In a recent string of tweets, Lindsay Rosenthal, formerly of the Center for American Progress and now at the Ms. Foundation for Women, compared concerns about insufficient due process protections on college campuses to the heavily partisan efforts to impose increased voter restrictions or to level fact-free allegations of “anchor babies”–a comparison, she added, that […]
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Does the college classroom have a “carrying capacity”? The term refers to the theoretical maximum population that a particular environment can nourish (or carry) for an extended period. I’ve been learning about it in “Introduction to Sustainability,” an eight-week MOOC offered on Coursera by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I’m taking the MOOC both because I’m interested in the sustainability dogma on college campuses, and because I’d […]
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Cross-posted from Open Market “The Wandering Dago food truck wants to park and sell food at various events on New York State property. The state says no, because the name is offensive. Does that violate the First Amendment?” The answer is probably yes, says UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh at this link. He recently discussed […]
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The academic left has created a great deal of mischief by appropriating wholesome words for unwholesome ends. This game has been perfected with diversity, inclusion, social justice, and sustainability–all words that mean roughly the opposite of what they sound like. Diversity on college campuses denotes both lockstep conformity on identity group politics and radical stereotyping of people by race. Inclusion means excluding […]
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Is majoring in the liberal arts a bad economic decision? Debra Humphreys and Patrick Kelly don’t think so. In their recent study for the Association for American College and Universities (AACU), they show that liberal arts majors enjoy comparable long-term career prospects as students who obtain degrees in more “useful” fields. Students who study the […]
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“Why could we not expel a student based on an allegation?” That astonishing question was posed at a conference on how colleges respond to sexual assault issues by Amanda Childress, Sexual Assault Awareness Program coordinator at Dartmouth. According to Inside Higher Ed, Childress continued: “It seems to me that we value fair and equitable processes […]
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On February 6 the Maine Heritage Policy Center sponsored a small conference in Brunswick, Maine. The idea was to present a follow-up to the National Association of Scholars’ lengthy study, What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students, by following one of its many threads. KC Johnson, one of the speakers, published […]
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Critics of American higher education usually focus on the deficiencies of college graduates —for example, their critical thinking isn’t much better than that of college freshmen, or they increasingly end up in relatively low-paying jobs requiring few high-level skills. Yet an indefatigable retired South Carolina college professor, sometime state legislator and relentless purveyor of collegiate […]
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Speaking at the nation’s largest community college (Miami Dade), Senator Marco Rubio proposed some very specific ideas on higher education that deserve serious consideration. Rubio recognizes that our federal student financial assistance program has enabled colleges to raise fees: “these hiked tuition rates….form a free subsidy for colleges…which use the funds to finance a myriad […]
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An unusual article appears in the Education Life section of Sunday’s New York Times. The headline is disturbing: “If She Can’t Stop Him, YOU CAN. Bystander intervention may be the best hope to reduce sexual assault on campus.” The strong implication here, and in the article, is 1) that rape is out of control on […]
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The Maine Heritage Policy Center, coordinating with the National Association of Scholars, hosted an event last Thursday continuing the conversation regarding the NAS’ comprehensive report on what Bowdoin does (and does not) teach. The event, in which I participated, focused on the theme of global citizenship. In his dismissive response to the NAS report, Bowdoin […]
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In 2011, I published The Fall of the Faculty pointing to the problem of accelerating administrative bloat at America’s colleges and universities. The book’s reception exceeded my expectations with professors throughout the United States (as well as Canada and Europe) writing to me with stories of mismanagement, administrative incompetence, bureaucratic waste and fraud and the sheer […]
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Karen Straughan, a soft-spoken Canadian activist, gave a controversial speech last night at Ryerson University in Toronto. Her topic was, “Are Men Obsolete? Feminism, Free Speech and the Censorship of Men’s Issues.” This is not a favored topic at Ryerson. Last March, the Ryerson Student Union banned the formation of any campus group dealing with […]
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By Andrew P. Kelly and Awilda Rodriguez Last fall, President Obama unveiled a controversial plan to promote college affordability by changing the way the federal government distributes student financial aid. The proposal calls for a new system of federal college ratings that would measure how well colleges perform on measures of access, affordability, and student […]
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Yale has released the latest of its biannual reports regarding sexual assault claims handled through the university’s due process-unfriendly disciplinary system. The report testifies to some interesting changes, strongly suggesting that Yale adjudicates sexual assault claims less on a principle of justice and more out of a concern with avoiding negative public relations. The background […]
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By Peter Augustine Lawler The president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, was asked by The Wall Street Journal to defend the skyrocketing cost of attending her university. The total residential cost, now $60,000, has risen much more quickly than the rate of inflation. She assures us that not only Harvard but the other relatively nonelite […]
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By Ron Lipsman The essays that appear on this site are often critical of academic faculty. The criticism is frequently legitimate, as faculty are oftentimes complicit in the formulation and execution of academic policies that should garner disapproval. Alas, faculty are too often found at the forefront of efforts to: install speech constraints on the […]
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When I attended Northwestern beginning in the late 1950s, most students paid exactly the same tuition, room and board fees. Today, only a minority of college students pay full tuition (“the sticker price”) from their own funds. At exclusive private schools, some students pay nothing for tuition, room and board, but others pay $50,000 or […]
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When I attended Northwestern beginning in the late 1950s, most students paid exactly the same tuition, room and board fees. Today, only a minority of college students pay full tuition (“the sticker price”) from their own funds. At exclusive private schools, some students pay nothing for tuition, room and board, but others pay $50,000 or […]
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Columbia president Lee Bollinger has announced a new commitment to transparency in reporting sexual assault cases on campus, and used the occasion to reveal a new university website detailing revised sexual assault procedures at Columbia. The new policy’s specifics won’t come as any surprise. As has almost become routine, Columbia’s policy violates basic principles of due process […]
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