When I wrote about the ludicrous Columbia Spectator op-ed linking a “Euro-Centric curriculum” to the noose incidents, I suggested that the author was clearly not alone in her sentiments. Today we have confirmation; there are plenty of fools at Columbia. The Spectator reports: Beginning today, five Columbia students will go on a hunger strike to […]
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More on indoctrination at the University Of Delaware. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) sent Patrick Harker, the president of the University, a voluminous set of papers on how their residence life program was run. “Hundreds of pages, without exception, are about how to indoctrinate students,” school of education professor Jan Blits told […]
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California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed legislation (SB 190), authored by State Senator Leland Yee, which would require the governing boards of California’s two university systems – the University of California and the California State University – to determine future pay increases of university executives in meetings that would be open to the public. “This […]
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Here’s another bit of wisdom from the Columbia Spectator, this time on the repulsive noose incidents. Here’s the first sentence of the op-ed. See if anything strikes you as odd. In the past weeks’ furor about nooses and graffiti, which dramatize age-old concerns about our Eurocentric curriculum, paternalistic gentrification efforts, and feelings of marginalization from […]
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Sharad Karkhanis, professor emeritus at Kingsborough Community College, is a vitriolic critic of the faculty union at the City University of New York. He’s accused Susan O’Malley, another professor at Kingsborough, of seeking to “recruit terrorists” to teach at CUNY. O’Malley has responded with a two million dollar libel suit, reports the New York Post: […]
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C-SPAN Book TV will broadcast three panels from the Manhattan Institute Center for the American University’s Closing of the American Mind Conference on Saturday and Sunday. Take a look at the schedule for details. Robert George, Roger Kimball, Jim Piereson, Heather MacDonald, and other luminaries are not to be missed.
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William and Mary’s new and anonymous bias reporting system is so wrong-headed that it’s hard to know where to begin protesting it. Some anonymous reports are legitimate, as Eugene Volokh argues at the Volokh Conspiracy, but calling for a college’s entire student body to watch out for bias, and then turn in their fellow students […]
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You’ll no doubt be encouraged to find out, on this fine date, that the academic study of horror cinema is alive and well. The University of Pennsylvania offers “Horror Cinema”, Bowdoin “The Horror Film In Context”, Xavier “The Horror Film”, and the University of South Carolina “Horror Films.” Australia’s not far behind, with horror offerings […]
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Many universities try to indoctrinate students, but the all-time champion in this category is surely the University of Delaware. With no guile at all the university has laid out a brutally specific program for “treatment” of incorrect attitudes of the 7,000 students in its residence halls. The program is close enough to North Korean brainwashing […]
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Brown University has been described as providing “the worst education in America.” Brown’s New Curriculum, far from requiring that students read a list of Great Books, has no core of any kind. Brown students are free to “shop” their courses and take only the ones they like. Brown’s libertarian attitude toward curricular structure no doubt […]
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Beware the words “social justice” and “dispositions” when used by schools of education and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). These apparently harmless terms lay the groundwork for politicizing the training of teachers and giving the ed schools an excuse to eliminate conservatives from their programs. The news this week is that […]
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The New York Times reports that “College Costs Outpace Inflation Rate.” Of course they have. The Chronicle offers a more telling headline: “Student Aid Has Gained, but College Costs Have Risen Faster.” The Times reports “in recent years, consumer prices have risen less than 3 percent a year, while net tuition at public colleges has […]
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Troy Scheffler, a graduate student at Hamline University in Minnesota, thinks that the Virginia Tech massacre might have been avoided if students had been allowed to carry concealed weapons. After e-mailing this opinion to the university president, he was suspended and ordered to undergo “mental health evaluation” before being allowed to return to school. Punishment […]
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Troy Scheffler, a graduate student at Hamline University in Minnesota, thinks that the Virginia Tech massacre might have been avoided if students had been allowed to carry concealed weapons. After e-mailing this opinion to the university president, he was suspended and ordered to undergo “mental health evaluation” before being allowed to return to school. Punishment […]
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Courtesy of the Harvard Crimson, the worst justification for a class I’ve ever seen: I understand that there are a number of students on this campus who think that FemSex is unnecessary, but what class or organization isn’t? Extracurriculars aren’t built out of necessity; they are created out of desires – to do what we […]
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The Naples News reports that Stephen Safranek, Edward Lyons and Phil Pucillo, all Ave Maria professors, have filled suit against Ave Maria University, contending that they were discharged in violation of their contracts. The lawsuit was not an unexpected development given the recent controversy at the school. The move to Florida and its handling by […]
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The University of Chicago hosted a conference last weekend on academic freedom. Participants ranged from John Mearshimer to Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali. Don’t laugh yet. The event’s cause celebre, the Chicago Maroon reports, was Norman Finkelstein. The partipants lamented DePaul University’s denial of tenure to Finkelstein, and lectured, predictably, on the evils of right-wing […]
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Color and Money: How Rich White Kids are Winning the War Over College Affirmative Action by Peter Schmidt Reviewed by George C. Leef Exactly how important is a college degree from a prestige school? Many believe that having such a degree is extremely important – a virtual guarantee of success in life. The higher education […]
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Do minority law students drop out or fail to pass the bar because of affirmative action? That’s exactly the direction recent research by UCLA law professor Richard Sander is pointing. His work, published in the Stanford Law Review, concluded that the admission of underqualified students due to affirmative action leads to higher drop-out rates and […]
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The study of professors’ views by Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons confirms much of what we already knew: there are more liberals than conservatives working in academia, and the ratio increases in the humanities and social sciences, as well as at more elite universities. However, the survey does show an important fact, that […]
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Drew Faust’s inauguration as Harvard President last Friday featured a surprising presence: the Harvard ROTC. The ROTC, which has been banned from the Harvard campus since 1969, formed a closing color guard composed of Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force students. Most wouldn’t have expected Faust to invite the ROTC – and they’d be right […]
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[This is an excerpt from a paper delivered by James Piereson at a Manhattan Institute conference on October 3, 2007, marking the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. He is Executive Director of the Center for the American University and President of the William E. Simon Foundation. […]
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[This is an excerpt from a paper delivered by Roger Kimball at the Manhattan Institute’s Closing Of The American Mind conference. It will appear in complete form in The New Criterion.] ..It is a rich and promiscuous stew that Allan Bloom served up, part polemic, part exhortation, part exercise in cultural-intellectual history. It sometimes grabs […]
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Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed has a long and excellent article on the Gross-Simmons study on the political and social views of professors, as well as on the Harvard symposium last Saturday that discussed the findings. The study concluded that the professoriate is more moderate than many believe, with younger instructors less activist and […]
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At the Saturday conference on the Gross-Simmons study, Lawrence Summers compared the meager number of conservative professors to the startling decline in the number of black players in major league baseball (now down to 8.4 percent). Blacks are well-represented among the best players, “but it appeared that there were not any African-American .250 hitters.” Alas, […]
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After 25 years in the corporate world, I decided to head back to the campus. In a way, I hadn’t really left since my dissertation. I had published several refereed articles in academic journals, five academic books (one a best seller in the field) and had conducted large research studies, collected a lot of data, […]
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Fear that Proposition 209 has whitewashed the University of California? A majority of students at seven of the nine undergraduate campuses at the University of California are now foreign-born or have one foreign-born parent, a new study by the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley reveals. Chinese, Latino, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, East […]
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The University of St. Thomas has now, predictably, re-invited Desmond Tutu to speak, after revoking his invitation over earlier concerns about his thoughts on Israel. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports: Rev. Dennis J. Dease, president of the university, sent a letter to students and members of the faculty and staff on Wednesday, saying he […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education, the voice of liberal academia, says that an important new study shows that liberal dominance among professors is much less than commonly believed. Not really. The study, by sociologists Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons of George Mason University, found that in 2004, 78 percent of faculty voted for […]
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Business Week reports on many colleges’ increasingly cozy relations with banks. In the most common formulation, the colleges permit their ID cards to double as debit and ATM cards for particular banks, in return, typically, for some portion of the profits. Parhaps it does work, but as Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American […]
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