When I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s at an elite liberal arts college, my anthropology professor assigned me as a paper topic, “Why do nearly all the students in the college wear blue jeans?” It was a surprisingly tough question. Looking around, virtually every student at the all-male college was wearing Levis or […]
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I’ve written previously about Katie Baker, the new BuzzFeed reporter on the “rape culture” beat, a correspondent for whom due process appears to be an alien concept. But in an article about Brown, and in her determination to wage war on campus due process, Baker buries the lede. Her story actually shows how anti-due process […]
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Our best public universities have spotty records in teaching such subjects as U.S.history, science and writing, and are having a persistent problem with grade inflation, according to a new report from the organization I work for, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Our report, Getting What You Pay For?: A Look at America’s […]
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The news in the Wall Street Journal this week about college loans was unsurprising. A special plan passed by the Democratic Congress in 2007 and expanded by the Obama Administration, “Pay As You Earn,” has grown wildly, “nearly 40% in just six months, to include at least 1.3 million Americans owing around $72 billion,” the […]
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How do the fine arts fit with the liberal arts? Not as well as one might think. Painting, music, photography, and other arts are often part of today’s jumbled curriculum, but they seldom have the academic status of disciplines such as English and art history. The situation is reversed when it comes to public status, where having a prize-winning […]
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“It has come to this,” Justice Scalia begins his devastating concurring opinion in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, referring with near-boiling incredulity to the fact that the Court was required to “confront a frighteningly bizarre question: Does the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbid what its text plainly requires? Needless to […]
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Graduate education in the humanities is in a deep crisis. The causes are complicated, but the basic reality is simple: there are more and more applicants for fewer and fewer positions on the tenure-track, or even with multiyear contracts. In my own field of political theory, which is technically in the social sciences but functions more […]
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Dear Azusa President Jon Wallace, I read with interest that you have disinvited the distinguished scholar Charles Murray as a speaker tomorrow at your university, Azusa Pacific. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Cancelling speeches is a hallowed campus tradition, like pantie raids were in the 1950s. But have you done it the wrong way […]
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I was scheduled to speak tomorrow to you and your fellow students at Azusa Pacific University. I was going to talk about my new book, “The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead,” and was looking forward to it. But it has been “postponed.” Why? An email from your president, Jon Wallace, to my employer, the American […]
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Dartmouth president Philip Hanlon recently gave a state-of-the-college address concerning disciplinary matters on campus. Dartmouth clearly wanted the address to receive attention—the college leaked the full text to the Washington Post, which dutifully reproduced it online and did a lengthy article about it. In highly charged language, Hanlon charged that “Dartmouth’s promise is being hijacked […]
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President Obama and three of his predecessors and assorted civil rights luminaries (Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, John Lewis) gathered recently at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and, belatedly, to honor the memory of Lyndon Johnson, who engineered its passage. (For years Democrats fled […]
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As a child I relished picking through rocks to find fossils of the lush tropical swamp that once covered my corner of southwest Pennsylvania. On trips to Ohio I collected specimens of the briny brachiopods that littered the floor of an inland ocean. Climate changes. I knew that by age seven. Whether it is changing […]
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The other day, the New York Times published a lengthy investigative piece on Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston. Much of the article, written by Walt Bogdanich, has little to do with higher education, per se–the Tallahassee Police Department comes across very poorly. Winston come across even worse, since the Times reveals that he was involved […]
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For years, Washington has failed to make universities accountable to the students and taxpayers funding them. This failure was epitomized by the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act, which forbade the Department of Education from creating a “student unit record system, an education bar code system, or any other system that tracks individual students over time.” The bill, argued the […]
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I couldn’t miss the eye-catching headline on Diane Ravitch’s influential blog: “Schneider Schools Sol Stern on the Common Core.” Mercedes Schneider, a Louisiana teacher, is one of Ravitch’s loyal allies in the education-reform wars. Ravitch thinks she’s a great investigator and often cites her work. Actually, what Schneider excels at is promulgating conspiracy theories and […]
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“As Erin Ching, a student at 60-grand-a-year Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, put it in her college newspaper the other day: ‘What really bothered me is the whole idea that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.’ Yeah, who needs that? There speaks the voice of a generation: celebrate […]
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Five years ago, I told the sad tale of curricular decline at the University of Chicago, whose core curriculum changes had met widespread national criticism ten years earlier. I am disappointed to report that the university’s offerings have declined further since 2009. The University of Chicago’s Core was once the gold standard in higher education. Though it went through many changes, when it […]
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Minding the Campus’s recent symposium on the liberal arts’ troubles was enlightening and timely. Many of the contributors offered stirring defenses of a classical, liberal arts education that emphasized the indispensability of the humanities to pursuing a rich and vibrant intellectual life. I’d like to add several points to the discussion. Symposium contributors properly shared […]
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In an unexpected burst of common sense, Oberlin College has tabled its new policy on “trigger warnings,” the alerts that were scheduled to be given to sensitive students about upcoming class material that might traumatize them. The warnings directly concerned sex, violence and racism, but were called for across the board “to anything that might […]
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This past weekend, the Florida State football team held its spring football game. Most of the media attention focused on quarterback Jameis Winston, who had also spent much of his spring playing for the FSU baseball team. Winston, of course, is by this point also well-known for events off the football field or the baseball […]
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