Many conservatives are groaning over a major new report from a commission of higher education luminaries calling on colleges to de-emphasize the SAT for college admissions. The catcalls from the right erupted after the National Association of College Admission Counseling suggested that colleges should rethink their reliance on the SAT for admissions. Wrongheaded, de-evolutionary, politically […]
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How would you like to be a full-time adjunct professor? Here’s a snapshot of the life, excerpted from a Washington Post magazine profile, published in 2002, of Larissa Tracy, a 28-eight-year-old woman with a doctorate in English literature from Trinity University in Dublin teaching five or six courses a semester on a part-time, non-tenure basis […]
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The Political Theory Project at Brown, as well as several other Veritas Fund efforts are profiled in yesterday’s Brown Daily Herald. The piece provides a strong account of Mark Bauerlein’s efforts at Emory: At Emory University, Mark Bauerlein directs the Program in American Citizenship, which is funded by Veritas. “In terms of content, we support […]
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Halloween is the perfect time for those dark and scary “Tunnel of Oppression” exhibits on many college campuses. The tunnels, billed as “grassroots diversity programs,” are meant to shock and waken students to the amount of hate and oppressiveness around the world and in America today. Photos and skits in the makeshift tunnels portray the […]
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The term “College Green” has a whole new meaning these days. No longer does it refer to the tree-lined verdant lawn at the heart of the classic college campus. It now reflects an environmental faddishness sweeping academia with a fervor exceeding even that for deconstructionism or take-back-the-night events. The big buzzword on campus is “sustainability.” […]
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The LA Times just finished a 3-part series on the study of video game design, at the collegiate level. Over 200 schools offer courses in “some aspect of video game development.” On the one hand, these students are actually learning something that employers value – the average salary for a video game designer is $73,600. […]
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The Shark provides a list of the top five Law School “Admissions Innovations” of 2008, with analysis. The ludicrous Baylor case is ranked one, but I hadn’t heard of several of the others. Take #3 University of Michigan Law School’s Wolverine Scholars Program admits University of Michigan undergrads who have at least a 3.8 GPA […]
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The following is an excerpt from Roger Kimball’s introduction to the third edition of his classic book on the humanities, Tenured Radicals. ————————————- One of the great ironies that attends the triumph of political correctness is that in department after department of academic life, what began as a demand for emancipation recoiled, turned rancid, and […]
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Harvard faculty maintain that additions to the courses that will fulfill General Education requirements (a replacement for the Core) are not growing easier. Subcommittee chairs maintain that their standards have not grown too lax. Here’s a defense, reported in the Harvard Crimson: Subcommittee chairs maintain that their standards have not grown too lax. “I don’t […]
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If you think that student life at an ultra-elite law school is a page ripped out of The Paper Chase—one long, frighteningly competitive grade grub under the icy eye of a clone of the movie’s fictional Prof. Charles W. Kingsford Jr.—think again. At Yale Law School, grades have been strictly optional since the 1960s (students […]
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Baylor University has taken U.S. News list hucksterism to a new level, in granting students a $300 bookstore credit for retaking the SAT, and a $1000 per-year merit aid increase for improving their score by at least 50 points. That’s called buying your way up the list.
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One of the hottest debates roiling American campuses today is whether the SAT and other standardized tests should continue to play a dominant role as a college admissions criterion. The main point of contention in this debate is whether the SAT or equivalent scores accurately gauge college preparedness, and whether they are valid predictors of […]
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People ask me when I got my first inkling that something was seriously wrong with the culture of our campuses of higher education. It was in the mid-1980s, and it had nothing to do — yet — with the post-modern corruption of the liberal arts, which was then beyond my professional interests and experiences. It […]
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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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The Board of Regents and officials of the University of Wisconsin system have recently proposed two sweeping changes to the system’s student misconduct codes. The first change is a new code covering student misconduct outside of university property (UWS 18). The second involves some major changes in the present Student Nonacademic Disciplinary Code, UWS 17. […]
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We are working on a re-design for Minding the Campus. One thing we want to fix is the display of reader comment. Letters now run at the bottom of the article being discussed, often a day or two after the article in question. So those who read the article on the day we run it […]
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“..the one aspect of American culture and society most in need of improvement and investment–education–has been greeted by deafening silence on the part of all candidates.” Leon Botstein, president of Bard College in his “charge” to the Class of 2008. Leon forgets to mention that all of today’s presidential candidates, including also-rans, offer detailed prescriptions […]
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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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The stage is now set for wide debate over mandatory student fees These are the fees that educational institutions or student governments assess students above and beyond the monies that pertain to tuition, housing, dining, and similar goods. Some of these additional fees typically fund extracurricular activities or needs such as medical services, crime victim […]
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“Parents asking, ‘Where’s the trash?’ were promptly corrected by event staff and volunteers, who proudly provided composting crash courses to the thousands of students and family members.” The “event”—described in an online news release–was the Second Annual Zero-Waste Freshman Orientation Picnic at Duke University on Aug. 19, a campus event for entering Duke students and […]
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– The University of Michigan has opened a Computer and Video Games Archive Now, as the Michigan Daily reports, students can study video games at their library. “Or just play them.” How exactly will this work? Once traffic picks up, the library will use a reservation system, with priority going to researchers. …. Because of […]
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John McCain and Barack Obama’s calls to Columbia to end its ban on the ROTC continue to yield procedural results, however much any real change remains in doubt. Columbia is set to feature two informational forums in coming weeks prior to a student survey on whether to lift or continue a ban on the Naval […]
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Many of us are unfamiliar with the postmodern debating style on college campuses, but here’s how it works. A topic is picked. The skilled postmodern debater ignores the topic and instead talks about race, gender and personal feelings. This “freewheeling aspect is what makes debate so exciting and challenging,” says the Chronicle of Higher Education. […]
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The Harvard Crimson today reports that, beginning in 2009, Harvard Law School students will no longer receive letter grades, and will instead be evaluated simply on a modified pass-fail system, consisting of “Honors” “Pass” “Low Pass” and “Fail”. Yale and Stanford have similar grading systems. An obvious point of objection was raised: According to Richard […]
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Imagine for a moment that you are a senior professor at an elite college with a proud 200-year tradition in liberal arts education. You attend a monthly faculty meeting in the fall 2007 and find yourself for the first time in a quarter century surrounded by seventy or so undergraduate activists who are staging a […]
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The “Diversity In Academe” issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education is out. And how is the quest for diversity going? Badly, as always. The number of Asian-American university Presidents remains insufficient, Middle Easterners aren’t considered an ethnic group, and paltry numbers of minority students study abroad. And those are just the minor problems. What’s […]
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Brown University is famous for having the loosest graduation requirements in the Ivy League. In fact, there are almost no graduation requirements at all, for although Brown undergrads do have to major in something in order to qualify for a degree, they are free to design their own majors. As for anything else in the […]
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A new issue of the Dartmouth Review, and with it, a revealing listing of Dartmouth’s worst professors. Here are some stellar academics: A self-described “recovering racist” who makes her classes into an airing of grievances rather than a study of literature because she “can’t read male authors anymore,” Grantham injects her writing courses with dogmatic […]
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“Senior officials never discussed hippo phase-out” In case you were wondering.
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