John Silber was not a humble man. In 1996, when he moved up from the presidency of Boston University to the chancellorship, he likened his successor to Joshua and himself to Moses, the only man, according to the Hebrew Bible, who saw God face to face. Today it’s hard to image a college or university […]
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Harry Lewis, a professor and former dean of Harvard College, wrote yesterday that the texts Harvard freshmen are reading this year “are more politically correct and less challenging than they used to be.” Yes, it would seem so. Here are this year’s readings: A More Perfect Union, Barack Obama Whistling Vivaldi , Claude M. Steele Choosing the Color […]
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The party’s over for community college students in California, notorious for large numbers of young and not-so-young people using the low-cost system to drift in and out of classes, fill up their time while looking for something better, or simply find themselves. The Board of Governors of the state’s cash-strapped two-year system has decided to get […]
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The most shocking thing about the Harvard cheating scandal was not that 125 students out of a class of 279 were found to have “committed acts of academic dishonesty” on an exam last spring, or even that the exam was for a course that was supposed to be an easy mark. It was that it […]
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Shirley Tilghman, who has just announced that she will step down as president of Princeton at the end of the academic year, was chosen as the successor to former president Harold Shapiro in part because the powers that be thought it about time that the university had a female in that office. She was the […]
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The Daily Texan has reported that a conservative student group at University of Texas-Austin has inaugurated a “watch list” containing the names of professors who “politicize the classroom” and squash “dissenting opinion.” The chapter of Young Conservatives of Texas describes the list as an information resource, providing information on wayward instructors before students sign up […]
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The current conversation on higher ed reform coming is unusually platitudinous even for an election year. This was clearest earlier this year during the battle between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on the proposed federal student loan interest rate, a subject fairly inconsequential in larger problem of sky-high college costs. In his Democratic nomination acceptance […]
Read MoreHarvard’s Dean of Freshmen Thomas Dingman has managed to circumvent the brouhaha he created last year with his “kindness pledge.” To recap: In the fall of 2011 Dean Dingman drew the wrath of former Dean of Harvard College Harry Lewis, as well as the mockery and criticism of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education(FIRE) […]
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It probably had to happen. The conversion of campuses into luxurious spa-like retreats started at elite and well-heeled institutions and has now spread to smaller, lesser-known colleges. The newest student residence at Saint Leo University in Florida houses nap pods, an electronic gaming area with four flat-screen televisions, a workout area and an arcade complete […]
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I’ve written before about the Pathways plan, a sensible proposal to create a common core curriculum at the City University of New York (CUNY). It has been sponsored by the administration of Chancellor Matthew Goldstein and approved by the CUNY Board of Trustees. The extraordinary–and student-unfriendly–process that currently exists at CUNY contradicts the vision of […]
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To the student tired of politically correct speech, whose soul longs for the free pursuit of truth, take heart! There are support networks that bring together like-minded students around conferences, seminars, reading groups, scholarships, and grants. Take a look at a sampling below. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute inspires students to discover, embrace, and advance the […]
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The University of Chicago hit two mile-markers in its decade-long transformation this week. The first, generally celebrated by students, alumni, and their parents, is a new high-water mark in the school’s US News & World Report ranking. The University now shares the fourth spot with Columbia, rising from 12 a few years ago and leapfrogging […]
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In a story helpfully marked “Not the Onion,” Gawker reports that Toronto’s Ontario College of Art and Design is requiring students to purchase a $180 art history textbook that has no images of art at all. The father of one student says the publisher of the book, Global Visual and Material Culture: Prehistory to 1800, […]
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Bruce Bawer’s new book, The Victims’ Revolution: the Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind, arrived on the front page of the “Back to School” issue of the New York Times Book Review. Any author of a book on higher education would have to be delighted to be awarded such prominence. The review itself, […]
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Using federal statistics, Laura Norén has prepared a series of graphics showing gender distribution among recent recipients of undergraduate, M.A., and Ph.D./professional degrees. The charts are visually striking, especially since all three sets of charts show movement in an identical direction. According to Norén, by 2020, women are projected to earn 61 percent of all […]
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Concordia University in St. Paul made news by cutting regular tuition costs by a hefty 33.7 percent–$10,000–leaving students to pay $19,700 if they receive no assistance or discounts. But the reduction disguises a fact true at Concordia and at most every other private schools: up to half of undergraduates don’t pay the full fee. At […]
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The University of California (UC) has put the kibosh on plans to set up National Dream University, a low-cost, low-admissions-standards college where illegal immigrants were to be trained in activism on behalf of…illegal immigrants. National Dream U. was supposed to be a collaboration between UCLA’s Center for Labor Research and Education and the union-subsidized National […]
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On September 12, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing that focused on the subject of unionization of graduate students. Inside Higher ed covered the story. Here is the issue. Private colleges and universities are subject to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which permits employees to seek to unionize through […]
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Political scientists Gary King (Harvard University) and Maya Sen (University of Rochester) recently produced a working paper titled, “The Troubled Future of Colleges and Universities.” Everyone interested in higher education should read it. The paper is instructive for those who want to understand how little most academics understand the crisis universities face. The problems with […]
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Universities are in the knowledge business, and the creation and dissemination of it is at the very core of what colleges do. Yet some forms of knowledge about higher education itself are either unknown, or hidden from the public. Why? Release of the information would prove embarrassing and possibly even costly to the school. 1. […]
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There are certainly some good reasons for some people to take the U.S. News college rankings seriously. Presidents of schools that went up a notch or two can trumpet the fact to their trustees while noting modestly, of course, that “we don’t really pay them any heed.” But if you are a college-bound student or […]
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Near the beginning of Bruce Bawer’s strong new book, The Victims’ Revolution, he talks about the anti-American attitudes that are nearly mandatory on campuses today and how they radiate throughout our culture. Those attitudes, inculcated by so many professors, range from apologetic and guilt-ridden to outright contemptuous and reflexively supportive of our enemies. The incredibly […]
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The vast majority of American colleges and universities make admission decisions without considering the financial need of applicants. Only a handful of private institutions admit their entire first-year class need-blind and then fully meet the financial need of all of their admitted students through a combination of grants, loans and employment opportunities. These institutions tend […]
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Untraditional students seek higher education because they hit a wall. Once they’ve committed themselves to obtaining a degree, however, they often hit another wall: the archaic “credit hour” rules enforced by the U.S. Education Department that demand extended time in classrooms and discourage self-study and flexible online offerings. Amy Laitinen of the New America Foundation […]
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After pushing freshmen to “pledge” to official Harvard values last year, this year the college is training students that there is One Right Ethical Way to Live Here at Harvard. “We did not have [freshmen] sign pledges,” Dean of Freshmen Thomas A. Dingman told The Harvard Crimson for a Sept. 7 article, “but we pushed every bit as hard on how […]
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Given all the cases that FIRE has handled over the years that display the same mistake committed by university administrators over and over again, one has to wonder how FIRE staff can avoid a permanent state of exasperation. How many times do they have to say “You cannot base speech policies on the response of […]
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As the 2012-13 academic year gets under way, more than 40,000 students from all 50 states and 130 foreign countries are attending the graduate and undergraduate schools of New York University. Some of these young scholars will undoubtedly ride to school in upscale cars or limos: a year at NYU with room and board costs […]
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In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last night, President Obama promised that he would “work with colleges and universities” to slow the steady rise in tuition we have experienced, cutting the rate of increase in half. Inside Higher Ed has the story. Naturally, the president’s statement drew applause from the Democratic faithful, […]
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Early in the summer, a friend and I enrolled in Introduction to Sociology, the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) recently discussed by Princeton Professor Mitchell Duneier. Prof. Duneier taught 40,000 online students via six weeks of free reading assignments, lectures, and discussions, interspersed with weekly quizzes and two exams. I quit three weeks into the […]
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Another wacky idea from California: forcing teachers in the state university system to provide some form of social service as a condition of achieving tenure. Assembly Bill 2132, which passed in the legislature and is now awaiting Governor Jerry Brown’s signature, “encourages” the independent University of California to include a demonstration of “service” in its […]
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