When I attended Northwestern beginning in the late 1950s, most students paid exactly the same tuition, room and board fees. Today, only a minority of college students pay full tuition (“the sticker price”) from their own funds. At exclusive private schools, some students pay nothing for tuition, room and board, but others pay $50,000 or […]
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When I attended Northwestern beginning in the late 1950s, most students paid exactly the same tuition, room and board fees. Today, only a minority of college students pay full tuition (“the sticker price”) from their own funds. At exclusive private schools, some students pay nothing for tuition, room and board, but others pay $50,000 or […]
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Columbia president Lee Bollinger has announced a new commitment to transparency in reporting sexual assault cases on campus, and used the occasion to reveal a new university website detailing revised sexual assault procedures at Columbia. The new policy’s specifics won’t come as any surprise. As has almost become routine, Columbia’s policy violates basic principles of due process […]
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The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) has a new State of College Admission Report that “provides a detailed look at some of the long-term trends observed in data collected by NACAC over the last ten years” as well as “a recap of some shorter-term observations.” For some unstated reason its release has been delayed, but […]
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Cross-posted from E21 President Obama delivered a mixed performance on higher-education issues in his State of the Union address. As college tuition continues to grow, debt loads increase, and delinquency and default rates on that debt rise accordingly, it’s more important than ever that students come out of college with promising employment prospects. To that […]
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Recent studies say two things about the liberal arts. They’re very important…and they’re in a parlous state. To figure out why they’re in trouble, ACTA looked at America’s finest liberal arts colleges in our new report, Education or Reputation? In addition to classic ACTA topics such as general education and academic freedom, we report on […]
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As the Obama Administration steps up the federal effort against an alleged epidemic of campus rape, some states are contemplating measures of their own. A recent Newsweek story on a bill pending in the California State Assembly, discussed by K.C. Johnson on Minding the Campus, raises a number of troubling issues: among them, potential spillover from the campus crusade […]
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The following is a letter to Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, and other campus officials by two student leaders of a campus libertarian group: We are writing to you to voice our concerns about the state of the intellectual climate on campus. Last week, Provost Pollack addressed an email to the […]
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On January 9th, Minding the Campus and the Manhattan Institute hosted Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit fame) for a lecture on his recently released book, The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. C-SPAN was there to film his talk, and has just made it available online here.
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The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is on the warpath again. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that the OCR has launched an investigation of Penn State. And while Penn State is an institution that is hardly deserving of sympathy, given the exposés of the Freeh Report, the OCR’s move has to raise eyebrows. The Penn State […]
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Clayton Christensen’s 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, posed the question, why do good companies fail? In industries ranging from computers to telephones to cameras to stock markets, the companies that monitored market trends, tended to their customers, and invested in high-returning capital capsized in a sea of start-up innovations (PCs, cell phones, digital cameras, and online markets, in these cases). […]
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Wednesday’s announcement of a White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault is the culmination of the Obama Administration’s years-long efforts in support for the feminist crusade against campus rape. It is too early to tell what new remedies for sexual assault on campus the task force will propose. So far, however, the initiative relies on the […]
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The National Institutes of Health is worried that it, or somebody, is discriminating against blacks. According to a long article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, NIH “shocked itself in 2011 with a study that found a wide race-based variance in its grant awards,” and it is still struggling to explain that variance. That 2011 […]
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I’ve written previously about the scandal at the University of North Carolina, where for several years, students (who were disproportionately members of UNC athletics teams) took no-show courses in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies. UNC has, not altogether convincingly, maintained that the scandal is solely an academic scandal and is solely confined to […]
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The MLA meeting of the delegate assembly to debate the resolution criticizing Israeli policies has received ample publicity, including Cary Nelson’s vehement opposition in the Wall Street Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Nelson’s statement elicited a reply at the Chronicle by one of the sponsors of the resolution, Bruce Robbins of Columbia University, […]
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Conservative critics have long argued two related points against liberals: 1) that modern liberalism has turned its back on what for generations, even centuries, was one of its foundational principles, that individuals should be treated by the state “without regard” to race, creed, or color, and 2) that its abandonment of that principle was so […]
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By now the arguments for and against “diversity” are so numerous, so heatedly argued that squabbling pro- and anti-diversifiers have become the academic equivalent of the prisoners who memorized their joke book and hence no longer need actually to tell the jokes; simply stating “No. 14” or “No. 36” is sufficient. (As an example, I am particularly […]
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Some updates on two of the Title IX lawsuits filed by male students accused of sexual assault and disciplined through college tribunals. In the Vassar lawsuit, discovery has commenced, and Vassar has until February 3 to turn over material to Peter Yu’s attorneys. Presumably this material will include documents on the shadowy organization–the Interpersonal Violence […]
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Readers of the New York Times might be forgiven for experiencing a bit of whiplash. Last year, when Brooklyn College’s political science department voted to officially support an event demanding a boycott of Israeli academics, the Times hailed the department as a heroic defender of academic freedom. Earlier this week, however, the paper portrayed the […]
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By Jonathan Marks The Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association narrowly passed a resolution last Saturday urging the State Department to “contest Israel’s denial of entry to the West Bank by U.S. academics who have been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian universities.” The anti-Israel movement within academia will try to […]
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The ongoing hype over MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) parallels the cold fusion debacle of 1989. The technology sounded like a panacea, a cheap and endless source of energy. Then it flopped. Another great notion down the drain. Similarly, educational entrepreneurs once believed that massive online courses would revolutionize higher education. MOOC providers, partnering with […]
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Cross-posted from Open Market Crime rates are not the same for different racial groups, and student misconduct rates aren’t, either. The Supreme Court ruled many years ago that such racial disparities don’t prove racism or unconstitutional discrimination. But in guidance issued last week by the Justice and Education Departments, the Obama Administration signaled that it will hold school districts […]
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Heather Mac Donald may be the Ida Tarbell of our age: a writer who combines a meticulous eye for facts, intellectual brilliance, a sure sense of the historical moment, and deep moral seriousness. Tarbell is famous for her History of the Standard Oil Company, serialized in McClure’s Magazine between 1902 and 1904, and is celebrated today by the Left for […]
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The victories in the fight to reform higher-ed are often dispiriting because they remind us of the enormity of our challenge. Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) announced that it had successfully pressured the University of Colorado to reinstate a course that CU had cancelled on the grounds that the professor, Patti […]
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Earlier this week, the great classicist Victor Davis Hanson made a few familiar complaints about American higher education: Colleges cost too much, depend too much on low-paid adjunct professors, employ too many administrators, and engage in political advocacy, rather than liberal education. However, he added some over-the-top rhetoric. Colleges, in his estimation, have “gone rogue […]
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From Newsweek (via Inside Higher Ed) comes news of an unusual, but excessively limited, proposal from California Assemblyman Mike Gatto. In response to events at Occidental, Gatto says he’ll introduce a bill requiring colleges in California to report some claims of sexual assault to police. This is an excellent idea–trained law enforcement officers, not campus […]
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Thanks to the American Studies Association’s recent vote for an academic boycott of Israel, the field of American Studies has been under a microscope. Prior to the boycott resolution, perhaps no one would have noticed the conference on “Transnational American Studies,” sponsored by the Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of […]
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This is an excerpt from “The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself,” published this week by Encounter Books. The author, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, is also a columnist and a nationally prominent blogger at Instapundit. *** College students and prospective students will have an effect simply by […]
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There is a mini-argument amongst some academic bloggers over the way UC-Riverside’s English department scheduled job interviews at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention. As Megan McArdle recounts at Bloomberg, Riverside emailed applicants to schedule interviews only five days (!) before the convention was to start in Chicag). For some applicants, that might have meant […]
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Last summer, when a flurry of reports and commentaries declared a material crisis for the humanities, many commentators denied the claim, for instance, this statement entitled “The Humanities Aren’t Really in ‘Crisis’” (note the gratuitous sneer-quotes). But the bad news keeps coming. Last week, Inside Higher Ed reported, “History Jobs Down 7.3%.” Data from the […]
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