Minding The Campus - Page 2 of 117 -

Liberals and the Looming Big Money Problem Facing Higher Education

June 18, 2019
By John S. Rosenberg

Today’s liberals not only tolerate but encourage colleges and universities to give preferences based on race (see affirmative action and the College Board’s new “adversity” score). Now they want to prohibit giving preferential admissions treatment based on … well, it’s not completely clear, but family wealth comes pretty close. As a result, many defenders of […]

The $44 Million Verdict Against Oberlin

June 13, 2019
By KC Johnson

Oberlin College just got hit again with a jury judgment that could cripple the college financially. Last Friday, the jury found the college guilty of libel and returned a verdict award of $11.2 million to Gibson’s, a local store and its proprietors. Today, the jury added $33 million in punitive damages – a clear sign […]

Whitewashing the Harm Colleges Inflict on the Nation

June 10, 2019
By George Leef

Over the last half-century, higher education in America has been transformed from a quiet backwater with relatively little influence or cost into a powerful system responsible for or at least deeply complicit in numerous deleterious trends that are today wreaking havoc on the nation. A bill of indictment would have to include the following. The […]

Let’s Privatize State Colleges

June 6, 2019
By Richard Vedder

Op-Ed. An estimated 14.67 million college students attend what we call “state universities.” Some of them are renowned highly selective research institutions like the University of California at Berkeley or the University of Michigan, while others are relatively obscure schools with an open admissions policy. But all receive some degree of subsidization from the state […]

When Radical Ideologies Corrupt Universities

June 4, 2019
By Allen Farrington

I keep being invited to talk about free speech on college campuses and every time I’m invited I make the same point: that this isn’t about free speech and this is only tangentially about college campuses. This is about a breakdown in the basic logic of civilization, and it’s spreading. College campuses may be the […]

Will the Universities Start to Collapse?

June 3, 2019
By Roger Kimball

People used to talk about the ends of the university and how the academic establishment was failing its students. Today, more and more people are talking about the end of the university, the idea being that it is time to think about closing them rather than reforming them. Last month at a conference in London, […]

Yet Another Attack on Due Process by Title IX

May 30, 2019
By KC Johnson

“It’s Title IX, not Miranda,” Susan Riseling, former chief of police at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told a conference of academic administrators in 2015. “Use what you can.” Riseling was describing a case in which a Wisconsin student had been subjected to both a criminal and a Title IX complaint. The police originally didn’t have enough […]

Goodbye Humanities—Hating White Males Is Not a Curriculum

May 29, 2019
By Mark Bauerlein

As the humanities continue their steady slide toward the margins of the campus, the faculty still can’t look in the mirror and face the sources of the problem. Last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education, four assistant professors of English responded to a previous essay about the state of the field and unintentionally revealed […]

College Students Aren’t Even Learning New Words

May 27, 2019
By Hans Bader

People’s vocabularies are shrinking at a time when more and more people have college degrees. As Zach Goldberg notes, people’s mastery of hard words has been falling for well over 20 years, and their mastery of easier words has been falling for over 15 years. Meanwhile, a higher proportion of Americans have college degrees than […]

Word by Word, SJW’s Are Changing America

May 21, 2019
By Philip Carl Salzman

It is not news that “social justice” ideology, supported by its pillars of “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “equality of results,” has replaced liberal democratic culture in our government, university, and business offices. Instead of being treated as individuals, people are treated according to the racial, gender, sexual preference, and ethnic categories that they belong to. Instead […]

The Final Corruption of the SAT’s

May 20, 2019
By Peter Wood

The College Board, ever alert to cultural signals, has decided the SATs can be improved by adopting what might be called McNeil methods. In the 1930s, Charles K. McNeil, a math teacher at Riverdale Country School in New York, indulged a not very respectable hobby of gambling on the side. Growing bored with picking winners […]

Harvard Yields to an Angry Student Protest

May 15, 2019
By editor

The following is an excerpt from an op-ed in The New York Times by Randall Kennedy, a law professor at Harvard. I have been a professor at Harvard University for 34 years. In that time, the school has made some mistakes. But it has never so thoroughly embarrassed itself as it did this past weekend. […]

Whatever Happened to Reading?

May 14, 2019
By Fred Siegel

A recent article on the decline of reading by Steven Johnson for The Chronicle of Higher Education has drawn a good deal of attention. The article opens with David Joliffe, an English professor at the of the University of Arkansas, depicting his students’ inability to tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Johnson tells us this isn’t […]

The Consequences of Forgiving $1.5 Trillion in Student Loans

May 13, 2019
By Daniel L. Bennett and Anne R. Bradley

Senator and Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) recently proposed a policy to cancel student loan debt. She wants to cancel up to $50,000 of debt for borrowers with annual household incomes under $250,00, including full cancellation for households with incomes under $100,000. It would be financed with an “Ultra-Millionaire Tax” – a massive redistribution […]

The Wolves of the Academy

May 9, 2019
By Robert Weissberg

University faculty have been notable for “odd” views, but today’s campuses are manufacturing screwball ideas on an industrial scale. Moreover, these ideas are hardly harmless unlike say, Esperanto. Rather, they resemble toxic pathogens that have escaped a supposedly secure lab, and now cause untold harm in society more generally. I am talking about the likes […]

Google, Facebook Censorship ‘A Mistake’

May 8, 2019
By Peter Wood

Last week Google told the Claremont Institute that the Institute’s advertisements for its annual conference were banned. This act of censorship by the internet giant followed Facebook’s announcement that it was banning Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones, Louis Farrakhan, and Paul Watson. Ryan P. Williams, the president of the Claremont Institute, posted his account of what […]

The Birth of a Nation

May 6, 2019
By Mark Bauerlein

Last month, Chapman University’s film school removed from the walls posters that students and many professors deemed offensive. They were original posters promoting Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s sweeping silent classic set during the Civil War and after. The film was fabulously successful in its day, and historians regard it as a breakthrough […]

Rampant Hypocrisy at UMass

May 3, 2019
By Daphne Patai

Which is it? Do universities these days want to be zones where no one will ever get offended, or do they want to promote free speech and academic freedom with all their attendant risks and discomforts? The University of Massachusetts Amherst is just one place that can’t make up its mind. For years now it […]

News and Fake News About College Admissions

May 1, 2019
By John S. Rosenberg

As demonstrated by both the complaint that Harvard discriminates against Asians (the Boston federal district judge’s decision is presumably imminent) and the furor over the spreading pay-to-admit scandal of rich parents buying their kids’ admission to selective colleges, affirmative action remains a hotly contested matter of ongoing public debate. The latest brouhaha comes from Washington […]

The War Against White People

April 29, 2019
By Philip Carl Salzman

Anti-white hate is now mainstream American culture. Not just by racial extremists such as Black Lives Matter, for whom statements such as “all lives matter” or “blue lives matter” are racist. Our highest leaders sing the same song. Presidential candidate Barack Obama said of working class, white voters in 2008, “They get bitter, they cling […]

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Another Blow Against Integration

At the University of Nevada, a public school in Las Vegas, integration on campus is not exactly encouraged according to a report in the College Fix. In fact, the University discourages socially mixing different groups by providing separate dorms for identity tribes, all at taxpayer expense: Howell Town for black students, Stonewall Suites for LGBT students, Tonopah housing community for women only, the Health Living floor for those who still like tofu and kale, and the Study Intensive Hall for those who plan on graduating.

Oberlin--Let's Blame the Media!

Oberlin College's student newspaper editorial board blasted national media coverage of the Gibson’s Bakery trial, saying that it “misses the mark,” and that the ruling is part of an “increasingly authoritarian country,” Campus Reform reports. The Oberlin Review’s editorial board published an editorial Wednesday, titled “Media Coverage of Gibson’s Verdict Misses the Mark,” in which it strongly criticized how national media covered the case resulting in the college being ordered to pay Gibson's Bakery $44 million.

Western Civilization = White Supremacy

New York City school administrators have been taught that pillars of Western Civilization such as objectivity, individualism, and even belief in the written word all are examples of … white supremacy, the New York Post reports.

A slide presentation obtained by the Post from the workshop “Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change” includes claims that a belief in an “ultimate truth” (objectivity) leads to a dismissal of “alternate viewpoints or emotions” as “bad” (this is straight out of the critical race theory playbook), and that emphasis on the written word overlooks the “ability to relate to others” and leads to “teaching that there is only ‘one right way’ to do something.”

Other “hallmarks” of white supremacy include a “sense of urgency,” “quantity over quality,” and “perfectionism.” Read more at The College Fix

The Civility Problem

Maybe a few courses on how to create a civil society would help America's so-called "social warriors" learn how to deal with their fellow men and women. Let's start with Amherst College in Massachusetts, where former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was scheduled to address the ongoing issue of free speech on campus. Campus Reform reports that Sessions got a dose of today's SJW tactics when a stinkbomb was set off before he went on stage. Then, a walkout was staged by a gay pride group punctuating the assault on the former A.G. Stinkbombs? What is this, 7th grade?

Studying 'Angry White Males'

The University of Kansas has approved a course called “angry white male studies,” open to all students willing to take a women’s studies course first. The course on white males will explore recent changes in demographics since the 1950s. Republican Congressman Ron Estes took a dim view, arguing that ”KU is offering a class that divides the student population and could pose a TitleIX violation by creating a hostile campus movement based on gender.”
The course will be taught by Christopher Forth, who focuses on gender, fat-shaming, and masculinity.

Erasing White Men from Politics

Believing that courses on American political thought are too fixated on white males, Professor Chad Shomura of the University of Colorado at Denver has solved the problem by banning discussion of white men in his course on the nation’s political thought. This means nothing from Washington, Jefferson, Tocqueville, Rousseau or any of the pre-Obama presidents. Discussion of the Hillary Clinton race for the presidency in 2016 is allowed, but how she managed to lose while apparently “running unopposed” is unclear.

In response to "Doing Physics While Black"

Physics “for students with little or no high school physics or calculus.”

This is like teaching SCUBA diving to people who don't know how to swim or having your first hike being the entire Appalachian Trail. Or putting Pop Warner players into an NFL game.

Trig, Geometry, and Algebra likely isn't enough, because without calculus, you cannot teach physics. You can teach principles of physics without it, and the value of such a course taught to non-science majors should not be dismissed. But expecting someone to major in Physics without a solid math background is like expecting someone to make it onto an NBA team without being able to dribble.

For example, if you don't understand sine curves, you will never understand AC Power -- you may understand not to connect the phases together, and what happens if you do, but not why. It's that simple.

And it's not fair to the students, either. We're setting kids up to fail.

-Ed Cutting, Amherst, Massachussets

Bloomberg Warns Colleges on Limiting Free Speech

Has Harvard Lost Its Taste for Western Civilization?

Doing Physics While Black