In the spring of 2008 Baylor University denied tenure to a larger than usual number of Assistant Professors up for promotion, including two-thirds of the women, and while tenure denial is normal at Baylor, the carnage uptick – from 10% to 40% in a single year – drew national attention and outcries of unfairness. No […]
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The Way We Were This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina , Kansas , USA . It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina , KS , and reprinted by the Salina Journal. 8th Grade Final Exam: Grammar (Time, one hour) […]
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First smile of the day: Harvard is holding a conference on women featuring a few speakers outside the traditional cozy confines of the feminist left. Here is the announcement, rich in exclamation points, from the Program on Constitutional Government: A Harvard First! The Conference the Radcliffe Institute Didn’t Want to Host! A Genuine Debate with […]
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By Robert L. Freedman A.B. ’62 I am running as a petition candidate for Harvard’s Board of Overseers to help Harvard College improve itself. I have been interested in higher education – and in particular in what is taught and how it is taught – since graduating from the College in 1962. I have the […]
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In today’s smorgasbord world of offbeat college courses, it can be hard to persuade atudents to sign up for plain-vanilla offerings in, say, physics or philosophy. So some professors have discovered a way to attract bodies to their classrooms: add the name “Harry Potter” to the course title. One of the pioneers of this strategy […]
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You’ve just started your freshman year in college, so one of your first stops is the campus bookstore to pick up your textbooks. You signed up for Econ 101, where your professor has assigned one of the top-selling basic textbooks in the field: Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw’s 936-page Principles of Economics (South-Western/Thomson), now in […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education began a recent report on perceptions of politics in the academy “the older Americans are, and the less time they have spent on a college campus, the more likely they are to believe that professors are politically biased.” This framing minimized the subsequent revelation that 29 percent of respondents aged […]
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“I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behavior.” – Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, 1928 Those were the days. A novelist could teach for a year or two and emerge with enough satire to fill a library. Alas, the Academy […]
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Are overweight people a victim group? On many campuses they are. Over the past decade “Fat Studies” has shown up on the curriculum at many colleges. The courses have little to with actual study, and a lot to do with identity politics, the airing of grievances and demands for protection from the oppression of the […]
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The Moving Picture Institute and MindingTheCampus.com invite you to a public screening of Indoctrinate U on Monday April 14, 2008 from 6:00-8:00 PM. The screening will be held at the Directors Guild of America Theater and will be followed by a discussion featuring MindingTheCampus.com editor John Leo and David DesRosiers, executive director of the VERITAS […]
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The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the National Association of Scholars (NAS), two groups conspicuously devoted to protecting traditional freedom on campus, have both come under attack as right-wing organizations. The criticism of FIRE came in a distorted entry on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. The Wikipedia entry, which has since been corrected, […]
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The Rutgers Daily Targum, an expertly edited publication, offered a story on yesterday’s New Brunswick anti-war event, “U. professors cancel class in support of ralley” [sic]. Copy editing’s not their evident strength; this seems little surprise when you see what one of their Journalism professors thinks about holding classes. Bruce Reynolds and several other professors […]
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[Indoctrinate U, a documentary by Evan Coyne Maloney on the state of intellectual freedom at American universities, premiered at the Kennedy Center in September 2007 and has screened in multiple locations since. Peter Berkowitz, writing in The Wall Street Journal, called Indoctrinate U a “riveting documentary about the war on free speech and individual rights […]
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Here is one response from Hawaii on the l8-day Israel-bashing conference sponsored by the University of Hawaii at Manoa: “I just found out that an anti-Israel activist spoke at my daughter’s school. She is in the fifth grade at Kamehameha a private school for those with some Hawaiian blood or ancestry. Her mom (my wife) […]
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An interesting news item caught my eye last week. The BB&T Charitable Foundation has made a million-dollar donation to Marshall University’s Lewis College of Business. The donation comes with a string attached: Marshall must teach Ayn Rand’s classic tribute to capitalism, Atlas Shrugged, as part of the curriculum. The BB&T Foundation has made numerous grants […]
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The University of North Dakota is sponsoring a controversial lecture by 1960s bomber Bill Ayers, now a “distinguished professor of education” at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Three groups invited Ayers to speak on April 3rd: the Department of Educational Foundations and Research, the College of Education and Human Development, and Students for a Democratic […]
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Many in the One Dupont Circle crowd talk a good game about the “Federal Ministry of Education” and the threat of nationalized standards. (See “The Future of Accreditation” in Inside Higher Ed by Judith Eaton, president of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation – a meditation on what accreditation will look like in 2014.) But […]
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Recently I sat down with a young woman who shared with me the experience of her first year at Thurgood Marshall College, one of the six colleges of the University of California at San Diego. She explained to me that regardless of her major field of study and in order to graduate she was required […]
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The Harvard Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, William Fitzsimmons, spoke out for SAT II tests at a recent panel at Harvard. The utility of the examinations has come into question as the University of California mulls dropping their SAT II application requirements. The Crimson reports on Fitzsimmons’ surprisingly spirited defense: “The SAT IIs have […]
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Readers who wish to comment on the University of Hawaii sponsorship of a recent 18-day Israel-bashing conference should Email Dr. Virginia S. Hinshaw, chancellor of the university —vhinshaw@hawaii.edu or mco@hawaii.edu. The office phone number is 808-956-7651and the address is Chancellor’s Office, 2500Campus Road, Hawaii Hall 202, Honolulu,HI 96822.
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Peter Wood and Ashley Thorne write on the upcoming AAUP Presidential Election at the NAS site. Cary Nelson, the current President, is facing Tom Guild, a professor emeritus of legal studies at Oklahoma State University. Guild is railing against the organization’s fiscal troubles under Nelson’s leadership, and “insider” posture. Thorne interviewed both candidates; here’s a […]
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In recent years, conservative critics of academia have had few better friends than Ward Churchill, the Group of 88, MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins (who fled Larry Summers talk about variations in intelligence between genders), and a few other hot-headed leftists on campus who made headlines. They proved the point about ideological bias every time […]
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When an American university sponsors a conference on Israel and Palestine, most observers know what to expect: a prolonged rabble-rousing attack on Israel sponsored by the “anti-colonial” far left, with no one invited to defend Israel. Last Friday, the University of Hawaii at Manoa concluded an 18-day Israel-bashing festival, one of the longest such adventures […]
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Read James Piereson on the alarming spate of fabricated autobiographies as of late at Arma Virumque: Here’s a sampling “There’s money in poverty,” a well known professor said to me many years ago after he had won a large research grant to study the living conditions of the less fortunate. We both laughed, he at […]
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Selena Roberts, a former New York Times sports columnist, now with Sports Illustrated , is still trying to justify her garbled coverage of the Duke lacrosse case. A Roberts column of March 31, 2006, devoted to pre-judging the lacrosse players, said they had been forced to provide DNA (untrue, they provided DNA and hair samples […]
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U.S. universities pride themselves on their tolerance – religious, ethnic, gender-based, sexual orientation-based, whatever. But when it comes to lucrative consulting fees for partnering with universities in Mideastern countries where none of the above categories of toleration seems to exist, the campus open-mindedness apparently evaporates, and a strange variety of mulitculturalism takes over. Case in […]
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In his brief tenure as president of the University of Colorado, former U.S. Senator and ACTA National Council member Hank Brown – who stepped down this past weekend – managed to leave an indelible mark on CU and higher education generally. Taking the reins in the wake of a number of scandals, Brown established a […]
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An op-ed “Aid, Discrimination, and Justice” in Monday’s Columbia Spectator speaks to an increasing conception of universities not as American institutions, but as world institutions, with a responsibility to a global audience, and, in this case, student body. Columbia just announced an overhaul of its financial aid policies, of considerable benefit to poor and middle […]
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UCLA has just approved an addition to the majors offered by their Spanish and Portuguese departments: Spanish and Community and Culture, reports the Daily Bruin. What makes this different? Well, the Bruin has an answer: “what makes this major different from the other Spanish majors are two community service-based courses that place students in quarter-long […]
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By Gail Heriot (Ms. Heriot is a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. This piece is adapted from Ms. Heriot’s Commissioner Statement for the Civil Rights Report on Affirmative Action at American Law Schools released last fall.) I have no doubt that those who originally conceived of race-based admissions policies – nearly forty […]
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