The victories in the fight to reform higher-ed are often dispiriting because they remind us of the enormity of our challenge. Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) announced that it had successfully pressured the University of Colorado to reinstate a course that CU had cancelled on the grounds that the professor, Patti […]
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Earlier this week, the great classicist Victor Davis Hanson made a few familiar complaints about American higher education: Colleges cost too much, depend too much on low-paid adjunct professors, employ too many administrators, and engage in political advocacy, rather than liberal education. However, he added some over-the-top rhetoric. Colleges, in his estimation, have “gone rogue […]
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From Newsweek (via Inside Higher Ed) comes news of an unusual, but excessively limited, proposal from California Assemblyman Mike Gatto. In response to events at Occidental, Gatto says he’ll introduce a bill requiring colleges in California to report some claims of sexual assault to police. This is an excellent idea–trained law enforcement officers, not campus […]
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Thanks to the American Studies Association’s recent vote for an academic boycott of Israel, the field of American Studies has been under a microscope. Prior to the boycott resolution, perhaps no one would have noticed the conference on “Transnational American Studies,” sponsored by the Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of […]
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This is an excerpt from “The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself,” published this week by Encounter Books. The author, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, is also a columnist and a nationally prominent blogger at Instapundit. *** College students and prospective students will have an effect simply by […]
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There is a mini-argument amongst some academic bloggers over the way UC-Riverside’s English department scheduled job interviews at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention. As Megan McArdle recounts at Bloomberg, Riverside emailed applicants to schedule interviews only five days (!) before the convention was to start in Chicag). For some applicants, that might have meant […]
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Last summer, when a flurry of reports and commentaries declared a material crisis for the humanities, many commentators denied the claim, for instance, this statement entitled “The Humanities Aren’t Really in ‘Crisis’” (note the gratuitous sneer-quotes). But the bad news keeps coming. Last week, Inside Higher Ed reported, “History Jobs Down 7.3%.” Data from the […]
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Defenders of the academic status quo obviously don’t care much about promoting intellectual or pedagogical diversity on campus. But they should, if only for pragmatic reasons. In an ideal world, a robust marketplace of ideas on campus could serve as a testing grounds, forcing advocates of dubious concepts to defend themselves or rethink their assumptions. […]
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You may have read about the UCLA professor whose class was taken over by 25 of his students and other protesters on grounds that he was guilty of racial “micro-aggression.” Among other things, the professor, Val Rust, was accused of micro-aggressively undermining student advocacy by explaining that the word “indigenous” isn’t capitalized. Rust is a […]
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In a recent Wall Street Journal article co-authored by Purdue University president Mitch Daniels, Gallup CEO Jim Clifton observed that “Gallup’s hundreds of business clients report that many, if not most, college diplomas don’t tell them much about graduates’ readiness for productive work.” The information gap particularly hurts students attending non-selective admission colleges of so-so reputation: how do […]
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In analyzing the backlash against the American Studies Association’s demand for a boycott against all Israeli colleges and universities, two numbers are important: 81 and 4. No fewer than eighty-one college or university presidents have personally denounced the boycott (as helpfully compiled by Avi Mayer); the number is likely higher. But only four colleges or […]
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Just three days after the American Studies Association announced its boycott of Israeli academic institutions, I was able to report here that Brandeis University and Pennsylvania State University-Harrisburg would cancel their institutional memberships in the ASA. I predicted that more colleges and universities would join those two after the break. But some are not waiting. […]
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Several years ago, my Emory University hosted former Black Panther Elaine Brown for a couple of days of lecture, discussion, conversation, and meals. I attended one event and don’t remember what Brown said, but caught firmly the demeanor and cadence of the delivery. It was hip, knowing, coy, and canny, not an argument or a […]
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The friends of “disruption” in higher education typically cite grade inflation as proof that liberal education is substance-free. They are correct to assert, as Thomas Lindsay recently did on this site, that grade inflation is a real problem. But the disrupters haven’t identified the real problem with grade inflation: It makes liberal education seem to be worth […]
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The membership of the American Studies Association (ASA) on December 15 voted by a two-thirds majority to endorse a boycott of Israeli universities. Minding the Campus has provided good coverage of both the events leading up to this vote and its immediate aftermath. David Bernstein at George Mason and Jonathan Marks at Ursinus College have kept a close watch on the […]
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On December 16th, as I reported on this site, the American Studies Association voted to boycott Israel universities. Two days later, Brandeis University and Pennsylvania State University-Harrisburg announced that they would cancel their institutional memberships in the American Studies Association. Professor William Jacobson of Cornell University and Legal Insurrection has a list of affiliated institutions […]
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While Richard Pérez-Peña and the New York Times continue to ignore the issue, Bloomberg‘s John Lauerman penned a lengthy article on the wave of Title IX lawsuits filed by male students victimized by biased college sexual assault procedures. Unlike the Times‘ coverage of the Title IX/sexual assault procedures, Lauerman offered a balanced perspective, combining several […]
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A recent Harvard Crimson piece has raised eyebrows. From “Substantiating Fears of Grade Inflation, Dean Says Median Grade at Harvard College Is A-,” we learn that the estimable Harvard has done for grades what the Weimar Republic did for the mark. At Harvard, we read, the “most common grade is A.” But anyone surprised at Harvard’s hyperinflation hasn’t been paying […]
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If low-cost Internet-based learning totally transforms higher education, we can thank Charles “Chuck” Vest, long-time president of M.I.T. Chuck, who died last week of cancer, was a great man in many ways, but his crowning achievement, the OpenCourseWare program at M.I.T., spurred huge changes whose full implications are only beginning to be understood. In 2002, […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education has kindly validated our complaints about higher-education excess. According to the Chronicle’s analysis, 42 private college presidents received over one million dollars in total compensation in 2011, while the median compensation was $410,523. Though many of the top earners preside over some of the largest and most prestigious institutions–Chicago, Penn, […]
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