John McCain and Barack Obama’s calls to Columbia to end its ban on the ROTC continue to yield procedural results, however much any real change remains in doubt. Columbia is set to feature two informational forums in coming weeks prior to a student survey on whether to lift or continue a ban on the Naval […]
Read More
Many of us are unfamiliar with the postmodern debating style on college campuses, but here’s how it works. A topic is picked. The skilled postmodern debater ignores the topic and instead talks about race, gender and personal feelings. This “freewheeling aspect is what makes debate so exciting and challenging,” says the Chronicle of Higher Education. […]
Read More
The Harvard Crimson today reports that, beginning in 2009, Harvard Law School students will no longer receive letter grades, and will instead be evaluated simply on a modified pass-fail system, consisting of “Honors” “Pass” “Low Pass” and “Fail”. Yale and Stanford have similar grading systems. An obvious point of objection was raised: According to Richard […]
Read More
Imagine for a moment that you are a senior professor at an elite college with a proud 200-year tradition in liberal arts education. You attend a monthly faculty meeting in the fall 2007 and find yourself for the first time in a quarter century surrounded by seventy or so undergraduate activists who are staging a […]
Read More
The “Diversity In Academe” issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education is out. And how is the quest for diversity going? Badly, as always. The number of Asian-American university Presidents remains insufficient, Middle Easterners aren’t considered an ethnic group, and paltry numbers of minority students study abroad. And those are just the minor problems. What’s […]
Read More
Brown University is famous for having the loosest graduation requirements in the Ivy League. In fact, there are almost no graduation requirements at all, for although Brown undergrads do have to major in something in order to qualify for a degree, they are free to design their own majors. As for anything else in the […]
Read More
A new issue of the Dartmouth Review, and with it, a revealing listing of Dartmouth’s worst professors. Here are some stellar academics: A self-described “recovering racist” who makes her classes into an airing of grievances rather than a study of literature because she “can’t read male authors anymore,” Grantham injects her writing courses with dogmatic […]
Read More
“Senior officials never discussed hippo phase-out” In case you were wondering.
Read More
Today’s New York Times features a front-page story focusing on academic centers devoted to Western thought, the American founding, and similar ideals, which naturally features our VERITAS Fund prominently. It offers several stories of what the VERITAS Fund is accomplishing. Here’s an example: Colorado Springs used its $50,000 grant to publish “A Free Society and […]
Read More
Harvard is replacing its “core” (a somewhat shaggy assortment of distribution requirements, in fact) with a set of “Program in General Education” guidelines. The program seeks to “connect a student’s liberal education.. to life beyond college.” It mandates one letter-graded half courses in each of eight categories: Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding; Culture and Belief; Empirical […]
Read More
A group called Strong American Schools has just issued a report with the provocative title Diploma to Nowhere. The report is a lavishly produced cry of alarm: our high schools are failing. Millions of graduates are tricked into thinking their high school diplomas mean they are “ready for college academics.” But they aren’t. As a […]
Read More
In every discussion of left-wing bias on college campuses, a good portion of faculty defenders come to the table with a blunt contention. There is NO bias, they insist. Sure, most humanities and social science faculty register Democrat, but it doesn’t much affect teaching, and besides, campuses have their fair share of conservatism and libertarianism […]
Read More
I just learned about your organization today, following a link from, of all places, the Chronicle of Higher Education. Thank you for what you are doing. As a voice crying in the wilderness, I find that many of the points being made on your site resonate with my own critiques that fall, inevitably, upon deaf […]
Read More
– The Engingeering Student Council at Columbia has advanced a measure to permit student petitions on issues. The Not only are Barack Obama and John McCain for the step, the Columbia Spectator is as well. Past polls revealed majority student support. Opposed? The faculty, the administration, and, in past forms, student government. – Richard Vedder […]
Read More
I certainly am. Those with narrower interests will be well-served by Popular Science’s recent “A Geek’s Guide to College.” What do you want to do in college? Shoot Particles? Try Stanford. Enter The Deep Freeze? Montana State has a -80 degrees Fahrenheit lab. Study Killer Bugs? Boston University. See, much simpler than defining “best.”
Read More
With its $34 billion endowment growing at the rate of nearly 20 percent a year thanks to astute investments, Harvard University is probably the richest university on earth. But that didn’t stop Harvard from raising its undergraduate tuition 3.5 percent for the 2008-2009 academic year, to a record $32,557. When you figure in room, board, […]
Read More
If you like “whodunit” books and “perfect crime” plots, I heartily recommend the Tim Groseclose experience of trying to obtain the data to evaluate the “holistic” admissions process of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Groseclose is the political science professor who blew the whistle on what he considers to be UCLA’s violation […]
Read More
Walter Olson tipped us off to this, at Point of Law: Paul Caron of TaxProfBlog has run the numbers on this year’s Presidential contributions (at least those coded “law professor”, which may miss some) and they’re even more overwhelmingly lopsided than you might have expected: 95 percent Obama, 5 percent McCain. At Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, […]
Read More
It’s hard to say just when universities ceased to believe that education was a worthwhile mission. But that they have done so is beyond question. Among many signs of this reality is the anxiety to redefine the university’s task. After all, educators who no longer expect or demand serious intellectual effort from their students are […]
Read More
Transgendered Students at Yale are pressing for gender-neutral housing, the Yale Daily News reports. Somehow, Yale, run by a Puritan cabal as it is, has failed to yet provide it, and cites further difficulties in moving forward with such a plan: Administrators say they remain committed to meeting the needs of their students and have […]
Read More
The public furor over textbook prices shows no sign of halting, as students part with ever-larger sums for books. Before petitioning congress, all should take a look at the burgeoning number of private options for used and cheaper textbooks. Charlotte Allen pointed out several here this summer. Additional options continue to spring up. – The […]
Read More
Fewer and fewer high school students are taking the SAT exam these days—possibly because fewer colleges are requiring the submission of SAT scores as part of the admissions process. According to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest), an organization that admittedly opposes standardized tests, only 46 percent of graduating seniors in the […]
Read More
The keynote speaker at Brown’s opening convocation this year urged that students, according to the Brown Daily Herald, “should not limit definitions of themselves to those imposed by society” that they “should they should use their time at Brown to forge their own values and determine their own priorities” and “the importance of independent thinking […]
Read More
1. Several colleges have refused to return the U.S. News surveys asking colleges for opinions of their peers. The obvious question is why “peer review surveys” on an institutional level were ever regarded as helpful? It’s one thing to ask a philosophy department for their opinion of their peers, but a whole university? The level […]
Read More
Tim Groseclose, a Political Science Professor at UCLA, has resigned from its Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations with Schools, stating that “a growing body of evidence strongly suggests that UCLA is cheating on admissions” – of course, in order to circumvent the state ban on the use of race as a factor in admissions. […]
Read More
We’ve documented the foolishness of most “Freshmen Reading” assigments in the past. Looking through the dreck, Charlotte Allen discovered a ray of hope in Cornell’s assignment this year of Gary Wills’ Lincoln At Gettysburg. Now that the assignent is completed, what did Cornell students think? The Cornell Daily Sun reports: “I thought it was awful […]
Read More
Some 128 college and university presidents have lent their names to a statement questioning the wisdom of the national 21-year-old minimum drinking age. This has re-ignited a long-simmering debate about our nation’s approach to the vexing problems of drunk driving and alcohol abuse. In 1984, Congress chose to attack these two related (but in many […]
Read More