Alan Michael Collinge is back in his gadfly role agitating against the student loan industry. Collinge is the author of last year’s The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History—and How We Can Fight Back (Beacon Press) and founder of the website studentloanjustice.org, dedicated to, among other things restoring the bankruptcy protection […]
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Early February featured an interesting development from Fresno. Students of Bradley Lopez, a health instructor at Fresno Community College, claimed that Lopez was using class time to spread his personal anti-gay views. Lopez denies the allegation, asserting that all of his comments fell “within the scope of health science.” The students’ concerns attracted the attention […]
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A graduate of Wesleyan sent word that his alma mater now has a “Campus Climate Log” to chronicle “hate incidents and acts of intolerance” and help move “the entire campus towards a hate-free learning environment.” The project, wrapped in conventional diversity rhetoric, is overseen by the Dean of Diversity and Student Engagement as well as […]
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Should the American Anthropological Association “denounce the current human rights violations in Honduras” and “support Hondurans that… continue to resist the June 28, 2009 military coup in their country”? This question, put to a vote of AAA members, passed by a margin of 656-166 in online voting that ended last Friday. Taking a stand on […]
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In these days of 6-year degrees and students graduating at 25 if at all, it’s encouraging to see stories of far more intrepid matriculation – consider “The 10 Youngest College Graduates in U.S. History” at Online Degree. Number 1, Michael Keany, current holder of the Guinness World Record for “Youngest University Graduate.” “At the age […]
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In some quarters I’m viewed as a lawyer with a professional identity problem: I’ve spent half of my time representing students and professors struggling with administrators over issues like free speech, academic freedom, due process and fair disciplinary procedures. The other half I’ve spent representing individuals (and on occasion organizations and companies) in the criminal […]
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Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, quit the board of directors of Goldman Sachs, citing the “increasing time requirements associated with her position as President.” What she didn’t cite were the two or three weeks of steady criticism from financial analysts and students and the student newspaper in response to belated awareness of her lucrative […]
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Anyone who follows college sports knows the basic outlines of the fiasco that befell Binghamton University’s men’s basketball team. A few years after making the transition to Division I and building a new arena, Binghamton hired a new coach, Kevin Broadus, who recruited low-character, academically challenged “students” who happened to be talented basketball players. The […]
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Middlebury College is expected to announce a plan to hold the annual rise of tuition to one percentage point above the inflation rate. This announcement will likely be greeted with praise. But why? Costs may be held down in comparison with other colleges, but the bedrock assumption here is a familiar one: tuition must go […]
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President Obama has made reforming federal assistance to college students—with the aim of making it financially easier for more of them to obtain their degrees—-a centerpiece of his administration’s goals. In his State of the Union address on Jan. 27 he called for expanding the Pell grant program that currently serves about 7 million low-income […]
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On 2 December 2009 the curtain of Harvard’s famed Agassiz Theater rose on a production of Avrom Goldfaden’s Shulamis, one of the most famous plays in the Yiddish repertoire. An operetta set in the Land of Israel in late biblical times, it was last performed in Warsaw in 1939, and forcibly shut down by the […]
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One often hears about stressed and stretched and over-scheduled college students, but every survey I’ve seen, including those issued by National Survey of Student Engagement (Indiana University) and the Higher Education Research Institute (at UCLA) shows dismayingly low levels of study time and academic engagement among undergraduates. Another one came out the other day. It’s […]
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Take a look at ISI’s latest civic literacy survey “The Shaping of the American Mind: The Diverging Influences of the College Degree & Civic Learning on American Beliefs.” One finding: more than half of students polled did not know the three branches of the federal government.
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When talking with prospective students who are thinking about attending college, I often engage in a bit of “bait and switch.” Many of them are interested in jobs that will come for them after college and so they look at what college is about in almost functional terms. “What job will I be able to […]
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Given that it’s been 30 years since I left graduate studies in English Lit, I don’t spend much time reading up on the field. Still, when I saw the provocative headline, “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind,’” on a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education I knew immediately that this […]
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The AAUP recently produced a new journal devoted to exploring the state of academic freedom on today’s college campuses. As customary with anything from the AAUP in recent years, the publication was as notable for what it didn’t contain as what it did, in that it offered no mention of the internal threat to academic […]
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This is an excerpt from Professor Toby’s new book, The Lowering of Higher Education in America (Praeger). The balance between the pursuit of education and the pursuit of fun varies from college to college. Students in selective colleges and universities are less likely to goof off than in unselective institutions for at least two reasons. […]
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College investments dropped 23 percent in 2009, the most disastrous year since the National Association of College and University Business Officers began compiling investment statistics in 1971. Two observations can be made about NACUBO’s report, issued last week: One is: The richer the institution, the harder the fall, generally speaking. Harvard, the nation’s wealthiest university […]
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The headline in the East Bay Express a few weeks back probably didn’t surprise people in California, bracing as they have been for funding shortfalls in government services, including education: “Berkeley High May Cut Out Science Labs”. The first few words of the story delivered the distressing news that the School Governance Council had decided […]
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Last December, I wrote in these pages about allegations of racial discrimination in tenure denial at Emerson College, which had prompted the school to set up a three-person commission charged with reviewing those allegations. The panel’s report has just been released, and the good news is that the panelists “noticed no overtly racist or prejudiced […]
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Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University is a short, provocative book that raises many more questions than it answers. Its greatest contribution is that it clearly delineates the development of the American university from its origins in the late 19th century to the many absurdities that characterize it […]
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Barack Obama might be the most academia-friendly President since the development of modern higher education in the early 20th century. But anyone wondering why so few professors (and virtually none outside of law or economics) have been appointed to his administration should consider the case of Chai Feldblum. Nominated for a post at EEOC, Feldblum […]
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10. Justice O’Connor now suggests that the social-science evidence on which it was based is shaky. 9. The social-science evidence on which it was based is getting shakier, as more and more disinterested research is done. 8. There should not be a social-science exception to the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause anyhow. 7. In a variety […]
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</> Howard Zinn’s death yesterday affords us the opportunity to evaluate the remarkable influence he has had on the American public’s understanding of our nation’s past. His book A People’s History of the United States, published in 1980 with a first printing of 5000 copies, went on to sell over two million. To this day […]
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At several universities this summer, hope will float and perestroika will pay. At the end of August, Princeton, Harvard, Smith, Stanford, and Yale are taking the currying of favor with wealthier alumni seabound. For the fifth straight year, Princeton and other sponsoring universities are joining forces with a for-profit, West-coast speakers and travel bureau, this […]
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Two researchers offer a new twist on an old question—why do college professors overwhelmingly lean to the left? Bias against conservatives is not the main reason, nor are the allegedly higher IQs of liberals, say Neil Gross of the University of British Columbia and Ethan Fosse of Harvard. Instead they suggest a theory of “path […]
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The New York Times reports today on a new marketing gimmick for colleges seeking to boost applications during this recession-plagued time when every tuition-paying body in a classroom counts: the fast-track application form that allows some high school seniors seeking admission to bypass the usual fees of $50 or so, the tedious filling out of […]
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Sometimes people who don’t work in academia wonder why colleges are often the object of debates over free speech. Sure, some observers know that campuses are liberal enclaves, and they regard professors and administrators as easily intimidated by identity politics. But most people remember their college days as pretty much apolitical, and they continue to […]
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“Who are you kidding?” I wanted to get up and ask the English professor who was giving a talk at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association convention in November. He was analyzing a graphic novel, the spaces between panels, the line widths of the panels, the lettering inside the “speech bubbles.” Maybe he was trying […]
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Roger Clegg writes on a shocking new University of Massachusetts set-aside program over at Phi Beta Cons: The Boston Globe reports that the University of Massachusetts is setting up a med-school set-aside program: “Under an initiative set to be finalized today, the state’s only public medical school [i.e., at UMass] will partner with UMass campuses […]
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