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.
It wasn’t so long ago that the infrequent charge of liberal bias on college campuses was met with mockery and disdain. The allegations go all the way back to William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951) and Russell Kirk’s Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition (1955), neither of which earned the authors anything […]
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On May 25th, the House of Representatives passed what is called the Flake Amendment, which prohibits the National Science Foundation from funding projects in political science. Here are Congressman Jeff Flake’s words on the House floor from May 9th: “Let me simply say I can think of few finer examples to cut than the National […]
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The Washington Post and the president of Georgetown University have defended the appearance of Kathleen Sebelius at a commencement ceremony on the grounds of basic academic mission. The Post cited “the proper role of a university and the importance of vigorous, open debate, even–or perhaps especially–involving matters of intense controversy and religious disagreement.” In his […]
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Posted by Mark Bauerlein and Richard Vedder The removal of Naomi Shaefer Riley from the blogging staff of the Chronicle of Higher Education has been widely circulated in the cybersphere and the press, including Riley’s own account in the Wall Street Journal and many of our own contributors at Minding the Campus. All of them […]
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As has been reported here and here and here, some 90 Georgetown University professors and administrators sent a letter to Congressman Paul Ryan in advance of his speech on campus last week. The main point the letter makes is that Ryan’s political outlook and the budget that issues from it violate Catholic teaching, even though […]
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The problem is stated bluntly in this report from the American Association of Community Colleges, entitled, “Reclaiming the American Dream: Community Colleges and the Nation’s Future.” The report contains an overly-dramatic framing, with dire assertions such as this opening in the Executive Summary: “The American Dream is imperiled. Upward mobility, the contract between one generation […]
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For the Obama campaign, the college campus poses a whole different challenge in 2012 than it did in 2008. Earlier, the campus was one of the most solid and energized pro-Obama zones in the country. The group Students4Obama, which operated on more than 700 campuses, was just one program in the conversion of the campaign […]
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On most any college campus, first-year courses with more than a few dozen students have a high proportion of bored, disaffected, and/or uncertain students. Sometimes they feel that way because course materials just don’t excite them, or because they don’t seem relevant to their backgrounds and futures. But another reason is that neither the pace […]
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A story today at insidehighered.com has a hole in it: the faculty is missing. Entitled “So Close,” the piece covers unionization efforts at University of Michigan by graduate research assistants, those efforts recently blocked by state legislation, signed by the governor, preventing the union from happening. The story contains viewpoints from research assistants, union advocates, […]
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Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector, a DC think tank, has a commentary in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education that signals the kind of rhetoric we may expect from proponents of affirmative action as the Fisher case heads to the Supreme Court. It is a mixture of high-mindedness for one side and denunciation […]
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The first sentences of Jeffrey Williams’ essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Deconstructing Academe: The Birth of Critical University Studies”, sounds like an introduction to the many conservative and libertarian critiques of higher education that have appeared in recent decades, starting with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, Martin Anderson’s Imposters in […]
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As KC Johnson explained here a study by social scientists at Duke found that African American students “disproportionately migrate from science and engineering majors to less challenging majors in the humanities,” thus questioning the benefits of preferential admissions. In response, faculty members and student groups protested. It’s important to examine the actual content of those […]
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“Political and Social Views Decidedly More Liberal.” That’s the first finding in the 2011 American Freshman Survey, a project of the Higher Education Research Initiative at UCLA, one of the largest annual surveys of college students. Last year, the Survey chalked up 204,000 first-year-of-college respondents who filled out a lengthy questionnaire on behaviors, attitudes, and […]
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Another racial hoax on campus surfaced this week, this one at University of Wisconsin-Parkside. WTMJ reported on Feb 2nd that a noose had been found in a residence hall on the previous afternoon, then threatening notes had been sent to the person who reported the initial incident the next morning, along with other African American […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education had a cover story last week by Peter Schmidt on Angana P. Chatterji and Richard Shapiro, two anthropology professors at the California Institute of Integral Studies who have been fired, according to the school, because “they had breached student confidence, falsified grades, misapplied funds, and otherwise engaged in unprofessional conduct, generally […]
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What does a young academic need to do to qualify for tenure? For the answer, take a look at this recent survey of provosts. In a set of questions regarding tenure, the key question was, do you agree with this statement?: “Junior faculty today confront rising standards for tenure–standards that many of their senior colleagues […]
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Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for a Massachusetts senate seat may be most known outside the state for this statement she made a few months back: “You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you […]
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Last week on its “Working It Out” page, The Atlantic Monthly posed a far-reaching question: Should each college be required to prominently post consumer information for prospective students — a kind of nutrition label for higher ed?
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In the next 10 months, we shall see the college campus to be a center of Democratic activity. The reason appears in this short piece at The New Republic by Ruy Teixeira. According to Teixeira, the youth vote is crucial to Obama’s reelection, 18-29-year-olds forming one of his strongest support groups. In 2008, the youth […]
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At research universities and many liberal arts colleges, too, it is universally assumed that research is an unadulterated good. Research keeps professors fresh in their fields, makes them better teachers, and raises intellectual standards for departments. Who would disagree? In conversations about research in my world of the humanities, though, one doesn’t often hear about one […]
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If you go this web site, you can search the course roster at the University of Wisconsin and find out what grades were given each semester for the last several years. In Spring 2011, the average grade for 792 students in Intermediate Organic Chemistry was 2.8, a B-, while in Introduction to Education, 50 students […]
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A few years ago, at a luncheon at Harvard University, Larry Summers noted an interesting fact. If you look at the top ten players in any industry or business 50 years ago, the list would look wholly different than it does today–except in higher education. It was Harvard, Yale, Princeton . . . back then, […]
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English departments have diversified. Forty years ago, just about every faculty member defined himself or herself in literary historical terms. One was a Medievalist, one a Shakespearean, one a Romantic scholar, one a philologist. Large departments might have someone who does film plus a creative writer-in-residence. Today, click on any faculty roster and the expertises […]
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Not far into an important book published recently is a table displaying results for one question on the North American Academic Study Survey, a poll of professors, administrators, and students administered in 1999. The survey is the basis for The Still Divided Academy by the late-Stanley Rothman, April Kelly-Roessner, and Matthew Roessner, which reviews the results and draws balanced conclusions. […]
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Here is a story in The Fiscal Times that may sound a distant warning to wealthy universities. It raises a question that might sound repeatedly in the coming years: Since some private universities are so wealthy, why don’t they pay taxes? As the article notes, last year was a good year for endowments. Harvard’s climbed […]
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This week’s “Diversity in Academe” issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education contains an interview with the “first-person ever appointed to the position of vice president for diversity and equity at the University of Virginia,” a man named William B. Harvey. He has moved on to North Carolina A & T, where he serves as dean […]
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A recent survey of college admissions officers, sponsored by insidehighered.com, has attracted some attention in the press, such as this story in the New York Times and, of course, this account at Insidehighered.com (there is a link to a pdf of the full survey report). It’s a valuable document that reveals attitudes and policies among admissions officers […]
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Herb London and KC Johnson have already posted on the disappointing findings of the ACTA project What Will They Learn? But it is worth pondering some of the implications of the report. One of the more striking of them is the “Slightly less than 20% [of colleges surveyed] require U.S. government or history.” As KC […]
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One of the less inspiring features of academia over the years has been the tendency of the professorate (or at least a vocal portion of them) to respond to certain ideas with contempt. Twenty years ago it was “political correctness” that earned their scorn–that is, denying there was any such thing–and ten years ago it […]
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For a variety of reasons, but mainly because of cost, tenure has become a focus of debate in recent months. Given the trends in hiring and working conditions, though, one wonders why, for the fact is that tenure has been squeezed into an ever-smaller portion of the instructional employee population for years. Two charts in the Chronicle […]
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