A Coddled Professor Speaks Out
…with the research they did for their doctoral dissertations ever so long ago. Professors at small liberal-arts colleges often don’t have it much better, and they sometimes have it worse….
Search Results for: Our Colleges Are Getting Worse
Let’s Push Trustees to Solve the Adjunct Problem
…research, open debate, and knowledge production). But despite the large body of work on the subject, the ratio of “securely-employed” to “disposable” has only gotten worse over the years. As…
Writing Teachers: Still Crazy After All These Years
…than in the unchanging history textbooks. But by all indications, the social, civil, and aesthetic purposes are aimed in one ideological direction, for many audience members offered suggestions about getting…
What Characterizes the Modern Totalitarian, Corporatized University?
…the modern university. Though just now getting off the ground–it has yet to accept student applications–its stated mission is clear. Students will experience rigorous coursework year-round and focus on “reading…
A Terrible Time for New Ph.D.s
…nearly 90 percent of their alma maters’ revenues. Ph.D. programs, especially in the humanities, can be viewed as career colleges for the highly educated. As with career colleges, their stated…
What Happens When College Is Oversold
…A new CCAP study From Wall Street to Wal-Mart: Why College Graduates Are Not Getting Good Jobs, released today along with this essay, carries even worse news: the proportion of…
What Is Texas A&M up to?
Somewhere in America the president of a public university is getting hammered by the chairman of the board of regents. The hammerer—let’s say he owns a chain of automobile dealerships…
The Underperformance Problem
On average black students do much worse on the SAT and many other standardized tests than whites. While encouraging progress was made in the 1970s and early 1980s in improving…
An Open Letter to New Professors
…for eight years—I taught at a community college, at two four-year liberal arts colleges, and at a state university until I landed a permanent position at a private university, where…
Seeing Academic Repression Everywhere
…is once described as the “coup de Bush.” And the state of the nation hasn’t been getting any better since. The introduction asserts, “Our claim is not that there is…
On Pigeons, Pells and Student Incentives
…gone the way of the dodo. At a time when most colleges endorse the importance of a general education—a set of courses required of all students—in fact, colleges have virtually…
How the Universities Got This Way
…is this supply-demand imbalance not only persisting, but actually getting worse? Menand has two answers. First, perpetual student-hood followed by mediocre career prospects apparently appeals to a certain kind of…
The Failure Of For-Profit Schools
…situation seems exponentially worse. Commercial colleges, which enroll 2 million out of America’s 17 million college students, now seem to be not so much diploma mills as non-diploma mills, where…
Princeton’s Victory Over Grade Inflation
…grade inflation exists. According to these people — usually students or their parents — students are simply getting smarter these days, especially at the most prestigious colleges and universities which…
Pruning Ph.D’s
…of things you can do with a Ph.D. other than getting an academic job. The experience of getting the degree may be something that people want to do for itself.”…
Coping With The Diversity University
…the academy—the oft-discovered abuses are real enough—but it would be a strategic mistake to equate a few loud mouth, often subversive and attention-getting radicals with widespread idiocy. Those wanting to…
Who’s Acing The GREs?
…a commenter on Jacobs’s blog to write, “The fact that the dimmest bulbs in our colleges self-select themselves as being the ones who should influence the education of future generations…
The Sorry Plight Of The Adjunct Professor
…that she spent five full years–after receiving her Ph.D. from Trinity in 2000 and getting rejection letters from more than 27 colleges where she’d looked for full-time teaching jobs—hitting the…
Indoctrinate U. Was It Fair? Round II
…way, so I dismissed this as rather unimportant compared to the far worse penalties suffered by liberals and conservatives in many colleges. (Contrast that with a case this year where…
How Mismatches Devastate Minority Students
…right, it may fairly be said that almost forty years of race-based admissions at law schools will have been for nothing – or indeed worse than nothing. Just as Justice…