I agree with Andrew Gillen that a large segment of entrenched academia reflexively opposes for-profit colleges and online education. These people don’t even like the MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) started by MIT and Harvard! That said, I don’t see any evidence that the WASC acted unfairly when it refused accreditation to Ashford University’s massive, […]
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Tablet brings news of the unfortunate case of Sheherazad Jaafari, who was admitted to Columbia‘s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) despite her background as a public relations aide for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The admission raises important questions of standards and program policies.
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The world of higher education is abuzz with the news that a for-profit university, Ashford University, whose Iowa campus holds accreditation from the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, has been denied accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) for its online headquarters. Denial of accreditation for schools that already have […]
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Credentialing informal learning and experience is the next big push in higher education, with initiatives like Open Badges, Skills.to, Degreed, or LearningJar granting students credentials for skills and knowledge gained outside of school. Even traditional colleges are being pressured to accept credit by exam, portfolio, work experience, and other informal education, rather than reserving credit […]
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As one who has spent nearly four decades in the academy, let me confirm what outsiders often suspect: the left has almost a complete headlock on the publication of serious (peer reviewed) research in journals and scholarly books. It is not that heretical ideas are forever buried. They can be expressed in popular magazines, op-eds […]
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When college women study science, they tend to gravitate toward biology—about 58 percent of all bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in biology go to women. In contrast, women earn some 17 percent of bachelor’s degrees in engineering and computer science and just over 40 percent of bachelor’s degrees in physical sciences and mathematics. The likely reason for this, found in the study The Mathematics […]
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My editors at the Chronicle last week declined to permit me to publish my last piece on the same-sex marriage debate. They pointed out, reasonably enough, the topic is “too far afield from and tangential to academe and academic policy to run on Innovations.” That topic has, of course, had plenty of play on another Chronicle blog, Brainstorm, but I understand […]
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In the last few months, the highest-profile administrative skirmish has occurred at the University of Virginia. The affair was depressing in that an important principle (the need for aggressive oversight by trustees) appears to have been used to advance a rather weak agenda.
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A few weeks ago, controversy erupted after a diversity report prepared by two CUNY committees identified a “White/Jewish” category among the university’s faculty. (There was and is absolutely no reason to believe that this new designation reflected the thinking of either Chancellor Matthew Goldstein or the Board of Trustees, nor was there any reason to […]
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Colleges–both on the undergrad and graduate levels–typically admit students and encourage them to take on onerous amounts of debt, without first giving those prospective students the actual data about their chances of finding work in that major field afterwards. This is just as true, by the way, for non-profit as it is for for-profit schools. […]
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Back in 2010, University of Illinois, Chicago, Professor and former Weatherman radical Bill Ayers gave a presentation on Public Pedagogy at the American Education Research Association annual meeting. Ayers, then a member of AERA’s governing board, made the claim that he, Bill Ayers, was really not a terrorist. Ten of the first 11 sentences in […]
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The post-mortem continues on the two weeks of turmoil that included the abrupt forced resignation and the equally abrupt reinstatement of University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan. Everyone on all sides of the dispute over Sullivan’s ousting seems to agree that the Board of Visitors, UVa’s trustees, behaved secretively, discourteously, and ham-handedly when it handed […]
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What does one do when a culture of corruption is so pervasive that graduate students openly cheat and professors give out answers on exams? According to allegations at the Baruch (Zicklin) School of Business in the City University of New York, “cheating is their bread and butter.”
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By any ordinary standard, Teresa Sullivan is the kind of university president conservatives love to hate. In 2010, after the Board of Visitors unanimously elected her the first female president of the University of Virginia, one of her first acts was to endorse and publish the UVA Diversity Council’s statement expressing commitment in–what else?–diversity. Sullivan […]
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A professor posts excerpts from a book through the university’s electronic reserves for his class – an innocent enough practice that is fairly common in colleges across the country. Recently, 23 professors at Georgia State University (GSU) were alleged to have engaged in copyright infringement for doing just that.
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An interesting article by Sara Ganim noted that with the conclusion of the Jerry Sandusky trial, attention will shift to civil suits against Penn State and criminal actions against former and current Penn State employees. Probably the most explosive recent report came from NBC, which revealed existence of e-mails among former top university officials (including […]
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President Walsh, trustees, faculty, friends, noble parents…and dear class of 1996, I am so proud of you. Thank you for asking me to speak to you today. I had a wonderful time trying to imagine who had been ahead of me on the list and had said no; I was positive you’d have to have […]
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Now that the University of Virginia Board of Visitors has unanimously re-instated Teresa Sullivan as president, it will be important to put the controversy in the past as quickly as possible, to repair the frayed relations between supporters and opponents of the formerly fired president and between the Board and the faculty, which demanded her […]
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You’ve got to hand it to Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell. On June 22 he ordered the University of Virginia’s governing board to make it clear by June 26–yesterday–whether its fifteen voting members wanted to reinstate the university’s controversially ousted President Teresa Sullivan–or didn’t. If the board refused to “make a clear, detailed, and unified statement […]
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A report has been issued by the Coalition of the Academic Workforce that makes for depressing reading. It’s called “A Portrait of Part-Time Faculty Members,” and it offers preliminary findings of a survey of contingent faculty members and instructors in higher education. What is most depressing is not the median compensation adjuncts receive for teaching–overall, […]
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A few weeks ago, the Sunday New York Times published a review of Alice Kessler-Harris’ new biography of the writer and political activist Lillian Hellman. (Outside of the academy, Kessler-Harris is perhaps best-known for testifying against Sears and on behalf of the EEOC in a famous gender-discrimination case.) Written by Donna Rifkind, a regular Times […]
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These are banner days for the gay-rights movement. “Banner Days” is in fact the front page headline in The New York Times Book Review for a review of Linda Hirshman’s new book, Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution. The reviewer, Rich Benjamin, praises Hirshman’s work but feels the need to chasten her on the extent of […]
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Finally some defenses of the beleaguered University of Virginia Board of Visitors are beginning to appear. An editorial in the Washington Post half-heartedly and with notable lack of enthusiasm called for Teresa Sullivan’s reinstatement, but the next day it ran an OpEd piece by Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, […]
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What happens when higher education becomes not an end in itself, but a means for rapacious gain? Consider the current case in point: A small, primarily online Massachusetts institution, the National Graduate School of Quality Management (NGS), and its former president, Robert J. Gee. A team of student investigative reporters at Northeastern University, combing through […]
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Based on “new findings involving behavioral genetics,” reports the Chronicle of Higher Education, a growing clump of contemporary social scientists agrees with Gilbert and Sullivan that both liberals and conservatives (but especially conservatives) are the product of nature, although they seem to find nature’s […]
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Now that commencement speakers have finished their work, what messages did they dispense to the class of 2012, graduating into the worst economy since the Great Depression? Mostly generic words of anodyne idealism: “Live your dream,” “go change the world”–conventional bromides that graduating classes have heard since college life began. Few speakers gave the new […]
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The Star-Tribune opening paragraph–“The Minnesota Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the University of Minnesota’s discipline of a student over Facebook comments that her instructors found threatening, rejecting claims that flunking her infringed on her First Amendment rights”–couldn’t help but raise concerns. Given the judiciary’s excessive deference to higher-ed administrators, when courts uphold university actions against […]
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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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It’s no shock to learn that employees of colleges and universities donate more heavily to Democrats than to Republicans. In the University of California system, 10 times as much money went to Democrats than to Republicans, according to reports to the Federal Election Commission through May 21. At Harvard, it was 7X Democratic, Northwestern 6X […]
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The Boston Globe recently reported that the journalist Fareed Zakaria delivered very similar if not identical addresses this commencement season at Harvard and at Duke. Zakaria was perfectly within his rights to imitate himself on the podiums of higher learning. He did nothing wrong. The article reporting his “sin” was intended, however opaquely, to rap […]
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