Yes, there are cases of student councils refusing to translate progressive imperatives into University policy (less so, it seems than administrations) even, as we see today, at Brown. The Brown Undergraduate Council of Students voted against a resolution expressing support for the abrogation of Columbus Day as a University holiday by a a 21-15 margin. […]
Read More
Listen to our podcast of John Leo and Roger Kimball discussing the new edition of Kimball’s Tenured Radicals and the state of the modern university. – Sensationalist lure: one solution involves tanks.
Read More
The Center for College Affordability offers a great chart of the week, displaying the growth in the number of staff per student. At both public and private universities, the faculty numbers grew modestly, but were dwarfed by the change (1976 to 2006) in the increase in the number of “other professional” positions. Interestingly, private universities […]
Read More
As author of a major college guide, I try to approach college admissions issues from the point of view of what’s best for college-bound high school students and their parents. I speak with lots of such students and their parents every year, and the one topic that is guaranteed to come up is: What should […]
Read More
On Forbes.com today, Harvey Silverglate responds to a New York Times blogpost by Stanley Fish on Lawrence Summers, who may be president-elect Obama’s choice for secretary of the treasury. (We asked Silverglate to write it for us, but Forbes beat us by half an hour.) Silverglate did not much like Fish’s article, and we found […]
Read More
Peter Salins’s October 15 essay here , “Does the SAT Predict College Success?,” attracted attention from many quarters, including the New York Times. Today the Times’s op-ed page published a fresh version of the Salins piece, which reported that at the State University of New York (SUNY), the colleges that decided to require higher SAT […]
Read More
A just-released study from the University of California-Berkeley’s law school points out that the Law School Admissions Test, a sort of SAT for applicants to law school, focuses lopsidedly on takers’ cognitive skills while overlooking key non-cognitive traits possessed by successful lawyers. And no, that doesn’t mean an aptitude for ambulance-chasing or filing phony class-action […]
Read More
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s annual survey of executive compensation in Higher Education was released today, and, as usual, remarkable for its upper reaches. Median salaries at public universities increased by 7.6% in the past year, delivering such plum earnings as Ohio University’s $1,346,225 Presidential compensation, or the University of Michigan’s $760,196. Not so bad […]
Read More
Alexander McPherson, a Professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at the University of California: Irvine, is posing a test to the power of the University of California over its faculty members. They mandated that he attend a class on sexual harassment-prevention. He refused to attend. Six weeks ago, the University withdrew both his supervision of […]
Read More
The University of California raised no objection in 2004 when the California Assembly passed a law, AB1825, mandating that every employer of more than 50 persons provide sexual harassment training for all of its employees. Since then, I was occassionally advised that I was not in compliance with the law. I was warned that my […]
Read More
Of the many problems besetting higher education today, perhaps the most intractable is the incentives problem. On hundreds of campuses across the United States, thousands of college professors are being dragged away from their root educational mission. They serve as stewards of knowledge and trainers of citizens to come, but a binding demand makes them […]
Read More
I just noticed a recent Washington Post feature on study abroad in college. Several of the recollections are certainly worth a look. Of course, study abroad is not-at-all-trivially a money-making racket for U.S. colleges (if you haven’t heard, check out Peter Wood’s piece from last year) but several of the Post pieces offer eloquent testimony […]
Read More
Lawrence Summers will never escape his past. In 2007, when he was disinvited from a meeting of the University of California Board of Regents due to faculty protest, opponents identified him as a “speaker who has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia..” You won’t believe what they’re saying now that he might […]
Read More
Ivygate makes sport of the demise of the Harvard-philic 01238 magazine, and its soon-to-be-former list of top 100 graduates with a “best of the rest” list of grads. Where else to find Ted Kaczynski, Isoroku Yamamato, and Alger Hiss in the same number sequence?
Read More
Who are the smartest graduate students? You’ve probably already guessed that one: physicists. Second down in the brains ranking are mathematicians, then computer scientists, then economists and practically any sort of engineer. Such are the results of an analysis made in 2004 by Christian Roessler, a lecturer in economics at the University of Queensland, in […]
Read More
Apart from Barack Obama’s call for students who perform national service to receive a college tuition credit, issues related to higher education received scant attention in the 2008 campaign. Yet for those interested in meaningful reform on the nation’s college campuses, the election provides some intriguing possibilities—provided that Republicans move beyond the perspectives offered in […]
Read More
Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities, published in September to little fanfare, has caught on amid its intended audience: those who believe indoctrination of students is a figment of the conservative imagination and not really a factor on our campuses. The New York Times, calling indoctrination “an article of faith” among conservative critics […]
Read More
– After being offered and then denied an honorary degree by Northwestern University, Jeremiah Wright returned to speak at that institution on Friday, in a speech closed to media. The Daily Northwestern was there, and, while Wright’s remarks don’t seem to be particularly interesting, the opinions of students present clearly were. One attendee, echoing opinion […]
Read More
“Colorado First State Not To Reject Affirmative Action”
Read More
Brown Daily Herald: “Poll: Brunonians Think Highly Of Themselves.” Of course they do.
Read More
The ban is now behind by about 14,000, with 90% of precincts reporting. We’ll see if the remaining 10% can change anything.
Read More
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports (no subscription required). They provide an additional list of state referenda related to higher education. Several reveal a surprising new direction for education-financing: lotteries and taxes from casino gambling. That’s one way to do it, I guess.
Read More
Former Commissioner of Education Statistics Mark Schneider has caused a bit of a stir with a paper in which he argues that colleges are getting a free pass on a huge problem – a very high drop-out rate. Our colleges are failure factories for literally millions of students, Schneider says, and I agree. To be […]
Read More
Nebraska voters have approved a ballot initiative banning affirmative action, and Coloradans may do the same. As of 7:40 AM, CNN has the ban ahead 983,546 to 970,067, with 87% of precincts reporting). There’s victory for Ward Connerly, and hopefully soon two.
Read More
A Columbia Spectator editorial recently criticized the allocation of resources and publicity for the school’s Queer Awareness Month activities. Here’s the nub of their editorial: ..the organization largely focused on promoting events that emphasized sex over awareness. The Genderf**k party—where attendees donned only underwear—bore more of a resemblance to a raucous First Friday Dance than […]
Read More
Sad news: An Oregon judge has rejected a last-ditch lawsuit challenging the University of Oregon’s decision to discontinue men’s wrestling as a varsity sport as of last June. Although Oregon Circuit Judge Lynn Ashcroft, stated in his Oct. 22 opinion that the university’s decision to drop men’s wrestling was not “‘gender’ based”—rejecting a claim that […]
Read More
Are academic freedom and free inquiry “under many assaults” as a report at Inside Higher Ed alleges today? We think not. At a conference at the New School in New York City (“Free Inquiry at Risk”) historian Ellen Schrecker of Yeshiva University cited three examples of violated freedoms that seemed to remind her of Joseph […]
Read More
The Foundation For Individual Rights in Education is set to release (mid-day Friday) a compendious report by Adam Kissel on the Delaware Residential Life Program. If you haven’t followed this rank system of indoctrination (now happily suspended) the FIRE report is a comprehensive and sobering account of the roots and influences of the Delaware system. […]
Read More
The week is full of bleak educational news. Take a look: A Forbes story, “The Coming College Bubble”, forsees a world of trouble for Higher Education’s economic fortunes: According to a September 2008 study by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, of the 504 member institutions surveyed, one-third said the credit crunch had […]
Read More
To the surprise of few, donations from the Harvard College faculty in the presidential campaign have gone to Barack Obama over John McCain by a ratio of 20 to 1. A report in the Harvard Crimson said, “The words ‘liberal’ and ‘faculty’ seem to have been conjoined at the College for generations.” Nationally, academia has […]
Read More