There have been two interesting, if somewhat under the radar, higher education developments recently in New York City. First, on Tuesday, the CUNY Board of Trustees continued its consideration of the administration’s proposed general-education curriculum plan, called Pathways. The proposal calls for a mandatory 30 credits of core offerings for all CUNY students, divided between […]
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As you probably know by now, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear Fisher v. Texas, depending on your point of view a promising or threatening challenge to affirmative action. Major and minor media, blogs, whatever, are all filled with cries of hope or wails of fear that the racial preferences sanctified in Grutter will […]
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For insight into the corruption of the modern academy, look no further than Heather MacDonald’s extraordinary article on the recent controversy at Duke. Two Duke professors, Peter Arcidiacono and Ken Spenner, and a graduate student, Esteban Aucejo, produced a paper showing that African-American students at Duke disproportionately migrate from science and engineering majors to less […]
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The phrase “dominant narrative” is a sure sign that a postmodern, anti-Western or anti-male story line is about two seconds away. It appears early in a flattering Harvard Gazette profile of Susan Greenhalgh, “the newest professor of anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences” at Harvard. The profiler, Katie Koch of the Harvard Gazette […]
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Watch this space. I will be posting something shortly (but not short) on a proposed presidential executive order that would impose by White House fiat the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (discussed here and here), which serial Congresses have refused to pass.
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Professor Patrick Deneen’s Feb. 17 essay “Campus Libertarianism up, Civic Commitment Down” cries out for a response. He finds the apparent increase in libertarian thinking among college students disquieting, but I think that if this trend is real, it’s a reason for optimism. It indicates that young Americans are breaking free of the adulation of […]
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At the request of the unidentified Asian-American student who filed discrimination complaints against Harvard and Princeton, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has ended its investigation.
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It’s called “the Bennett Hypothesis,” and it explains–or tries to explain–why the cost of college lies so tantalizingly out of reach for so many. In 1987, then Secretary of Education William J. Bennett launched a quarter century of debate by saying, in effect, “Federal aid doesn’t help; colleges and universities just cream off the extra […]
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One of the most mentioned findings in the annual UCLA survey of college freshmen is a decided trend toward more “liberal” political attitudes. The survey shows increased support for same-sex marriage (supported by 71.3% of students, representing a 6.4% increase since 2009); for a pro-choice position on abortion; for the legalization of marijuana; and a […]
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When President Obama talked about unaffordable college tuition, he failed to point out that federal subsidies are responsible for much of the unaffordability. In his State of the Union message, he said, “If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down.” However, since tuition is dependent on […]
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President Obama’s fiscal 2013 budget contains an $8 billion program called the “Community College to Career Fund.” It would encourage community colleges, in partnerships with employers, to train about two million workers for future jobs. Since there are about 1,045 community colleges in America, the program would amount to a grant–over three years–of a little […]
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Dr. London, a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, received the Jeane Kirkpatrick Award for Academic Freedom on February 9 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the American Conservative Union Foundation. These were his remarks on the occasion. *** It is with enormous humility and gratitude that I accept this award from the […]
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In a case highlighted by FIRE, Oakland University in Michigan issued a three-semester suspension to a student named Joseph Corlett, allegedly in response to some of Corlett’s in-class writings that passed well beyond the bounds of good taste (in a writing journal, he ruminated on the sexual attractiveness of his female professors) and to Corbett’s […]
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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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Volokh Conspiracy’s David Bernstein posted a scathing review of Eric Alterman’s recent Nation column. The piece purported to analyze contemporary political culture through the prism of Newt Gingrich’s super PAC patron, Sheldon Adelson. Writing in what Bernstein termed a “passive/aggressive” style, Alterman described the casino mogul’s behavior as conforming to virtually stereotype of Jews held […]
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Soviet ideologues were famous for adjusting Marxism to the zigs and zags of history, but they were pikers compared to today’s campus affirmative-action apparatchiks. The latest installment from university diversicrats is–ready for this–affirmative action for men, not black or Hispanic men, but white men (see here and here and especially here). Allan Bakke, come back, […]
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Consider the following two cases: • Crystal Smith, VP for Human Resources at a small historically black state college in the deep South, was fired for her published letter in the local newspaper praising affirmative action and condemning Ward Connerly as a bigoted Uncle Tom because of his opposition to race preferences. In dismissing her […]
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As the Arab Spring uprisings transform the history and face of the Arab world, the American University of Beirut, the oldest and most prestigious private university in the Arab Middle East, is preparing to launch the most ambitious fund-raising campaign in its 145-year history. The campaign will seek to raise more than $400 million dollars […]
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The cheeky blog Edububble offers a modest proposal: Since college tuition is so high, why not skip the campus middleman and “hire your own professor” as a private tutor? You think you can’t afford that? You’re wrong. While it’s true that hiring a $300,000-a-year academic superstar from Harvard would break the bank for most students […]
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Cross-posted from Open Market “It launched a hundred ‘anti-bullying’ initiatives at all levels of government, but much of what you think you know about” the Tyler Clementi case “is probably wrong,” notes legal commentator Walter Olson at Overlawyered, the world’s oldest law blog. Andrew Sullivan discusses this as well, linking to Ian Parker’s article in […]
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In 1970, less than 10% of Finland’s students graduated from high school. Now most students do, and Finland is one of the highest-scoring countries on the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests for l5-year-olds in mathematics, science and reading.
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Two former students of Thurgood Marshall School of Law are suing the school for giving them poor marks. Walter Olson of overlawyered.com offered this comment: “Doesn’t it sort of prove you deserve the bad law-school grade when you bring a frivolous lawsuit over it?”
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Lawrence Connell has won vindication–of sorts. He is the tenured criminal-law professor who was suspended for a year without pay by Widener University’s law school last August and forced to undergo a psychiatric examination and treatment as a condition of his return, despite having been cleared by two separate faculty panels of allegations of sexual […]
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Most people believe that “in perpetuity” means forever, or at least until hell freezes over. But not the University of California at Los Angeles, which is now proceeding to sell a Japanese garden that it had accepted as a gift after promising to keep and maintain it “in perpetuity.” How, you may well ask, can they […]
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Believe it or not, there is at least one person on the Yale campus who has received less due process than Patrick Witt, the former college quarterback and Rhodes scholarship applicant whose reputation has been effectively destroyed by Yale and the New York Times. That information came last Tuesday in an e-mail from Yale president Richard […]
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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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Ever heard of the New Faculty Majority? That’s a euphemism of sorts, but an accurate one, for adjuncts and other non-tenure-track teachers who now account for 70 percent of all college instructors. The group is three years old and met for a premiere “summit” in Washington, DC. on January 28th in conjunction with the annual […]
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In a column posted Saturday, New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane concluded that the paper had gotten it wrong when it went after Yale quarterback Patrick Witt. Brisbane wrote “that reporting a claim of sexual assault based on anonymous sourcing, without Mr. Witt’s and the woman’s side of it, was unfair to Mr. Witt. […]
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On February 2 Daniel Golden, former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of a highly regarded book on college admissions, reported in Bloomberg’s Business Week that Harvard and Princeton are being investigated by the Dept. of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for discrimination against Asians. It’s not the first time. In fact, for the past […]
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