At long last an attempt is bring made to curtail blatant anti-Semitic commentary on American campuses. The Israel Law Center warns that colleges and universities “may be liable for massive damage” if they fail to prevent anti-Semitism. The center sent hundreds of letters to university presidents drawing a line in the sand. This Israel civil […]
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I thank KC Johnson for his thoughtful post below. Here is a link to the studies we released on the severe and unjustified admission preferences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,and to the press release that summarized them and announced the press conference: http://www.ceousa.org/content/view/929/119/. Since I was there, I thought I would also add a […]
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The Center for Equal Opportunity’s Roger Clegg convened a press conference in Madison, Wisconsin. The gathering intended to discuss findings from the CEO’s disturbing study of how the University of Wisconsin has misused and abused the school’s racial preferences admissions scheme. Using internal data obtained, in part, through a lawsuit against the university, the study […]
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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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Harvard College’s Class of 2015 found something unprecedented awaiting their arrival on campus: an ideological pledge. It was framed as a request for allegiance to certain social and political principles. No such request had been made of Harvard students since the college’s founding by Puritans in 1636. First-years are being pressured to sign a “Freshman […]
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Our own Charlotte Allen has a wonderful piece in the Weekly Standard on campus events marking the anniversary of 9/11. While some of the events are rational enough and a few seem moving, the general tone reflects the fact that after a decade, our campuses are still as out of sync with the rest of […]
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There’s good news out of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit: On Friday, the full court agreed to rehear a now infamous decision in which a three-judge panel had earlier struck down the state of Michigan’s Proposal 2. Proposal 2, in turn, is a ban on government discrimination and preference on the basis of […]
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The Chancellor of the University of Texas system has issued a disappointing response to pressure from the public and Governor Rick Perry for greater accountability on the system’s nine campuses. Chancellor Francisco
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The following job notice was posted August 4: The University of California, Berkeley invites applications for a position as an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) in any of the following three areas: (1) Diversity and Identity; (2) Legal or Philosophical Frameworks for Diverse Democracies; and (3) Diversity, Civil Society and Political Action, or some combination thereof. The anticipated […]
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Writing here over a year ago in The Misguided Push for STEM Diversity, I noted that “Sometimes it seems as though the most heavily researched, richly funded area of American science today involves studies of why there aren’t more women in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and efforts to induce, recruit, and retain […]
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How easy do some college professors have it? Here is a paragraph from an Aug. 28 story in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the effect of recession-hit Nevada’s higher-education budget cuts at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas: One person who hasn’t spent much time on the campus since May is [Lynn] Comella. Sitting behind a […]
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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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I do not want us to shut down economic drive to support false science, and on the other hand, I do not want to leave behind a scorched earth. …. Let’s get the science right! A better debate and research is needed by honest and believable scientists who study climate professionally. Richard Lindzen, Professor of […]
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The redoubtable Anne Neal, President of ACTA, has released a survey entitled “What Will They Learn?” – a sobering analysis of general education in the nation’s colleges and universities. The report covers major public and private institutions in all 50 states. Each of the higher education institutions was assigned a letter grade from “A” to […]
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Even the most jaded observer of the contemporary academy can sometimes be stunned. Consider, for instance, an article last week in the New York Times, detailing faculty unrest toward Columbia president Lee Bollinger, on grounds that Bollinger is . . . insufficiently committed to diversity. Bollinger, of course, presided over the University of Michigan’s aggressive (and […]
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ACTA has published its 2011-2 edition of What Will They Learn?, a study that examines, in basic terms, what 1007 colleges and universities around the country require from their students. The entire study is worth reading–and features an easy-to-use website–but I consider two aspects of ACTA’s findings particularly significant. First, military academies fare quite well […]
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This article appeared on the National Association of Scholars site on August 30th. Eros is notorious for its power to thwart our better judgment and to baffle the rational mind. It can draw us to destinations we would do better to avoid and can prompt forms of resistance that are themselves out of balance and […]
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The newest member of the Hamilton College English and Creative Writing department is Visiting Assistant Professor Alessandro Porco, who has published two books of pornographic poetry, including a repellent poem on his fantasy of having sex with the twin daughters of Laura and George W. Bush. One indulgent reviewer praises Porco’s first collection, The Jill […]
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Elmhurst College, in what is apparently a first, will ask this question on its admissions application: “Would you consider yourself a member of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) community?” Answering the question will be optional; applicants may chose “yes” or “no” or “prefer not to answer.” Those answering yes to the LGBT question will […]
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Sandy Hingston has captured, in an article of extraordinary importance, the fruits of political correctness in the Dept of Education (the insistence that colleges make it almost impossible for men to be found innocent of charges of sexual misbehavior), the infantilization of women; the grotesque joining of careerism, cynicism, and ideological blinders to actual justice […]
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J. M. Barrie’s famous 1904 play, Peter Pan o
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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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It’s hard to tell whether it’s a news story or a media meme: Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott, a fan of Texas Republican Gov. (and current GOP presidential candidate) Rick Perry, is reportedly considering foisting on Florida’s public universities the same much-criticized reform proposals that Perry has been trying to foist on public universities in […]
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Another day, another bunch of dollars thrown at studies lamenting “the gender gap in science and technology fields.” The most recent comes from the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation. From its Executive Summary: Our science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workforce is crucial to America’s innovative capacity and […]
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Grade inflation has been a prime topic of debate at least since Harvey Mansfield’s Chronicle essay a decade ago. Despite my general admiration for Mansfield’s critique of academic matters, I’ve never considered the issue among the more serious problems confronting the academy, partly because it seemed to me that grade inflation has resulted not just from […]
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Curbing for-profit colleges has been a goal of the Obama administration’s department of education. The plan was to erect regulatory hurdles to a very profitable product: online courses. In pursuit of that plan, the department issued a regulation last October requiring institutions offering Internet classes to seek permission from every state in which they enroll […]
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The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) made its name as a respectable association dedicated to promoting the interests of the academy and protecting the academic freedom of professors. Now, judging from its regular publications, it has morphed into something quite different—an association dedicated to promoting the agenda of the academic left. The July-August issue […]
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The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, by Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring, $32.95, Jossey-Bass, 475 pages. Online college courses are a “disruptive technology” destined to drive profound changes in higher education in the United States and around the world. This is not an especially new idea. […]
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The AAUP has now completed the final version of what NAS’ Peter Wood aptly termed a “firewall,” designed to protect academics from outside criticism, especially from conservatives and supporters of Israel. The organization’s new standards now face their first test–but from a most unexpected source. In the left-leaning New Republic, Alex Klein has a blog […]
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A rift is building between, on one side, university professors and, on the other side, university administrators (including finance officers), politicians, and parents. The rift doesn’t fall into one of the usual conflicts over ideology (for example, leftist faculty vs. moderate or conservative others) or educational mission (for example, social justice vs. workforce training). It […]
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