Here’s a scary statistic about American higher-ed: more than 40 percent of college students don’t graduate. But that number hides enormous variations in drop-out behavior. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center has issued a “state supplement” report filled with interesting statistics; Here are some: Completion rates are vastly lower for part-time students relative to full-time ones; Students […]
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It’s an old canard that Asian students outperform Americans on international tests of math, science, and reading skills because their schools emphasize rote memorization. In contrast, American schools are said to foster creative thinking, which supposedly leads to better problem-solving skills. However, new research upends this narrative. The New York Times reports that while American […]
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Cross-posted from the Volokh Conspiracy In a previous post, I noted that Brandeis University had previously declined to disinvite a controversial commencement honoree (Tony Kushner), on the grounds that Brandeis honors people for their achievements without vetting their political views. This conflicts with Brandeis’s stated rationale for disinviting Hirsi Ali; Brandeis acknowledges that it continues […]
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Today’s respondents to our symposium question, “Should we be unhappy that the liberal arts are going down?,” are Patrick Deneen, Peter Wood, and Peter Lawler. * * * .Patrick Deneen, Notre Dame We should be unhappy that the liberal arts are “going down” in theory but not in fact. Because the liberal arts, of course, have already […]
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Do you need a college degree to get elected president? Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who doesn’t have one, wants to know. As Walker begins contemplating his 2016 presidential bid, John Fund reports, his incomplete education is raising concerns among Republicans. Walker started college at Marquette University but dropped out to join the Red Cross. […]
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Cross-posted from Open Market Earlier, we wrote about a Wisconsin town whose ordinance holds parents liable for bullying by their children, including certain speech. We and law professor Eugene Volokh noted that this raised serious First Amendment issues. Now, a New Jersey judge has done the same thing by judicial construction, by allowing New Jersey school districts to drag […]
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As students and their families rethink the value of the liberal arts, defenders of traditional education are understandably ambivalent. On the one hand, the diminished stature of the liberal arts seems long overdue, and this critical reevaluation might lead to thoughtful reform. On the other, this reevaluation might doom the liberal arts to irrelevance. To that […]
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Sensibly enough, the Wall Street Journal berated Phil Hanlon, the president of Dartmouth, for mishandling the two-day takeover of the university administration building by a small group of diversity-obsessed students. Instead of the obvious move–having the protesters tossed out–Hanlon met with them, then announced: “Their grievance, in short, is that they don’t feel like Dartmouth […]
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For this exchange I accept Peter’s characterization that I made ten major points in my original rebuttal and will proceed accordingly. 1. The issue of evidence Peter doesn’t really dispute my claim that his critique of the Common Core was supported by little evidence and no citations from the actual Common Core document. […]
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Fisher v. University of Texas was the most eagerly (or anxiously) anticipated Supreme Court case of the last several years. Opponents of affirmative action hoped (and supporters feared) that it would, finally, fire a silver bullet into the heart of racial preference policies. It did not, but what it did do (if anything) has been […]
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These are slightly edited remarks delivered by Professor Mead at a Manhattan Institute luncheon on April 1 in New York City. He is James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and he currently teaches American foreign policy at Yale. He has served as Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and […]
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My friend Sol Stern has published a rejoinder here to two essays I recently published about the Common Core K-12 State Standards. Sol had quite a bit to say and I have replied point by point in an essay on the National Association of Scholars website. What follows is an abbreviated account. Sol makes, by […]
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The conventional wisdom among higher education historians is that government was uninvolved in the development of American higher education before the Civil War. In “Myth Busting: The Laissez Faire Origins of American Higher Education,” published recently in The Independent Review, I refute this view using a framework that compares the actual political economy during the […]
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Sometimes it is hard to take affirmative action seriously, or to distinguish it from parody (or often, tragedy). A case in point is a recent decision by a three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upholding the dismissal of a discrimination complaint by Dr. Marvin Thrash, a former faculty […]
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Some cautious (and perhaps unexpected) good news from the Department of Education. Inside Higher Ed reports that the new DOE rules regarding the Clery Act are not nearly as troublesome as many, including me, had feared. (I formally commented on the rules here.) The new rules contain two positive items. The first, and most important, […]
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It seems as if periods emerge where sexual assault issues tend to focus on a single university. Even in the aftermath of the lacrosse case, attention remained on Duke–in part because of the civil suits, in part because the university, rather than learning from its mistakes, adopted a new policy that could brand a student […]
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The Common Core State Standards have their critics, left and right, and some of the objections are worth listening to. Although the Common Core train has left the station, we still don’t know whether it will reach its destination of producing more literate and knowledgeable citizens. So it would be useful to have an informed debate about […]
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By Greg Lukianoff and Ari Cohn The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) receives countless requests from professors claiming that they’ve suffered in hiring and promotion because of their political or personal viewpoints. These cases are notoriously hard to prove and to win–and that’s why University of North Carolina-Wilmington professor Dr. Mike Adams’ court […]
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If you take a train from Spain to France, you’ll halt at the border, exit the train, and board another train on the other side. The stop isn’t an exercise in border security. There’s a much smaller reason: 237 millimeters, to be exact. In Spain, most trains run on a gauge of 1672 millimeters, while in […]
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A freshman in a sociology class at the University of Wisconsin (Whitewater) recorded “a guest lecturer denouncing many Republicans as racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, and dishonest.” To his surprise, he–rather than the Republican-bashing lecturer–became the issue. Since the 1970s, the university has required permission to record and distribute classroom discussion, and now seems bent on […]
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