The ills besetting higher education in recent years – ballooning tuitions, kangaroo disciplinary tribunals, speech codes and other violations of academic freedom, expanding bureaucracies, invasions of student and faculty privacy, lowered academic standards, and others – are on virtuallyeveryone’s minds. However, these problems are not mutually exclusiveand severable; rather, theyare manifestations of a larger downward […]
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I spoke with a colleague yesterday, a long-term staff member at Northwestern University. She told me that when Northwestern students report a rape, they are being told something like this: “If you report the incident to local police, they might not take you seriously. Your name will get in the newspapers. When the case goes […]
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The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has just scored yet another victory for free speech. In a sadly familiar case, the University of Hawaii at Hilo prevented students Merritt Burch and Anthony Vizzone from handing out copies of the US Constitution. A UH adminstrator told them they could only conduct such advocacy in […]
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Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone article detailing an alleged brutal gang rape at the University of Virginia has triggered widespread outrage. But it also has prompted varying degrees of skeptical commentary from (most importantly) Richard Bradley, and also Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, Reason’s Robby Soave, and Judith Shulevitz in the New Republic. […]
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The U.S. Department of Education announced on Tuesday a new set of rules designed to stimulate greater effectiveness in America’s teacher training programs. States will now be required to report to the federal government statistics such as job placement rates and student performance. Favorable student outcomes, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan suggested, could also be […]
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American college students these days seem to divide by moral temperament into two very different cohorts. On one hand, a large number of students prize the freedom to do and say what they want and deeply dislike the constraints of external authority. On the other hand, a large number of students prize social control as […]
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There was a thoughtful op-ed in the New York Times last week on the Asian American challenge to admissions procedures at Harvard University. It was written by a political theorist who teaches writing at Harvard, and it acknowledges that Harvard “engages in ‘racial balancing,’” a procedure that keeps Asian American admissions to the college at a consistent 17-20 percent even […]
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The Rolling Stone exposé of an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia (and the university’s indifferent response) has received enormous attention. Three pieces analyzing events in Charlottesville and recommending solutions are particularly worthy of note. First, writing in Slate, Dahlia Lithwick (one of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s favorite legal commentators) noted that the case […]
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With apologies to Robert Tracinski. Cheryl Abbate, a grad student teaching “Theory of Ethics” at Marquette University, recently told a student that if he wants to speak against gay marriage, he should drop her class. We do not know the student’s name but we do know that he secretly recorded the conversation, which took place […]
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The recent drama at Brown University over a campus forum debating sexual assault could have been an episode in a sharp and outrageous satire of political correctness gone mad—complete with a “safe space” counseling group for undergraduates traumatized by the presence of heresy on campus and with one of the panelists opening her remarks by […]
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There are two certainties from the current crusade against due process for students accused of sexual assault. First, in coming years, there will be a higher percentage of convictions, since colleges must use the preponderance-of-evidence and are strongly discouraged from allowing accused students from cross-examining their accusers. Second, because so few due process protections exist […]
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“The Microaggression Farce,” Heather Mac Donald’s latest article for City Journal, is getting a lot of attention. It examines one of the more pathetic campus trends, finding alleged racism in acts so small (or non-existent) that only aggrieved students of color and their allies can spot them. Mac Donald writes: “As student claims of racial […]
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You can’t make this stuff up. Elon University in North Carolina has dropped the word “freshman” and replaced it with “first-year,” according to The College Fix. ”Freshman,” of course, has the deadly word “man” in it. Can’t have that. But there’s another reason for the change: “f——n” ” may contribute to sexual violence on campus […]
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In his fine essay in The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel, Russell Berman of Stanford University, says this of the boycott Israel movement in academe: “a hatred of knowledge and of reasoned argument pervades its prose.” I thought that characterization over the top until I read this account of a panel on Palestine at […]
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Debates on campus are now as rare as white truffles, and the reason is fairly obvious: as essentially homogeneous liberal outposts in a center-right nation, the campuses see no need to allow adversaries and dissidents to speak. So it’s a surprise to see that Brown University hosted a debate on “How Should Colleges Handle Sexual Assault?” […]
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Last Saturday, Yale Law professor Jeb Rubenfeld had an important op-ed in the Times discussing the issue of how colleges respond to campus sexual assault. His argument? “Forced by the federal government, colleges have now gotten into the business of conducting rape trials, but they are not competent to handle this job. They are simultaneously failing […]
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There have been two major developments in the past week in the fight against racial and ethnic preferences in university admissions. First, last week, in Fisher v. University of Texas, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit denied further review of a panel decision that had rejected the challenge to that school’s use […]
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The“Truthy” project at Indiana University should have set off alarm bells right at the start. Described as a research project to study how memes spread on social media, it was created in 2010 by university computer science professor Filippo Menczer, and began tracking “suspicious memes,” and “false or misleading ideas” on Twitter. So far it […]
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The New York Times has followed the issue of campus rape for a number of years without mentioning the shaky procedures and lack of due process in college hearings on sexual assault. The first acknowledgement we have seen in the Times that these hearings are basically unfair came in a Sunday Review opinion piece November […]
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When the history of folly in college accreditation is written, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools will command attention for its outstanding mishandling of academic fraud at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Nearly three weeks after news broke of the imaginary classes and unearned marks for athletes at UNC, the accreditor acted–by […]
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