Andrew Breitbart has shot onto the media-and-politics scene in the last two years with several well-publicized stories and controversies. What many people may not realize is the extent to which Breitbart’s adversarial approach to the media was formulated out of his college education. When Breitbart sat down with Peter Robinson for his show Uncommon Knowledge […]
Read More
A huge brouhaha has erupted over the release and interpretation of data about the faculty of the University of Texas, centering on whether a relatively few individuals are doing most of the teaching at the system’s flagship institution, UT-Austin. Two reports drew most of the fire, one by my organization, the Center for College Affordability and Productivity […]
Read More
It seems only yesterday that a few colleagues and I gathered every night in the back of the newsroom of New York Times, then on West 43rd Street, to create the first edition of the Fiske Guide to Colleges. It’s hard to believe that the appearance of the 2012 edition this month marks the 30th […]
Read More
It’s no secret that America’s colleges and universities have become bastions of political rectitude. This is often attributed to the left-liberal political orientation of the faculty. Typically, however, the administration, not the faculty, is the driving force behind efforts to promote campus diversity, to build multicultural programming and to regulate campus speech. The president of […]
Read More
In his blog commentary, KC Johnson of Brooklyn College questions the results of a new American Historical Association survey, which found that more historians are focusing on diplomatic and military history than in recent times. “In contrast to critics (including me) who have suggested that the profession has aggressively diminished approaches to history deemed ‘traditional,’” Johnson […]
Read More
Last week, the American Historical Association released a members’ survey regarding how historians classify themselves. In contrast to critics (including me) who have suggested that the profession has aggressively diminished approaches to history deemed “traditional,” Inside Higher Ed reports that “designations of military history are up by 39 percent over the decade, for instance. Diplomatic […]
Read More
The firing of a controversial aide to the University of Texas system has triggered a full-blown debate over the productivity of teachers and whether “star” professors who teach few classes are really worth the cost to the public. Rick O’Donnell, dismissed on April 19 after only 49 days on the job as special adviser to […]
Read More
Robert Klein Engler, an adjunct professor at Roosevelt University, told a small joke in his “City and Citizenship” class in 2010: “There was a sociological study done in Arizona, and they discovered that 60 percent of the people in Arizona approved of the immigration law and 40 percent said, ‘no habla ingles.’” His class was […]
Read More
By Jonathan B. Imber Until 1969, on the campus where I teach, all students were required to take two semester s of Bible, which made the Department of Religion a central force in the life of the institution. When I arrived twelve years later, with no Bible requirement any longer in place, the only remnant […]
Read More
At Stanford, according to the “alternative misconduct review process” guidelines offered on the university’s website, a student accused of sexual misconduct doesn’t have the right to cross-examine his accuser–or any other witnesses in his case. He cannot offer exculpatory evidence on his behalf, but can only “request” that the university’s assigned “Investigator contact individuals who […]
Read More
I recently posted an essay here about a racial hoax at the University of Virginia Law School that quickly became an issue implicating the University’s honor code. Briefly, Johnathan Perkins was an attractive third year UVa law student from what could be described as a civil rights family inasmuch as both his father and grandfather wrote […]
Read More
Reprinted from City Journal. California’s budget crisis has reduced the University of California to near-penury, claim its spokesmen. “Our campuses and the UC Office of the President already have cut to the bone,” the university system’s vice president for budget and capital resources warned earlier this month, in advance of this week’s meeting of the university’s […]
Read More
The cost of higher education in America spirals out of control. Tuition and fees have increased fourfold in real terms in the last two decades, far outstripping the rise in the cost of medical care. At the same time, the quality of instruction plummets, thanks to declining standards, grade inflation, and the hollowing out of […]
Read More
The Chronicle of Higher Education has published the results of
Read More
English professors have long been straying far afield from literary studies, expanding into women’s studies, disability studies, ethnic studies, even fat studies. Recently they have migrated into animal studies. An ambitious professor might be working on a paper for “Cultivating Human-Animal Relations Through Poetic Form,.” a panel scheduled for the November South Atlantic Modern Language […]
Read More
It’s a constant skirmish between donors seeking to fund specific scholarly projects at universities and the universities’ administrators, who would typically like to see as much of that money as possible go to “unrestricted” uses–that is, whatever the administrators, not the donors, deem the best use of the funds. And nowadays, with universities’ endowment values falling during the […]
Read More
Jamie Kirchick pens what’s likely to be the definitive account of Yale’s controversial decision to terminate the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism (YIISA). Kirchick convincingly demonstrates how a toxic combination of anti-Israel sentiments from some key faculty members combined with Yale’s desire to cultivate Middle Eastern donors (as part of the university’s […]
Read More
For yet another glimpse of what’s wrong with higher education, read “Teaching Them How To Think,” the story of George Plopper, associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. After attending a conference on teaching and learning in 2004, Plopper had an epiphany of sorts, and now uses Bloom’s Taxonomy to assess […]
Read More
What you may have heard coming out of Nashville recently is not the twang of country music but the shrill trill of academic controversy provoked by the decision of historically black Tennessee State University to eliminate two programs from opposite ends of the curriculum, physics and Africana studies. According to Inside Higher Ed, Administrators said the reorganization […]
Read More
A divided three-judge panel from the 6th Circuit has issued a remarkable decision striking down the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, which prohibited state institutions from contracting.” In 2006, Michigan voters had approved the measure, by a 16-point margin. Voters in other blue states, such as California and Washington, have endorsed similar measures. Judges Guy Cole and […]
Read More