“Maximize Your 529 College Savings Plan” from the Boston Globe
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One of the key contributions of second-wave feminism to the academy is what is known as “standpoint theory,” which asserts that members of oppressed groups have special “ways of knowing” based on their group’s unique experiences. The problem standpoint theory attempted to address is how to respond to the apparent monopoly of knowledge and power […]
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Those who suspect that “Middle Eastern studies” is actually a code word for anti-Israel advocacy have some new evidence to support their position: an entire academic conference scheduled for this week at York University in Toronto that appears to be entirely devoted to the idea of erasing the state of Israel from the map. The […]
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By Harvey Silverglate With Kyle Smeallie Harvard University may be losing money like a hard-luck high-roller, but the Vegas tagline (what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas) certainly does not apply: what happens at Harvard reaches well beyond the Cambridge confines. For better or for worse, many schools follow in Harvard’s footsteps. What better place, […]
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Two weeks ago a state district judge in Denver issued a ruling that makes it next to impossible for a college in the Colorado state system to revise its faculty handbook so as to make it easier to lay off tenured faculty members in the event of a reduction in employment force, even when state […]
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Illinois, the state where Senate seats are sometimes sold, has now scandalized higher education with the revelation that hundreds of applicants to the University of Illinois were placed on a special “clout” list, many receiving favorable treatment. According to a series of investigative reports by The Chicago Tribune, state legislators, university trustees, and former Gov. […]
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Have you heard about: The UNC job created for the wife of the former governor of North Carolina (with an $850,000 contract)? The underqualified applicants admitted to the University of Illinois thanks to political pressure (among them a relative of Tony Rezko’s)? The university that gamed its way up the US News and World Report […]
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Even the dark cloud of the current recession has some silver linings. One of them seems to be an unexpected up-tick in the number of college students majoring in engineering, an academic field that actually leads to production of useful things, such as bridges and medical devices, in contrast to, say, women’s studies, which produces […]
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A few weeks ago a teenaged pot dealer was shot dead in a Harvard dormitory. That alone was depressing enough. However, Harvard suspects a black senior, Chanequa Campbell, of an association with the pot dealer — Justin Cosby, also black — and last week was barred from her dormitory and prevented from graduating. Campbell grew […]
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“Should America Tax University Sports?” Read the piece, and an interesting comments thread.
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About five years ago, shortly before my term ended as a Regent of the University of California (UC), I was having a casual conversation with a very high-ranking UC administrator about a proposal that he was developing to increase “diversity” at UC in a manner that would comply with the dictates of California’s Constitution and […]
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Take a look at brief state-by-state overview of student loan forgiveness programs, from the New York Times.
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The good news: A survey from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) announcing that “distribution requirements” in undergraduate education are out and “general education” is back. Translated, that means—or ought to mean—that colleges are reinstating the idea of a core curriculum of essential courses, conveying essential knowledge, that every well-rounded college graduate ought […]
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What acid rain is to our irreplaceable forests, lakes and streams, leftist dogma is to American higher education. In every corner of the land, it has turned once-flourishing departments of English and history into barren wastelands where only the academic equivalent of cockroaches can thrive. Its corrosive poison – infantile anti-Americanism, hatred of capitalism, scorn […]
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A few weeks ago, the Delta Phi fraternity at Hamilton College distributed on campus fliers welcoming students to attend “the 53rd annual Mexican Night” party. The invitation, which was intended to be symbolic of spring-break excursions to Cancun and other vacation spots south of the border, contained the image of a Trojan Horse in the […]
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Liberty University made a mistake in revoking recognition of its student Democratic club. But the argument put forth by the conservative Christian institution had some substance to it. Mathew Staver, dean of the university, and John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute both argued that religious freedom trumps questions of political balance. That’s true. A religious […]
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Two years ago, I pointed out that UCLA seemed to be having trouble coping with its many identity-group graduations. Crowded into a single weekend, these ceremonies tend to overlap, though the good news was that multiple graduations were possible: a few students were eligible to graduate four or five times in three days. For instance, […]
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If you thought last fall’s staggering endowment drops were the end of collegiate financial troubles, you haven’t been paying attention. Another minefield awaited – application season. It wasn’t simply colleges that were feeling a pinch, so were their future customers. After decades of tuition increases that failed to dent application numbers, colleges were suddenly forced […]
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The last time President Obama gave a speech dealing with education (his address to Congress on February 24), he misrepresented government data to make his case that the country needs to put a significantly higher percentage of people through college. (I wrote about his fudging of the figures here) For that reason, Americans would be […]
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“8 Tuition-Free Colleges” from Mental Floss
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In recent years the stakes for entrance to the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities have risen to absurd heights, with students (or, their families) not only now paying significant sums for private school tuitions (or the entry cost into good school districts, namely expensive housing), SAT training, and coaching for application writing, but increasingly […]
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Last week the Wall Street Journal asked several college Presidents to answer an essay question from their own application. Presidents from Barnard to Wesleyan participated. Take a look at their entries. Would you admit these students?
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Donald Downs appeared here in New York at an event co-sponsored by the Pope Center and the Manhattan Institute on academic freedom, presenting his fascinating new paper “Academic Freedom: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and How to Tell the Difference.” Listen to John Leo interviewing Donald Downs in a new podcast.
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Like Caesar’s Gaul, President Obama’s plan for higher education is divided into three parts: 1) Every American should have postsecondary educational training, and within a few years we should again lead the world in the proportion of young graduates with bachelor’s degrees; 2) Federal financial assistance to pay for college should become an entitlement like […]
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Last Friday, a 6-hour conference at the City University of New York (CUNY) graduate center examined “rightist efforts, from fiscally or socially conservative movements to hate groups.” It apparently raised no eyebrows, though if the meeting had set out to examine “leftist efforts, from fiscally and socially liberal movements to the Unabomber and animal rights […]
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Newspapers are folding right and left—the Rocky Mountain News in February, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in March, the Boston Globe any day now, it would seem—and, according to the American Journalism Review, some 15 percent of the newsroom jobs, about 5,000 of them, last year (with another 7,500 vanishing so far this year) at newspapers across […]
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Every few weeks or so a new marginalized group is discovered on campus, requiring new bursts of emotional inclusion and sometimes a demand for special housing and curriculum change as well. At Cornell the latest people revealed to be suffering discomfort are transfer students. “Study Finds Transfers Feel Marginalized on Campus,” said the headline in […]
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In theory, e-mail should make it easier to organize for social and political change. But, as recent events in my campaign as a petition candidate for Harvard’s Board of Overseers have shown, new means of communication can be used to relegate would-be reformers of the academy to dead-ends, and to keep the outsiders outside. If […]
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill finally got it right. Instead of letting radical protesters chase an invited conservative speaker out of his lecture hall–as they did with former U.S. Congressman Tom Tancredo on April 14– when the radicals tried the same stunt a little over a week later, on April 22, against […]
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