In April, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights outlined a policy shift that represented perhaps the gravest threat to civil liberties on campus in a generation. Worse, Sen. Patrick Leahy inserted a provision in a draft of the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2011 that would have made the dubious new policy part […]
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The influential website Campusbooks displays a roster of “Popular Classics Textbooks” in fiction. The list offers an aperture into the minds of University English departments: Catch 22 by Joseph Heller Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Animal Farm by George Orwell The Rum Diary by Hunter S.Thompson Lord of the Flies by William Golding To […]
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College students have been protesting lately in many different settings, from Occupy Wall Street to classroom walkouts, to the riots at Penn State. Each incident recommends its own separate analysis and explanation, but it is important to recognize what they share in common as well. Philip C. Altbach and Patti Peterson reminded us that student protest […]
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The New York Times proclaimed recently that science educators and others are vitally concerned that high dropout rates of students studying math, science, and engineering (the “STEM” disciplines) will imperil our nation’s technological leadership. There is a shortage of people in these fields, it is argued, and efforts to increase numbers are thwarted by dropout rates […]
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An elephant in the room that universities avoid is how their system is rigged to serve the rich over the poor. An October study by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) entitled “Cheap for Whom?” showed one way that the university system is rigged in favor of the rich. It said: “Average taxpayers provide more in subsidies […]
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The Board of Trustees acted properly in cleaning house at Penn State, by firing president Graham Spanier and longtime football coach Joe Paterno. The inaction of the duo, along with similar conduct from now-suspended Athletic Director Tim Curley and now-retired VP Gary Schultz has exposed the university to potentially massive legal liability, as well as […]
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The football rivalry between DePauw University and Wabash College usually comes with all the trimmings–a traveling trophy, angry and intoxicated fans and vulgar T-shirts. This year’s shirts read “You’ve had our Dick” on the front and “Now here’s our Seaman” on the back, a reference to two conveniently named DePauw stars, former quarterback Spud Dick and current […]
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A few years ago, at a luncheon at Harvard University, Larry Summers noted an interesting fact. If you look at the top ten players in any industry or business 50 years ago, the list would look wholly different than it does today–except in higher education. It was Harvard, Yale, Princeton . . . back then, […]
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Thomas C. Foster’s book is three years old, but it still holds the gold medal for Turnoff Title of the New Millennium: How to Read Novels Like a Professor. The author, who teaches English at the University of Michigan, attempts to sanitize his work with the subtitle, A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary […]
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Like their compatriots in Zuccotti square, the 70 Harvard college students who walked out of Greg Mankiw’s economics class were larger on theatrics than on message, and failed to articulate a reasonable, much less coherent, justification for their protest. Gabriel Bayard and Rachel J. Sandalow-Ash, the two organizers of the protest, discuss the reasoning behind […]
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Back in September the College Republicans at the University of California, Berkeley, garnered a good deal of attention (including here and here) by sponsoring an anti-affirmative action bake sale. Part of their purpose was to call attention to legislation, SB 185, then waiting for Gov. Brown’s signature, that in clear violation of the state constitution’s prohibition […]
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The American Association of University Women, the voice of hard-line campus feminism, published a survey today showing that 48 percent of American 7th to 12th graders were sexually harassed during the last school year, with 87 percent of those harassed suffering negative effects such as absenteeism, poor sleep and stomach aches. These are alarming numbers, but then, the AAUW […]
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The case of Julio Pino, the Kent State professor who shouted “death to Israel” at an address by an Israeli diplomat, has received a good deal of attention. In a rare, if commendable, instance of administrative courage, Kent State president Lester Lefton issued a statement condemning Pino’s behavior as “reprehensible, and an embarrassment to our […]
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When last we heard from Wisconsin, Roger Clegg, the mild-mannered, scholarly president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, had provoked a riot of pro-racial preference liberals there by visiting the state to discuss CEO’s studies demonstrating massive racial discrimination by the University of Wisconsin. He must have put something in the water (or beer) […]
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The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are no longer merely residents of Zuccotti Park, they have converted themselves into roving bands restricting traffic on Broadway and Church Street and occupying nearby buildings. Yet the city authorities avert their gaze and well known scholars who share a hard left ideology such as Cornel West, Slavoj Zizek and […]
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Among those prizing truth, modern social science does not enjoy an especially good reputation. As a political scientist myself, I’ve long encountered conservatives who often complain that much contemporary social science does little more than demonize conservative views. Unfortunately, such grumbling is often correct but that said, complainers rarely grasp how this bias is imposed […]
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Crossposted at the National Association of Scholars. Last year, Berkeley physicist Richard Muller quietly assembled a team of researchers for the purpose of creating a new and independent assessment of the evidence for global warming. The group, which eventually called itself Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST), came to public notice in February 2011 in an article by […]
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English departments have diversified. Forty years ago, just about every faculty member defined himself or herself in literary historical terms. One was a Medievalist, one a Shakespearean, one a Romantic scholar, one a philologist. Large departments might have someone who does film plus a creative writer-in-residence. Today, click on any faculty roster and the expertises […]
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Institutions from charter schools to the White House are pushing hard for more young people to go to college, but with almost half of students at four-year colleges destined to leave without a degree, a counter-trend is starting to take hold: a loose coalition of people in the credentialing, training, and grant-making businesses are working […]
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The Catholic University of America is, um, a Catholic university. So–surprise, surprise–its Washington, DC campus, like those of most other Catholic institutions of higher learning, has a lot of Catholic stuff around. Chapels, priests and nuns on the faculty, crucifixes in the classrooms, statues of the saints, and a gigantic church dedicated to the Virgin […]
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The classic tuition bill covers tuition, room and board if applicable, and fees. This somewhat amorphous last item generally doesn’t worry students much. It’s usually a small sum, just a few hundred dollars. Unless of course you’re attending Rutgers, where high fees are needed to fund things like a $30,000 speech from Snooki. However, there is […]
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Suppose you are the president of Brown University or a member of the Brown corporation and, for some reason that eludes most sentient adults, you want to maintain your ban on ROTC on campus. You are in a tough spot, since all the other Ivy League schools, President Obama, the national political establishment, and the […]
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We all know the story of Lucy and Charlie Brown–just as Charlie Brown is lining up to kick the football, Lucy pulls it away, and Charlie Brown tumbles down. And then Charlie Brown, ever gullible, falls for the same trick over and over again. Reading Brown president Ruth Simmons’ recommendation that the university not permit […]
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The Income Based Repayment (IBR) program, which took effect in 2009, is designed to lighten the student-loan burden for some students. The basic idea is to limit monthly payments to less than 15% of disposable income. If a student makes these payments for 25 years, any remaining balance is forgiven, meaning that taxpayers essentially pay […]
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Columnist Mike Adams has some fun today with the strange decision of his college, the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, to lump together two serious academic departments (because of a shortage of funding) while once again expanding the campus diversity bureaucracy (for which no funding shortage ever seems to appear). As Adams figures it, the university […]
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Males are keenly aware that when they go to college they are entering a hostile environment. Freshman orientation alone has had a distinctively anti-male cast for years: heavy emphasis on date rape, stalking, unwanted sexual attention, and sexual harassment amount to an unmistakable message that males are patriarchal oppressors and potential sex criminals. The lesson […]
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http://www.openmarket.org/2011/10/24/senate-bill-would-further-undermine-due-process-on-campus/
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Stuart Taylor, my colleague from the lacrosse case, and UCLA Law School professor Richard Sander, have filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to hear Fisher v. University of Texas, the University of Texas racial preferences case. Hopefully the brief will achieve its purpose; it certainly presents a compelling indictment of the racial preferences structure […]
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Many in the academy, whether on the left or right, will agree that in the late 1960s, a fundamental change took place in the balance between student demands and faculty authority. At about the same moment when many schools began eliminating comprehensive examinations to assess the competence of students in their major subjects, these same […]
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I’ve often written of how groupthink has negatively affected the quality of higher education–while, of course, ensuring that those whose views fall within the academic majority have a better chance of success on campus. Ironically, however, what Mark Bauerlein had termed the Common Assumption effect and the law of group polarization also have combined to […]
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