Inside Higher Ed had a brief notice yesterday, “Worldwide Gender Gap in Academic Salaries in Science,” that, though accurate as far as it goes, is revealingly, almost humorously, incomplete and misleading. Here is the IHE piece in its entirety: A worldwide analysis by Nature of the salaries of men and women in academic science has […]
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Ponder this: According to the most current Supreme Court authority, a group of students can form a local chapter of a violent national organization, refuse to promise that they won’t disrupt the campus, and still have a right to be recognized by the university. At the same time, however, if the university has a certain, […]
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My last post looked at the latest troubling educational initiative from the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U). The organization is especially pernicious not simply because of its agenda—which is, after all, quite mainstream in the contemporary academy. What distinguishes the AAC&U is its contempt toward students at non-elite schools, its belief that such […]
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Connecticut’s Quinnipiac College, best known for its political polling, is now at the center of the newest round in the controversy over Title IX and women’s sports. In a trial that opened last week, a federal judge must decide whether competitive cheerleading should count as a sport for gender equity purposes. The case illustrates the […]
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Few higher education groups have as pernicious an agenda as the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The diversity-obsessed organization combines an unrelenting campaign against quality—especially at schools whose student bodies are more middle- or working-class—with an Orwellian tendency to use words to describe their opposite. Beyond this pattern, AAC&U initiatives tend to have […]
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Almost every morning, after taking a shower, I get on the scale to see if I have lost some of the extra weight that I do not want or need. I have tried many ways of shedding the pounds, with diet and exercise at the top of the list. The pounds refuse to disappear. After […]
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The U.S. soccer team surprised most viewers by tying its first-round World Cup game with soccer-powerhouse England 1-1—and then tied Slovenia 2-2 in a match that many said the Americans should have won except for a bad referee call. Furthermore, the US.-U.K game, televised on ABC, drew 14.5 million viewers, a record for a first-round […]
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Federal subsidies long ago achieved the goal of making higher education more attainable for students from middle- and lower-income families. Yet such programs cloud the fact that good politics often tend to represent bad economics. In this case, government efforts have reflexively ushered a generation of students down a one-size-fits-all conveyor belt that has too […]
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In 1977 the great mathematician and teacher Morris Kline published an indictment of academe in a book aptly called Why the Professor Can’t Teach. Kline not only blamed “the overemphasis on research” as the “prime culprit” for the poor quality of undergraduate education, he also blamed professors—especially tenured professors—for ignoring their “moral obligations to students” […]
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To continue the commentary on the Cry Wolf project . . . In the final sentences of the story on the project at InsideHigherEd.com, Peter Dreier offers this remarkable defense of the plan: “‘This is legitimate work,’ he said, and the essays will be scrutinized for accuracy.” In other words, the results will undergo careful […]
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The review board of the UC Berkeley campus police has issued a 128-page report on the violent student protests of last November, criticizing actions by campus police and the University administration. The introduction and summary are here and the full report is here. Coverage of the report by the AP and The Daily Cal are […]
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The “Cry Wolf” project, launched by a group of academics, plans to pay for research papers useful for liberal causes. That sounds harmless, but as KC Johnson argued in his posts here on the project, it boils down to commissioning scholarly work meant to reach a pre-determined result. Before any evidence is gathered, both the […]
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Inside Higher Ed took a look at the controversy over the “Crying Wolf” project, in which a committee consisting mostly of academics will pay for works of “scholarly integrity” dealing with contemporary public policy issues. Scholarly “integrity,” in this case, means reaching the conclusion before assembling the evidence. Defenses of the Wolfers, alas, confirm critiques […]
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President Botstein’s portrait of Bard College’s summer reading assignments in the context of the college’s curriculum and larger educational aims is winsome and compelling. The college leads its students astutely into reading important books. It attends to the order in which such books should be read—Virgil before Dante. It is mindful of the need to […]
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Every ideology has its factual holes. The press of ideas and values highlights certain facts and obscures others, and when the ideology grows in force in local settings, those obscured facts disappear entirely, or even turn into outright falsehoods in the eyes of the “ideologues.” George Mason economics professor Daniel Klein and Zogby International researcher […]
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In the wake of the National Association of Scholars’ report on summer reading for college freshmen—the report found many of the assigned books trivial and politically one-sided—we asked Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, to explain his institution’s unusually rigorous approach to summer reading. For the past two years, Bard College has asked first-year students […]
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Academic freedom carries with it rights as well as responsibilities. The concept derives from the belief that academics, because of specialized training in their subject matter, have earned the right to teach their areas of expertise and to follow their research questions as the evidence dictates—free from political pressure from the government. Indeed, only through […]
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The indispensable Erin O’Connor, writing this morning on her web site, Critical Mass, discusses an astonishing memo from Peter Dreier of Occidental College and two other progressives seeking “paid academic research” that can “serve in the battle with conservative ideas.” The project, sponsored by the Center on Policy Initiatives in San Diego, will pay fifty […]
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Sparks were few at this season’s commencement speeches, and so were remarks inspiring much enthusiasm or objection. Protests arose, as they always do, whether of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie at Monmouth College (for state Education budget cuts), Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren at Brandeis (for assorted Israeli actions), or Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit at Columbia’s […]
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It’s a well-known fact that there’s a severe gender imbalance in undergraduate college populations: about 57 percent of undergrads these days are female and only 43 percent male, the culmination of a trend over the past few decades in which significantly fewer young men than young women either graduate from high school or enroll in […]
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What books do colleges and universities ask incoming freshmen to read over the summer? “Beach Books,” a study by the National Association of Scholars, has an answer: it turned up 180 books at 290 institutions and concluded that the book choices are unchallenging, heavily pitched to themes of alienation and oppression, and overwhelmingly reflect liberal […]
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In a recent article for Career College Central, I discuss the negative implications of the Department of Education’s (ED) proposal to alter the gainful employment rule to restrict the amount of money that a student could borrow by program of study and expected entry level occupational earnings. I identified three major flaws with the proposal. […]
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An Inside Higher Ed article yesterday by English professor Satya P. Mohanty of Cornell on “Diversity’s Next Challenges” constructs an elaborate house of cards but then inadvertently knocks the whole thing down. The piece features, in particular, an argument suggesting that “stereotype threat”—the claim that fear of being judged by a stereotype can cause minorities […]
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