One of the main findings of this year’s American Freshman Survey Is the drift of 2012 first-year college students toward the political center. The report collects 2008 and 2012 results and finds that “in one significant point of comparison, students moved toward the center in self-perceived political orientation, with the ‘middle-of-the-road’ category growing from 43.3% […]
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Sen. Marco Rubio spoke out again this week on the importance of higher education as a support for the middle class. Unlike many other high-profile proponents of higher ed reform, he believes Washington lacks an appreciation for technical education. So he proposed making federally-backed student loans available to those seeking technical degrees online as well […]
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For the past 20 years, most of our history departments have had an almost monomaniacal emphasis in on the issues of race, class, gender, and ethnicity in American history. Meanwhile, there has not been enough attention paid to the history of American politics, economics, culture, and the military. Having taught at the University of Texas […]
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Troy Duster, a past president of the American Sociological Association and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Warren Institute for Law and Social Policy, has a long Chronicle of Higher Education article that is usefully if unwittingly revealing and instructive because it so perfectly reflects both the profound misunderstanding of their critics […]
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Despite the billions of dollars showered on our schools, American public education is poor to mediocre and likely to remain so. Only 7% of our grade 8 students reach the Advanced level in mathematics, suggesting why little advanced coursework in mathematics and science can be taught in our high schools. In contrast, from 27 to […]
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One reason disparate impact theory has become such a standard element in institutional affairs is that it is so simple. It begins and ends on a basic numerical axiom: if a practice affects an identity group disproportionately, we have some kind of bias at work. It offers as evidence only a ratio, for instance, a […]
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Last week we posted Heather Mac Donald’s criticism of an off-beat student project at Phillips Andover Academy on”The Perversion of the American Dream: Deconstructing Media Portrayals of Sex Workers through Analysis and Real Narratives.” The student, Nikita Singareddy, writing on Facebook, protested the article and Heather Mac Donald responds here. *** Nikita Singareddy: Normally, I wouldn’t […]
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Not Bhaskar Sunkara, the 23-year-old founder of Jacobin magazine. He’s marshaled allies from within the university to convince the American people otherwise. The New York Times recently featured a flattering profile of Sunkara, an alumnus of George Washington University who founded his magazine while on medical leave in his sophomore year. The piece, which notes […]
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Stanford Law School has opened the nation’s first law clinic for the defense of religious liberty. As examples of the type of cases it will handle, the school cited Seventh-day Adventists fired by Fed Ex for refusing to work on Saturdays, a Muslim group challenging land-use laws that prohibit building of mosques, and a Native […]
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The new report from Moody’s Investors Service, casting doubt on the financial state of affairs in higher education, has provoked a good deal of anxiety. The report referenced five revenue streams affecting all public universities. Two (philanthropy and endowments) deal primarily with broad, macro-economic trends over which university leaders have little, if any, control. On […]
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In 2004, the Duke Conservative Union conducted a study of the political affiliations of the Duke humanities faculty, finding an overwhelming (142-8) tilt toward the Democrats. In and of itself, this discovery had many plausible explanations, though the overwhelming partisan discrepancy did raise eyebrows. (Full disclosure: I’m a registered and strongly partisan Democrat.) But reaction […]
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College campuses abound in silly sentiments and enthusiasm for actions that make zealous students, professors, and administrators to feel good about themselves, but accomplish nothing. The current push to compel colleges and universities to divest their stock holdings in companies that produce fossil fuels — discussed in this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education […]
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The impulse to impose Sarbanes-Oxley on universities is tempting. Indeed, formal legal mandates on conflicts of interest and the other attributes of good governance might be even more appropriate for universities than for public corporations, as universities lack many of the safeguards of good governance, such as the ability to measure performance through profitability and […]
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San Jose State University in California is teaming up with Udacity, the for-profit pioneer of massive open online courses (MOOCs), to start a pilot program that will create three introductory mathematics courses online that can be taken for credit from San Jose State if the enrollee chooses. The courses sound like a godsend to high-school […]
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Harvey Silverglate and Greg Lukianoff are speaking at a Manhattan Institute book forum on January 23. If you’re interested in attending, please call Debbie Ezzard at (646)839-3370.
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Here’s a statistic that should make every college teacher cringe. From 1976 to 2010, the rate of high school students graduating with an “A” grade–point average doubled. They didn’t increase their work load, and their test scores didn’t rise correspondingly, but their teachers gave them the highest grade possible again and again. The impact of […]
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As a staffer with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the early 1970’s, would-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. penned his historic, if awkwardly titled, memo, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” In that August 1971 “confidential memorandum,” to the Chamber’s board of directors, Powell called for an unprecedented effort on behalf of […]
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Need any further evidence of the insularity and obtuseness of the academic left – of its stubborn and unreflecting conviction of its own virtue and superiority, its breathtaking incomprehension of and condescension toward those who don’t share its ideology? Me neither. Nonetheless, a new book entitled Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives (Princeton University […]
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A pop quiz: Where might a student most likely research the following topic: “The Perversion of the American Dream: Deconstructing Media Portrayals of Sex Workers through Analysis and Real Narratives”? At Smith, perhaps? Possibly Brown? Actually, Phillips Andover, one of the country’s oldest and most august prep schools, recently sponsored a student project in this […]
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From the National Association of Scholars One of the distinguishing features of America from the founding throughout our history has been classlessness. In recent years, especially since 2009, there has been a relentless assault by the progressive left on what it considers the unfair income distribution between the rich and others, propounded particularly in academia […]
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