“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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Claremont McKenna College, a private liberal arts school nestled in the foothills on the eastern outskirts of Los Angeles County, dishonored itself and defrauded the public in a cheap effort to bolster its national rankings in U.S. News and World Report. But if that weren’t bad enough, Claremont’s deception calls into question the very worth […]
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Richard Perez-Pena’s New York Times article on Patrick Witt consisted of little more than dubious inferences and negative insinuations. But the story did, unequivocally, feature one revelation: someone (presumably either in the accuser’s entourage or a Yale administrator) violated Yale’s procedures by leaking existence of the “informal” complaint against Witt–with the motive of torpedoing his […]
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In an essay in the Wall Street Journal plugging his new book “Coming Apart” (which I haven’t read yet), Charles Murray writes about a new American divide: “We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the […]
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These days, the agenda of the academic elite can be boiled down to a few liberal buzzwords. The most important buzzword is “diversity,” which is usually nothing more than a code word for reverse discrimination and skin-deep identity politics. Recently, at Northwestern, they held a “race caucus” where 150 people gathered to discuss their experiences […]
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Cross-posted from Open Market. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a team of eight law firms have just “sued a dozen more law schools across the country, accusing them of luring students with inflated job-placement and salary statistics and leaving graduates ‘burdened with debt and with limited job prospects.’ The lawyers . . . […]
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In an ideal world, Richard Perez-Pena and the New York Times would have been subjected to widespread condemnation, even shame, for the character-assassination frame the paper gave to the Patrick Witt story. Kathleen Parker, most prominently, has spoken with moral clarity on the issue, translating the Times argument as, “We don’t know anything, but we’re […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education had a cover story last week by Peter Schmidt on Angana P. Chatterji and Richard Shapiro, two anthropology professors at the California Institute of Integral Studies who have been fired, according to the school, because “they had breached student confidence, falsified grades, misapplied funds, and otherwise engaged in unprofessional conduct, generally […]
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Some Penn State alumni, outraged over the Board of Trustees peremptory firing of Coach Joe Paterno, are organizing a campaign to elect three new trustees. The objective of Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship is, ultimately, to oust the current Board. The Board fired Paterno, two University officials and the University President for not responding forcefully […]
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In his January 29 Forum piece, Peter Sacks says that I engaged in “nitpicking” in a blog post expressing disdain for President Obama’s higher education agenda. He’s free to call my skeptical view about federal initiatives to lower the costs of college whatever he wants. But in my opinion, it is naive to believe politicians […]
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The denouement of the Times’ coverage of Duke lacrosse came when then-sports editor Tom Jolly apologized for the paper’s guilt-presuming, error-ridden articles on the case. Will the paper ever get around to giving former Yale quarterback Patrick Witt an apology? With a few days perspective, it’s become clear that the Times‘ mishandling of the Witt […]
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The naysayers started their nitpicking the day after President Obama, in his State of the Union Speech, presented his plan to kick-start America’s sputtering system of higher education. George Leef of the Pope Center said “Obama’s talk about getting tough with colleges over tuition is pure political blather.” Hans Bader and others offer another off-center […]
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It’s happening, almost overnight: what could be the collapse of the near-monopoly that traditional brick-and-mortar colleges and universities currently enjoy as respected credentialing institutions whose degrees and grades mean something to employers. The most dramatic development, just a few days ago, was the decision of robotics-expert Sebastian Thrun to resign from his position as a […]
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Cross-posted from Open Market. In his State of the Union Address, President Obama decried skyrocketing college tuition, attempting to take advantage of public anger over the steadily-worsening college tuition bubble. This was ironic, since his own Administration has done much to foster rising college tuitions. For example, it imposed the 90-10 rule, which forced low-cost educational institutions to raise their tuition to […]
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When Justice John Paul Stevens retired from the Supreme Court in 2010 ABC News noted that over the course of his 34 years on the Court he “became a hero to liberals[,] voting to … uphold affirmative action” and other liberal causes. Now he has written an autobiography, Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir, ruminating […]
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