New York Times reporter Richard Pérez-Peña has had a disturbing record of slanted coverage of campus sexual assault issues, but he brought his performance to new lows in an article posted to the Times website Tuesday afternoon. MTC readers will doubtless remember Pérez-Peña’s name; he authored the wildly slanted Times exposé on former Yale quarterback […]
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Steven Hayward has accepted a one-year appointment as Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Hayward, who holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Claremont Graduate School, is the author of several books, including volumes on Reagan and Churchill, and has held positions at the American Enterprise Institute, Pacific […]
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In the Sunday New York Times Opinion Section Dan Slater asks, “Does Affirmative Action Do What It Should?” However, his over-2000 word piece provides no semblance of an answer because he misrepresents affirmative action. “Affirmative action policies attempt to compensate for the country’s brutal history of racial discrimination by giving some minority applicants a leg […]
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The end of higher education as we know it is no myth. Say you have three children and they’ll come of college age about two years apart. That’s a lot of money. But what if the college were to make you a deal? Buy one college education at full price, get the next college education […]
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For John Sexton, president of New York University, March came in a like a lion. In one aggravating week Sexton found himself the subject of two biting stories in the press: a no-confidence vote from faculty and focus on $72 million in unexplained NYU loans to Jack Lew and many others. The first was merely […]
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Chief Justice Roberts, with the four liberal justices in tow, upheld Obamacare only because it was (or could be construed as) a tax, not a penalty. Try telling that to the University of Virginia or the editors of the Charlottesville Daily Progress, whose lead article March 14, under the big, bold headline “‘Obamacare’ to swallow […]
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John Dewey said the job of education was to free students from the intellectual captivity imposed by “village truths,” the groupthink version of reality they had grown up with. But the irony now is that liberalism, once created in opposition to small-town traditionalism, has generated its own all-encompassing “village truths” creating conformism on today’s campus. Students are now subject to a […]
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A friend recently sent me an article entitled “University Presidents – Speak Out!” published in The Nation, a periodical I mostly avoid. In the article, author Scott Sherman laments that university presidents don’t air their views more often on the “big issues.” His idea of an estimable college leader is someone like Lee Bollinger of Columbia […]
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Can it be that “it is not left-wing academics, but ideologues of the radical right, who are pursuing political correctness in American universities?” No, not really, but that’s what the 1960’s activist and historian, and more recently labor lawyer, Staughton Lynd, argues on The History News Network site. In a hagiographic obituary for historian Herbert Shapiro, Lynd charges that the right has […]
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Nearly two years after the Office of Civil Rights ordered all universities to lower the procedural threshold through which accused students can be found guilty of sexual assault, the New York Times turned its attention to the issue–via a five-person “Room for Debate” item. Superficially, the segment seemed balanced: two essays in favor the policy, […]
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Reposted from Open Market We live in a culture where harsh but truthful criticism, or exposure of wrongdoing, is viewed by some as “bullying,” especially when it affects someone’s inflated “self-esteem.” Some examples: DePaul University has punished a student for publicizing the names of fellow students who admitted vandalizing […]
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The lesson to draw from the Harvard email episode is simple: a university is a business and everyone who works there is an employee. The Harvard administration combed through email accounts of resident deans in order to track down leaks regarding last year’s cheating scandal. The cheating happened last year when students were discovered to […]
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Andrew P. Kelly and KC Deane Despite our better instincts, we looked at Andrew Leonard’s recent piece on the conservative plot to “wreck higher-ed.” He begins with an oft-heard although accurate lament about public colleges: state funding is decreasing while costs and prices continue to climb. However, Leonard’s argument quickly veers into conspiracy-land: There’s a […]
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A recent piece from CNNMoney has noted the deflating value of a bachelor’s degree. Although community college degrees are frequently perceived as less “prestigious” than a four-year B.A., it turns out that nearly 30% of Americans with Associate’s degrees now make more than those with Bachelor’s degrees, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and […]
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Hamilton College has a diversity problem–though it’s not what you think. The college has created a sizable bureaucratic apparatus to enforce its particular brand of “inclusiveness.” The apparatus has grown so vast and intertwined over the years that the college had to establish a “Diversity Coordinating Council” comprised of the Chief Diversity Officer, the Director […]
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My sorry academic discipline, anthropology, has been in the news the last few weeks. Napoleon Chagnon broke his long silence by publishing a memoir, Noble Savages, about his work among the South American Yanomamo Indians and the long nightmare of politically correct recrimination that greeted his work. Chagnon was infamously accused of infamy by a […]
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University of Chicago economics professor Gary Becker, recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize, maintains a consistently interesting blog with the prolific law professor Richard Posner. Recently, Becker responded to a Posner post (on reasons to change our system of legal education) with an argument that “higher education is still a very good investment.” I submit […]
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In 1999, I was a sophomore at the University of Houston when Dr. Ross M. Lence invited me to participate in a small, graduate seminar entirely dedicated to John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. It was an experience I will never forget. During the first few weeks, I found myself utterly unprepared for the rigor […]
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Hateful graffiti at Oberlin College have drawn national attention (NY Times, CNN) and caused turmoil on campus. The graffiti, which included nasty words for blacks and gays, swastikas and “whites only” scrawled on a water fountain, prompted a big anti-hate rally, outpourings of emotion and a one-day cancellation of all classes. Though written slurs can […]
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As part of sex weekend, Yale held a seminar last Saturday on an ever-vexing question– “Sex: Am I normal?” Obvious answer: “Of course you are.” The visiting guarantor of normalcy this year was one Jill McDevitt, billed as “the only person in the world with all three of their degrees–b.a., m.a, ph.d.—- in sex!” (Exclamation […]
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