Rescuing the University, I
…his or her graduate students, “If I’ve made it by not drinking the PC Kool-Aid, you can, too, so don’t flee and if a few years you, like me, can…
Search Results for: don't learn much
The Rankings Go Global
…Higher Education Learning Outcomes that takes account of “outcome” measures such as how much students learn. For a thoughtful description of these see Ben Wildavsky’s recent article in Washington Monthly….
Be Careful What You Wish For
…the way.” (Me) “What do you mean? One hundred pages don’t seem too much for a paralegal program.” (Student) “Yeah, but I came here because I want to graduate. My…
Why Don’t More Graduate
…rates to America’s continued economic and educational leadership. We learn that increasing graduation rates is critical in achieving the objective of much larger rates of higher education attainment. BCM give…
Community Colleges Are Bulging, But…
…a short driving or public-transportation distance away from campus and thus don’t have to pay for dorms, community colleges are on a roll of popularity. Not only is Tri-C, for…
We Should Applaud Stanley Fish
…critics by casting them precisely as outsiders, people who haven’t done the work to enter the professoriate, and so they don’t understand what professors really do. Now, conservatives can claim…
The Poetry Wars
…poems don’t use jingling rhymes. Few poems are effusions that flow unimpeded from the poet’s heart. Poets work hard revising their creations, as manuscripts demonstrate, even for the most direct-sounding…
Are Ed Schools Failing?
…(many history teachers don’t know much about history, and many math teachers can barely add or subtract, let alone help youngsters learn those operations). The programs also waste credit hours…
Fuzzy Math in California Admissions
…and -1236 for whites. The category of “other” is – 220, and those who “declined to state” race or ethnicity, believed to be mostly whites who don’t want to play…
Teaching Twittering?
…the text-messages and twitters “aren’t graded, they don’t require research, they don’t observe grammar and punctuation and spelling, and they address peers, not adults.” Bauerlein is especially critical of the…
The Rise Of The Economics Major
…that less than a quarter of top schools required English majors to take a course in Shakespeare. The success of the economics major suggests that bright, ambitious students don’t want…
How Will The Colleges Cope?
…are used to seeing it this way, and I don’t think we are ready for the “green eye shades” who measure acceptability in terms of standards that are not intelligible…
Financial Pain on the Campuses
…campaign – but so far, the projected savings, many based on Tennessee employees’ suggestions, don’t look substantial: eliminating vacant positions ($2 million), trying to reduce coal, oil, and natural gas…
Why I Left Academia
…that the discrimination I faced was so pervasive that there would be no escaping it in the years ahead. Don’t misunderstand what I write in the paragraphs that follow. I…
Shouldn’t All Students Learn Economics?
…typically don’t ask for help with their finances—and don’t avail themselves of help when it is offered. According to American University financial aid director Brian Lee Sang, students often adopt…
Why Read In Advance? Professors Don’t.
…if profs are supposed to be no more than role models for assimilating good “learning skills and strategies,” won’t someone eventually decide that universities don’t need so many of them?…
No Stimulus Money For Colleges
…was. We know that several of your friends are going there, but don’t you think you might prefer to learn electrical work or something like that? Son: Well, that makes…
Latest Vanished Requirements: Harvard English
You say you’re an English major—but you’ve never read a word of Chaucer, you don’t know which century Dickens wrote in (wasn’t he the author of “Scrooged”—or was that Bill…
Fixing the Anything-Goes Philosophy at Brown
…it. Don’t like math and science? You’ll never be asked to take a single class in either at Brown. Find learning a foreign language too difficult? No worry—you’ll never have…
The ABA’s Diversity Agenda
…of $160,000. Some of those students are, of course, minority students. The saddest fact is that research now suggests that affirmative action policies don’t just bring students into law school…
Those Thin-Skinned Professors
…do. This is a mis-estimation of off-campus debate, of course, for public life allows for lots more criticism and raillery than scholarly exchange does. Furthermore, the recourse to “You don’t…
Preserving The Core At Georgia
…America these days, don’t really have anything that can be described as a core curriculum in the traditional sense: a series of lower-level courses that all undergraduates are required to…
Tenure And The Litigation Culture
…tenure. First, as assistant professors become more skilled at defending their jobs, universities will increasingly abandon tenure track positions. You don’t hire what you can’t fire. This is already happening…
Why Do Textbooks Cost So Much?
…point that’s trying to make), and cartoons and other illustrations for students who learn better by looking at pictures. Your textbook-bill total for the semester is now $475.60 for just…
University Of The Absurd
…think it’s a big deal if white people listen to black rap. I don’t understand why we’re getting so upset about it… I don’t care, I don’t feel offended.” But…
Academic Gibberish And The Hermeneutics Of Mistrust
…disproportionate share of their political donations to left-leaning candidates. A recent study of donations by faculty at Princeton University during the current Presidential election season shows that every faculty donation…
Excerpt: “Beet” – A Satiric Look At An Awful College
By Roger Rosenblatt (Harper Collins, $23.95) “Don’t bother to come home if you still have a job,” Livi Porterfield called to her husband as he shoved their two groggy children…
The Aristocratic Reign Of Group Preferences
…One of these obstacles is the claim that a community makes on us, when some member of it says, in effect, “Don’t forget where you came from.” Another obstacle is…
College Applications – Still Absurd
…learn, more often than not the AP classes don’t earn the advanced place in college that students expect. But this doesn’t matter – just as no one seems to mind…
Ed School Politics – Still A Problem
…a dispositions test at her school. “I don’t know how to answer that,” she replied. As NCATE tells it, “the term ‘social justice,’ though well understood by NCATE’s institutions, was…