This is an excerpt from Dr. Smith’s new book, “Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood and the American Dream-And Why It Matters.” If women were fleeing the nation’s universities and colleges, we would have a national uproar, but men are now fleeing in large numbers and society barely notices. Numbers tell the […]
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Egalitarians never run out of things to complain about. Any statistical disparity between groups causes them to wring their hands and call for action to remedy the “inequity.” The latest outbreak of egalitarian fever has to do with higher education in America, specifically the alleged “rich kid problem.” Jordan Weissman of The Atlantic recently penned […]
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Since Stephen Colbert and Cory Booker occupy divergent spheres of American life, they unsurprisingly chose to deliver very different commencement addresses. Colbert, who spoke at the University of Virginia on May 18, devoted much of his address to taking the University down a few pegs. In addition to ribbing UVA’s founder, Thomas Jefferson–who, Colbert joked, […]
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Eugene Volokh posts a counterintuitive argument (from a civil libertarian’s standpoint) defending the OCR-imposed preponderance-of-evidence standard for campus allegations of sexual assault. Since Volokh advances a much more compelling argument for the change than did the OCR’s “Dear Colleague” letter, the post is worth reading in full. His basic argument: campus allegations of sexual assault […]
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Like a creeping mildew on a shower wall, student fees easily go unnoticed. Yet they grow relentlessly until, one day, you look down in total disgust and there they are. What are student fees next to the mountains of cash poured into tuition, room and board? A few hundred wasted dollars every year among tens […]
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My colleague Richard Vedder once described former Undersecretary of the Department of Education Robert Shireman as “the only guy I ever met whose very appointment to public office destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars in wealth.” Of course, Vedder was referring to the rapid devaluation of publicly traded higher education firms’ stock prices that followed Shireman’s […]
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In the last few months, there’s been a flurry of articles in the mainstream press acknowledging the same problem: a paucity of high-achieving, low-income students at elite colleges. “Better Colleges Failing to Lure Talented Poor,” says the New York Times. ABC tells us “Colleges Struggle to Connect With High-Achieving Poor Students.” Likewise, NPR is concerned […]
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One of the things that strikes me about modern universities is the inordinate amount of lying that goes on -both by institutions and members of the university communities- and how little is done about it. As respect for moral absolutes is replaced with a mushy moral relativism, perhaps a decline in honesty is to be expected. But […]
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The Washington Post notes today that though President Obama’s commencement address at Morehouse College received a “rousing response” from the audience, some of his African-American supporters are less than pleased. Amazingly, they argue that the President has devoted too much time to discussions of black accountability and responsibility. They also suggest that Jesse Jackson has […]
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It’s hard to find a “serious” commencement speech that isn’t about remembering that there’s more to life than power and money. And that the secrets of a successful life include following your passion and finding purpose, not to mention giving back to your community. The president’s speech at Morehouse had a few of these insipid […]
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“F*** Your Constructive Dialogue” reads the headline of an article by Kate Aronoff that’s posted on a website that “seeks to facilitate the discussion of political, cultural, and social issues that are often left out of mainstream discourse.” (The asterisks, as Stanley Kurtz nicely put it, are not in the original.) Ms. Aronoff is a […]
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A few months ago, a post with a shocking claim about misogyny in America began to circulate on Tumblr, the social media site popular with older teens and young adults. It featured a scanned book page section stating that, according to “recent survey data,” when junior high school students in the Midwest were asked what […]
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Columbia professor Joseph Massad has made the news yet again. Small wonder: his recent essay in al Jazeera, entitled “The Last of the Semites,” linked Zionism to Nazism and claimed that all of the good, anti-Zionist Jews perished in the Holocaust, Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg congratulated al Jazeera for having “posted one of the most anti-Jewish screeds in recent […]
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“FIRE is right to note that fair, inclusive enforcement of this mindlessly broad policy is impossible. But I doubt it’s intended to be fairly enforced. I doubt federal officials want or expect it to be used against sex educators, advocates of reproductive choice, anti-porn feminists, or gay rights advocates, if their speech of a sexual […]
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As the Supreme Court prepares its opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas (in which that school’s use of racial and ethnic admissions preferences is challenged), and as our bien pensants continue as always to agonize about the state of race relations in the United States (which are actually quite good, by the way), a […]
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According to a new report released by the American Association of University Professors, the gap between the salaries of faculty at private and public universities is widening. The “Annual Report on the Status of the Profession” found that at the public institutions, full professors averaged $118,054 and assistant […]
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Socioeconomic preferences can be a better proxy for race than race preferences, according to an Inside Higher Ed report this morning on a new study to be published this summer in the Harvard Law & Policy Review. More precisely, the authors, Matthew N. Gaertner, a researcher at Pearson’s Center for College and Career Success and […]
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As everyone but members of the National Ostrich Society now knows, Washington, D.C. is beset by three actual or potential scandals: the Benghazi matter; the IRS’s politicization; and the wiretapping of the Associated Press by the DOJ. These matters are important and call for genuine investigation and concern. But there is another controversy emanating from […]
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By Harvey Silverglate and Juliana DeVries In a breathtakingly bold move, the civil rights offices of both the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have mandated the effective abolition of free speech on college campuses, as well as the almost certain conviction of large numbers of students, many of whom will be innocent, […]
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The Obama administration is currently embroiled in two political scandals, and a third, understandably overshadowed by Benghazi and the IRS, is brewing on our campuses. The Civil Rights offices of both the Education Department and the Justice Department have issued a flabbergasting and clearly unconstitutional assault on free speech, ruling that colleges must eliminate and punish […]
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Cross Posted from the Volokh Conspiracy The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is telling universities to institute speech codes. And not just any old speech codes: Under these speech codes, universities would be required to prohibit students from, for instance, 1. saying “unwelcome” “sexual or […]
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Students at Stanford are the latest to fall victim to the assault on due process mandated by the “Dear Colleague” letter. Last week, the university’s faculty senate approved the “Alternative Review Process,” an across-the-board diminution of due process rights for Stanford students accused of sexual assault. The Office of Civil Rights’ “Dear Colleague” letter, to […]
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The Higher Education Act is up for reauthorization this year, so this is an especially good time to talk about improvements to it. (We ought to consider repealing it instead, but almost nobody in Congress would support that.) One idea, recently advanced here by Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is to stop […]
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The University of Virginia prides itself on being “Mr. Jefferson’s university,” where unfettered free speech is both practiced and respected in the manner called for in his First Inaugural address when Mr. Jefferson (as locals still reverentially refer to him) fervently urged his fellow citizens to let misguided and even evil notions “stand undisturbed as […]
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The higher-education story of the week is about cost: colleges and universities are cutting prices. At least that’s the impression one gets from media coverage of the annual report from the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). “Colleges Cut Prices by Providing More Financial Aid,” states the Wall Street Journal. “Private U.S. […]
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Here’s what happens when you send a book questioning anthropogenic global warming to the chairman of the Department of Meteorology and Climate Science at San Jose State University: The book, The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism, was sent out by The Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank. Dr. Alison Bridges, chairman of the department, […]
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The University of Minnesota has a program of dual enrollment in which high schools create courses that match selected UM first-year courses in content and rigor and students earn UM credits. It’s called College in the Schools, and it offers 22 courses in the humanities and social sciences such as Calculus I, Intermediate French, and […]
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Not too long ago CBS MoneyWatch published a list titled “25 Schools with the Worst Professors,” using data which we at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) had gathered from evaluations published on ratemyprofessor.com (RMP). We strongly believe that this list of 25 schools is a complete misrepresentation of our work. While it […]
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Mr. Cheston, I disagree entirely. Let’s start with freedom of association. No, Trinity College is not a public university, so the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply (although some universities, such as Yale, have issued guarantees of free speech and association to their students that may have some legal weight). It may well be that in terms of legality, Trinity […]
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Once again, the youth vote–18-30-year-olds–provided Barack Obama a staunchly reliable bloc in the 2012 election. According to the Center for Information & Research on civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), the youth vote went 67 percent for Obama, 30 percent for Romney. If the youth vote were taken out of the population, Romney would have won […]
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