Obama

Obama Promised Hope but Delivered Racial Animosity. Academia Follows Suit.

In 2008, the voters of the United States elected their first and, to date, only President of color, Barack Obama. We were told at the time that his elevation to the highest office in the land would herald a new age of race relations in our nation. The country would no longer be defined by […]

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Obama’s Win Is An Indictment of Higher Education

This morning in the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes summed up one condition of the Republican Party: “What’s their problem? In Senate races, it’s bad candidates: old hacks (Wisconsin), young hacks (Florida), youngsters (Ohio), Tea Party types who can’t talk about abortion sensibly (Missouri, Indiana), retreads (Virginia), lousy campaigners (North Dakota) and Washington veterans (Michigan). Losers […]

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Student Voices
The Candidates Flunk Education Policy

Yesterday Time Magazine published articles by President Obama and Governor Romney on their higher education policies. Both paint a rosy view of a college degree but offer few specifics on how to best facilitate it. Obama speaks highly of his college days, acknowledging that “Michelle and I are who we are only because of the […]

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Campus Due Process, Obama-Style

In this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Joseph Cohn, director of policy at FIRE, summarizes the due process implications of a letter sent to colleges and universities last April by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. As was widely reported at the time, the letter instructs schools to adopt the lowest standard of […]

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Want to Hear Obama? Just Say You Support Him

Many people are miffed at the way the University of Wisconsin is handling President Obama’s visit to our campus today. Concerns are not with the visit per se–most of us think the event is something very compelling, a bit of history entering through our gates. The location of the speech in the heart of the […]

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Those Mealy-Mouthed Statements from Our Cairo Embassy

Near the beginning of Bruce Bawer’s strong new book, The Victims’ Revolution, he talks about the anti-American attitudes that are nearly mandatory on campuses today and how they radiate throughout our culture. Those attitudes, inculcated by so many professors, range from apologetic and guilt-ridden to outright contemptuous and reflexively supportive of our enemies. The incredibly […]

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Why President Obama Can’t Lower Tuition

In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last night, President Obama promised that he would “work with colleges and universities” to slow the steady rise in tuition we have experienced, cutting the rate of increase in half. Inside Higher Ed has the story. Naturally, the president’s statement drew applause from the Democratic faithful, […]

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Campaigning in the Classroom

Last month, distinguished Ohio State English professor Brian McHale sent out the following email to colleagues: Colleagues,            I’ve been in touch with a couple of campus organizers for the Obama campaign, who have asked me to pass along to all of you a request for access to your classes in […]

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The Affirmative Action Zealots Have Won: Time to Surrender

For a half century I’ve vehemently opposed racial preferences in higher education. Opposition was partially ideological–I believe in merit–and partly based on sorrowful firsthand experience with affirmative action students and faculty. Though my principles remain unchanged I am now ready to concede defeat, throw in the towel and raise the white flag. Abolishing racial preferences […]

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Student Voices: The Obama’s Administration’s Attack on Religious Colleges

With election season well under way, the Obama administration now finds itself up against lawsuits brought by several of the nation’s most prominent religious universities. Catholic University and the University of Notre Dame have already filed suit in opposition to the now-infamous federal requirement that insurance companies provide no-fee coverage of a slew of contraceptive […]

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A Survival Guide for the Right in Leftist Academia

Back in 2010, University of Illinois, Chicago, Professor and former Weatherman radical Bill Ayers gave a presentation on Public Pedagogy at the American Education Research Association annual meeting. Ayers, then a member of AERA’s governing board, made the claim that he, Bill Ayers, was really not a terrorist. Ten of the first 11 sentences in […]

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A Controversy at Post-Catholic Georgetown

Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, is scheduled to speak Friday at a Georgetown University commencement event, setting off protests among Catholics and others who believe the Obamacare mandate violates religious liberty. So far, some 25,000 people have signed petitions asking for the invitation to be withdrawn. On campus, the reaction seems more […]

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The Notorious “Dear Colleague” Letter in Action

Inside Higher Ed brings interesting news today about how the infamous “Dear Colleague” letter from the Obama education department–which requires all sexual assault and harassment cases to be judged by the lowest possible burden of proof, a preponderance of the evidence–has affected one university campus. In response to the letter’s mandate, the University of North […]

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Still For Obama, But Disenchanted

For the Obama campaign, the college campus poses a whole different challenge in 2012 than it did in 2008. Earlier, the campus was one of the most solid and energized pro-Obama zones in the country. The group Students4Obama, which operated on more than 700 campuses, was just one program in the conversion of the campaign […]

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The ‘Inequality’ Movement–A Campus Product

The sharp political focus on inequality, driven into the public mind by the Occupy movement and endorsed by President Obama in his State of the Union message, was born, not on the street, but on the campus. It thrives there, mostly under the aegis of elite universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia and Johns […]

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The Terrible Textbooks of Freshman Comp

Freshman composition class at many colleges is propaganda time, with textbooks conferring early sainthood on President Obama and lavishing attention on writers of the far left–Howard Zinn, Christopher Hedges, Peter Singer and Barbara Ehrenreich, for instance–but rarely on moderates, let alone anyone right of center. Democrats do very well in these books, but Abraham Lincoln–when […]

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Professor Sanctioned for Siding with Rush

Inside Higher Ed reports this morning — surprise! — that “®oughly two-thirds of public and private college presidents say they plan to vote for President Obama in November.” Only two-thirds? Actually, that is a surprise. I wonder how many of them are in states that have had to cut or reduce spending on higher education […]

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The Obama Video: Fuss and Obfuscation

The 1990 Harvard Law School video of Barack Obama endorsing a quota-hire protest unearthed by Buzzfeed has generated widespread comment in both the blogosphere and the conservative media. Much of the commentary from the right was overheated and wide of the mark; representative commentary on the left, however, was deliberately deceptive.

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The Troubling Video of Obama at Harvard Law

For Democrats (like me) concerned with academic freedom and depoliticizing personnel and curricular processes in higher education, the 2008 primary season offered only one candidate who even might adopt a good policy on higher education, an area where the GOP has had the overwhelming advantage in recent years. Even if he wasn’t a transparent phony, […]

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‘It’s a Major Assault on Religious Freedom’

The abortion-drug and contraceptive mandate issued by the Obama administration is a frontal assault on the freedoms given to every American by God Himself, and guaranteed in our Constitution.  If allowed to stand, the precedent will have been set that the government can, in fact, prohibit the free exercise of religion, by taking to itself […]

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Obama Seeks Disability Quotas

Cross-posted from Open Market The Obama administration is pushing quotas in the workplace and higher education, seeking to force businesses that have federal contracts to hire at least 7 percent disabled workers, and encouraging colleges to use race in admissions to achieve a “critical mass” of black and Hispanic students — a de facto quota.  […]

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Is Another Furor Over Religious Liberty Coming?

Pressure has been building for President Obama to sign an executive order prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression by federal contractors, a move that might make the recent controversy over requiring religious institutions to offer contraception services look mild by comparison. Metro Weekly recently reported on a strategy session in […]

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Foolish Defense of the Politicized University

Political observers might have noticed that hostility to higher education has formed a sub-theme of the Republican presidential race. Mitt Romney has criticized Barack Obama for embracing the ideals of the “Harvard faculty lounge.” Rick Santorum, more recently, has faulted Obama for encouraging all students to attend college, which the former Pennsylvania senator has termed […]

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Is Investing in Community Colleges a Good Idea?

President Obama’s fiscal 2013 budget contains an $8 billion program called the “Community College to Career Fund.” It would encourage community colleges, in partnerships with employers, to train about two million workers for future jobs. Since there are about 1,045 community colleges in America, the program would amount to a grant–over three years–of a little […]

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Obama Fosters the Skyrocketing Tuition He Criticized

Cross-posted from Open Market. In his State of the Union Address, President Obama decried skyrocketing college tuition, attempting to take advantage of public anger over the steadily-worsening college tuition bubble. This was ironic, since his own Administration has done much to foster rising college tuitions. For example, it imposed the 90-10 rule, which forced low-cost educational institutions to raise their tuition to […]

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The Times Vilifies Another Athlete, Presenting No Evidence

Over the past year, FIRE has led a campaign of civil liberties organizations against the Obama administration’s infamous “Dear Colleague” letter, which ordered colleges and universities to lower the burden of proof in their on-campus judicial proceedings. The letter demanded that all universities receiving federal funds employ a “preponderance of the evidence” standard (in other […]

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Obama Campus 2012

In the next 10 months, we shall see the college campus to be a center of Democratic activity.  The reason appears in this short piece at The New Republic by Ruy Teixeira.  According to Teixeira, the youth vote is crucial to Obama’s reelection, 18-29-year-olds forming one of his strongest support groups.  In 2008, the youth […]

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A Foolish Move to Hobble For-Profit Colleges

Curbing for-profit colleges has been a goal of the Obama administration’s department of education. The plan was to erect regulatory hurdles to a very profitable product: online courses. In pursuit of that plan, the department issued a regulation last October requiring institutions offering Internet classes to seek permission from every state in which they enroll […]

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The Star Chamber Comes to a Campus Near You

As Harvey Silverglate and Kyle Smeallie pointed out in Minding The Campus, the recent letter from the Obama Administration’s Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights outlines a policy shift that represents perhaps the gravest threat to civil liberties on campus in a generation. The letter’s provisions would be gravely damaging even in its narrowest possible scope, […]

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Could the Feds Tell College Students What to Do?

If the Obama administration’s argument that Congress has the authority to require every individual to purchase health insurance is upheld by the Supreme Court, many students may be in for a big surprise. Yes, students. The administration argument, briefly, is that access to affordable health care is so essential to both personal and national security […]

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