The Huffington Post brings news of faculty complaints at Occidental College. The background: Several months ago, students filed an OCR complaint, alleging that the school’s process for investigating sexual assault complaints was so biased against accusers that it violated Title IX. That process (which nearly all news media ignored) denies the accused student a right […]
Read More
Writing at National Review Online about the recent release of SAT scores, Jason Richwine wonders whether all the fretting about low college-readiness rates among high school graduates really makes much sense. He links to an Atlantic Monthly story on the 2013 scores that bears the title “This Year’s SAT Scores Are Out, and They Are Grim.” Scores were […]
Read More
Many recent articles say the humanities are in deep trouble on our campuses. Minding the Campus asked seven prominent scholars to respond briefly to this question: “If you could change one thing about the humanities, what would that change be?” Here are the answers from Stephen F. Hayward, Samuel Goldman, James Piereson, Daphne Patai, Patrick Deneen, Peter Wood, […]
Read More
(A speech delivered September 19 at a symposium on “Religious Freedom Under Obamacare,” the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana.) * * * The official title of this talk, “New Gods on the Public Square,” is a cleaned-up version of what it would be at the New York Post, where I now work as […]
Read More
Some 200 Canadian and American men’s activists will gather this Friday at the University of Toronto, where they will be met by angry feminists dedicated to tearing down their posters, heaping abuse on speakers, blockading events and denouncing police as “f—ing scum” if they try to restore order. At least that’s what happened last November […]
Read More
Children of alumni have long enjoyed advantages in gaining admission to the most selective private colleges and universities in the United States–a practice rare in other nations and puzzling and unsavory to foreigners. If not as puzzling, legacy admissions are equally unsavory to many Americans, especially those who consider themselves “meritocrats” and those on the […]
Read More
Classes have started at CUNY, and at least one highly troubling event has occurred. Last week, NRO revealed that CUNY students and at least six members of the CUNY faculty union, the PSC, had descended upon the Macaulay Honors College campus to harass David Petraeus, a visiting professor at the Honors College this term. The […]
Read More
Reprinted from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette On Sept. 1, Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct professor who had taught French at Duquesne University for 25 years, passed away at the age of 83. She died as the result of a massive heart attack she suffered two weeks before. As it turned out, I may have been the […]
Read More
“Disrupting” may have had its day as a pervasive buzzword, claims Judith Shulevitz in The New Republic. It is or is soon to be toast as “jargon cluttering the pages of Forbes and Harvard Business Review” and as part of the title of many a TED talk. Disruptive used to refer to students and others who had impulse-control “issues” in class. It now […]
Read More
Several years ago, I attended a Liberty Fund conference where one of the readings was Edward Chase Kirkland’s Dream and Thought in the Business Community. What I remember most from the book is that many of the great business leaders of the late-1800s not only regarded college education as unnecessary for anyone who was looking […]
Read More
(Cross-posted from Open Market) Earlier, we wrote about the Obama administration’s attempt to inject a race-conscious “disparate impact” provision into colorblind anti-discrimination laws like the Fair Housing Act, and how that could lead to risky, race-conscious lending, bad loans, and future bank failures, mortgage meltdowns, and financial crises. Now, Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder highlights an […]
Read More
The “Massive” in MOOC refers to class size, but one might think it stands for cost savings as well. MOOCs are free for students who register and cheap for those who seek credit. Few colleges and universities plan to grant credit for MOOCs, but of those who do, the cost to the student is typically a […]
Read More
There are a number of college rankings. Of course, the best known by far is the U.S. News& World Report ranking, which for many people is the college ranking. (This year, Princeton edged out Harvard for bragging rights.) Forbes publishes another ranking, using an approach designed by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. (Stanford […]
Read More
“Study Gives Tenured Professors a Failing Grade” is the headline of a recent Walter Russell Mead blog post. The study shows that a Northwestern undergraduate in an introductory course is more likely to take another course in the field and perform well in it if his or her instructor is not tenure-track. That, according to […]
Read More
Surveys suggest, unsurprisingly, that most students go to college to acquire job credentials, not to pursue deep learning or ponder eternal truths. The biggest problem: that credentialing is extremely expensive–usually between $100,000 and $200,000–and doesn’t indicate much. Given today’s non-selective admissions policies, grade inflation and lax college academic standards, a college diploma doesn’t tell us […]
Read More
Google is always trying to expand our access to information, so it’s no surprise that it’s teaming up with the MOOC platform EdX to create Open EdX, a website that will open up the MOOC-building process to anyone with a message, an Internet connection, and a few pieces of hardware. “All of us are learners […]
Read More
More than 130 members of the Wellesley College faculty are protesting the potential dismissal of a dissident Peking University professor and threatening to challenge the formal partnership Wellesley recently signed with the Chinese institution. In an open letter, the Wellesley protesters noted that Peking University will sponsor a vote on whether to fire professor Xia […]
Read More
It was bound to happen sooner or later: an important committee at the University of Virginia (UVA) has recommended the de facto privatization of the institution. Specifically, “The University of Virginia and its supporters should initiate a process designed to change the status of the University from a state controlled…and supported entity to a state […]
Read More
What is “nonconsensual sex”? Rape, right? Not at Yale, where the term can be applied to a variety of acts generally accepted as minor offenses or non-offenses in the real world. Since 2010 Yale has become the national center of efforts to whittle away the due process rights of students accused of sexual assault in […]
Read More
This semester, Harvard Business School marks the 50th anniversary of the arrival of its first female students. Just in time for the occasion, the New York Times ran a lengthy front-page feature on a new experiment at HBS intended to boost the performance of female students, which has tended to lag behind that of the men. The article, by Jodi […]
Read More