Jackson Toby, professor emeritus of sociology at Rutgers and author of the new book, The Lowering of Higher Education in America, delivered this speech yesterday (April 7) at a luncheon in New York City. The luncheon, at the University Club, was sponsored by the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University and Minding the Campus. […]
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One often hears about stressed and stretched and over-scheduled college students, but every survey I’ve seen, including those issued by National Survey of Student Engagement (Indiana University) and the Higher Education Research Institute (at UCLA) shows dismayingly low levels of study time and academic engagement among undergraduates. Another one came out the other day. It’s […]
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Last December, I wrote in these pages about allegations of racial discrimination in tenure denial at Emerson College, which had prompted the school to set up a three-person commission charged with reviewing those allegations. The panel’s report has just been released, and the good news is that the panelists “noticed no overtly racist or prejudiced […]
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Allegations of tenure discrimination have recently been leveled against Emerson College on grounds of race and against DePaul University on grounds of sex. At Emerson, two black scholars were denied tenure, the local chapter of the NAACP became involved, and an investigation has been launched by the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination. The school has agreed […]
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Last Sunday, the New York Times’ “Ethicist” column featured a letter from a lawyer loath to hire internship applicants that belonged to the Federalist society. Randy Cohen, the “Ethicist” suggested that disqualification on the grounds of their membership was unfair. The lawyer went ahead and rejected all applicants who were members anyway. Ilya Somin, at […]
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Our friend Patrick Deneen of Georgetown posted an evocative comment today on an Inside Higher Ed item concerning the President’s hopes for higher education as a source of job creation. It’s very much worth a read. The nation’s universities have already implicitly justified their existence – and expense – to a generation or more of […]
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I have the print copy of the October 2009 Modern Language Association Job List, the annual publication in which English departments in research universities and major liberal arts colleges publicize open positions. It doesn’t contain every job opening in English literature at every institution of higher learning, but it is the main source for people […]
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Does a black professor deserve tenure because his college hasn’t granted tenure to very many black professors in the past? To provide a role model for black students? To help the school achieve ethnic diversity faster than it otherwise might? To ensure that the proportion of black professors matches the proportion of black college students? […]
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Here’s a peculiar requirement for a tenure-track job teaching early modern British literature at Duquesne University: “Applicants must be willing to contribute actively to the mission and to respect the Spiritan Catholic identity of Duquesne University. The mission is implemented through a commitment to academic excellence, a spirit of service, moral and spiritual values, sensitivity […]
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Almost all of the best-paying undergrad degrees by salary are in engineering, the Huffington Post points out in a gloss on the PayScale rankings of degrees by average salary.
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Curious about the starting and mid-career salaries of graduates of different colleges? Wonder no longer. Check out an interesting list at Payscale. Yes, Amherst is higher than Auburn, but there are some surprising results.
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The New York Times poses the question. I’m not going to tell you the answer – take a look for yourself.
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Two weeks ago a state district judge in Denver issued a ruling that makes it next to impossible for a college in the Colorado state system to revise its faculty handbook so as to make it easier to lay off tenured faculty members in the event of a reduction in employment force, even when state […]
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Take a look at brief state-by-state overview of student loan forgiveness programs, from the New York Times.
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What acid rain is to our irreplaceable forests, lakes and streams, leftist dogma is to American higher education. In every corner of the land, it has turned once-flourishing departments of English and history into barren wastelands where only the academic equivalent of cockroaches can thrive. Its corrosive poison – infantile anti-Americanism, hatred of capitalism, scorn […]
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On February 25, 2009, an article by Patricia Cohen appeared in the New York Times: “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.” Its thesis was a familiar one: an economic downturn will lead to a decline in the number of college majors in the humanities because in hard times enrollments shift toward majors […]
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An article in Governing explores the increasing centrality of Universities and medical centers to regional economic health. It notes a 1999 Brookings Institute study that found multiple cities in which more than half of the jobs among the top 10 private sector employees were provided by universities or hospitals. Baltimore, for one: One of the […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education’s annual survey of executive compensation in Higher Education was released today, and, as usual, remarkable for its upper reaches. Median salaries at public universities increased by 7.6% in the past year, delivering such plum earnings as Ohio University’s $1,346,225 Presidential compensation, or the University of Michigan’s $760,196. Not so bad […]
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Former Commissioner of Education Statistics Mark Schneider has caused a bit of a stir with a paper in which he argues that colleges are getting a free pass on a huge problem – a very high drop-out rate. Our colleges are failure factories for literally millions of students, Schneider says, and I agree. To be […]
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Madonna Constantine has filed a lawsuit against Columbia University in the New York State Supreme Court. What could possibly be the grounds? The Spectator reports: The law firm of Paul Giacomo will litigate Constantine’ case under an Article 78 proceeding of New York’s Civil Practice Law and Rules, which allows Constantine to challenge the process […]
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Walter Olson writes at Point Of Law on a “lawsuit in a Moscow commercial court in which the government of Russia is invoking the RICO law — America’s RICO law, that is, not some equivalent on its own books — to demand that Bank of New York pay compensation over a ten-year-old episode in which […]
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Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University since October 2007, holds the record for heading the most universities in America. Here’s Gee’s history at the helms of U.S. institutions of higher learning: West Virginia University (1981-1985), University of Colorado-Boulder (1985-1990), a first round at Ohio State (1990-1997), Brown University (1997-2000), Vanderbilt University (2000-2007), and now, […]
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It’s hard to say just when universities ceased to believe that education was a worthwhile mission. But that they have done so is beyond question. Among many signs of this reality is the anxiety to redefine the university’s task. After all, educators who no longer expect or demand serious intellectual effort from their students are […]
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The Wall Street Journal reports on a new survey of 1.2 million bachelor’s degree holders, which reveals significant variations in average salaries of different graduates. Ivy League graduates earned a median starting salary 32% higher than average liberal arts college graduates, and, at ten year’s distance, earned salaries 34% higher than average liberal arts college […]
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Bob Weissberg brought our attention to this job opening, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Italics mine: The Department of Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, invites applications for a full-time tenured scholar focused on the theory and practice of social movements, civil society institutions and/or the third sector within neoliberalism. […]
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In the spring of 2008 Baylor University denied tenure to a larger than usual number of Assistant Professors up for promotion, including two-thirds of the women, and while tenure denial is normal at Baylor, the carnage uptick – from 10% to 40% in a single year – drew national attention and outcries of unfairness. No […]
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Randy Cohen, the New York Times “Ethicist”, offered a very slippery response to a reader last week, on the question of financial incentives for the hiring of minority professors. You’d best read the whole exchange first. My comments are beneath: I teach at a state university that offers financial incentives to hire minority candidates. A […]
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