Move over MOOCs, a different model is coming to town–blended learning. Deep within the New York Times’ article today on online courses, readers learned of the “striking” success of San Jose University’s pilot blended course. While MOOCs dominate conversations about the future of higher-ed, it’s the blended model, which combines face-to-face interaction with web based […]
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PETER WOOD: Samuel Goldman seeks to distinguish the small and marginal subset “conservative defenders of liberal education” from other kinds of conservatives. He places these poor folks “in a blind alley.” They are, he says, at odds both with “potential allies outside the conservative movement” and with the conservative movement itself, which finds its center of […]
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I found much to admire and little to disagree with in Sam Goldman’s defense of liberal education. Well, I was offended that he called my use of “cultural transmission” postmodern. I wasn’t offended for any good reason, of course. Putting the techno-phrase in quotes is, of course, a postmodern or cloyingly ironic “move.” It is a way […]
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What’s conservative about liberal education? On any serious consideration, the answer is: a lot. Students do pick up marketable skills when they take classes in literature, history, or philosophy. But the real purpose of studying languages, books, and arguments is to initiate them as members of a community of free men and women, the present […]
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Wednesday’s episode of “Law & Order, Special Victims Unit” dealt with fictionalized versions of recent campus rape cases. In the story, a fraternity produces a crude, misogynistic t-shirt (left). The real T-shirt it is based on (right) was far worse. It was produced and sold last year by an unauthorized frat at Amherst College. Jezebel and AVC have […]
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Time to end it, says the Economist: Universities that want to improve their selection procedures by identifying talented people (of any colour or creed) from disadvantaged backgrounds should be encouraged. But selection on the basis of race is neither a fair nor an efficient way of doing so. Affirmative action replaced old injustices with […]
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It’s clear that the return on the investment in a college education isn’t as promising as it once was. To that end, The Chronicle of Higher Education recently wondered how to “assess the real payoff of a college degree.” Answering this question necessitates defining higher education’s purpose. If one attends college simply hoping for an […]
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Here’s an instructive exercise: The next time you read an article about “diversity” (see, e.g., the interview with the University of Wisconsin’s diversity honcho in Inside Higher Ed today), mentally substitute the letters “BS” for “diversity” every time the latter appears. It’s amazing how much more accurate and understandable the article becomes! (It’s even better […]
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At some point the demands for federal investigations into our colleges’ supposed indifference to accusers in sexual assault cases will reach the point of parody. In fact, that point might already have been reached with two recent developments. First, celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred, an attorney who never met a TV camera she didn’t like, has […]
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The Association for Asian American Studies just made news by becoming the first American academic organization to support a boycott of Israeli universities. In case you were wondering, the AAAS did not also call for a boycott of any other Asian universities located in countries with less-than-stellar human rights records. They seemingly believe that Israel is […]
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Those eager to see a shredding of political correctness on campus should sample this interview between HBO’s Bill Maher and Brian Levin, a professor at California State-San Bernardino who directs the school’s Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism. Levin’s apparent goal in the interview was to suggest that all major religions are equally inclined toward politically-oriented […]
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We’ve learned this week that Chelsea Clinton and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky have spent $10 million on a 100-foot-long condo opposite Madison Square in Manhattan. This seems to be a rare example of an NYU administrator whose lavish housing is not subsidized by NYU, which has handed out so many questionable loans–$72 million to 168 people. […]
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A big divide is showing up between conservative and libertarian criticisms of higher education. Conservatives–and I am among them–argue that higher-ed has become too vocational and libertarians say it is not vocational enough. Professor Michael Hepner of the University of Dubuque, part of an influential and cutting-edge effort to think through the causes of the […]
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What more can the “diversity” movement do to our colleges and universities? How about mandatory indoctrination? According to an official faculty proposal, Northwestern University is considering a move “to enhance the educational opportunities” of students by installing a diversity course requirement for all undergrads so that the students will “recognize their own positionality in systems […]
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Last week Amherst College rejected an offer from online education company edX to develop MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) featuring its faculty. Though we do not know the full details of Amherst’s deliberations, it is clear that its faculty recognized several important implications of this new technology. Some faculty members expressed concern that middle-tier and […]
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By Greg Lukianoff and Robert Shibley It’s no longer a matter of much debate that America’s college campuses are not the beacons of free and open discussion they were intended to be. In its 14 years of existence, our organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has documented hundreds of cases of gross […]
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Two trains carrying loads of conflicting values, requirements, and prohibitions affecting college admissions and hiring are hurtling rapidly toward each other, but no one seems aware of the impending collision. On one track, the Supreme Court is probably poised to impose new restrictions on race- and ethnicity-conscious policies in Fisher v. University of Texas and […]
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California legislators appear smitten with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). In response to the high demand for classes and long waiting lists in California’s public colleges and universities, they have proposed a bill that would force schools to give credit for faculty-approved online courses completed by students unable to enroll in lower-division courses. Unfortunately, the […]
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One of the purposes of Common Core, the initiative to draft new standards for math and English, was to align secondary curricula with the demands of college. The presumption was that high school expectations simply fell short of first-year college coursework and the standards it set. Further evidence of mismatch came out this week in […]
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One of the more annoying tropes of the left is that while it may be all right for profit-oriented businesses to function in many markets – I have yet to hear anyone demand that dry cleaning, for example, be done by non-profit entities – they shouldn’t be in “helping” fields like health care and education. […]
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Originally run as a Manhattan Institute Policy Brief. The growth of student-loan debt has raised a vexing question: Is a college degree still a good investment? No segment of American higher education has faced greater scrutiny than for-profit colleges and universities. For-profits differ from traditional institutions in important respects. They are accountable chiefly to […]
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Gone are the days when the liberal press covered the Federalist Society as if it were a mysterious and sinister cult. Now (April 17) the Chronicle of Higher Education features a largely favorable feature article hailing the Federalist Society’s history as “a story of how disaffection, bold ideas, commitment to principle, and enlightened institution-building have […]
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Another day, and another awful consequence of our student debt problem has come to light. The New York Fed just released data showing that growing levels of student debt have impacted homeownership and car purchasing patterns. In the past, 30-year-olds who at some point owed student debt were more likely than those who didn’t to […]
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Easy question. Administrators do. Odd as it may sound today, faculties have long assumed the right and duty to set the campus agenda–to establish admission standards, control research and curriculum, run visiting speaker programs, and set the academic and professional criteria on which promotions, prizes and appointments are based. Historically, the faculty actually did control […]
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If you’re worrying about your child’s student debt obligations, you might want to check up on your parents, too. The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports that adults over 60 have the fastest growing student-loan debt and that their growing delinquencies are leading the Department of Education to garnish Social Security checks. Stung by the Great […]
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I am writing in response to Dr. Lawler’s post here. First, to clear up one important point that Dr. Lawler addresses – libertarians (such as myself) have no desire to make liberal arts courses be more expensive than STEM course. Indeed, as he rightfully notes, because liberal arts degrees are associated with lower lifetime earnings, […]
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I’m writing in response to Yevgeniy Feyman’s challenging comments to my conservative defense of liberal education: We see more and more libertarian nudging in higher education. Consider the proposal, coming out of Florida, to incentivize students to choose the most demonstratively productive majors. They are, of course, the STEM majors–science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Tuition […]
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This past February, in the final act of Brooklyn College’s BDS fiasco, four Jewish students were kicked out of the talk. (Brooklyn’s Political Science Department had formally voted to affiliate itself with the talk, which featured two speakers who advocated a nationality-based boycott against Israelis, divestment from Israel, and international sanctions against the Jewish state.) […]
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From the National Association of Scholars’ 100 Great Ideas for Higher Education *** The great scandal of American education is that students can complete their schooling without learning to write correct prose. Even at the college level, and at good schools, most students cannot write even a page of text without committing some error of […]
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Universities enjoy a privileged position in our society and lots of independence from political and economic forces, partly to provide an environment where diversity of views reigns -where conformist, stifling uniformity is suppressed in favor of a “free market in ideas.” Coupled with that historically has been a sense of meritocracy -the academy is an […]
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