The University of Virginia has distinguished itself in its ability to pretend that the collapse of Sabrina Erdely’s Rolling Stone article never occurred. President Teresa Sullivan—after rashly suspending not merely the fraternity at which “Jackie” was supposedly assaulted, but all fraternities—refused to lift the ban, or even to acknowledge that the factual basis for her […]
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The post-Ferguson and post-Garner racial agitation has led to a wave of violent rhetoric and actual violence in the United States. Street protesters have called for “pigs in blankets,” declaring, “Arms up, shoot back,” and asking, “What do want? Dead cops. When do we want it? Now.” This rhetoric has campus amplifiers. Is the infatuation with violence […]
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A long report by the Chronicle of Higher Education finds alcohol abuse among college students nearly apocalyptic. Each year 1800 college students die from alcohol-related causes and consumption of booze seems to keep rising. One college town police officer said: Average blood-alcohol levels in students stopped by the police have risen steadily—this year one blew […]
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Steven Pinker, an experimental psychologist and prominent public intellectual, has written an important letter concerning the latest controversy over Israel at Harvard University, where he is based. Such controversies are notuncommon there. First, some background. SodaStream, an Israeli company that makes a popular home carbonation system, has been an object of the boycott, divestment, sanctions […]
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When the White House released the outlines of its long awaited college ratings plan on Friday, the world of higher education was underwhelmed. Colleges are “a little mystified,” Sarah Flanagan of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities told the Chronicle of Higher Education. “There isn’t much new here, and there isn’t much that […]
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FOIA requests from several reporters prompted the release of numerous e-mails between various UVA officials and Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Erdely and fact-checker Elizabeth Garber-Paul. A few items that we learned: Erdely and UVA Employees The e-mails show that UVA wanted to control its message by not allowing Erdely to interview lower-level administrators. As a result, […]
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To most Americans, Catherine Lhamon is all but unknown. As the U.S. Department of Education’s Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, however, she plays an outsized role in pursuing colleges for their purportedly incompetent handing of sexual assault cases. As the issue of campus sexual assault continues to make news, it’s important that we understand her […]
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James Ceaser recently became the first UVA professor to publicly speak out regarding the deeply unhealthy climate on his campus, exposed by the publication of the now-discredited Rolling Stone article alleging multiple gang rapes at the school. (The sole source for each of these allegations appears to have been “Jackie.”) Ceaser lamented how few people […]
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Simple Justice This post is about the month-long uproar at the University of Michigan triggered by a satire of liberal thought by a conservative Muslim student, Omar Mahmood. As a result, he was fired by the Michigan Daily and the door to his apartment was pelted with eggs and covered in obscene graffiti. *** When I read Omar […]
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One of the most revealing statements of 2014 was made by comedian Chris Rock, who told interviewer Frank Rich that he no longer appears on college campuses because “everything offends students these days.” (Read about that here.) In case you think Rock was exaggerating, a recent incident at the University of Michigan shows how correct […]
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Marquette University, the Jesuit school in Milwaukee, has shot itself in the foot again. Weeks ago in a “Theory of Ethics” class, philosophy instructor Cheryl Abbate listed several possible topics of discussion, but said one of them –gay marriage—could not be addressed because any opposition argument would offend homosexual students, and besides society has already […]
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“This isn’t another message about higher education in crisis.This is a message about what higher education should be.” So reads the urgent email that faculty across the country received recently from the American Association of University Professors. A hundred years after the organization’s founding, the AAUP’s leaders are worried that people don’t understand what higher […]
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The collapse of the Rolling Stone rape story had an important byproduct—it showed the stunning unfairness of UVA’s proposed new sexual assault policies. UVA’s proposed guidelines, like those of many colleges, are heavily pitched toward accusers, minimize due process and all but ensure that key evidence will not come before the university, especially if that […]
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The people who run Harvard College rarely wade into intensely controversial public policy issues. Their personal views may not be at all representative of the Harvard alumni whose contributions are needed to keep the endowment growing. It is thus somewhat surprising that the Harvard administration has been so unhinged by the deaths in Ferguson and […]
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Many colleges and universities have adopted data-mining to improve student retention and to channel students to courses and programs that the institutions judge most appropriate. The future of higher education is here and it is, in spirit, benignly totalitarian. Goldie Blumenstyk, writing about it in the New York Times, (“Blowing Off Class? We Know”) emphasizes […]
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Southern Methodist University has become the latest target of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), signing an agreement admitting to violations of Title IX and adopting new policies. As with all such agreements, due process for accused students is the loser. But this agreement has a few unusual clauses. While the SMU OCR complaint dealt […]
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Inside Higher Edreports on yet another hand wringing study of the difficulty of “diversifying” (that is, employing more women and certain minorities) in academic STEM fields. This time, however, the obstacle or barrier is at the end, not the beginning, of the pipeline: women and minorities themselves choose to abandon STEM careers in academic research […]
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The UC Student-Workers Union represents “over 13,000 student-workers across the University of California system.” They are affiliated with the United Auto Workers. The union exists to bargain with the University of California concerning “salary, benefits, workload, grievance procedures, fair hiring processes and other issues.” On Wednesday, the union announced that its members had voted, 1411 […]
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Lawrence Summers lost his job as president of Harvard partly because he failed to grovel quick enough and hard enough for a harmless remark about a possible obstacle to female success. Smith College president Kathleen McCartney , on the other hand, has just performed a state-of-the-art grovel over an even more harmless comment. At the […]
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Overlawyered Should we cheer or boo when outspoken professors at state universities become the target of public records demands filed by antagonists seeking their emails and correspondence? As we had occasion to note during the Douglas Laycock controversy in May and June, there’s plenty of inconsistency on this question on both left and right. Some […]
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In the last couple of days, two items have appeared at the New York Times in which the paper—whose coverage of campus sexual assault issues has learned no lessons from its propagandistic performance in the Duke lacrosse case—purports to lecture other journalists on how they should cover the issue. The first came from a blog […]
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Between 2002 to 2012 annual undergraduate tuition at the University of California tripled, rising from roughly $4000 to $12000 after adjusting for inflation. That increase drastically changed UC’s affordability relative to other state universities. In 2002 UC was about 50% below the national average for tuition costs, but ten years later it was 50% above […]
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Americans are competitive people and therefore obsessed with rankings, even geeky ones. Higher ranked colleges attract better students and more grants. Rankings might even push administrators to focus more resources on mere undergraduate teaching, a mission long ghettoized in research universities. So how can we make college rankings better? Rankings do a decent job of […]
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The collapse of Sabrina Rudin Erdley’s “don’t-tell-all” UVA gang rape story was quick. The Washington Post did what Erdely and Rolling Stone had refused to do—some actual reporting—and exposed massive holes in the accuser’s story. (Some examples: though the Rolling Stone article portrayed the alleged assault as some kind of fraternity initiation, no member of […]
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Once the Supreme Court (actually, only Justice Powell’s pivotal opinion) said in the Bakke case that programs to increase student “diversity” could be justified if they brought about educational benefits, the higher education establishment began a frantic quest for such evidence. For example, the University of Michigan, needing something that would look sufficiently expert to […]
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Yesterday’s Chronicle of Higher Education summarizes perhaps the main critique of Sarah Erdely’s “don’t-tell-all” article alleging a grotesque gang rape at UVA: the reporter’s decision not to seek contact from any of the people her article had described as gang rapists. That point, too, has now received a vigorous response from Erdely’s defenders. A faux-balanced […]
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It does not surprise anyone that graduates of four-year colleges have lower rates of unemployment – or employment in jobs that do not require a college education – than high school graduates or high school dropouts. What has occasioned mild surprise are the tens of thousands of graduates of four-year colleges who cannot find full-time […]
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The ills besetting higher education in recent years – ballooning tuitions, kangaroo disciplinary tribunals, speech codes and other violations of academic freedom, expanding bureaucracies, invasions of student and faculty privacy, lowered academic standards, and others – are on virtuallyeveryone’s minds. However, these problems are not mutually exclusiveand severable; rather, theyare manifestations of a larger downward […]
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I spoke with a colleague yesterday, a long-term staff member at Northwestern University. She told me that when Northwestern students report a rape, they are being told something like this: “If you report the incident to local police, they might not take you seriously. Your name will get in the newspapers. When the case goes […]
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The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has just scored yet another victory for free speech. In a sadly familiar case, the University of Hawaii at Hilo prevented students Merritt Burch and Anthony Vizzone from handing out copies of the US Constitution. A UH adminstrator told them they could only conduct such advocacy in […]
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