Latest Articles

Less Writing, More Teaching?

Years ago, assigned to cover a national meeting of sociologists for a major newspaper, I asked the convention press office to get me a copy of every paper to be delivered. The press officer looked thunderstruck but complied, handing over several hundred papers in a stack more than three feet high. I read them all […]

VERITAS in Philanthropy

Philanthropy profiles the VERITAS Fund, among other organizations, in a look at new efforts to revive civic education on American campuses. Take a look.

6 New Rules Of College Admissions

The Daily Beast offers several interesting features on “Getting In.” Read “How Obama’s College Plan Hurts My Generation” on rising college costs, “The Year to Bribe Your Way In” on this year’s increased efficacy of donation as an admissions (ahem) tool, and other stories on cheap colleges and application strategies.

A Look At Real Diversity

I have been teaching a class at Columbia on Western Civilization since September. The class is highly diverse. By that, I mean that among the 21 students there is an Orthodox Jew, a child of Russian immigrants, and a couple of Korean-Americans. Plus a Chinese-American. And one of them grew up in France; just why […]

Teaching Twittering?

Whenever you read the words “for the 21st century” in connection with some educational topic, you know it’s time to run for cover. That’s because “21st century” is edu-speak for “letting your students mess around on computers instead of teaching them something substantive.” The latest manifestation of this seems to be a report released at […]

Questioning Horowitz

Mark Bauerlein asks, “What can we say of disciplines that license teachers to stray so far from their training?” We can say, “great!” Encouraging professors to go beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries is one of the best things we can do to improve higher education. Horowitz’s view, seemingly embraced by Bauerlein, would require an incredibly repressive […]

The Left Reacts To Horowitz

Whenever David Horowitz issues a broadside against leftwing bias in higher education, academics have a ready reply. He packs his sallies with pointed illustrations but the record is feeble, they say. He cherry-picks evidence and magnifies a few bad cases into an epidemic of malfeasance. He relies on indirect documents (for instance, course descriptions) but […]

Endowments Are Still Massive–So Spend

Many people think the colleges and universities are overreacting to the sharp drop in their endowments. Lynne Munson, former deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is one of these critics. In a letter (subscription only) to the Chronicle of Higher Education, she argues that higher ed endowments haven’t lost much value if […]

Quiz Time

A new book of essays, Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University (SUNY, 2009), celebrates the current president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The book’s cover says, “This collection brings together distinguished and rising cultural studies scholars to explore the ways in which Cary Nelson’s work unites scholarship and activism, demonstrating […]

The Rise Of The Economics Major

This piece was co-authored by Maurice Black With the global economy enduring its worst downturn in decades, a nervous public anxious to know what might happen next, and economics professors becoming media celebrities in their own right, it’s no surprise that more college students are gravitating toward economics classes. The Oberlin College economics department reports […]

The Trouble With Cutting College Costs

Harvard University, trying to trim its operating budget in the face of a projected 30 percent decline in the value of its endowment stemming from the current financial meltdown, announced its intention to cut 13 of the 27 janitors who service its medical school and an unspecified number of custodial workers elsewhere at Harvard residential […]

Why Students Flee The Humanities

On February 25, 2009, an article by Patricia Cohen appeared in the New York Times: “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.” Its thesis was a familiar one: an economic downturn will lead to a decline in the number of college majors in the humanities because in hard times enrollments shift toward majors […]

How To Finesse A Student Occupation

What kind of mark does NYU deserve for its handling of its student occupation? Let’s give the university a “B-plus” or even an “A” for a performance marred only by a poor end game—immediately reinstating the suspended perpetrators of the sandbox revolution, thus letting them claim that they had won. (“We did it”, said the […]

In The Blogs

Some reading for the day: – Advice on improving scholarly journals at The Monkey Cage (part one and part two) -Richard Vedder on innovations at the University of Toledo. Contracting out for online education? Imagine that? -The Epicurean Dealmaker on college expenditures. “In short, private education in America spends money like a drunken sailor with […]

15 Strangest College Courses

These are always fun. Samples: “Philosophy and Star Trek”, “Cyberporn and Society”, and “The Simpsons and Philosophy.”

A Call for “Intentional Upheaval”

This article is adapted from the American Council on Education’s Atwell Lecture, delivered on February 8th by Dr. Gee, president of The Ohio State University The transformative effect of higher education, to change individual lives and to remedy global problems of all kinds, is without question. And it is shared equally among us. Public or […]

Lose A President To A Coup And You Will Fail

The recent attempts to drive Robert Kerrey from the presidency of The New School are reminiscent of how Larry Summers was driven from the Harvard presidency in 2006 and, further back, how controversies, real and specious, roiled American campuses in the 1960s and 1970s. If the Trustees of the New School are at all tempted […]

If You Haven’t Laughed Today

Take a look at some hilarious footage of the end of the NYU building occupation, courtesy of Gawker. You won’t regret the nine minutes spent watching this. “I don’t think they want water bottles. They probably drink corporate water.” -Protester

NYU Is Safe Again

New York University students, or at least a few dozen of them, have just set several records for student occupations of a campus building: fewest occupiers, shortest occupation (3 days) , least support among the student body and longest list of demands. Surely the strange litany of demands had much to so with the adventure’s […]

How Will The Colleges Cope?

Dr. Macchiarola, chancellor of St. Francis College in Brooklyn, delivered these remarks on February 5th at a one-day conference in New York on “The Future of the University.” The conference was sponsored by the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University. If I were making this presentation a year ago, I would not have some […]

New ACTA Report

https://www.goacta.org/publications/index.cfm?categoryid=7E8A88BF-C70B-972A-68008CC20E38AF8A#4CE03472-B0EC-DD53-2130EBC7F7E51C95

Who Is the Real “Fascist Bastard”?

The case of Jonathan Lopez, the Los Angeles Community college student who allegedly was called a “fascist bastard” by his speech professor for delivering a Christian speech, has indeed touched a nerve, as his lawyer, David French of the Alliance Defense Fund said. Once again the mainstream press got a few things askew. The Los […]

Financial Pain on the Campuses

On February 11 art-lovers packed a meeting room at Brandeis University to protest Brandeis’s plans to shut down its on-campus art museum and auction off the museum’s entire 6,000-piece collection. The list of holdings at Brandeis’s Rose Art Museum, most of them donated since the museum’s opening in 1961, reads like a Who’s Who of […]

A Small Stimulus for Colleges

In the area of higher education especially, but in most other areas too, the Stimulus bill looks more like an emergency measure designed to maintain current programs than a strategic package aimed to stimulate growth. Among others, college and university presidents are likely to be among those sorely disappointed. Last November, shortly after the election, […]

A Crucifix Controversy at BC

Over the winter break, Boston College placed in its classrooms crucifixes and other Christian symbols, many of them brought back from historically Catholic countries by BC students studying there. To the surprise of no one, this turned out to be controversial at the Jesuit-run institution. Any lurch in the direction of religion by religious colleges […]

Getting Lincoln To College

On the day in 1858 that Abraham Lincoln debated Stephen A. Douglas in the fifth of their great series of debates across Illinois, both candidates mounted a platform which had been hastily cobbled together and moved to the east side of Knox College’s ‘Old Main,’ in Galesburg, Illinois. Because of a quirk in the height […]

Stanley Fish And The Storm In Ottawa: Seven Professors Say What They Think

Denis Rancourt, a professor of physics at Ottawa University, an anarchist and a backer of Critical Pedagogy, may be the most dramatic example of a politicized teacher yet seen in North America. He believes that college instruction is an instrument of oppression and that his proper job is to combat this oppression by ignoring what […]

Brandeis: Still Abusing A Professor

By William Creeley & Harvey Silverglate Reaction to Brandeis University’s plan to close the Rose Art Museum and sell its esteemed collection was swift—and scathing. Within the Brandeis community, President Jehuda Reinharz’s proposed fire sale provoked howls of betrayal from students, faculty, alumni, and donors. In the art world and news media, the move was […]

The University Tomorrow?

Universities, Individualism, and David Brooks

In a recent op-ed, New York Times columnist David Brooks raised an interesting and important question. Drawing on a recent book (largely neglected) by Hugh Heclo entitled On Thinking Institutionally, Brooks critiqued a report on education that a Harvard University faculty committee issued a few years ago. According to the report, “the aim of a […]