Wayward reporter Richard Perez–Pena, who covers campus sex codes and hearings for the New York Times, recently examined events at four campuses: Amherst, Yale, the University of North Carolina, and Occidental, offering readers positive portraits of “activists” who seek to decimate due process protections for students accused of sexual assault. A hallmark of the Times‘ coverage of college sexual assault questions has […]
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Cross-posted from Concurring Opinions Books have lined the shelves of the offices of all my colleagues at every school where I have worked. In my early days of teaching, or when spending a term as a visitor, I’d wander into a learned neighbor’s office to get acquainted. The titles and content of those books announced […]
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Remarks delivered upon acceptance of the Bradley Foundation‘s Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Award, March 15. *** Commitment to the principles of academic freedom was tested when new forces of politically correct censorship […]
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Defenders of affirmative action must work hard to explain away a serious problem: the tendency for the students admitted due to preferences to do relatively poorly in their coursework. When the class average in a calculus course is 85 but the average among the students who were preferentially admitted is 65, people start asking the […]
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FIRE notes that The Student Group Protection Act has passed in Virginia, ending, in one state at least, left-wing activists’ practice of penalizing campus religious and ideologically-oriented groups with which they disagree. Under some college anti-discrimination rules, student Evangelical groups have been defunded or forced off campus for not allowing the election of leaders who reject […]
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By Harvey Silverglate, Juliana DeVries, and Zachary Bloom There’s been a lot of head-scratching of late about how and why a clutch of Harvard administrators searched the email accounts of 16 “resident deans” in a Nixonian effort to find and then plug a leak of utterly inconsequential information about the so-called Harvard “cheating scandal.” But […]
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The year of the extremist continues at CUNY’s Brooklyn College. Fresh off the anti-Israel BDS fiasco, the college has announced that the prestigious Charles Lawrence Memorial Lecture will be delivered by the chairman of Duke’s sociology department, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. Such high-profile figures as John Hope Franklin, Eugene Genovese, William Julius Wilson, and Herbert Gans have […]
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Glenn Reynolds, perhaps the leading libertarian critic of the higher education bubble, has yet another idea for popping that bubble: What if you unbundled the “hotel” functions of a college — classrooms, dorms, student center, etc. — from the teaching function? You could basically have a college without faculty: Get your courses via MOOC, have […]
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Accreditation is rapidly changing. Instead of remaining just a mildly annoying and inefficient barrier to innovation and change in higher education, it is evolving into a major impediment. Increasingly outrageous decisions by power hungry accreditation czars are becoming a serious problem. I have recently written about this issue here, but the problem is growing so […]
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My fellow mammal in residence, Sparky the Orange Cat, wanted out at a party at my home one cold and rainy night, but I knew what would happen–the ritual cat delay in the doorway: a long period of staring and hesitation while I shivered in the cold, followed by his running back into the warm […]
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Richard Pérez-Peña, an unusually shaky New York Times reporter who covers campus sexual misconduct cases and gets many of them wrong, has been corrected by his bosses, though the Times didn’t announce it as a correction and managed to introduce a new error while altering the inaccurate wording of the March 19 story. At issue is […]
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In December, after extended controversy and protest, Michigan passed a right-to- work-law allowing employees to opt out of mandatory union membership and dues. The law goes into effect March 27, leaving all earlier contracts unaffected. Rushing to beat that deadline, Wayne State University has signed a new eight-year contract with its faculty union, and the […]
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New York Times reporter Richard Pérez-Peña has had a disturbing record of slanted coverage of campus sexual assault issues, but he brought his performance to new lows in an article posted to the Times website Tuesday afternoon. MTC readers will doubtless remember Pérez-Peña’s name; he authored the wildly slanted Times exposé on former Yale quarterback […]
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Steven Hayward has accepted a one-year appointment as Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Hayward, who holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Claremont Graduate School, is the author of several books, including volumes on Reagan and Churchill, and has held positions at the American Enterprise Institute, Pacific […]
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In the Sunday New York Times Opinion Section Dan Slater asks, “Does Affirmative Action Do What It Should?” However, his over-2000 word piece provides no semblance of an answer because he misrepresents affirmative action. “Affirmative action policies attempt to compensate for the country’s brutal history of racial discrimination by giving some minority applicants a leg […]
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The end of higher education as we know it is no myth. Say you have three children and they’ll come of college age about two years apart. That’s a lot of money. But what if the college were to make you a deal? Buy one college education at full price, get the next college education […]
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For John Sexton, president of New York University, March came in a like a lion. In one aggravating week Sexton found himself the subject of two biting stories in the press: a no-confidence vote from faculty and focus on $72 million in unexplained NYU loans to Jack Lew and many others. The first was merely […]
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Chief Justice Roberts, with the four liberal justices in tow, upheld Obamacare only because it was (or could be construed as) a tax, not a penalty. Try telling that to the University of Virginia or the editors of the Charlottesville Daily Progress, whose lead article March 14, under the big, bold headline “‘Obamacare’ to swallow […]
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John Dewey said the job of education was to free students from the intellectual captivity imposed by “village truths,” the groupthink version of reality they had grown up with. But the irony now is that liberalism, once created in opposition to small-town traditionalism, has generated its own all-encompassing “village truths” creating conformism on today’s campus. Students are now subject to a […]
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A friend recently sent me an article entitled “University Presidents – Speak Out!” published in The Nation, a periodical I mostly avoid. In the article, author Scott Sherman laments that university presidents don’t air their views more often on the “big issues.” His idea of an estimable college leader is someone like Lee Bollinger of Columbia […]
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Can it be that “it is not left-wing academics, but ideologues of the radical right, who are pursuing political correctness in American universities?” No, not really, but that’s what the 1960’s activist and historian, and more recently labor lawyer, Staughton Lynd, argues on The History News Network site. In a hagiographic obituary for historian Herbert Shapiro, Lynd charges that the right has […]
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Nearly two years after the Office of Civil Rights ordered all universities to lower the procedural threshold through which accused students can be found guilty of sexual assault, the New York Times turned its attention to the issue–via a five-person “Room for Debate” item. Superficially, the segment seemed balanced: two essays in favor the policy, […]
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Reposted from Open Market We live in a culture where harsh but truthful criticism, or exposure of wrongdoing, is viewed by some as “bullying,” especially when it affects someone’s inflated “self-esteem.” Some examples: DePaul University has punished a student for publicizing the names of fellow students who admitted vandalizing […]
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The lesson to draw from the Harvard email episode is simple: a university is a business and everyone who works there is an employee. The Harvard administration combed through email accounts of resident deans in order to track down leaks regarding last year’s cheating scandal. The cheating happened last year when students were discovered to […]
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Andrew P. Kelly and KC Deane Despite our better instincts, we looked at Andrew Leonard’s recent piece on the conservative plot to “wreck higher-ed.” He begins with an oft-heard although accurate lament about public colleges: state funding is decreasing while costs and prices continue to climb. However, Leonard’s argument quickly veers into conspiracy-land: There’s a […]
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A recent piece from CNNMoney has noted the deflating value of a bachelor’s degree. Although community college degrees are frequently perceived as less “prestigious” than a four-year B.A., it turns out that nearly 30% of Americans with Associate’s degrees now make more than those with Bachelor’s degrees, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and […]
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Hamilton College has a diversity problem–though it’s not what you think. The college has created a sizable bureaucratic apparatus to enforce its particular brand of “inclusiveness.” The apparatus has grown so vast and intertwined over the years that the college had to establish a “Diversity Coordinating Council” comprised of the Chief Diversity Officer, the Director […]
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My sorry academic discipline, anthropology, has been in the news the last few weeks. Napoleon Chagnon broke his long silence by publishing a memoir, Noble Savages, about his work among the South American Yanomamo Indians and the long nightmare of politically correct recrimination that greeted his work. Chagnon was infamously accused of infamy by a […]
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University of Chicago economics professor Gary Becker, recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize, maintains a consistently interesting blog with the prolific law professor Richard Posner. Recently, Becker responded to a Posner post (on reasons to change our system of legal education) with an argument that “higher education is still a very good investment.” I submit […]
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In 1999, I was a sophomore at the University of Houston when Dr. Ross M. Lence invited me to participate in a small, graduate seminar entirely dedicated to John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. It was an experience I will never forget. During the first few weeks, I found myself utterly unprepared for the rigor […]
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