Mark Bauerlein is a professor emeritus of English at Emory University and an editor at First Things, where he hosts a podcast twice a week. He is the author of five books, including The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults.
The best ranking of undergraduate institutions by their general education is ACTA’s What Will They Learn? project. The evaluation looks at seven core subjects (composition, literature, foreign languages, U.S. government or history, economics, math, and science) and tallies whether schools require all students to show sufficient knowledge and proficiency in each one. The ACTA approach goes […]
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Dana Dusbiber’s statement in The Washington Post deploring the teaching of Shakespeare in high school English courses evoked universal scorn and laughter. Her thesis is simple: Shakespeare is too old, white, male, and European for 21st-century American students, especially those of color. His language is dense and unfamiliar, enough so that Dusbiber herself can’t always understand it. […]
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Kevin Carey hates college. Or rather, he hates the higher education industry, the system, the establishment. An encounter on page 39 of his new book, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere indicates one reason why. Carey sits down at a Starbucks in Washington, DC, with a junior at […]
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At Salon Magazine, Bill Moyers has an essay penned in direct response to criticism of Barack Obama for his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. People have assailed Obama for his scolding tone, bad timing , poor history, and moral equivocation. And here is Bill Moyers expanding President Obama’s point, an opinion piece entitled: “When […]
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A recent Inside Higher Ed story documented an alarming trend in the English departments at University of Maryland, George Mason University, and Florida State University. The numbers of English majors there have plummeted in the last few years. Maryland lost 88 majors in 2012, 79 majors the next year, and 128 majors 12 months later, the story […]
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Last month, we had two cases of college presidents at high-profile universities join in student protests over the grand jury’s decision in the Ferguson case. Here is a story on President Eric Barron, head of Penn State, standing amidst students with hands raised. The students had spent two days gathering on campus, shouting slogans (“Black lives […]
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There was a thoughtful op-ed in the New York Times last week on the Asian American challenge to admissions procedures at Harvard University. It was written by a political theorist who teaches writing at Harvard, and it acknowledges that Harvard “engages in ‘racial balancing,’” a procedure that keeps Asian American admissions to the college at a consistent 17-20 percent even […]
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A particular nostalgia is at work in academic discussion. We still talk about of liberal education, the liberal arts, and the humanities as if they remain viable activities in higher education, threatened, yes, and losing ground, but open to revival. Universities have grown ever more “corporate,” students flock to business and vocational programs, the sciences […]
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As Lauren Noble wrote two days ago here at Minding the Campus, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s speech at Yale on Monday night was a success, despite the discomfort felt by the Yale Muslim Students Association (MSA). I say “discomfort” because that is what the MSA itself emphasized in its September 10th letter to the Yale community […]
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Well, the 2015 U. S. News & World Report rankings are out, and here are the elite Top 10 for “National Universities”: 1. Princeton 2. Harvard 3. Yale 4. Columbia 4. Stanford 4. University of Chicago 7. MIT 8. Duke 8. Penn 10. California Institute of Technology And here are the rankings of the Top […]
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Scores of colleges, from Goucher to Harvard, now feature “Undead Studies,” that is, academic work on zombies and vampires. Depending on your point of view, this is either yet another indicator of the debasement of higher education, or a playful way to attach serious thinking to not very serious expressions of popular culture. Frivolous or not, it takes […]
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The thesis of my 2008 book, The Dumbest Generation, was that digital tools and media have become so prominent in teens’ and 20-somethings’ thoughts and acts that their intellectual and civic capacities are bound to deteriorate. While devices and social networks allow the possibility of intellectual and civic engagement, I argued, they mean something else entirely […]
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The sad debate over “white privilege” education sessions on elite campuses has reached its low point with a comment in a New York Magazine article by a Harvard student Reetu Mody, a graduate student in public policy and “campus activist.” Mentioning Princeton student Tal Fortgang’s protest against these privilege-consciousness-raising programs, the article continues: “Mody has […]
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The news in the Wall Street Journal this week about college loans was unsurprising. A special plan passed by the Democratic Congress in 2007 and expanded by the Obama Administration, “Pay As You Earn,” has grown wildly, “nearly 40% in just six months, to include at least 1.3 million Americans owing around $72 billion,” the […]
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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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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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Several years ago, my Emory University hosted former Black Panther Elaine Brown for a couple of days of lecture, discussion, conversation, and meals. I attended one event and don’t remember what Brown said, but caught firmly the demeanor and cadence of the delivery. It was hip, knowing, coy, and canny, not an argument or a […]
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A story in the Harvard Crimson last week reported on a meeting at the university that produced an exchange that should surprise nobody. Professor Harvey Mansfield rose in the midst of a session with faculty and administrators to pose a discomfiting question: “A little bird has told me that the most frequently given grade at […]
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This is an excerpt from the article, “What Dido Did, Satan Saw and O’Keeffe Painted,” from the November issue of The New Criterion. The full text is here. Starting in June, a flurry of reports and commentaries appeared, projecting a dim present and dark future for the fields (of the humanities). A Harvard report warned […]
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The New York Times has a Room for Debate forum on the humanities this week, and one of the contributors, Ben Schmidt, takes the opportunity to chide those who repeat “the persistent idea that the humanities are imploding in on themselves.” Citing numbers from the U.S. Department of Education and the Modern Language Association, he […]
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People under 40 years of age don’t remember what it was like in the humanities circa 1990. The academic theater of the Culture Wars was tense and vibrant, with national publications debating what was going on in English departments. Books decrying trends in the humanities by Allan Bloom and Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza were […]
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Last week I published a commentary on affirmative action at Inside Higher Ed that laid down a simple proposal. With 30 percent of first-year college students terming themselves “Liberal” or “Far Left,” 47 percent of them “Middle-of-the-road,” and with only 23 percent of them agreeing that “Racial discrimination is no longer a major problem in […]
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When 2013 SAT scores came out last month and showed no significant change from 2012,many educators may have felt not disappointed or neutral, but relieved. That’s because the overall trend since 2006, when the writing component was added, has been downward. Critical reading has dropped seven points, math four points, and writing nine points. In […]
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Writing at National Review Online about the recent release of SAT scores, Jason Richwine wonders whether all the fretting about low college-readiness rates among high school graduates really makes much sense. He links to an Atlantic Monthly story on the 2013 scores that bears the title “This Year’s SAT Scores Are Out, and They Are Grim.” Scores were […]
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That sounds like a slogan of progressives, who often justify their critique of the United States, organized religion, patriotism, Western civilization, and other traditional institutions on the grounds that the purpose of higher education is to instill critical thinking about prevailing norms and beliefs. But the phrase above actually comes from a blog post by […]
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The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a rising trend among employers of recent college graduates. To determine a job applicant’s skills and knowledge, many of them have started to rely on a test instead of the graduate’s grade point average. Some of them, such as General Mills, have crafted their own job-applicant examinations, while […]
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One of the best tools for gauging the historical knowledge and civic awareness of young Americans is the exam administered to 12th Graders by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in U.S. history and civics. Every few years, students across the country take these low-stakes tests and provide data on how many of them […]
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A few weeks ago, the Regents of the University of Colorado voted to commission a “political climate” survey of the Boulder campus to determine whether ideological discrimination exists there. Not long after, the AAUP issued a letter in response, warning against the threat to academic freedom that the survey poses. The letter is a prime example […]
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As reported here and here, the Regents of the University of Colorado have voted to commission a survey of the political climate on the Boulder campus. I spoke at the meeting, and the discussion was less complicated than one might expect given the history of liberal bias topics at Colorado and elsewhere in the last […]
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