Month: November 2010

What Is Texas A&M up to?

Somewhere in America the president of a public university is getting hammered by the chairman of the board of regents. The hammerer—let’s say he owns a chain of automobile dealerships – is arguing that the president must get faculty costs under control – or else. “Admit it, John,” the chairman says to the president. “Your […]

The Wild, Ethically Dubious Allegations at Wesleyan

I first encountered Wesleyan professor Claire Potter at the tail end of the Duke lacrosse case. The self-described “tenured radical” published a post claiming that “the dancers” at the lacrosse team’s party “were, it is clear, physically . . . assaulted.” She produced no evidence for the assertion (perhaps because no evidence existed); indeed, even […]

“Bake Sales” Still Cooking On Campus

When the history of the decline and fall of the regime of racial preference is written, recognition will of course be given to the power of the moral, philosophical, historical, legal, and political arguments arrayed against the repugnant notion that benefits and burdens should be distributed on the basis of race. But it seems to […]

The Bill Ayers Decision and Conservative Misjudgment

A few months back, as readers of Minding the Campus likely took note, Education professor Bill Ayers popped up in the news once again. He had retired from his post at University of Illinois-Chicago, and the next step was to assume “emeritus” status. The title is granted by the trustees and usually follows without question. […]

College Is Cheaper Than in the Mid-1990s? No Way

By Andrew Gillen and Robert Martin The annual release of Trends in Student Aid and Trends in College Pricing are big news in the higher education world, and rightly so. Since Department of Education data often take a year or two to become available, these reports provide the earliest and most comprehensive preliminary look at […]

Are Blacks and Hispanics More “Holistic” Than Whites And Asians?

In “Rising Admissions Standards Have Kept Top Colleges Out of Many Minority Students’ Reach,” Peter Schmidt reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education on yet another study of blacks and Hispanics being “channelled” into less selective colleges. The most selective colleges have raised the bar for admission over decades in which more black and Hispanic […]

Seeing Ghosts in Class

The Chronicle of Higher Education has just added a new nail to the coffin of American Academia. Lax admission policies, politically correct texts, underpaid assistants who do the teaching in place of the big name professors busy on their next books, incompetent management, to name just a few liabilities, are wrecking the once-proud reputation of […]

The Douglas Debate–No Lincoln This Time

What’s in a name? A great deal, if it happens to be Stephen A. Douglas. A hundred and fifty years ago, Stephen Arnold Douglas was the most powerful politician in America. He had begun his political career as a hyper-loyal Andrew Jackson Democrat, snatched up one of Illinois’ U.S. Senate seats in 1846, and rose […]

‘Defend the Humanities’–A Dishonest Slogan

College foreign language and literature programs have been in decline for some time, first shrinking, then being consolidated with other departments, and now in a growing number of cases actually closed down. But the recent decision to eliminate French, Italian, Russian and Classics at SUNY Albany appears to have struck a nerve, and caused an […]

Can States Restrict Their “Supportive Nudges” to Graduate Students By Race?

In “A Supportive Nudge for Minority Graduate Students on the Path to a Ph.D.,” the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported on the Compact for Faculty Diversity‘s annual Institute on Teaching and Mentoring. The Compact for Faculty Diversity has what its web site acknowledges is “a simple goal: to increase the number of minority students […]

Kaplan University and the Short-Changing of Minority Women

The education of black and Hispanic women is very much at stake in the on-going controversy over for-profit colleges. A November 9th story in the New York Times by Tamar Lewin, “Scrutiny and Suits Take Toll on For-Profit Company,” documented potential abuses found at Kaplan University, one of the schools that disproportionately enrolls black female […]

Reducing the Cost of College

How many different ways are there for colleges to cut costs? A lot. At the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, we have identified 25 such ways in a book-length study. In Part 1, focusing on Using Lower Cost Alternatives, released Wednesday, we offered the following 5 suggestions for college and university administrators and public […]

Social Justice Art and Liberal Democracy

Michelle Kamhi is the co-editor of the online arts review Aristos, and a mild-mannered, well-spoken New Yorker with a love of art and intellectual integrity. She is also the cause of a heated controversy that has broken out in the world of art education. The source of this conflict is an op-ed Kamhi wrote in […]

Summer School on World Threats

Matthew J. Connelly, a historian at Columbia, is busy preparing for a second summer of scholarly doom. Last May, he presided over “Nuclear Summer,” an intensive 12-week course of study, research and collaborative writing about coping with nuclear proliferation and various nuclear scenarios. Next week, he is scheduled to announce that his 2011 summer course, […]

Minorities in College—Good News, But…

How are Hispanic, Black and American Indian students doing in college? The American Council on Education, which bills itself as “the major coordinating body for all of the nation’s higher education,” has just released its 24th annual report on the subject, titled Minorities in Higher Education. It provides valuable information, but the interpretations of the […]

Why the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative Was Needed

This week Arizonans overwhelmingly enacted the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative, which bans state and local discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, and sex in contracting, employment, and education – including racial preferences in university admissions. Opponents of such initiatives frequently claim that they are a solution in search of a problem, that the presence […]

Conservatives Love War, They Say

I write this on Nov. 2, before the election returns have come in. This morning at a weekly gathering at the James Madison Program, estimates of how many seats the Republicans would pick up in the house ranged from a low of 45 to a high of 72. Wherever it falls, as many have noted […]

Let’s Hear More About Teaching

In my last essay here, “This Is A Bold Plan For Higher Ed?”, I commented in passing that most books on higher education these days – including Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus’s Higher Education? – fail to address the real crisis in higher education: poor teaching. That prompted Ms. Dreifus to ask if I had […]

Student Apathy – Public Enemy Number One