For forty years I labored in the groves of Academe as professor and dean. Though I learned many lessons in this four decade period, three of them are worth noting. NYU, the place I called academic home, transformed itself from a “commuter school” into a “world class university” with campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai […]
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This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education has a story on diversity in higher education that begins, “Despite decades of antidiscrimination policies and affirmations of equality, there’s still little racial and ethnic diversity at the top at many of the colleges.” And last year, as legal challenges to affirmative action were building, the Board of Directors […]
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The growing fossil-fuel divestment movement on campus is the “first effective opposition” to the fossil fuel industry, according to writer and activist Bill McKibben. Across the country, students alarmed about climate change are urging their colleges to disinvest their endowment funds (“divest”) from petroleum-extracting companies. They have been garnering headlines in recent months, and, according […]
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Quite a few people have built careers in higher education around the supposed need to study how different groups compare, and when the inevitable disparities are discovered, setting up programs to address the “underrepresentation problem.” To get a sense of just how deeply ingrained such thinking is, consider this piece from Inside Higher Ed, “The […]
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Odysseus, in Homer’s Odyssey, orders himself tied to the mast of his ship so he can hear the beautiful song of the Sirens without risking the usual gruesome fate of those who sail too close to the singers. This lesson – if you know you are going to make a bad decision you should tie […]
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In the search for substance in the sea of edifying platitudes in commencement addresses, I came upon Ben Bernanke’s thoughtful list of ten suggestions or observations on life after graduation he gave at Princeton’s tradition-laden Baccalaureate. It’s the rare graduation address that’s clearly worthy of commentary, analysis that inevitably generates some criticism. Here is one […]
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Gordon Gee’s sudden retirement from Ohio State (after a widely reported, off-the-cuff slur on Catholics) probably ends a remarkable career of academic leadership almost without parallel in American higher education. For a university president to survive 10 years as president of one institution or 25 years in total as president is very unusual, yet Gee […]
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Joseph Urgo, the President of St. Mary’s College of Maryland, has resigned after a major embarrassment: under his leadership the incoming freshman class is so small–nearly a hundred student fewer than expected–that the school faces a $3.5 million budget shortfall. That shortfall comes after St. Mary’s, a secular private college, greatly simplified its application and […]
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In a letter dated May 9, the federal government dramatically expanded the definition of sexual harassment on campus. In the 31-page letter, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education, informed the president of the University of Montana, Royce […]
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In the academic world, the rules on “diversity” hires generally remain unspoken. Public colleges and universities–and private schools that care about their reputations–can’t well advertise new positions with the tagline, “No white males need apply.” Beyond the legal ramifications, such a move would abandon any pretense that colleges want the best possible faculty for all […]
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Leon Wieseltier has offered a welcome and inspiring set of reflections for the graduating class of Brandeis University and for many beyond that campus. In a time when nearly every campus is experiencing a collapse in confidence in the role of the humanities, and a corresponding rush to justify education purely in terms of narrowly-conceived […]
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This is an excerpt from Dr. Smith’s new book, “Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood and the American Dream-And Why It Matters.” If women were fleeing the nation’s universities and colleges, we would have a national uproar, but men are now fleeing in large numbers and society barely notices. Numbers tell the […]
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Egalitarians never run out of things to complain about. Any statistical disparity between groups causes them to wring their hands and call for action to remedy the “inequity.” The latest outbreak of egalitarian fever has to do with higher education in America, specifically the alleged “rich kid problem.” Jordan Weissman of The Atlantic recently penned […]
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Since Stephen Colbert and Cory Booker occupy divergent spheres of American life, they unsurprisingly chose to deliver very different commencement addresses. Colbert, who spoke at the University of Virginia on May 18, devoted much of his address to taking the University down a few pegs. In addition to ribbing UVA’s founder, Thomas Jefferson–who, Colbert joked, […]
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Eugene Volokh posts a counterintuitive argument (from a civil libertarian’s standpoint) defending the OCR-imposed preponderance-of-evidence standard for campus allegations of sexual assault. Since Volokh advances a much more compelling argument for the change than did the OCR’s “Dear Colleague” letter, the post is worth reading in full. His basic argument: campus allegations of sexual assault […]
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Like a creeping mildew on a shower wall, student fees easily go unnoticed. Yet they grow relentlessly until, one day, you look down in total disgust and there they are. What are student fees next to the mountains of cash poured into tuition, room and board? A few hundred wasted dollars every year among tens […]
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My colleague Richard Vedder once described former Undersecretary of the Department of Education Robert Shireman as “the only guy I ever met whose very appointment to public office destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars in wealth.” Of course, Vedder was referring to the rapid devaluation of publicly traded higher education firms’ stock prices that followed Shireman’s […]
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In the last few months, there’s been a flurry of articles in the mainstream press acknowledging the same problem: a paucity of high-achieving, low-income students at elite colleges. “Better Colleges Failing to Lure Talented Poor,” says the New York Times. ABC tells us “Colleges Struggle to Connect With High-Achieving Poor Students.” Likewise, NPR is concerned […]
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One of the things that strikes me about modern universities is the inordinate amount of lying that goes on -both by institutions and members of the university communities- and how little is done about it. As respect for moral absolutes is replaced with a mushy moral relativism, perhaps a decline in honesty is to be expected. But […]
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The Washington Post notes today that though President Obama’s commencement address at Morehouse College received a “rousing response” from the audience, some of his African-American supporters are less than pleased. Amazingly, they argue that the President has devoted too much time to discussions of black accountability and responsibility. They also suggest that Jesse Jackson has […]
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