Sunday’s New York Times ran a lengthy story on what appears to be a mishandled allegation of sexual assault at Hobart and William Smith. (This was one of at least a dozen articles the Times has run on the topic, even as the “paper of record” has yet to run even one article on any […]
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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) provider Coursera wants to change the way we think about the revolutionary learning platform. In response to arguments that MOOCs are too impersonal, in November it announced partnerships with nine institutions that would create thirty “learning hubs,” where students taking the same MOOC could physically meet to discuss the course […]
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The news media took little notice when 14 organizations and religious leaders, including Rick Warren, Christianity Today and Catholic Charities, sent a letter to President Obama last week seeking religious exemptions from his forthcoming executive order barring federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. But the Boston Globe and gay activists noticed […]
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Over the past several months, Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri) has emerged as the Senate’s most ferocious opponent of campus due process. One of the upper chamber’s unequivocal defenders of the Office for Civil Rights, McCaskill also attempted to browbeat the American Council of Education for representing its members, and convened several town hall sessions on campus […]
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If you’re feeling hopeless about the apathy of today’s college students, check out FIRE’s latest video. Entitled “Don’t Shut Up–Stand Up For Speech!,” it highlights students who’ve asserted their First Amendment rights in defiance of hostile administrators and professors. The video also informs students of FIRE’s role in assisting such students. Check it out here:
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Bill Powers, embattled for years as president of the University of Texas at Austin, appears at last to be facing his Alamo. On Thursday, the UT Board of Regents will meet and Powers, mired in controversy over costs and mission, is expected to either resign or be fired. A face-saving compromise would be to let […]
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As everyone knows by now, the Supreme Court has just held in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (discussed here) that requiring the owners of a closely held family business to provide employees abortifacients that violated their sincerely held religious beliefs was barred by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (passed virtually unanimously by a Democrat-controlled Congress and […]
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I’ve long believed that the main threat to liberal education—real higher education, in my view—is our tendency to judge the success of academics in technical terms. Too often, social critics attack tenured humanities professors for their inefficiency and poor productivity. Though they think they’re saving higher education, these pundits are harming higher-ed more than political […]
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The Washington Post has helpfully compiled a table, using Clery Act statistics, of allegations of campus sexual assaults in 2012 (the last year for which figures are available, including all schools with 1000 or more students). To put it mildly, the data do not substantiate White House claims of a virtually unprecedented violent crime wave […]
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The College Board recently released its new AP U.S. History (APUSH) Curriculum Framework. It is, in many respects, a dispiriting document. A great deal of important U.S. history is given cursory treatment and some ideological themes are sounded rather loudly.
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Cristina Hoff Sommers–the “Factual Feminist”–has a few suggestions:
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In March 2007 Barack Obama bragged, as he has on other occasions, that “I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the Constitution.” Of course, many much more prominent and prolific Obama-supporting law professors (easy, since Obama published nothing on the subject) do not “respect the Constitution” — […]
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The grades I just issued in my post-calculus, differential equations course – a sophomore math offering taken mostly by engineering students—followed the usual bell-shaped curve, roughly 10% A’s, 20% B’s, 40% C’s, 20% D’s and 10% F’s. The complaints came more from the D students than from the Fs.
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The Chronicle has a revealing piece on a group largely overlooked in the war on due process—college attorneys, who since 2011 have been aggressively pressured to establish systems to investigate one of the most serious offenses in the criminal justices system (sexual assault) with few, and in some cases none, of the tools available to […]
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Should you be allowed to hand out copies of the Constitution anywhere and any time you like at a public college? California’s Modesto Junior College didn’t think so. In 2013 its administrators and campus police prevented student Robert Van Tuinen from distributing Constitution pamphlets outside its “free speech zone” and without having requested to do so in advance. […]
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At the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009, leaders from more than a hundred nations gathered to consider an agenda that included a massive transfer of money from developed countries to the Third World. The developed states were tagged to provide $130 billion by 2020 to help developing nations deal with the consequences of […]
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Volokh Conspiracy Just yesterday I was pointing out that many people were misled about the content of George Will’s column on sexual assault by left-wing sites that manufactured outrage by putting a wholly inaccurate headline on a blog piece that proceeded to misrepresent what Will wrote. Now it’s my turn. Here’s the Gawker headline: Law Professor: […]
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It’s not just the Obama administration VAWA Office that thinks all sexual contact or behavior without “explicit consent” is sexual assault. So does Senator McCaskill (D-MO). Later this summer, McCaskill is going to propose legislation that would further undermine due process on campus. According to Senator McCaskill’s spokeswoman, she thinks that people (including, presumably, her […]
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In a recent article in the New York Times (6/17/14), economic columnist David Leonhardt says that “affirmative action as we know it is probably doomed”. I wish I could be so confident. Premature obituaries for affirmative action have been a periodic feature of commentators and op-ed writers for three decades now (I foolishly engaged in […]
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I recently looked at the inconsistent and in some cases outright arbitrary ways the nation’s leading universities are defining one form of campus sexual assault—rape that occurs because the accuser cannot consent. The piece made three points: (1) a substantial minority of schools have a definition of sexual assault that technically applies to many instances […]
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