As a long-time refugee from higher education, I tend to forget — and hence am continually shocked when I rediscover — that denizens of that strange land are often impressed by research findings that those of us who live in more pedestrian territories assume everyone (even college administrators) already knew, without the need of research. […]
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A few weeks ago, I wrote about my quest to track down a shocking “fact” from an acclaimed gender-studies textbook, The Gendered Society by Stony Brook University sociologist Michael Kimmel–that American teenage boys typically say they’d rather kill themselves than be a girl–and my discovery that not only was this claim based on a misreading […]
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I previously wrote about the federal lawsuit filed against St. Joseph’s University (and accuser Lindsay Horst) by former St. Joe’s student Brian Harris. (You can read the complaint here.) Here are three reasons why the lawsuit could be significant. Burden of Proof. Critics of the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter have focused on the OCR’s mandate […]
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The report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences about the sorry state of the humanities was utterly forgettable, and Andrew Sullivan focused sharply on what’s wrong with it. But I think a bit more should be said in the service of my conservative defense of liberal education, part of which is the defense […]
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An interesting Title IX case was filed earlier this week in Pennsylvania. (You can read the complaint here.) Brian Harris, a former student at St. Joseph’s University, was expelled from the school after he was determined to have committed sexual misconduct. Harris has sued St. Joe’s, alleging gender discrimination on grounds that the judicial procedure […]
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Both Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education have just reported on a new finger-wagging “report card” that scolds college athletic programs for “racial hiring practices” resulting in insufficiently “diverse” staffs. The card, issued by TIDES, the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, is aghast that only 18.8 […]
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Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, gave voice to what is now a standard appeal for diversity in American institutions of higher learning on the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education (July 5, 2013). Challenging Justice Clarence Thomas’ claim that there is “no principled distinction between the University’s assertion that diversity yields educational […]
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The state of Oregon has announced a new pilot program for funding higher education. Per the Wall Street Journal: As lawmakers in Washington remain at loggerheads over the student-debt crisis, Oregon’s legislature is moving ahead with a plan to enable students to attend state schools with no money down. In return, under one proposal, the […]
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On his blog, Via Meadia, Walter Russell Mead commented on my June 26 post on this site and presented a very thoughtful analysis of the MOOC phenomenon and its likely impact on higher education. Mead likened MOOCs to Craigslist which siphoned off the bulk of the classified advertising that had formerly been a major source […]
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In settling a dispute at the University of Montana, the federal government decided to impose a “blueprint” that envisioned speech codes at virtually all American universities. An outcry arose from all ideological quarters. George Will criticized the arrangement–but so too did the liberal editorial page of the Los Angeles Times and such usual defenders of […]
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At many large universities with an undergraduate college of education, the education school is regarded by students and faculty alike as the weak link, sometimes something of an embarrassment. None of the top dozen or so universities in rankings compiled by magazines like US News or Forbes typically even has an undergraduate ed school, in contrast […]
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When I began by academic career in 1965 as a graduate student in political science, the social sciences seemed on the verge of curing the world’s problems. We were scientists; we had statistics and computers, every student studied scientific methodology, and the National Science Foundation funded our endeavors. Alas, a half century later, pessimism prevails. […]
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Earlier this spring, CUNY scored a coup when it announced that David Petraeus, former Director of Central Intelligence and commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, would be joining the CUNY faculty as a visiting professor of public policy, in the Macaulay Honors College. (The Honors College, one of the most important legacies of […]
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The Sunday New York Times this week included one of those impressive (and expensive) full-page ads that appear when an interest group wants to make a Big Statement. The new ad, sponsored by the Washington Higher Education Secretariat (WHES), is addressed to all of us. It declares in all-caps, “DIVERSITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION REMAINS AN […]
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The City University of New York’s “Black Male Initiative” is inherently segregative and discriminatory against whites, Asians, other non-whites and all women. In protest, I sent the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) substantial documentary evidence of how programs at three CUNY colleges, in violation of civil rights laws, had specified that their […]
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As reported here and here, the Regents of the University of Colorado have voted to commission a survey of the political climate on the Boulder campus. I spoke at the meeting, and the discussion was less complicated than one might expect given the history of liberal bias topics at Colorado and elsewhere in the last […]
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From the National Association of Scholars’ 100 Great Ideas for Higher Education It would be great and interesting for all concerned if every college student had to present a one-hour talk on some topic on which he had recently done research and written a substantial paper. Too few college students–if any other than the salutatorian and […]
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As the 20th century drew to a close, women had started to outpace men on university campuses, and as doctors, lawyers, psychologists, biologists and managers. As a group, they lived longer and epidemiologists described them as healthier and happier. Yet a raft of books about professional women published around the millennium placed them firmly […]
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What is valuable, one-of-a-kind and can’t be copied while retaining its original worth? The high-end art market. It contains thousands of works of art whose value is determined by what any individual or group is willing to pay. As the prices for such works of art escalate, something almost magical happens: the value pushes most […]
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Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin has posted a critique of my Minding The Campus commentary worrying that the Supreme Court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas could have the paradoxical effect of entrenching racial preferences for decades. Ilya makes reasonable points, and he may turn out to be right. I respectfully disagree, as […]
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