The campus diversity warriors are once again pounding at the gates. This time the pounding comes from on high–the American Political Science Association (APSA) itself. It is a serious clamor: a 76 page report called Political Science in the 21st Century authored by fourteen professors, many from elite research-oriented schools such as Berkeley and UCLA. […]
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FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has attracted important support for its open letter asking the Department of Education to define harassment narrowly enough to allow genuinely free speech on campus. Many colleges and universities ban expression that might be considered “offensive” or cause “embarrassment” or “ridicule.” The January 6 letter, sent to […]
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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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These are the opening statements of a luncheon debate co-sponsored by the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University and the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. The debate, held January 11 in New York City, pitted George Leef, research director of the Pope Center, against Peter Sacks, economist and author of Tearing […]
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The law school at the University of Iowa, like so many departments at so many institutions of higher learning, has a faculty that is politically pretty much of one mind, with (as of 2007) 46 registered Democrats and only one registered Republican. When instructor Teresa Wagner applied for a professor’s post in her specialty, legal […]
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Minding the Campus readers who follow college basketball doubtless have heard about former St. Joe’s center Todd O’Brien. For others, to recap his story: a few years ago, the NCAA instituted a rule to allow student-athletes who graduate in four years but have one year of athletic eligibility remaining to transfer to another institution, provided […]
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There’s something even worse than undergraduate debt. It’s graduate-school debt. According to the American Student Assistance website, which uses figures from such sources as the National Center for Education Statistics, the College Board, and the nonprofit Finaid.org, 60 percent of recipients of bachelor’s’ degrees borrowed to fund their education during the 2000s, with the average […]
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As I noted previously, a three-judge panel of 11th Circuit made a troubling decision in the Jennifer Keeton case. But it did so not because it declined to reinstate Keeton, a Counseling student who said that she would recommend “conversion therapy” for prospective teenage clients who were gay and lesbian. As the decision noted, Keeton […]
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A central component of the groupthink academy is the law of group polarization–that in environments (such as most humanities and social sciences departments) in which people basically think alike, more extreme versions of the common assumption will emerge. Within the academy, that condition has had the effect of producing more extreme new faculty hires and […]
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Although our beleaguered universities continue their seemingly inexorable march from being institutions of higher education to resembling, more and more, political and social re-education camps for the young, every now and then the students demonstrate that they remain well ahead of campus administrations and faculties when it comes to appreciating the true role of our […]
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As a dean at a rural community college in Illinois, I recently served as a judge for a history fair for seventh and eighth graders at a local school–an assignment that involved a real surprise. When the Social Studies teacher gave me the grading rubric, I saw only three categories: Superior, Excellent, and Good. I […]
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Cross-posted from National Association of Scholars. Cross-posted from National Association of Scholars. Fall 2011 has seen some major milestones for the SAT/ACT optional movement. DePaul University, for instance, initiated its first admission cycle sans test requirement. Clark University announced last month that it will offer test-optional admissions for the incoming class of 2013. In his […]
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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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Keeping quiet can seal your fate if you are a professor facing a campus kangaroo court after being accused of racial “harassment” over your classroom speech. Free-speech advocates use adverse publicity to save wrongly-accused professors from being convicted and fired. They put to good use Justice Brandeis’s observation that publicity cures social evils, […]
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In the groupthink academy, perhaps the most opaque, but significant, personnel process comes in the hiring of new faculty. In a flawed tenure case (as I came to discover), some precedent exists for the courts (or, in my case, fair-minded senior administrators) intervening to undo an ethically improper outcome. In the typical hiring process, however, […]
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What were the best books of the year on higher education? A panel of ten prominent people in the field, invited to vote by Minding the Campus, picked as their top two choices, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa; and “Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting […]
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I’ve written before of the peculiar case of Brown and Marcella Dresdale. In 2006, Dresdale accused another Brown freshman, William McCormick, of sexual assault. But she didn’t go the local police, and she never filed charges. Instead, she went to the Brown administration–over which, it turned out, her father Richard, a major Brown donor, exercised […]
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By Frank J. Macchiarola and Michael C. Macchiarola As law schools have come under fire on many fronts, the growing cost of tuition has drawn the most attention. This is not surprising, given the shrinking job market for lawyers and tuition increases that have far outpaced the general cost of living for more than two […]
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It’s not often that a university’s personnel decision is so egregious that even the editorial pages of the local newspaper denounce it. That occurred with Hamline University, whose seemingly rescinded appointment to Tom Emmer generated a blistering editorial from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Between 2004 and 2010, Emmer served as a prominent member of the Republican […]
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Both of my parents were public school teachers, and through them I gained an appreciation of the value of teachers’ unions. Though the NEA and AFT can sometimes frustrate public education reforms, they play a critical role in giving teachers a seat at the table in setting education policies. Indeed, perhaps the most objectionable aspect […]
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Crossposted from OpenMarket.org The New York Times featured an excellent news story Sunday by David Segal on the costly white elephant that is legal education in America. He describes how law school is expensive because of government-enforced accreditation standards that prevent law schools from containing costs even if they wanted to (and in truth, most […]
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http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2011/12/the_many_problems_of_online_ed.html
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I’d like to respond to Peter Sacks’ critique of my new study. Something that I think is lacking from Sacks’ critique is any sort of acknowledgement of what the paper is about. So, for those that haven’t read it yet, here is the basic story of my report…
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Correction: The post that appeared here under the name of Robert Weissberg was not written by him. The author, Lennard Davis of the University of Illinois, Chicago, posted it on Huffington Post. December 2.
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When individuals seek higher education, why should all of us have to pay? After all, individuals decide whether to seek a college degree based on their own calculations of expected costs and benefits. That taxpayers must bear the burden of financial aid to these individuals seems unfair. Given the billions of dollars governments pay individuals […]
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Time magazine has named The Protester as its Person of the Year. As a result, my brother Peter, intrepid humor columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, writes to brag that he has now been picked as the magazine’s Person of the Year four times: 1966 (everyone under age 25), 1968 (middle Americans), 2006 (YOU, i.e., everyone […]
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Cross-posted from National Association of Scholars. Climategate, both 1 and 2, are textbook cases of gross lapses in professional ethics and scientific malfeasance. To understand why, one must first understand what science is and how it is supposed to operate. Science is the noble pursuit of knowledge through observation, testing and experimentation. Scientists attempt to […]
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Both Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education have just reported that the U.S. State Department has teamed up with 36 American women’s colleges to launch a program that discriminates against Arab men and U.S. co-ed institutions.
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The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) has done it again. This is the group that effectively drove former Harvard president Lawrence Summers out of office over a 2005 remark of his about possible differences between the sexes that didn’t sit well with hard-line feminists on the Harvard faculty. The FAS voted its “lack […]
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At Bloomberg News, Virginia Postrel writes about how federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable have instead encouraged rapidly rising tuitions, in a column entitled, “U.S. Universities Feast on Federal Student Aid.” Education analyst Neal McCluskey links to four studies showing that increased government spending on student aid results in large tuition increases. As […]
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