emerged at the top of the five, with its $13 billion endowment losing only 23 percent of its value in fiscal 2009, while Stanford lost nearly 27 percent and Texas nearly 25 percent).

According to a Jan. 28 article by Inside Higher Education's Jack Stripling, smaller colleges with lower endowments fared better than their super-rich cousins only---or at least mostly--because their endowments' relatively modest sizes barred them from either participating in the riskier investments such as hedge funds and private equity funds and also kept those schools from hiring the kind of sophisticated endowment managers who gambled their way into disaster. They were stuck, so to speak, with portfolios heavy on unadventurous investments in fixed-income securities and cash, which happened to be the only ones performing relatively well last fiscal year. After all, as Stripling's article points out, the wealthy elite institutions that lost the most remained just as wealthy and elite, comparatively speaking, as they had been before the rolling economic crash that began in 2007---in part because their high-risk investments had paid off royally during the boom years. They thus outpaced their smaller poorer cousins over the long run despite the devastating blows to the rich universities' endowments during the last two years. "Colleges with endowments over $1 billion have an average 10-year return of 6.1 percent, compared with 3.9 percent for the least wealthy," Stripling wrote---even though the 52 institutions that fell into that category suffered higher-than average endowment shrinkages of 20.5 percent during FY 2009, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Continue reading "Is an Endowment a Nest Egg or a Gambler's Stake?" »

By Peter D. Salins

Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University is a short, provocative book that raises many more questions than it answers. Its greatest contribution is that it clearly delineates the development of the American university from its origins in the late 19th century to the many absurdities that characterize it today.

Menand's exposition of the various key events and trends that have shaped the contemporary American university runs like a stream throughout the book's occasionally disjointed sections and chapters (the book is largely a compilation of lectures he gave at the University of Virginia). What we learn is that, for the most part, all of the key features of the American university as we know it today emerged full-blown in a burst of academic gestation over a single generation - approximately 1870 to 1900 - largely through the efforts of one man, Charles Eliot, Harvard University's president from 1869 to 1909. Although Menand reviews the important ways in which the American university has changed since then, describing some of the key twists and turns along the way, he stresses that much has remained the same - often for no particularly good reason.

Menand divides the American university's historical evolution into three distinct phases: a formative period running from its launch in 1870 under the influence of Harvard's Eliot through its institutional maturation in the 20th century up to the onset World War II; a "golden age" of rapid expansion in enrollment, funding and prestige that lasted from 1945 to 1970, a product of post-war population and economic growth and the cold war, heavily influenced by another Harvard president, James Bryant Conant; and a post-golden age phase taking us from 1970 to the present, that Frederick Hess (but not Menand) has aptly dubbed the "politically correct" university.

Continue reading "How the Universities Got This Way" »

By Ron Radosh

Howard Zinn's death yesterday affords us the opportunity to evaluate the remarkable influence he has had on the American public's understanding of our nation's past. His book A People's History of the United States, published in 1980 with a first printing of 5000 copies, went on to sell over two million. To this day some 128,000 new copies are sold each year. That alone made Zinn perhaps the single most influential historian whose works have reached multitudes of Americans. Indeed, Zinn found that his book was regularly adopted as a text in high schools and most surprisingly, in many colleges and universities.

One can easily summarize the argument Zinn makes in that book, as well as on his recent television special on The History Channel and soon to be released DVD, called "The People Speak." America, he charges, was guilty of waging war on those who really made the American nation: Native Americans, African-Americans, the working-class, the poor, and women. American history, as Zinn saw it, was that of a history of "genocide: brutally and purposefully waged by our rulers in the name of progress. He claimed that these truths were buried "in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth."

Zinn was aided in getting his book attention by two youthful neighbors, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. When both became movie stars, they used their celebrity to popularize Zinn's work and to help bring it to a wide audience. As Damon told the press recently, Zinn's message showed that what our ancestors rebelled "against oftentimes are exactly the same things we're up against now." Zinn himself added a few weeks ago that his hope was that his work will spread new rebellion, and "lead into a larger movement for economic justice."

Continue reading "America the Awful---Howard Zinn's History" »

By Daniel B. Klein

Two researchers offer a new twist on an old question---why do college professors overwhelmingly lean to the left? Bias against conservatives is not the main reason, nor are the allegedly higher IQs of liberals, say Neil Gross of the University of British Columbia and Ethan Fosse of Harvard. Instead they suggest a theory of "path dependence" --few conservatives are attracted to work in scholarly fields dominated by the left, just as few males want to be nurses in a traditionally female field. People tend to giggle when a man wants to become a nurse, they say, and conservatives tend to feel similar embarrassment in entering leftist academe.

This giggle theory underrates what leftist domination does to faculties. In the recent book The Politically Correct University: Problems, Scope and Reforms, Charlotta Stern and I discuss groupthink mechanisms. The majoritarian procedure of each department means that once a majority leans left, the department will tend toward leftist uniformity. The pyramidal structure of each discipline means that publication, awards, grants, recommendations will follow the pyramid's apex, and if the apex goes left it tends to sweep leftists/neuters into job posts throughout the pyramid.

If leftists have a lock on many fields, it means that non-left applicants will tend to be screened out. Awareness of that feeds back to the non-left student's thoughts about the future. Self-selection is a function of the screening.

Continue reading "Why So Few Conservative And Libertarian Professors?" »

By Mary Grabar

"Who are you kidding?" I wanted to get up and ask the English professor who was giving a talk at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association convention in November. He was analyzing a graphic novel, the spaces between panels, the line widths of the panels, the lettering inside the "speech bubbles."

Maybe he was trying to keep his job in a field that by job postings indicates increasing irrelevance. Students are leaving English departments in droves. "This is a profession that is losing its will to live," proclaimed William Deresiewicz, former English professor himself, in 2008 in the pages of the Nation, no less.

It's been a death by slow suicide. The reference to "spaces" coming from the podium was the same kind of self-abusive parsing, I had seen applied by deconstructionists in the 1990s when I was a graduate student. The depressed patient, failing to see any worth in his work, had leveled the greatest works to "texts." Reading between the lines of "text" has evolved into reading the gaps between panels: "Lots of stuff happens in that silent space," said the professor.

Continue reading "Death by Suicide: The End of English Departments and Literacy" »

By Cathy Young

The death of feminist philosopher, theologian and former Boston College professor Mary Daly earlier this month at the age of 81 received fairly little notice in the media. What attention Daly did receive, however, was almost entirely of the positive kind. Time magazine ran a short obituary by fellow radical feminist Robin Morgan, who eulogized Daly as "a fierce intellectual, an intrepid scholar, a wicked wit and an uncompromising radical" as well as "a central figure in contemporary feminist thought." A Boston Globe editorial called Daly "a fighter" as well as "a vital figure in feminism and in the recent history of Catholicism in America," while acknowledging that her radicalism was at times excessive.

Trained as a Roman Catholic theologian, Daly eventually became a self-proclaimed 'post-Christian' whose vitriolic anti-Catholicism went far beyond liberal demands for reform. She wrote, notably, that 'a woman's asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person's demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan.' She continued, nonetheless, to teach at Catholic Boston College for more than 30 years, despite openly deriding that school as 'a laboratory for patriarchal tricks.'

Daly's most notorious moment came in 1999, when she became embroiled in a controversy about her policy of barring men from her "Introduction to Feminist Ethics" course. A Boston College senior, Duane Naquin, complained. Since Daly's practices were a clear violation of one of the feminists' favorite laws, Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments - which forbids educational institutions that benefit from any federal funds to discriminate on the basis of gender, except for single-sex schools - the college ordered her to admit Naquin into the class. Daly discontinued the class instead. After a prolonged squabble, she either she either resigned (according to the college) or was kicked out (according to her).

Continue reading "The Death of a Radical" »

By Donald Downs

Cary Nelson, current president of the American Association of University Professors, has a new book dealing with academic freedom and its relationship to broader structural problems in higher education. No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom is interesting and important, but also frustrating. It provides remedies to the problems confronting academic freedom at the same time that it reflects some of the problems it purports to remedy. Nelson is compelled to criticize the nation's faculty members for their lackadaisical support of academic freedom at the same time that he feels obliged to vehemently defend higher education from critics who attack higher education for this very reason. Balancing these positions makes sense if one carefully distinguishes valid and invalid attacks, and Nelson often succeeds in doing so. But too often his defenses of higher education come across as special pleading for the professoriate as a class, thereby weakening his claims.

Once upon a time the AAUP was the nation's leading supporter of academic freedom. In recent decades, however, its prestige has slipped. A couple of years ago the Chronicle of Higher Education featured articles on this reversal of fortune, citing such matters as the AAUP's bureaucratic inertia, the association's perceived complacency about the chilling effects of political correctness, and broader trends in higher education that have made faculty members less knowledgeable and appreciative of the organization's efforts. Leaner and meaner, FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, founded in 2000 in Philadelphia) has replaced the AAUP as the nation's most vibrant fighter for academic freedom. FIRE is conscientiously non-ideological, but its eagerness to take on the policies of political correctness that suppress freedom has made it a favorite of the right in addition to the civil libertarian left.

Nelson's ascendancy to the presidency of the AAUP represents the organization's effort to regain its past glory. He is a prolifically published, self-proclaimed "radical" (for academic freedom and other causes), a claim that makes him a left-wing answer to FIRE in terms of commitment. Among Nelson's impressive list of publications we find Manifesto of a Tenured Radical and Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left. Nelson's left-wing legacy is important to his arguments because his approach to academic freedom is steeped in a broader leftist framework.

Continue reading "What Is The AAUP Up To?" »

By Charlotte Allen

Why do our for-profit colleges seem so disappointing? Why are they plagued by high levels of student debt, high loan-default percentages, dismal graduation rates, and third-rate reputations that lead some employers to reject their graduates automatically? Sure, back in the old days there were plenty of commercial schools whose sole raison d'etre was apparently to separate students from their money: those correspondence law schools that advertised on matchbooks and the art academies that would accept you if you could doodle a stick figure onto a restaurant napkin. But today the situation seems exponentially worse. Commercial colleges, which enroll 2 million out of America's 17 million college students, now seem to be not so much diploma mills as non-diploma mills, where the vast majority of enrollees pay tuition bills comparable to those at four-year public universities but never manage to graduate. Katherine Gibbs, for example, limped along for decades trying to offer alternate career training after the market for private secretaries dried up during the 1970s, then permanently shut its doors in 2009 amid complaints to state regulatory agencies about unqualified faculty members, shoddy and inadequate course offerings, and four-year schools unwilling to accept Gibbs transfer credits. The chain's redoubtable foundress must be turning over in her grave.

What happened? How did a for-profit college model morph into today's basement-reputation for-profit model, exemplified by Saturday Night Live's fictional "University of Westfield," where the students mainly learn how to fudge the fact that their degree are from the University of Westfield? I blame the corrupting influence of federal money, the easily available Pell grants and guaranteed loans that began to flow with the passage of the Higher Education Act of 1965. Easy federal money has contributed to a vast growth in enrollments at both non-profit and commercial institutions, a ballooning of tuition costs, and, in the for-profit sector, a focus not on the academic outcomes that might build a school's reputation as a selling point but upon getting as many bodies as possible into their classrooms.

Let's take the enormous---and vastly profitable--University of Phoenix, with its nearly 400,000 students in 39 states as well as online. Phoenix is regarded as one of the more reputable commercial schools, and it has gained respect over the last two years for issuing fairly candid reports about its strengths and shortcomings. Still, Phoenix and its parent company, Apollo Group, have had their troubles during the last decade---and recently entered into a $78.5 million settlement regarding allegations that Phoenix illegally paid cash bonuses and other gifts to recruiters based on the number of young people they signed up for classes. Phoenix derives an ever-increasing amount---more than three quarters during its 2008 fiscal year, according to a March article in Business Week--of its $3 billion-plus annual revenue from federal student aid. Ii's the biggest recipient of Pell grants in the nation. Yet Phoenix's graduation rates seem abysmal. According to the U.S. Education Department, only 4 percent of Phoenix's students who entered four-year-programs as freshmen graduated within six years, compared with 55 percent of students at non-profit four-year schools. And an executive-search company specializing in financial services told Business Week that a Phoenix degree didn't "add any value" to a graduate's resume.

Continue reading "The Failure Of For-Profit Schools" »

By Frank J. Macchiarola and Michael C. Macchiarola

Why do law schools charge higher and higher tuitions that keep outrunning the cost of living? In the two decades ending in 2007, according to the American Bar Association, the cost of attending the average private law school (including tuition and fees) more than tripled--increasing from $8,911 a year to $32,367. Unsurprisingly, the average amount borrowed by law students has risen just as dramatically. Last year's average private law student graduated with more than $87,000 in law school debt.

In trying to understand this phenomenon, many have blamed the American Bar Association's Standards for Law Schools. The ABA accredits 200 American law schools that adhere to the Standards and, by doing so, permit their graduates to sit for the bar examination in every state. These standards govern student's course of study, the law school's administration, the faculty's rights and obligations and the adequacy of the physical plant. Among other things, law schools are reviewed in a comprehensive three-day site visit with several visitors every seven years to maintain their accreditation.

Others, particularly law school deans, who face competitive pressures from other law schools, have blamed the U.S. News and World Report rankings of law schools. These critics believe the rankings spark a tournament of law schools to compete on the magazine's terms, often at great costs and at the expense of more student-centered activities. In a December 2009 report to the Congress, the General Accounting Office dealt, in part, with concerns that have been raised about how some of the accreditation standards of the ABA may affect the cost of law school.

Continue reading "Does U.S. News Make Law Schools More Expensive?" »

By Roger Clegg

Should universities weigh race and ethnicity in deciding whom to hire for their science departments?

The American Association for the Advancement of Science thinks so, according to a recent National Journal article. "Science and engineering should look like the rest of the population," says AAAS's Daryl Chubin, and if hiring decisions don't yield the right numbers, "somebody needs to pull the plug and say this has not been an open and fair search."

Taking steps to ensure that the best possible individuals apply and are hired is fine---indeed, that's precisely what the whole process should be about. Casting your recruiting net far and wide is a good idea, as is reassessing your recruiting policies to make sure that you are not overlooking good sources of candidates. Reevaluating selection criteria from time to time is, likewise, unobjectionable; if some criteria are weighed too heavily or not heavily enough, with the result that the best individuals are not selected, then that needs to be fixed. And, of course, everyone involved in the selection process, from beginning to end, needs to be told that the best individuals, regardless of skin color or national origin, are to be picked.

But it's clear that nondiscrimination is exactly what AAAS does not have in mind. The National Journal article says that it wants to "allocate additional slots to U.S. racial and ethnic minorities" and to protect universities from "likely lawsuits by groups seeking color-blind admissions policies." As the quotes above suggest, it is demanding that schools get their numbers right. It wants quotas, it wants race and ethnicity to be weighed when hiring decisions are made.

Continue reading "Another Bad Idea: ''Diversifying'' Science Faculties" »

By Charlotte Allen

Shortly after his inauguration in January President Obama announced a proposal to get rid of a 44-year-old program known as the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program. In the FFEL system, the federal government guarantees loans to students from private banks and similar institutions under a variety of programs (the best known is the so-called "Stafford" loan) to help pay for the students' education, whether at the undergraduate or postgraduate level. The idea behind FFEL, part of a massive piece of 1965 legislation designed to make higher education more attainable and affordable to larger numbers of Americans, is to encourage private lenders to extend credit for college to a cohort of society that would otherwise not qualify for loans that these days can total tens of thousands of dollars a year. In return for guaranteeing student loans against their borrowers' default, the U.S. Education Department charges the lenders modest fees and sets maximum allowable interest rates.

Under Obama's plan all students needing higher-education loans would instead obtain them through the William D. Ford Federal Direct Student Loan Program (Direct Loan for short), a Clinton administration creation of 1993 in which the U.S. Education Department itself lends money for post-secondary education. The only role that private banks and other institutions such as Sallie Mae (the formerly government-backed but, since 2004, completely private entity that currently originates about a fourth of all FFEL loans) would continue to play in student lending would be to service some of the loans under contract with the department.

The administration argues that eliminating private financial institutions as middlemen (until the administration embarked on its anti-bank stance Sallie Mae and other private entities accounted for 80 percent of the $92 billion federally subsidized loan market, and it continues to issue about 58 percent of those loans), would save the government $87 billion over the next 10 years in default payouts and interest subsidies to institutions that lend to students who demonstrate financial need. (For subsidized loans, the government pays the interest until the student leaves school; for unsubsidized loans, the interest accumulates, but the student is not obliged to make payments before leaving school, and there is also a variety of repayment and forgiveness plans geared to income levels after graduation.) Under Obama's proposal the government would use part of the anticipated savings to put another $40 million into beefing up funding for Pell grants, yet another federal aid program for college students launched in 1973 and named (in 1980) after the recently deceased Democratic Sen. Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island. Under the Pell program, which costs the government $18 billion annually, about 7 million low-income college students (the ceiling family income is $40,000) receive outright grants from the government (the current annual maximum is $5,350), to help pay for their college educations.

Continue reading "Waste And Folly In Student Loans" »

By Matt Shaffer

As the senior class of Yale College prepares for its final semester and reflects on the Bright College Years so swiftly gliding by, I have heard one phrase repeated with surprising frequency: "I wish I had done Directed Studies." It's a statement that doesn't accord with the stereotype of Yale seniors as either careerists shaking hands toward Wall Street or activists uninterested in the intellectual foundations of their slogans.

Directed Studies is a full year, freshmen-only Great Books program. The very short, very intense introduction to the Western Canon consists of three courses per semester--one in Literature, Philosophy, and History & Political Thought each. All students together attend lectures by professors like Harold Bloom, Dave Kastan, Donald Kagan, Charles Hill, and others less famous but equally revered by their students. Afterward, students break out into smaller discussion seminars.

The program has a reputation for being demanding, and a quick look at the syllabus shows why. The spring semester in Literature alone includes Don Quijote, War and Peace, Swann in Love, Paradise Lost, Faust, and more. The fall semester in History and Political Thought covers Thucydides' and Herodotus' histories, The Republic, Aristotle's Politics, Livy, Tacitus and Augustine! And both are just one out of three for the semester.

Continue reading "Yearning For Great Books" »

By Sally Satel

Imagine you are a sophomore in college. The semester has been academically overwhelming, and your girlfriend recently dumped you. One night it reaches crisis level and you go to campus mental health worried you might harm yourself. You volunteer to enter the hospital and are released a few days later feeling more hopeful.

Then your college tells you to leave school. Period. No formal evaluation of your mental health condition. No discussion with you. Just out.

According to a newly released report from the State of New Jersey called College Students in Crisis: Preventing Campus Suicides and Protecting Civil Rights, policies which allow or require removal based solely on the existence of suicidal thoughts or behavior may be increasing. They are premised on the need to remove the student from the stresses of student life and to motivate them to get the care they need.

In the wake of tragedies such as the self-immolation of a sophomore at M.I.T. in 2000 and the shooting spree at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 2007, concerns among administrators took on urgency. But lawyers argue that such blanket involuntary removal policies infringe upon a student's civil rights.

Continue reading "Expel Students Who Might Kill Themselves?" »

By Roger Clegg

Allegations of tenure discrimination have recently been leveled against Emerson College on grounds of race and against DePaul University on grounds of sex.

At Emerson, two black scholars were denied tenure, the local chapter of the NAACP became involved, and an investigation has been launched by the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination. The school has agreed to give one of the professors another shot next year, in exchange for dropping his complaint with the Commission.

Four women are challenging DePaul's tenure denial. They have a lawyer, have unsuccessfully appealed the denial to the school's president, and have now indicated that they plan to take DePaul to court.

In neither case has direct evidence of discriminatory intent been alleged, such as racist or sexist comments. Instead, statistical disparities of one sort or another are cited.

So, is there anything to these allegations?

Continue reading "Discrimination In Granting Tenure?" »

By Peter D. Salins

The Obama administration - along with many in the opinion elite - is looking to the nation's two-year community colleges as the primary vehicle to ramp up future Americans' level of post-secondary educational attainment. A down payment in this direction are the billions of dollars of direct and indirect community college aid included in the administration's "stimulus bill." However, before we get carried away with enthusiasm for community colleges as the best place to extend the frontier of higher education, there's a question to consider: how well have these institutions actually succeeded in their mission to provide an inexpensive but effective college education to our millions of academically under-prepared high school graduates?

A cursory look at the data is not encouraging. Although 41 percent of America's college-bound students enter community colleges each year , only 28 percent of this cohort actually complete their studies and earn a degree , an even more dismal outcome than that displayed at the nation's baccalaureate colleges, where 56 percent manage to graduate . These depressing statistics haven't dampened the general consensus favoring support of community colleges because proponents appear to believe that college "access" trumps successful college completion and that "some college is better than none." Refuting the latter point, U.S. community college non-graduates have only marginally higher earnings and lower unemployment rates than high school graduates and do far less well than their counterparts that manage to complete their studies .

The disappointing outcomes at community colleges are to some extent hard-wired into four aspects of their design. These institutions are proudly and aggressively "open admissions" which means that there are no academic criteria to get in except, in most places, a high school diploma. They are indifferent to the extent to which their students are diverted from their studies by work or other outside obligations, convinced that such distractions are an unavoidable and immutable aspect of "nontraditional" student profiles. Their abundant array of courses (including ones for English and math remediation that a majority of their students test into and often fail) are taught primarily by low-paid part-time faculty who have little time for interaction with students beyond classroom hours. Finally, community colleges view their mission in strictly vocational terms. They offer majors geared to every occupation that their "environmental scanning" process identifies as having job openings, while slighting the kind of general education offered by baccalaureate institutions that may contribute more to post-collegiate success than narrow (and quickly obsolete) occupational skill sets. While educators and the media tend to be scornful of the academic pretensions of proprietary, often on-line, "universities" like Phoenix and DeVry, the public community colleges are not operationally very different or in their academic results any more successful.

Continue reading "A New Kind of Community College" »

By Ward Connerly

As a regent of the University of California (UC), I voted against "fee" increases proposed by the administration as often as I voted for them, but with each vote I realized that UC was slowly moving toward the day when basic decisions would have to be made about how the university is financed, who can attend it, and what the public should expect from the institution. Well, that day has come; and the public can either dodge the issues or face them and try to craft a new relationship with UC.

Several days ago, the regents voted to increase fees by a whopping 32% - that's right, 32% - starting in the fall of 2010. Notwithstanding the predictable assertions about "quality" being threatened and the prospect of a "faculty exodus," with a loud voice, I would have voted against this increase. Not because the university isn't justified in raising fees to some extent, but because the economy is in the tank, many students' parents are unemployed and no business in its right mind raises its prices 32% under such a set of circumstances.

The operative word above is "business." The University of California IS a business that likes to operate as if it were merely a public service enterprise. It doing so, it gets to have the best of both worlds. As a business, UC chooses to compete with other businesses for talent - and seeks to compensate them accordingly. As a public service enterprise, the university expects to be subsidized heavily by the taxpayers - when we can afford it - and to have all of the protections and perquisites of a public corporation.

Continue reading "The Money Problem at U Cal" »

By Sandra Stotsky and Ze'ev Wurman

Every year seems to produce a burst of attention to a particular crisis in education. In 2009, the most publicized crisis is likely the staggering number of post-secondary students with severe debilities in reading and math. Estimates of those needing remedial classes before taking credit courses range from 30% of entering students to 40% of traditional undergraduates. According to a 2008 report by the CUNY Council of Math Chairs, 90% of 200 City University of New York students tested couldn't solve a simple algebra problem in their first class at a four-year college.

A 2004 U.S. Department of Education study reports that 42% of freshmen in public two-year institutions need remediation. While there are many adult (non-traditional) students in remedial classes, those 21 or younger make up approximately 80% of remedial class enrollment, according to a 2009 policy brief from the Charles Houston Center for the Study of the Black Experience in Education.

More than half of all college students will not earn a degree or credential, according to a 2009 Gates Foundation report drawing on national education statistics. For community college and low-income students, it notes, the numbers are much worse. Only about one-quarter of the African-American students who enrolled in a community college in 2004 graduated within three years. Immediate enrollment in credit courses that accumulate rapidly towards completion of a degree program is not possible for under-qualified young adults who need to spend at least part-time on remedial courses.

Continue reading "College Students Who Can't Do Math Or Read Well" »

By Barry Strauss

If there's anything uniting faculty on different sides of the aisle nowadays it's disapproval of large lecture courses. To the Left, lectures are authoritarian; to the Right, they are lowbrow. Better the egalitarian or members-only atmosphere of the seminar, they say. To anyone who is just "agin' the guv'ment," lecture courses suffer the stigma of administrative approval, because deans and provosts love lectures as cheap and efficient ways to deliver information.

That is, if the courses succeed: many alumni remember only the professor's yellowing notes or the students' back-row shenanigans and not any actual learning. Nor is the future of lecturing bright, according to some experts, who say that nothing so prehistoric as a lecturer's voice could possibly penetrate the digital habits of Generation Net.

But that's not been my experience. Course evaluations--and I've read more than a few--show that students love pointed, provocative well-delivered lectures. They appreciate and respect a master narrative (the Left's bugaboo), if only to give them something to rebel against. They can see through a professor's bias and they don't even mind it, as long as the professor acknowledges it. They appreciate common touches such as references to popular culture (the bane of the Right) as long as they are up-to-date. They want their electronic images, but not without a commanding voice behind them.

Continue reading "Big Is Beautiful" »

By KC Johnson

Thanks to the efforts of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education---and a rare, if welcome, instance of Congress standing up for students' rights in higher education---the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) abandoned its de facto "social justice" criterion. Yet while the development made it harder for Education schools to use "social justice" and "diversity" to demand ideological fidelity from students, the ideologues that populate such programs have hardly ceased their efforts. Only now they must take accountability for their actions.

A good example of the continuing problem is the renewed emphasis on "cultural competence"---a term, much like "dispositions," which is meaningless to anyone outside the academy but has a specific, and ideologically charged, designation to those familiar with Education code. Take, for instance, the Education Department at the University of Minnesota whose activities were exposed by Katherine Kersten in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Kersten uncovered a report prepared as part of the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, which is reorienting the U of M's teacher-training curriculum.

The intellectual interests of the report's authors not only preview the group's recommendations but also give a sense of what passes for the ideological mainstream in Education departments on the nation's college campuses. The work of Professor Tim Lensmire, who says that he uses the classroom to promote "radical democracy" through embracing "various progressive, feminist, and critical pedagogies," sets the ideological tone: Lensmire notes that his "current research and writing focus on race and education, and especially on how white people learn to be white in our white supremacist society." The report's other authors include Bic Ngo, whose research examines "the ways in which the education of immigrant students are shaped by dynamic power relations as they play out at the intersection(s) of race, ethnicity, class and gender" using "critical, cultural and feminist theories" to explicate "the role(s) of critical multicultural education"; committee chair Michael Goh, whose research explores "multicultural counseling"; and two non-tenure track figures, Mary Beth Kelley and Carole Gupton.

Continue reading "Decoding Teacher Training" »

By Naomi Schaefer Riley

Earlier this month a Maine parole commission accomplished what pleas from citizens and the governor of Massachusetts could not, in preventing the speech of a convicted terrorist at the University of Massachusetts. Widespread protest greeted an invitation by professors to Raymond Luc Levasseur, the leader of United Freedom Front, a violent anti-government group linked to some 20 bombings and the slaying of a New Jersey State trooper. What these protests could not stop, Levasseur's parole commission did. What was the University administration's catch-all defense of the event? Academic Freedom. The professors who invited Levasseur were entitled to host whomever they wanted in the name of "academic freedom and free speech."

We've seen this show before, of course. When a speech at the University of Nebraska by Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers was canceled last year, professors rose up crying that it was a violation of academic freedom. Of course, it's not only when visitors come that professors become interested in academic freedom. Ward "little Eichmanns" Churchill and Nicholas "a thousand Mogadishus" De Genova were also only exercising their academic freedom when they made their outrageous pronouncements. Arthur Butz, author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry, has been teaching at Northwestern University for more than 30 years, regularly exercising his academic freedom, for instance by congratulating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his Holocaust denying views.

Despite what seems like some pretty wide latitude for faculty, the American Association of University Professors is up in arms about recent attacks on academic freedom. They announced last week that they are launching a campaign to fight back. "The right of faculty members at public colleges and universities to speak freely without fear of retribution is endangered as never before," the AAUP said in a newsletter called "Speak Up, Speak Out: Protect the Faculty Voice on Campus." The newsletter urged faculty and administrators to adopt policies that would protect faculty who speak up (and out) on academic matters, university governance, teaching, research, and, of course, issues that have nothing whatsoever to do with higher education at all. Cary Nelson, the AAUP president, told the Chronicle of Higher Education, breathlessly, "One is only willing to play Russian roulette with a certain number of the chambers filled."

Continue reading "What Speech Is Protected?" »

By Adam Kissel

The University of Chicago met widespread national opposition ten years ago after it instituted a new, less demanding core curriculum to make way for more electives. It was part of a plan to make the curriculum significantly less demanding (more "fun") to attract more students and improve the school's bottom line. Instead of 21 required courses (in the quarter system), there became 15: six in the sciences, three in the social sciences, and six divided among the humanities and civilization studies. The changes were bitterly opposed when they became public, but too late. Over the past ten years, the university's curriculum has slouched farther toward mediocrity.

After 1999, a student could forgo the modern era in the humanities as well as one third of the education in a civilization that used to be required for a bachelor's degree worthy of Chicago's name. While students need not avoid such courses, they may, and many do. In the first year of the new curriculum, only about 20 percent of students chose not to complete the third quarter of their humanities sequences, and it was argued that most Chicago students could be trusted to take their education into their own hands. The situation today is not so rosy.

In 2007-2008, for instance, nearly 47 percent of students chose to abandon their humanities core sequence to study something else. Maybe they were leaving room for more electives or were making hard choices as they tried to fit the core into study abroad and early graduation. But the fact is that half of Chicago's undergraduates now choose to forgo a year-long sequence, which at its best weaves multiple common themes through various changes across the centuries, in favor of a piecemeal education. Some of the humanities sequences have shrunk on the presumption that they can only maintain about 22 weeks' worth of undergraduate attention. Why keep up an integrated three-quarter sequence if students treat the third quarter as an elective?

Continue reading "The University Of Chicago - What's Been Lost" »

By Judith Miller

An intense controversy has erupted over the efforts of Northwestern University journalism students to discover the truth about a 1978 murder case. The government is attempting to wrest sensitive information from the former students. At the heart of that contentious legal move is a deceptively simple question: were the 30 students who spent three years studying whether a man was wrongfully convicted of the murder acting as journalists or investigators?

If the students were acting as working journalists, as Northwestern University and their professor, David Protess, who directs the Medill Innocence Project, assert, they would be covered by Illinois's media shield law, which would bar the state from forcing them to reveal confidential sources or produce working notes and documents relating to their inquiries. But if they were "criminal investigators", as Cook County prosecutors maintain, they would not be covered by the state's shield law, and Protess and the college could be held in contempt of court if they do not acquiesce to the government's sweeping subpoenas for any and all unpublished student videos of their interviews with witnesses, interviews, notes and emails relating to their investigation, their former students' grades, grading criteria, performance reports, class syllabus, and expense reports.

Vowing to resist the subpoena, Northwestern and Prof. Protess, backed by many media groups, have decried what they see as the government's unwarranted "fishing expedition" into their students' sources and efforts to secure information about them that might violate their privacy under Federal law.

Continue reading "Were The Students Journalists Or Advocates?" »

By Charlotte Allen

In May the Illinois State's Attorney's office issued a stunningly unusual subpoena. It asked for the student grades, grading criteria, class syllabi, expense reports, and even e-mail messages of undergraduates taking an investigative reporting class at Northwestern University. The class tied into the Medill Innocence Project, a program administered by Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism that gathers evidence aimed at overturning wrongful criminal convictions. Over the following months the journalistic world has seethed with outrage at what seemed to be a best a fishing expedition and at worst an act of retaliation against the students for coming up with evidence that could free 49-year-old Anthony McKinney, convicted by a jury of first-degree murder and serving a life sentence without parole for shooting a security guard named Donald Lundahl in the face during the course of a 1978 armed robbery in Harvey, Ill., a Chicago suburb. An Oct. 31 editorial in the Washington Post stated: "These subpoenas -- and the stunning overreach they represent -- should be quashed."

Perhaps they should---although on Nov. 10 the state's attorney's office filed a 54-page document, complete with signed investigative reports, in which the office alleged that the Northwestern students gave money to two of the witnesses they interviewed (for a reporter to pay sources is regarded as highly unprofessional), including $40 to buy crack cocaine to a man named Tony Drakes in exchange for a videotaped confession to the murder in 2004. The reports also stated that students had flirted with several male witnesses (including Drakes) who then gladly told them what they wanted to hear; and that the Medill school refused to give prosecutors access to much of the students' notes and tapes, including all records pertaining to student interviews with a second man, Robert Magruder. According to Drakes's videotape, Magruder was supposed to have fired the fatal shot at Lundahl. (Both Drakes and Magruder denied involvement with the murder in more recent interviews with state's attorney's investigators.) The state's attorneys argue that the students enrolled in the course weren't functioning as reporters gathering news but as investigators for their professor, David Protess, who also happens to run the Medill Innocence Project. The tapes and notes they produced didn't result in the students' writing any news stories, even for Northwestern's student paper, the state's attorneys say, but rather, went straight to lawyers affiliated with Northwestern's law school who are representing McKinney in his quest for a reopening of his conviction.

Furthermore, accompanying the students during the 2004 interview with Drakes (and apparently in charge of the interview, according to the state's attorney's office) was a private detective, Sergio Serritella, whose LinkedIn page describes him as the CEO of Tactical Solutions Group, a private-investigations firm in Chicago specializing in criminal cases. (The Medill school says that Serritella, who works on and off for the institution, was along only to provide security, as Drakes had served time for a different murder.) In short, says the state's attorney's office, the students, even though they were enrolled in a journalism class, weren't entitled to invoke the protection of Illinois's shield law, which allows reporters to keep their notes and sources confidential.

Continue reading "Should J-Students Work For The Defense?" »

By Russell Nieli

Grade inflation is one of those realities of the post-60s academic world that most college teachers bemoan but feel powerless to do anything about. It is virtually impossible for any single faculty member to do much to stem the tide of ever rising grade distributions. If a faculty member refuses to go along with the upward shift in grades and gives his students lower grades than they would have received for comparable work in other courses, students will rightfully complain that to those reading their official transcript it will falsely appear as if they have done lesser work or achieved at a lower level in the hold-out grader's course than in other courses. Such faculty members will find many fewer students taking their courses -- including many conscientious and competitive students whom the teacher does not want to scare away. Worse still, since tenure and promotion decisions are often partially based on student evaluations and student enrollments that frequently reflect past satisfaction with a professor's grading policy, university teachers today pay a heavy price for bucking the inflationary trend.

Perhaps the best that a lone academic can do is represented by Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield. Mansfield can remember a time when the average GPA at Harvard College was around 2.5 on a 4.0 scale -- today it is about 3.5. The transition from C+ to B+ as the average grade has produced the ludicrous result that in some years nine in ten Harvard seniors graduated with official honors. For Mansfield the idea that grades should mean what grading keys still often say they mean -- i.e., that an A means "Excellent," "Truly Outstanding," a B "Very Good," "Above Average," and a C "Average" -- carries a good deal of weight. But implementing such a grading policy is impossible in a grading environment in which C grades have practically disappeared from most humanities and social science courses (representing less than 5 percent of the grades in some departments), and more than half of students in many Harvard courses receive A range grades. Mansfield came up with a creative solution that enabled him to avoid what would have been a bitter and ultimately futile struggle against the inflationary flood waters of the times without having to sing praises to the river gods. Mansfield has for many years now given his students two sets of grades, one for the official Harvard transcript, the other representing what the students really deserve on a non-inflated grading scale.

Does It Really Exist?

Some deny that grade inflation exists. According to these people -- usually students or their parents -- students are simply getting smarter these days, especially at the most prestigious colleges and universities which draw from a huge talent pool. The higher grades obtained at such places reflect genuinely higher achievement, these people say, just as the superior performance in track and field events at the Olympics represent genuine advances over earlier competitors, not changes in the evaluation metric.

But no college teacher with hands-on experience of the rising grades at the better colleges over the past several decades can take such claims seriously. Term papers of a quality that would have received a B or B+ in former times are now routinely given an A-, and with the near elimination of C range grades in many humanities and social science courses (except for failing or near-failing work), the B and B- grades have come to absorb everything that previously would have been awarded a C or even a D. To anyone with knowledge of an earlier period, it is clear that there has been both protracted grade inflation (higher grades overall for work no better than in an earlier period), and grade compression (almost all grades compressed into the A+ to B- range).

Continue reading "Princeton's Victory Over Grade Inflation" »

The president of the University of Chicago, Robert J. Zimmer, spoke at Columbia University on October 21st on the topic, "What Is Academic Freedom For?"

Minding the Campus invited several academics and other observers of the campus scene to post brief reactions to President Zimmer's remarks. The comments are from Peter Sacks, Erin O'Connor and Maurice Black, Adam Kissel, John K. Wilson and Candace de Russy.

Continue reading "Is Academic Freedom In Trouble?" »

By Peter Wood

(This is a response to Robert Weissberg's "Rescuing The University")

Professor Weissberg's "Rescuing the University" offers a compact assessment of the frailties of the movement to restore higher education to light and sanity. He also urges the merits of another, he supposes, untried approach. "Guerilla warfare" and "monastery construction" are the unflattering labels he affixes to some of the efforts he thinks futile. His dismissals strike me as too breezy. FIRE and the Center for Individual Rights, which he cites as among the guerilla forces, have some pretty substantial victories to their credit. Were it not for them, our nation's universities would be far more strangled by speech codes and systems of racial preferences than they are. It is easy to take their victories for granted or to sleight their accomplishments as falling far short of a re-conquest of the university for wholesome respect of academic principles, but I think Professor Weissberg's gloom gets the better of him here. Things could be worse. Much worse. Those organizations that pursue tactics based on challenging specific transgressions at specific universities have achieved not only tactical victories but have also kept alive ideals that were in danger of being smothered under the academic left's self-proclaimed "consensus."

Professor Weissberg cites Princeton's Madison Center and the Veritas Center as examples of "monastery construction." He could easily have expanded the list. (Here's NAS's count: There are now about 40 campus centers around the country that aim to keep the study of Western civilization and other major ideas disfavored by the establishment left alive during the dark-ish and still darkening age we inhabit. The National Association of Scholars has had a hand in founding many of them. Are they monasteries, holding out against the barbarian horde? We prefer to think of them as beachheads for faculty members and points of embarkation for students, who might never otherwise glimpse what the life of the mind is really all about.

Professor Weissberg dismisses these centers as weak, vulnerable to leftist take-over, and intrinsically unable to "restore the Enlightenment." Surely there is some truth to all three criticisms. But there is also something blinkered in the attitude. Many of the centers are thriving and are in fact lifelines to thousands of students. I wouldn't lightly brush aside the University of Colorado, Boulder's Center for Western Civilization, right there in the heart of Ward Churchill country. The Center for Political and Economic Thought at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania shows that a well-focused program can transform a whole college. Even centers that have hit rough sledding, such as the Hamilton Institute that had to set itself up off-campus near the uber-PC Hamilton College in upstate New York, have proven to be nimble in creating important debates in the face of complacent and self-satisfied orthodoxy.

Continue reading "Responding To Weissberg" »

By Robert Weissberg

Part II, The Solution

(The first part of this essay can be found here.)

Restoring good sense to universities means allowing levelheaded academics to compete with radical imposters who proliferate by printing up their bogus currency. In a phrase: restore the gold standard of discovering and imparting truth. It is unnecessary to re-write university regulations to stop Ward Churchills or stipulate "good" and "bad" scholarship (which, in any case, is legally impossible and futile). The radicals have created a huge infrastructure, everything from journals to foundations, which, together with skilled back scratching, permits them to multiply virtually unchecked. A well-funded counter-weight is necessary. This is not about re-stocking the university with right-wing professors. The aim is encouraging non-ideological, unbiased let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may research. To paraphrase Orwell, victory will be announced when a professor can stand before his class and say, without fear, 2 +2=4.

Research requires money, often relatively small sums, and these are often difficult to obtain for those with the "wrong" views. University research boards, the traditional sources of seed money, are often controlled by PC forces. My own personal experiences here was that no hare-brained leftish proposal, no matter how technically flawed, was denied, even when damned by reviewers. If endangered species faculty are denied support, they will be enticed away by rivals, so it is better to give $10,000 to study cross-dressing Latina truck drivers than recruit a hard-to-find replacement for the "unappreciated" scholar. This is just supply and demand. As for the legitimate researcher seeking funds, a single impassioned rejection is sufficient no matter how ideologically motivated.

Similar obstacles are encountered when appealing to large foundations---requests to fund project that might "offend" politically protected groups are probably DOA, and so unlikely to be submitted in the first place. More generally, and this certainly includes nearly all "right wing" foundations, few foundations favor small grants or small projects---processing is just too labor intensive. Better to give a million to a single program than tediously scrutinize hundreds of requests for $25,000 or less. The Olin Foundation's $25,000 for Allen Bloom's Closing of the American Mind is a rare exception but one worth emulating (even Olin favored large scale, institution-building investment, however). To my knowledge, the only conservative benefactor that currently plays this seed money role is the Earhart Foundation, but their resources are modest and, I am told, like Olin, they are about shut down voluntarily (Disclosure---I have received several Earhart grants).

Continue reading "Rescuing The University" »

By Robert Weissberg

Part I, The Problem

How is the university, specifically the humanities and social sciences, with its rampant anti-Americanism, anti-intellectualism, muddle-brained identity politics, hostility to the unvarnished truth and all the rest to be re-conquered and restored to sanity? As one who has spent four decades in the belly of the beast, half of which was resisting this pernicious stupidity, let me offer some observations and suggestions. They are especially directed to non-academics who badly want to help, willingly put their money where their mouth is, but, alas, are clueless. To cut to the chase, universities are the faculty, and without bringing in fresh blood or helping sympathizers already there, all else is ephemeral. To paraphrase the familiar real estate adage, its people, people, people. Warning: some readers sharing my views may find my remarks a bit upsetting.

Reform currently has three main elements, two of which thrive but, unfortunately, are unlikely to succeed; a third might be victorious but remains largely untried. I'll call them (1) guerilla warfare; (2) monastery construction; and (3) CIA-style covert funding.

Guerilla warfare is waged by groups outside the university. Some like FIRE and Center for Individual Rights combat legal abuses and rescue victims of egregious PC. Others like David Horowitz's Front Page, Campus Watch and Minding the Campus are of the sunlight-is-the-best-disinfectant school: expose the rascals in the hope that the chastised will repent. These hit-and-run tactics are absolutely vital, can be great though depressing fun, but will not restore reason since they leave faculty composition untouched, and without refurbishment, the abuses will grow only slightly less obvious. Nefarious deans will just become more media savvy and advise the local Ward Churchills not to put it in writing lest the dreaded Horowitz-the-Horrible (not to be confused with Leo-the-Impaler) discover it. And, sadly, many miscreants are often immune to the disinfectant, and not even being linked to Islamic terrorism embarrasses them.

The monastery approach creates campus sanctuaries promoting solid, traditional education, e.g., Princeton's Madison Center. This is what the Veritas Center is all about. Hopefully, a few hundred students a year now escape mumbo-jumbo PC and learn that Western Civilization had a virtue or two. As an "alternative university" (to use the left's 60s vocabulary) it is a wonderful (though frightfully expensive) enterprise but, here too, it will not alter faculty composition. These Centers cannot hire new faculty or award tenure to assistant professors. Today's PC universities would never allow such back-door conversion regardless of financial enticements. Radical faculty would be outraged at not having a finger in the pie and, rest assured, if they were consulted, the Monastery would be forcefully diversified and made multicultural. At most, university administrators will graciously permit wealthy benefactors "the opportunity" to donate a few million for an endowed chair for an already distinguished conservative tenured faculty member, so nothing new intellectually is added. At the margins newly created sanctuaries permit a few tenured professors to burnish resumes or gain some release time. But, at day's end, the PC fortress barely notices and if things got tough financially, radicals would shamelessly just confiscate everything. Sanctuaries may help survive the Dark Ages but they will not restore the Enlightenment.

Continue reading "Rescuing the University" »

By Charlotte Allen

Does a black professor deserve tenure because his college hasn't granted tenure to very many black professors in the past? To provide a role model for black students? To help the school achieve ethnic diversity faster than it otherwise might? To ensure that the proportion of black professors matches the proportion of black college students?

These are some of the issues raised by the supporters of Pierre Desir, a cinematographer and assistant professor of film at Emerson College in downtown Boston who was denied tenure in 2008. Emerson, founded in 1880 and with 3,200 full-time undergraduates and 900 graduate students, specializes in teaching communications and the performing arts (graduates of Emerson include Jay Leno and Norman Lear). Desir was one of two blacks up for tenure in 2008 after six years of teaching. Neither he nor the other black scholar, journalism professor Roger House, received tenure, although three white professors who were up at the same time did. As is the rule with tenure denials, both Desir and House were allowed to teach for a seventh academic year at Emerson (2008-2009) while presumably looking for other academic jobs. Both filed complaints charging Emerson with racial discrimination with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination this past May. Over the summer Emerson offered both men a second shot at tenure in 201l in exchange for dropping their complaints. House took up the offer and is back teaching at Emerson this fall. Desir refused and is currently living on unemployment.

Emerson won't discuss Desir's case, but it seems that the main reason his tenure bid was rejected by Emerson's arts dean, Grafton Nunes, and vice president of academic affairs, Linda Moore, was Desir's thin creative production---the equivalent of scholarly production for humanities professors--during his six years on the faculty. Over that time Desir completed a single 17-minute arty documentary about Thelonious Monk in 2006. He did, however, do the cinematography, his academic specialty, on four feature films, and he complained that it was unfair for Moore to ignore that work, which his tenure committee had considered sufficient enough to recommend the tenure that Nunes and Moore vetoed.

Continue reading "Tenure And Diversity" »

By Edward B. Fiske

The Times Higher Education Supplement has now come out with its sixth annual listing of the world's top universities. Harvard continues to top the list, followed by the denizen of that other Cambridge across the Pond, which has now edged out Yale. The big news this year: the number of North American universities in the top 100 dropped from 42 to 36 from last year, while Asian universities are coming on strong.

I typically react to such news items in three stages. First, OMG, American higher education is tanking. Then I begin to fear that U.S. News & World Report copy-cats are taking over the world. Then the left side of my brain checks in and I ask myself whether such international comparisons are worth the bother.

Let's take these reactions one at a time, not necessarily in chronological order.

Continue reading "The Rankings Go Global" »

By Donald Downs

"Student engagement" is a movement and a cause that has made steady progress on our campuses. According to Inside Higher Education, it has reached a "critical mass" of participants, though many in the world of colleges and universities are only half-aware, or perhaps unaware, of what the movement is all about. The National Survey of Student Engagement, an organization driving the cause, is at least partly a product of both a nation-wide administrative push and the nation's education schools. Student engagement activities, ranging from community service to deeper involvement in more academically-oriented concerns, are gaining more official status with the passage of each year. Last year, for example, leaders of the University of Wisconsin system declared their intention to require students to maintain a "second transcript" that tracks students' extra-curricular activities. Students would not be required to do anything, but such supplementary transcripts would become part of their record alongside the traditional academic transcript. Such pressure no doubt would compel many more students to enhance (or pad) their resumes, for better or for worse. (I raised many questions about this program here last year.) As far as I know, the program has yet to be instituted.

Robert Morris University, a private school of 4700 students in Pittsburgh, pioneered the next stage of development last month by establishing the nation's first known deanship to oversee the school's new Student Engagement Transcript program. According to another recent story in Inside Higher Education, the program "tracks and certifies a student's participation in faculty-sponsored extracurricular and co-curricular activities. Activities must fall in one of seven areas: arts, culture and creativity; "transcultural/global" experiences, which include studying abroad; research; community service; leadership; professional experience; and independent study projects." In addition to completing the requirements for traditional majors, Robert Morris University will now require freshmen students to "demonstrate participation in at least two of the seven categories in order to graduate."

Continue reading "The Problem With Student Engagement" »

By Sean McKitrick

President Obama's call for an increase in college graduation rates and the establishment of a $2.5 billion college completion fund begins to address a vexing issue for those of us employed in higher education, namely, how do we make the United States more economically competitive in a world that demands a well-trained, college-educated workforce? The president's call is welcome. Graduation rates need to increase, especially among under-represented groups and first-generation college students. If we want more Americans to become more competitive in a smaller and smaller "world village," we must pay attention not only to those who traditionally pursue higher education, but also to those who do not have such a tradition. No doubt, "a high tide lifts all boats."

However, this insistence on increasing the numbers of college graduates appears to overshadow a more overarching but simpler objective of higher education---to educate rather than graduate students. Consider two statements common in higher education, both of which I have heard in conversation, one with a student, the other with a faculty member (thankfully, not at my current institution, which clearly does focus on educating rather than graduating students).

The first conversation was with a paralegal student I advised when I was an academic dean at a two-year for-profit institution in the western U.S. The conversation went something like:

Continue reading "Be Careful What You Wish For" »

By Richard Vedder

Less than 60 percent of students at our four-year colleges complete their studies and graduate. That depressing statistic has drawn many critics, and now it has occasioned a book, Crossing the Finish Line, by three well-connected members of the academic establishment--William Bowen, Matthew Chingos, and Michael McPherson (hereafter, BCM). The authors obtained some data on individual student performance unavailable to most researchers, uncovered some interesting facts and made some worthwhile observations. The question is, how much light has this effort produced.

BCM base their conclusions largely on a sample of data from a few dozen public universities. Since they are writing about public education, it would have been useful if at least one of the authors had some experience, either as a student or professor, in such an institution at some point in their eight decades of accumulative academic lifetime. Unfortunately, none studied or taught at a public university, meaning that they are not likely fully conversant with the cultural differences between, say, the Ivy League vs. the California State university system. Interestingly, with one exception, even all the announced authors' book receptions are being held at such private establishment enclaves as Harvard or the Brookings Institution.

At the book's beginning, BCM talk about the importance of higher college graduation rates to America's continued economic and educational leadership. We learn that increasing graduation rates is critical in achieving the objective of much larger rates of higher education attainment. BCM give a lot of attention to what they term the "undermatching" of high quality students with lower quality institutions. According to them, in North Carolina alone in 1999 there were about 2,500 undermatched high school seniors. These undermatched students went to lower quality schools than their capabilities suggested were feasible (or to no school at all), and tended to have graduation rates that were perhaps 15 points lower than similarly qualified students going to top-flight public schools (adjusting for other characteristics such as socioeconomic status, the gap was typically closer to 10 points). Assuming the North Carolina numbers are representative of the nation, what these results suggest is that ending undermatching could raise the national graduation rate by something less than one percentage point (e.g.., from about 55 to perhaps 56 percent), a relatively trivial movement.

Continue reading "Why Don't More Graduate" »

By John McWhorter

While this year has become best known as the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, it was also forty years ago that the first African-American Studies department was established, at San Francisco State University.

Forty-one fall semesters later, there are hundreds of such departments. Has what they teach evolved with the march of time? What should the mission of a truly modern African-American Studies department be?

The answer common in such departments is that the principal mission is to teach students about the eternal power of racism past and present. Certainly it should be part of a liberal arts education to learn that racism is more than face-to-face abuse, and that social inequality is endemic to American society. However, too often the curriculum of African-American Studies departments gives the impression that racism and disadvantage are the most important things to note and study about being black.

Continue reading "What African-American Studies Could Be" »

By Edward Blum

As the saying goes, "fuzzy law begets controversy", and nothing has proven this maxim better than the Supreme Court's 2003 landmark ruling on "diversity" in higher education. Lacking clarity, the ruling has left individual institutions to interpret how to achieve diversity on their campuses, stoking never-ending conflict over race and admissions. However, a new lawsuit from Texas that is working its way up the appellate ladder---the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit Court of Appeals took the case this week--- may compel the justices to clarify---and limit---how race and ethnicity may be used in the admissions process.

Some background is in order. Six years ago, the high court handed down a decision from a University of Michigan case that addressed the use of race as a factor in university admissions. In Grutter v. Bollinger, a challenge to Michigan's law school admissions practices, the justices ended a debate that had bedeviled college administrators for decades by permitting institutions of higher education to employ racial and ethnic preferences in order to create a "diverse" student body.

The Grutter opinion was significant in that it held that the creation of a racially diverse student body was so beneficial to the educational experience of everyone that there was a "compelling state interest" to lower the admissions bar for some applicants, and raise it for others.

Continue reading "Deciphering Grutter V. Bollinger" »

By Judith Miller

Fourteen Columbia professors are protesting the university's apparent decision to award tenure to Joseph A. Massad, a controversial anti-Israel professor of Arab studies.

The professors are from the schools of law, business and public health. They expressed their concern in a five-page letter to the incoming Provost, Claude M. Steele. The letter asserts that the university's decision to guarantee Massad a life-time teaching post "appears to have violated" Columbia's own rules, thus raising profound questions about the university's academic integrity. The university's administration, weirdly, still refuses to confirm or deny that Massad won tenure, but yesterday the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department let the cat out of the bag---it announced a beginning-of-term party next week congratulating Massad on gaining tenure.

This week Provost Steele belatedly issued a polite, noncommittal response. In a four-paragraph "Dear Colleagues" letter to the fourteen professors, Steele, a former Stanford psychologist, says he would "welcome" a meeting to discuss their concerns. After he learns more about Columbia's tenure process, Steele writes, he may "want to make some changes in our procedures." But nowhere does he state that Massad has, in fact, been awarded tenure. Nor does he acknowledge that the professors raise deeply troubling concerns, that if true, go to the heart of what many regard as the core of a university's integrity.

Continue reading "Massad Got Tenure (Don't Tell Anyone)" »

By Edward B. Fiske

Test prep pioneer Stanley H. Kaplan, who died this week at the ripe old age of 90, was a living embodiment of the roller coaster changes that have roared through the college admissions scene over the last three decades. He also set the stage for students, and later colleges and universities, to game the system.

Kaplan began his career intent on showing how the SAT, designed in such as way as to preserve the elitist nature of U.S. higher education, could become a vehicle for broadening access. In doing so he helped unleash forces leading to the current situation in which working the system is the norm for both institutions and applicants alike. Stanley Kaplan got the car rolling, climbed aboard and had one heck of a ride.

I first met Stanley Kaplan at an academic conference in the 1980s. He was the last person I would have picked out of the crowd as a test prep baron whose name was anathema to college admissions officers. He was short, gentle and avuncular in manner and, as I recall, dressed in what seemed to be battle fatigues. He was a born educator who wrote in his autobiography that "while other children played doctor, I played teacher." It was Stanley Kaplan the teacher who began tutoring students for the New York State Regents exams in the basement of his Brooklyn apartment and giving them a shot at higher education.

Continue reading "Gaming The College Rankings" »