Rob Weir, at Inside Higher Ed, offers a list of academic squabbles worth giving up. Any worthy dead horses to clamber out of? Well, no, it’s mainly a list of disputes in which he feels the other side ought to give up. Consider “Are Campus Conservatives Victims of Discrimination” Does anyone have any spare crocodile […]
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Rhode Island College received national attention recently when the student newspaper published a cartoon depicting Jesus as the perfect roommate complete with smelly feet, turning water into wine like a card-trick at the weekly keg party. Many people objected but the College was correct to say that they wouldn’t restrict the student’s first amendment rights. […]
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The New York Times offers a good look at alumni preferences today, particularly in its account of legal challenges to the practice. There’s only been one court case to directly consider the practice, and that, made by a federal judge in 1976 in Durham, found the practice rationally supported, as it generated universities money, and […]
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After decades of watching the sons and daughters of black doctors and lawyers get preferencial tretment in college admissions over those of white coal miners and mill workers, and corporate titans kowtow to the Al Sharptons of the world, those appalled by America’s ever-expanding regime of racial quotas will be forgiven for thinking things could […]
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Is it just me, or have others noted that “Big-Time College Sports” (basketball and football, primarily) have recently taken yet another leap into a qualitatively different zone? In my neck of the woods, we have the very controversial new Big Ten Network, which hopes to make gobs of money from advertisers if cable companies ever […]
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With some recent encouraging efforts to right the ridiculous financial metrics of college attendance, let’s not forget how rapidly other aspects of the college experience continue steaming into absurdity. Andrew Ferguson offered a prescient corrective in the Weekly Standard – here’s a telling bit: A further symptom of college madness, as I should have known […]
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I know this is almost too easy, but here are several nominees for the best paper titles at this year’s MLA Conference: “The Buggering Hillbilly in the Buddy Movie: Male Sexuality in Deliverance“ “Giving Ourselves a Good Kick in the Assessment: Entering and Expanding the Outcomes Conversation,” and my favorite: “Queer in a Vaginal Economy: […]
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In order to fulfill the requirements for a major in history at Northwestern University, my daughter took a course called “The Cold War At Home.” As one might imagine in the hothouse of the college system, left wing views predominate. The students read Ellen Shrecker, not Ronald Radosh. Joseph McCarthy has been transmogrified into Adolf […]
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A few weeks ago, I alerted readers to the threat of a tightening of the student loan market . Banks have been bundling student loans, like home mortgages, and selling them as securities. First Marblehead Corporation in Boston has been the nation’s biggest player in “securitizing” student loans, and just like home mortgage-backed securities, the […]
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Inside Higher Ed’s report on the proceedings of the delegate assembly at this year’s Modern Language Association conference is titled “A Moderate MLA” – the title seems to have been chosen mainly for its alliterativeness – moderation, by MLA standards, being a quality far from centrism or temperance in the larger world. The MLA, for […]
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We won’t be operating on a regular schedule next week. We’ll return with fresh content in the new year. Enjoy your holidays, and if you lack for anything to read, take a look at several stellar pieces from recent months you may have missed. College Admissions, Let’s Not Break The Law – Ward Connerly An […]
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Harvard’s announcement, on December 10, that it was eliminating student loans, and otherwise increasing grant support for lower and middle income students, has set off a torrent of welcome news in the last nine days. Two days following, Yale declared that revisions to its student aid program were forthcoming. Soon, Swarthmore announced the elimination of […]
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It is slowly dawning on the public that fake hate crimes, like the one just perpetrated by Princeton student Francisco Nava, are quite common on college campuses. Perhaps some aspiring academic, casting about for a PhD. thesis, will try to explain why these hoaxes – mostly imaginary rapes or fake attacks on black students – […]
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Against repeated accusations of leftwing bias on campus, professors have mounted many rejoinders disputing one or another item in the indictment. They claim that the disproportion isn’t as high as reports say. Or that reports focus on small pockets (women’s studies, etc.). Or that party registration is a crude indicator. Or that conservatives are too […]
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The Alice-in-Wonderland view of Duke University received yet another boost: a committee of the board of trustees has affirmed President Richard Brodhead’s “compelling vision” for Duke and found “general support, overwhelming support, for the leadership that the president is providing.” The obvious question here is “What leadership?” Brodhead’s performance during the Duke non-rape crisis was […]
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[a speech originally given at the University of Texas] What is an appropriate curriculum for our students? What happened to the consensus on which the college curriculum once rested? Together these comprise two of the most urgent questions in contemporary American higher education. It seems to me that the criticisms of Allan Bloom’s The Closing […]
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Consider the unbelievable obtuseness of Lawrence Bacow, president of Tufts University. Bacow talks endlessly about how he and Tufts revere the principle of free speech. Last spring someone at Tufts apparently induced New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in his commencement speech, to congratulate the university for its fierce protection of free expression. Yet that […]
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John Moores is a friend of mine. When I was a member of the Board of Regents of the University of California, John was my closest ally. Occasionally, we found ourselves on different sides of specific issues, like student fees. But, more likely than not – and especially on other fundamental issues – our perspectives […]
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Recently, former University of Colorado ethnic studies professor and documented academic fraud Ward Churchill spoke to a crowd of 500 at UC Davis. Preceded by protests, Churchill delivered a talk comparing nineteenth-century American westward expansion to the Holocaust. He then took questions from audience members who challenged his credentials and his version of history. The […]
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Last week, First Marblehead Corporation, a Boston-based company, saw its stock plummet after cutting its dividend. The problem? First Marblehead is in the business of “securitizing” student loans. A year ago, this would have required some explanation, but the sub-prime mortgage mess has taught Americans – and people all over the world – the meaning […]
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The University of Texas at Austin has just approved the formation of a field of study for the recently-established Program In Western Civilization and American Institutions. This enables the center to begin offering great books-based classes on Greek and Roman Philosophy, literature, and the American founding, among other topics. It’s a broad step forward for […]
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The National Association of Scholars has a question: “How many Delawares are there?” The reference is to the indoctrination scandal at the University of Delaware, which is very likely not an isolated case. NAS executive director Peter Wood has announced an investigation to see whether Delaware’s “education program” in student residence halls (in plain English […]
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The case of the Robertson Foundation versus Princeton University has not, after nearly five years of litigation, yet come to trial. But it’s already shaping up to be the most expensive donor intent case in history. Reports of spending by the Robertson family differ, but news reports indicate the family may have spent as much […]
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In my last essay for Minding the Campus, I discussed how faculty indifference may have contributed indirectly to the establishment of the University of Delaware’s now notorious residence hall re-education program. If so, we should consider this a crime of omission rather than a crime of commission. This perspective on the problem either differs from […]
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Yale’s college council has come up with a bright idea: it endorsed a call for each of the twelve residential colleges on campus to have two diversity coordinators. The relentless expansion of what Claremont McKenna professor Frederick Lynch calls “the diversity machine” is not exactly breaking news. Diversity is a restless quasi-religion whose missionaries are […]
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The New York Times yesterday featured a revealing piece on “branding” as a strategy for college admittance. There are few topics so noxious as the lengths to which desirous students will go (and amounts that parents will pay) to buff their applications to a fine polish with the aid of pricey consultation services. Their counsel […]
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Dartmouth trustee Todd Zywicki made several clumsy remarks in an otherwise good speech about campus orthodoxy. Speaking at a conference at the John William Pope Center, Zywicki compared faculty pressure to oust Harvard president Lawrence Summers to the Spanish Inquisition, called former Dartmouth president James Freedman a “truly evil man,” and said those who control […]
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Readers of this web site were challenged to translate into English an incomprehensible call by the Society for Cultural Anthropology for papers to be delivered at the society’s convention next May in California. The winner of our translation contest is Tom Kerrigan of Bethpage, New York. Here is his winning entry: Pseudo-intellectual gibberish pontificated by […]
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John noted here on Friday that Columbia’s effort to placate its hunger strikers was likely to bring them “more protests and larger demands.” That’s exactly what seems promised in a triumphant editorial by Andrew Lyubursky, one of the hunger strikers, in the Columbia Spectator today: The experience of the last two weeks has shown us, […]
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Nestled away in the heart of one of the most conservative Midwestern states is a publicly funded university radically at odds with its surroundings. Universities are in theory, marketplaces for ideas and ideologies; centers for free expression as well as vigorous and informed debate; refuges for free and independent thought. But if the taxpayers who […]
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