A courageous group of students are using Valentine’s Day to protest the hook-up culture. At twenty-five schools, students from the Love and Fidelity Network are holding a week-long campaign called “Words that Still Matter.” On Monday they hung 4,400 posters around their campuses, placed ads in their student newspapers, and began inundating social media with […]
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Near the beginning of Dickens’ novel Little Dorrit (1857), a character named Monsieur Rigaud explains to a companion, “I am a cosmopolitan gentleman. I own no particular country. My father was Swiss–Canton de Vaud. My mother was French by blood, English by birth. I myself was born in Belgium. I am a citizen of the […]
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Heavy pressures for more accountability are descending on colleges. Senators Ron Wyden and Marco Rubio want states to release data on salaries for recent grads of public colleges, and Eric Cantor pledges the same in the House. The information, the argument goes, would help parents and high school seniors make wiser choices, the reasoning goes, […]
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The push to make public the earnings of new college graduates and President Obama’s “College Scorecard,” which he touted in his State of the Union Speech last night, are promising tools to assist graduates in making the best choices of school and major. Several states have also set up similar methods of evaluating the “bang […]
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In his response to the President’s State of the Union address, Marco Rubio once again displayed his worrisome approach to higher ed policy. Though he rightfully lamented both tuition cost growth and the government’s bias against non-traditional institutions, his proposals did not address the heart of the matter. He suggested expanding federal student aid for students […]
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From the New Criterion Last month we noted some of the trends affecting the future of higher education in this country. One trend is the explosion in tuition and fees over the last several decades, an explosion matched by the hypertrophy of college administrators, as more and more “deans of diversity” and programs in non-subjects […]
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Here’s a plug for a site I belatedly discovered the other day: Open Culture offers free access to 650 academic courses, movies (from Charade to Charlie Chaplain), language lessons, self-help advice, books (from textbooks to the Harvard Classics), audiobooks, a list of grants available to women, and much more cultural and educational material “scattered across […]
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The Brooklyn College pro-BDS event–with which the school’s Political Science Department formally voted to affiliate itself–has come and gone. The big news from the gathering last Thursday came not in anything the two pro-BDS speakers said (their anti-Israel ramblings were entirely predictable) but in reports from Tablet and the Daily News that four anti-BDS students […]
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After the indictment of former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, Penn State did something quite rare for an institution of higher learning facing scandal–it hired a respected outside investigator (former FBI director Louis Freeh) and gave him total access to the relevant university records, including e-mails between key administrators. The resulting Freeh Report used senior […]
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From the blog The Quick & the Ed The Undergraduate Teaching Faculty The 2010-2011 HERI Faculty Survey , a survey of faculty at four-year universities by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, contains some interesting findings. Almost a quarter of professors at four-year universities do not consider teaching their “principal activity” (pg 19) The […]
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Clues to the structure of academia and its ideological leanings sometimes turn up in policy journals. Here’s one: In the Georgetown Public Policy Review, Robert L. Oprisko, a visiting professor at Butler University, notes that “eleven schools contribute 50 percent of the political science academics to research-intensive universities in the United States. Over 100 political […]
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A petition hosted by MoveOn.org is circulating protesting comments made by North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory about the curriculum in colleges and universities in the state. He made his remarks on Bill Bennett’s radio show, and they infuriated faculty members at Chapel Hill and elsewhere. Responding to Bennett’s question about what he plans to do […]
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Perhaps as long as people have made maps they have also made maps of imaginary places. Sometimes inadvertently, of course. Some cartographers really did think Terra Australis filled up the bottom of the globe or the red marks on Mars were the canals of Martian commerce. But imaginary maps have mostly been a recreation for […]
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Buried in a new Congressional Budget Office report is the revelation that the CBO now thinks federal student loans will add $35 billion more to the deficit in the next ten years than it previously thought. “The Budget and Economic Outlook: Fiscal Years 2013 to 2023,” released this week, details the changes in the CBO’s […]
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Richard Vedder made the breathtaking assertion here yesterday that “public support of American higher education, on balance, has increased income inequality in the United States.” He claims we must “drastically” reduce government subsidies for education in order to attack income inequality. He calls his view “non-orthodox.” I would just call it wrong. Vedder states, for […]
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A sign of the times: Yale, Penn, and George Washington University are now suing their former students for defaulting on their student loans. The loans in question are Perkins loans, which are set aside for poor students and disbursed by colleges rather than the federal government and. This news broke shortly after the Wall Street […]
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Let us look at the typical liberal/progressive American who supported President Obama in 2012, who enthusiastically favors raising taxes on the affluent, and who supports most federal programs designed to help economically disadvantaged Americans. My guess is this individual also probably supports vastly expanding federal financial aid to college students, favors increased state appropriations for […]
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It seems that higher education reform has found its voice. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor gave a speech earlier today at the American Enterprise Institute on the role of the federal government in creating economic opportunities for families, and he devoted a good amount of attention to the failings of our higher education system. He […]
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The Intercollegiate Review has news: To fulfill the religion requirement at the Jesuit-run College of the Holy Cross, students can study “Gardens and World Religions,” learning about world foliage instead of actual faiths. We can think of other hard-hitting religion courses Holy Cross could add: How about “The Phrase ‘Holy Moley’ in Batman and Robin: […]
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Connecticut governor Daniel Malloy recently made a splash with a plan to spend $1.5 billion expanding the University of Connecticut’s science, technology, engineering and math programs, thus–he thinks — turning his state into a magnet for high-tech employers. Alas, the idea of using educational central planning to boost the economic fortunesof a state is beset with problems. […]
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American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times defending online higher education by appealing to his own experience with distance-learning and correspondence schools. As a nontraditional student, he enrolled in Thomas Edison State College, a distance learning university, and he also received college credits through correspondence schools. As […]
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It turns out that “easy A” classes can lead to complications–even at Harvard. Last week the university announced that around 60 students were asked to withdraw for one to two years after a cheating scandal emerged from the much-derided “Introduction to Congress” course. The students who enrolled in the course last Spring did so on […]
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The National Association of Scholars issued a significant study of U.S. history teaching at the University of Texas-Austin and Texas A & M last month that has evoked heated commentary from the history profession. The report examines basic history instruction and instructors at the two flagship campuses of the Texas university system and determines that […]
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In early 2012, Yale University admitted that its campus grounds are a hotbed of violent crime–far more dangerous, in fact, than the surrounding high-crime areas of New Haven. That, at least, was the finding of a document produced by Deputy Provost Stephanie Spangler, who claimed to offer a “comprehensive, semi-annual report of complaints of sexual […]
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Professor Benjamin Ginsberg’s concern over the burgeoning administrative bureaucracies on many campuses is well-placed, but I fear that his proposed remedy of applying the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in the academy would be doomed from the outset and might even exacerbate the problem. SOX was designed to prevent corporate malfeasance and outright fraud […]
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I’m not sure whether student loan debt is exaggerated on other campuses, but here at Brooklyn College the amount of debt is surely overstated. The faculty of CUNY, which includes BC, has consistently protested tuition hikes, on grounds that student debt is unacceptably high. But my new survey of BC students found that few have […]
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The New York Daily News had a question yesterday about the coming anti-Israel hatefest in the city: “Why is Brooklyn College’s political science department officially sponsoring a one-sided event that calls for divestment, boycotts and sanctions against Israel?” As they have done on other campuses, anti-Israel activists talk colleges into sponsoring events featuring rabid Israel haters (in […]
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Standardized tests are often about as popular as the messenger murdered for bringing bad news — and if it were up to their critics, would meet the same fate. Their “disparate impact” on minorities (most recently discussed here) provides one of the standard justifications for continuing affirmative action. Now their use seems to be seeping […]
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I accepted some warm invitations from the Federalist Society chapters at law schools in the chilly Midwest and spoke last week at Indiana University, Notre Dame, and the University of Michigan about Fisher v. University of Texas, the case before the Supreme Court challenging the use of racial preferences in university admissions. Here’s an edited […]
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Two university presidents are in the news. Mitch Daniels, until recently Governor of Indiana, became Purdue’s president amidst much publicity. Arguably the most important leader in American higher education, Mark Yudof, announced he is retiring as the head of the University of California, having previously run the universities of Minnesota and Texas. Just recently, another […]
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