I cannot reflect upon my four years at UC Berkeley without mentioning the word “Diversity.” When one’s college experience is oversaturated by incessant lessons in racial and ethnic awareness, the word becomes unavoidable in any mention of Berkeley. Berkeley’s particular concept of diversity seemed to avoid the basic goal of fostering cultural tolerance and understanding. […]
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Operators of a diploma mill, convicted of selling 10,000 bogus academic degrees out of Spokane, Washington, are on their way to prison. The Justice department declined to release the names of buyers, saying that it was against policy, but the Spokesman-Review made the complete list public today on its website. The buyers include at least […]
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Rockingham Community College in North Carolina has shifted the schedule of all of its course offerings to reduce the cost of commuting. Classes held five times a week will be held four times, while classes held three times a week will now be held twice. If only larger colleges showed a comparable attention to cost…
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Aggressive diversity programs on campus now come with harmless-sounding names such as “sustainability,” “social justice” and the need for good “dispositions.” The latest in this series is “intergroup dialogue.” Who can oppose “intergroup dialogue”? Many of us, if the real meaning of the term is excavated. “Intergroup dialogue” is the new euphemism for the oppression […]
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The New York Sun reports that Mercy College is creating an “instant, on-the-spot evaluation that allows students to learn whether they have been admitted 24 hours after showing their high school transcripts.” Where to find such impatient prospects? Admissions officers will also be canvassing local beaches and malls in the five boroughs and Westchester in […]
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The New York Times ran a piece Monday on Berea college, which, judging from the article’s comment section and blog responses, appears to have hit a raw nerve. At a point when Congress is about to publish a list of the worst tuition-increase offenders, and yearly college price-tags are climbing nearer $50,000 a year, it’s […]
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As Charlotte Allen points out here, required summer reading for college freshmen is often highly politicized. That goes double for freshmen introductory writing courses and textbooks. Teaching composition to new students ought to be an ideology-free effort, but for many years on many campuses it hasn’t been. For example, take Ways of Reading: an Anthology […]
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The efforts of some of the University of Chicago’s faculty to derail a planned research institute named after the university’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006) is full of delicious ironies. In a June 6 letter to Chicago’s president, Robert Zimmer and its provost, Thomas Rosenbaum, more than 100 professors—not a single one from Chicago’s […]
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It’s July, and there’s one safe bet to be made about the 2.8 million or so new high school graduates who will be entering college as freshmen in just six or seven weeks: Few of them are likely to have even started reading the “one book” that the adminstrators at their chosen college have likely […]
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Laura Ingalls Wilder as a proto-Reaganite? Surprisingly, the book (Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Impact On American Culture) didn’t appear until now. When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, Fellman saw how deeply his individualist rhetoric resonated with average Americans and was reminded of her own emotional reaction to Wilder’s stories of prairie […]
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In 2003 Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, decided that the one-year curriculum at the university’s historic Graduate School of Journalism wasn’t intellectual enough, because it focused on the acquisition of practical skills such as reporting, editing, and broadcast techniques rather than training fledgling journos for what many of them would rather be: public intellectuals. […]
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Book Review: Ending Racial Preferences: The Michigan Story by Carol M. Allen (Lexington Books, 2008, 422 pp.) I like this book, but fairness to the prospective reader requires disclosure of three facts: (a) it is an odd book, (b) I am an odd reader, and (c) it costs ninety dollars, for Pete’s sake. The last […]
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The Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) is at it again. In the latest set of rulings to come from this regional accreditor’s Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, fifteen institutions find themselves in various states of probation or warning or show cause. No school is shut down; the federal dollars keep flowing. And […]
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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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President Bush has nominated Robert Paquette, of the Alexander Hamilton Center (once nearly an institution at Hamilton College) to the National Council on the Humanities. All luck with his confirmation.
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– The chancellor of the Washington D.C. public school system is considering a dual-track system of employment – one with lower pay and traditional job protections, and one with higher pay, fewer protections, and greater chances for raises. Richard Vedder suggests the same for universities: ..You can either go for job security or for higher […]
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The ABA is very big on diversity. To satisfy its standards, nearly all law schools must seriously relax their admissions standards for minority students. But how many of so-called beneficiaries of affirmative action are graduating and passing the bar? And how many are winding up with nothing to show for their trouble but students loans? […]
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If I ran the campus I’d start out anew I’d make a few changes That’s just what I’d do Here’s a simple suggestion (Avoiding all fads) I’d have some professors Who teach undergrads I hear you all snicker I hear you all scoff But I’ve got to believe That many a prof Would thrill to […]
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The New York Times noted the work of our VERITAS Fund in last week’s “The ’60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire.” With previous battles already settled, like the creation of women’s and ethnic studies departments, moderation can be found at both ends of the political spectrum. David DesRosiers, executive director of the Veritas […]
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Several years ago a Korean-American student in one of my politics classes at Princeton described the reaction of his Asian classmates in the California private school he attended when the college acceptance and rejection letters arrived in the mail the spring of their senior year. A female Black student, he explained, had applied to more […]
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In a new report on elementary teacher preparation, the National Council on Teacher Quality finds that only 10 of 77 schools surveyed did an “adequate” job of preparing aspiring math teachers. Low expectations and standards, inconsistent guidance, insufficient grounding in algebra, and a nationwide inability to agree on what math teachers should know is effectively […]
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Do not attempt satire on the campus of Colorado College. Student Chris Robinson and a friend who wants to remain anonymous satirized The Monthly Rag, a flyer published by the Feminist and Gender Studies program. The parody, The Monthly Bag, contained short notes poking fun at hypermasculine swagger as well as feminist complaining. One note, […]
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Times are tough these days for self-styled progressive colleges. Last week Antioch College, the venerable liberal-arts institution in Yellow Springs, Ohio, that never recovered from the 1960s, shut its doors and laid off the last of its faculty members who had served an ever-dwindling number of students. And now, the New College of California in […]
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At its annual meeting, the American Association of University Professors declined to vote to criticize Israel, yet voted to condemn Iran. In December, the MLA rejected a statement defending critics of Israel and replaced it with a much-milder statement defending contentious Middle East research. They also resisted condemning Ward Churchill’s firing, and instead only objected […]
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Madonna Constantine, Columbia’s Plagiarist, has been fired. How have some reported on this? “Victim of Hate Incident Fired From Columbia University” – The Daily Voice “Victim of Noose Incident, Columbia U. Professor Is Fired Amid Plagiarism Charges” – Diverse Issues In Higher Education Remember, the plagiarism was proven, the noose charge wasn’t. In case you […]
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Advisers to student newspapers, on both the high school and college level, sometimes lose their jobs for backing student journalists who report stories displeasing to school administrators. Or under the implied threat of being fired, faculty advisers may steer the journalists in a direction the administration wants them to go. So the California legislature overwhelmingly […]
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One of the least-kept secrets in higher education is the fact that many colleges and universities, especially the more select ones, consciously seek to suppress their “Asian” student enrollment. During the first year of my term as a regent of the University of California (UC), a prominent member of the staff at one of the […]
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So, which news stories about the College Board’s new report on the addition of a writing section to the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) do you believe? Here’s the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “The results echo preliminary findings, released in April, that the new exam is just about as good as high school grades – and in some […]
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Given their common characteristics it’s often difficult for a person of even superior discernment to tell, from a slight distance, the difference between an accomplished university bureaucrat and a robust brick wall. Both seem witlessly to beg for the wrecking ball. The nation’s nine colonial colleges—not to mention the hundreds founded since—are thronged with administrative […]
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