The Common Core State Standards have their critics, left and right, and some of the objections are worth listening to. Although the Common Core train has left the station, we still don’t know whether it will reach its destination of producing more literate and knowledgeable citizens. So it would be useful to have an informed debate about […]
Read More
By Greg Lukianoff and Ari Cohn The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) receives countless requests from professors claiming that they’ve suffered in hiring and promotion because of their political or personal viewpoints. These cases are notoriously hard to prove and to win–and that’s why University of North Carolina-Wilmington professor Dr. Mike Adams’ court […]
Read More
If you take a train from Spain to France, you’ll halt at the border, exit the train, and board another train on the other side. The stop isn’t an exercise in border security. There’s a much smaller reason: 237 millimeters, to be exact. In Spain, most trains run on a gauge of 1672 millimeters, while in […]
Read More
A freshman in a sociology class at the University of Wisconsin (Whitewater) recorded “a guest lecturer denouncing many Republicans as racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, and dishonest.” To his surprise, he–rather than the Republican-bashing lecturer–became the issue. Since the 1970s, the university has required permission to record and distribute classroom discussion, and now seems bent on […]
Read More
For decades critics have lamented that big time college sports have a corrupting influence on college and university campuses. Big time sports push aside the educational goals of the university, recruit athletes to campus who have little interest or aptitude for learning, turn football and basketball coaches into national celebrities, and in general create a […]
Read More
BuzzFeed is uncritically fascinated with “rape culture.” Combine that with Occidental, a college where a male student can be branded a rapist even if his partner says “yes,” and the result is an article by Jessica Testa. Her BuzzFeed article, which reads as if it comes from the Onion, provides an unintentional commentary into how […]
Read More
Here’s some more evidence for those who wonder whether a college degree is “worth it.” The online job portal CareerBuilder announced last week that more employers are requiring their employees to hold an associate’s or bachelor’s degree. 27 percent of the surveyed employers said that they increased “educational requirements” for obtaining a job in the past five years, […]
Read More
If you’re interested in the worrisome growth of student debt, check out my new essay for National Affairs. I explain how the student debt crisis came about, explore some of the suggested reforms, and offer my own solution. In short, I argue that the federal government should stop calculating loan awards on the basis of individual colleges’ cost of […]
Read More
E21 The excitement of the NCAA tournament continues this weekend with the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight, but the final four schools in terms of athletic subsidies have already been decided. While all of their teams lost in the second round of the basketball tournament, the universities of Massachusetts Amherst, Delaware, Western Michigan, and New […]
Read More
The Gettysburg Address is just over 300 words long, while the Declaration of Independence is 1,137 and entire U.S. Constitution is 4,400 words. But the Obama Administration’s new rules pertaining to “gainful employment,” applicable to many higher-education institutions, including virtually all “for-profit” ones, run about 185,000 words and 841 pages, slightly longer than the Bible’s […]
Read More
The reason that Sandra Y.L. Korn’s article in the Harvard Crimson went viral is that she audaciously wrote what so many sophisticated Americans now think: that “academic justice” should be privileged over “academic freedom.” The Harvard undergraduate contends that self-evidently unjust opinions contradicting both the findings of academic studies and politically correct university policy should be banned […]
Read More
From Volokh: A patient police interrogator tries hard to draw some common sense from the mind of a feminist studies professor.
Read More
A philosophy professor and a journalism student are involved in an unusual he-said she-said sex case at Northwestern. The student filed a federal Title IX lawsuit last month, alleging that professor Peter Ludlow sexually assaulted her two years ago and that the school took no disciplinary action, despite finding that he had engaged in “unwelcome and inappropriate […]
Read More
Cross-posted from SeeThruEdu New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently set off a firestorm by saying he wants to reintroduce state-funded college classes in state prisons. He wants classes in 10 prisons as a trial. Such classes were defunded in the 1990s. Meanwhile bipartisan federal legislation would give time credit for prisoners in education programs. Cuomo’s proposal does raise interesting […]
Read More
Cross-posted from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity The subject matters of arts and humanities, like philosophy and English, are often viewed as being too far removed from daily life to be useful outside of the academic world. Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, claims that a student not in a STEM field […]
Read More
Anyone who follows the contemporary media closely is doubtless familiar with the suddenly ubiquitous phrase “rape culture.” In the context of higher education, the phrase implies two interlocking beliefs. First: despite crime statistics showing sexual assault (as well as all violent crimes) to be very uncommon on campus, colleges and universities are, in fact, hotbeds […]
Read More
Changes in the SAT, announced on March 5 by the College Board, adjust the test to the ongoing decline in the nation’s public schools. The new test lightens vocabulary and math and eliminates the penalty for bad guessing. The new SAT grows out of and accommodates the Common Core State Standards, the controversial set of […]
Read More
A college commencement is a splendid time to celebrate student achievement. But it’s “disinvitation season” again, as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education observes: the time when intolerant students and faculty advocate against their school’s choice of commencement speaker, sometimes causing the speaker to be disinvited. These power-hungry protesters demonstrate how little they have learned […]
Read More
This week I watched the eighth and final set of lectures for “Introduction to Sustainability,” the Coursera MOOC I’ve been taking and chronicling over the past few weeks. This week’s topic was “measuring sustainability.” Seated before a camera, a photo of Utah’s Arches National Park behind him, Professor Tomkin opened his lecture just as he’s […]
Read More
More often than one might think, Americans on the “Right” agree with Americans on the “Left” when it comes to higher education. A few years ago, the Pope Center hosted an event that brought together three critics from each wing of the political spectrum to explore the intersection of their views. I suspect that there will be […]
Read More