Happy holidays to our readers. We’d encourage you to catch up on material from recent months: Wondering how to read College rankings? – When College Rankings Are A Marketing Ploy by Edward Fiske. About the collapse of endowments? Ivy-Covered Hedge Funds by Joe Malchow Looking for current arguments in the SAT debate? Downgrading SATs Makes […]
Read More
One thing to be said for the $42.5 billion or so in supposed stimulus dollars that publicly funded institutions of higher learning are trying to squeeze out of the incoming Obama administration’s economic package is that the amount isn’t too much larger than Harvard’s $28 billion endowment. Oh, and it’s also not too much larger […]
Read More
On December 16, the higher education establishment put out its tin cup, asking Congress to give it a 5 percent cut of any “stimulus” spending package—around $40 to $50 billion for new university construction projects. In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I’m opposed to the concept of “economic stimulus” spending. The […]
Read More
This past April, Stanley Fish, the postmodernist English professor with a knack for parlaying whatever current well-compensated teaching job he holds into an even better compensated teaching job somewhere else (he’s now a “distinguished professor” at Florida International University after stints—necessarily somewhat brief—at the University of California-Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke, and the University of Illinois-Chicago) […]
Read More
Duke’s Endowment down 19%. Yale’s down 25%. More blows to the “Yale model” of investment. If you didn’t catch it, read more from Joe Malchow on the topic here.
Read More
FIRE has just released their third Spotlight on Speech Codes report, and the results are depressing, as usual. Of the 364 schools whose speech policies were reviewed by FIRE, 270 earned a red-light rating (unconstitutional speech policies), 78 earned a yellow-light rating (some troublesome policies), and a princely 8 received a green-light rating (no limitations […]
Read More
In early December, the Board of Regents of the Kentucky Community and Technical College system agreed to vote in a few months on a proposal that may have far-reaching effects on higher education. The proposal would end the practice of offering tenured or tenure-track posts to new faculty hires. Is this a crack in the […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 Murray?), and you think “The Rape of the Lock” is about a guy with a sexual fixation involving keyholes. Guess where you go to college? […]
Read More
The nearly six-year-old lawsuit between the heirs of donors Charles and Marie Robertson and Princeton University over who controls the assets of the Robertson Foundation has been settled. Princeton has now acquired most of the Robertson Foundation’s endowment, enabling it to exercise control over the foundation’s assets, which amount to between $600 and $700 million, […]
Read More
Should colleges analyze their faculties by race, ethnicity and gender to see which group is happier and more content with life on campus? Short answer: no. Identity-group politics is already out of hand in the world of universities. Comparative contentment reports are sure to reinforce the notion of identity uber alles. Besides, grievance is still […]
Read More
After years of fat, our colleges and universities are now facing decisions imposed by the coming years of lean. Will the academy pull back from the spending binge of recent decades by cutting away administrative fat, or by chipping away at academic bone? Will it be administrations or faculties that get downsized? The answer will […]
Read More
The details of the suit are not entirely clear from early reports, but the 6-year suit between the Robertson family and Princeton over the alleged misuse of their endowment has come to and end in a settlement. Princeton is providing $40 million to pay the legal fees of the Robertson family, establishing a $50 million […]
Read More
Wisdom from a candidate for the Presidency of the Harvard Undergraduate Council, from the Harvard Crimson: The Waite-Petri campaign is adopting an age-old tradition of using their platform to advocate for the abolition of the Council. There is one caveat, however. “We’re going to invite a member of the House of Hapsburg to rule the […]
Read More
There may be something to demand-side economics: According to the most recent annual report from the National Science Foundation, the number of Ph.D. degrees awarded in the humanities dropped by almost 5 percent from 2006 to 2007. As Inside Higher Education reported, the decline—steepest for doctorates in literary studies such as English, foreign languages, and […]
Read More
A video from the Daily Princetonian blog.
Read More
– A leader of Michigan State’s student government could be suspended for emailing a critique of changes in campus policies to faculty members and asking for their views. Kara Spencer wrote an analysis of the university’s proposed changes in the academic calendar and freshman orientation and emailed it to 391 members of the faculty. As […]
Read More
If you weren’t aware, the annual conference of the National Association of Scholars is fast-approaching, and well-worth your time and attendance. The conference, held at the Washington Marriot January from 9th to 11th, will feature Abigail Thernstrom, Victor Davis Hanson, Richard Vedder, and the excellent folks at NAS, among others. Take a look at the […]
Read More
The idea of “bubble” has been on everyone’s mind since the escalating housing and economic crisis first erupted in July 2007. Throughout these turbulent times, one institution appeared to be coasting along above the fray: Higher Education. Higher ed has been growing for decades, becoming a staple in the national political economy. The supply and […]
Read More
Harvard’s Endowment has suffered a staggering eight billion dollar loss, or a loss of at least 22% in the last four months. That’s the worst endowment drop for Harvard in 40 years, and dwarfs most comparable recent plunges in University endowments. Read on. Given uniformly dolorous news in the financial sector, it’s encouraging to see […]
Read More
In the reporting on our present economic infelicity we learn, astonishingly, that among the most extravagantly foolish investors have been America’s oldest and (so we are given to believe) wisest institutions of higher learning, including Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth. A twenty-something taking his first dip in the stock market might be expected to display irrational […]
Read More
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has just released a new report “Metrics For Effective Governance” offering eight simple metrics for gauging “institutional success in attaining agreed-upon goals.” The key measures that ACTA suggests include: 1. Student Characteristics 2. Student Selectivity 3. Cost of Attendance and Financial Aid 4. Financial Resources and Performance 5. […]
Read More
Amidst a climate of financial worry for many American students, the tide of amply-compensated Presidents refusing or returning portions of their salaries appears to be growing. The Daily Princetonian reports that Amy Guttman, the President of the University of the University of Pennsylvania, and her husband have made two gifts totaling $250,000 to support undergraduate […]
Read More
The good news is that the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which wound up its annual meeting last week in San Francisco, did not go the whole hog and endorse the idea that it’s unethical for an anthropologist to consult for the U.S. military—even though that is exactly what many of the AAA’s 11,000 members, mostly […]
Read More
If your plans for next semester were ucertain, here’s a surefire plan: NYU’s new one-credit “Intergroup Dialogues” which are “designed to foster communication among racial groups at NYU.” The sessions are to be gerrymandered, of course, according to the Washington Square News: To ensure balance, a 14-student section addressing racial issues would have seven white […]
Read More