ACTA’s latest publication, “For the People: A Report Card on Public Higher Education in Illinois” has unearthed more of the usual disappointments. In a series of rankings, General Education requirements earned an F, with only three public universities (out of eight) indicating a foreign language requirement “and not a single institution received credit for Literature […]
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(This is a response to Robert Weissberg’s “Rescuing The University”) Professor Weissberg’s “Rescuing the University” offers a compact assessment of the frailties of the movement to restore higher education to light and sanity. He also urges the merits of another, he supposes, untried approach. “Guerilla warfare” and “monastery construction” are the unflattering labels he affixes […]
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While selective colleges and universities have become more selective, middling and lower-tier schools have become less selective, according to a new study reported on Inside Higher Ed. The study’s author, Stanford’s Caroline M. Hoxby, correctly noted that “typical college-going students in the U.S. should be unconcerned about rising selectivity. If anything, they should be concerned […]
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When I came out of high school in 1977, I had a GPA of 3.1, a straight B average. My SAT scores were 710 Math and 590 Verbal, pretty good but not stellar. My entire college application process took a half hour. I sauntered into the counselor’s office at Torrey Pines High School north of […]
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Part II, The Solution (The first part of this essay can be found here.) Restoring good sense to universities means allowing levelheaded academics to compete with radical imposters who proliferate by printing up their bogus currency. In a phrase: restore the gold standard of discovering and imparting truth. It is unnecessary to re-write university regulations […]
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Part I, The Problem How is the university, specifically the humanities and social sciences, with its rampant anti-Americanism, anti-intellectualism, muddle-brained identity politics, hostility to the unvarnished truth and all the rest to be re-conquered and restored to sanity? As one who has spent four decades in the belly of the beast, half of which was […]
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Here’s a letter from a reader addressing some of the travails of technology at her college and the role that they seem to play in the dropout rate: I went back to college this semester after dropping out 18 years ago for a family obligation. I came from a wealthy family. My entire family were […]
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Abby Thernstrom famously called our colleges and universities “islands of repression in a sea of freedom,” meaning, of course that for some twenty years, no other American institutions have worked harder to repress free speech. Consider these recent adventures in the long campus campaign against free expression: – After a peaceful protest over budget cuts […]
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At the tenth anniversary dinner last night for FIRE—the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education—I asked Robert Sibley of the group if they were still winning 97% of their cases filed for student freedom. Greg Lukianoff, head of fire, gave me that statistic two or three years ago. “It may have dropped down a notch […]
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Like many people in the world of higher education, my first exposure to FIRE came when I was under duress. During my 2001-2 tenure fight, I (naively, in retrospect) assumed that college officials would follow written rules and regulations—after all, academics are supposed to revere due process and regular procedure. Instead, I was trapped in […]
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KC Johnson wrote here last about the University of Alabama’s combination of its women’s and African-American studies departments. It seems they’re not alone. In an act of even more radical compression, the University of Nevada-Reno has combined [takes a breath] the holocaust, genocide, and peace studies program, religious studies, ethnic studies, and women’s studies into […]
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People who followed the course of the Alexander Hamilton Center from the time it was conceived by professors Robert Paquette, Douglas Ambrose, and James Bradfield (later joined by Elias W. Leavenworth) until it sank under the pressure and machinations of hostile faculty at Hamilton College had good reason for dismay over the prospects of traditionalist […]
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The College Board’s “Trends In Pricing” report, released this week, reveals that public university tuition rose by an average of 6.5% this fall while private university costs increased by only 4.4%. The discrepancy is no surprise, in an atompshere of reduced state education budgets, declining out-of-state enrollment, and notable increases in in-state applications (and attendant […]
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For educational reformers, the struggle can sometimes be frustrating, in that even successes—such as getting policies that attack academic freedom repealed—generally leave in place the people who designed and implemented those policies in the first place. But, at the very least, such efforts can force ideologues to abandon easy tools for enforcing their orthodoxy. Take, […]
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Does a black professor deserve tenure because his college hasn’t granted tenure to very many black professors in the past? To provide a role model for black students? To help the school achieve ethnic diversity faster than it otherwise might? To ensure that the proportion of black professors matches the proportion of black college students? […]
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The New York Times’ college admissions blog The Choice hosted four days of questions for the President of the College Board. The questioners aren’t pulling any punches: I always try to give the benefit of the doubt, but is the College Board really nonprofit? Why does testing cost so much? Where does the money go? […]
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The Times Higher Education Supplement has now come out with its sixth annual listing of the world’s top universities. Harvard continues to top the list, followed by the denizen of that other Cambridge across the Pond, which has now edged out Yale. The big news this year: the number of North American universities in the […]
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One reason the academic side of the lacrosse case was so important is that the Group of 88—the Duke arts and sciences faculty members who, two weeks into the case, declared that something had “happened” to false accuser Crystal Mangum and thanked protesters who had carried ‘CASTRATE’ signs for “not waiting and for making yourselves […]
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“Student engagement” is a movement and a cause that has made steady progress on our campuses. According to Inside Higher Education, it has reached a “critical mass” of participants, though many in the world of colleges and universities are only half-aware, or perhaps unaware, of what the movement is all about. The National Survey of […]
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A “Kinsley gaffe” comes when a politician inadvertently reveals a politically inconvenient truth. Perhaps in higher education, we can now speak of an “Alabama gaffe,” named for the University of Alabama, which recently decided to combine (“blend” was the university’s preferred verb) its women’s studies and African-American studies programs, creating a new entity called the […]
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President Obama’s call for an increase in college graduation rates and the establishment of a $2.5 billion college completion fund begins to address a vexing issue for those of us employed in higher education, namely, how do we make the United States more economically competitive in a world that demands a well-trained, college-educated workforce? The […]
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Total enrollment in colleges and universities is expected to rise to 20.6 million by the fall of 2018, according to a new projection from the U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics. That’s a 13 percent increase over the 16 million or so enrolled in 2007, according to the report. The greatest percentage growth […]
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Patrick Deneen, professor of government at Georgetown and founder of Georgetown’s Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy, spoke September 23rd at a luncheon in New York sponsored by the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University. The following is an excerpt. The full text will appear in the winter issue of The New […]
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Here’s a peculiar requirement for a tenure-track job teaching early modern British literature at Duquesne University: “Applicants must be willing to contribute actively to the mission and to respect the Spiritan Catholic identity of Duquesne University. The mission is implemented through a commitment to academic excellence, a spirit of service, moral and spiritual values, sensitivity […]
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Less than 60 percent of students at our four-year colleges complete their studies and graduate. That depressing statistic has drawn many critics, and now it has occasioned a book, Crossing the Finish Line, by three well-connected members of the academic establishment–William Bowen, Matthew Chingos, and Michael McPherson (hereafter, BCM). The authors obtained some data on […]
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As president of a university that experienced a high-profile false rape claim, Hofstra president Stuart Rabinowitz would have a long way to go to match the poor performance of Duke president Richard Brodhead. That said, Rabinowitz certainly would win no awards for profiles in courage. In response to the filing of false sexual assault charges […]
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Does it matter which college guide a high-school student consults? Yes indeed. They all differ in poundage, cost and frankness. To illustrate the various approaches, and the various levels of candor, here are five guides discussing one school, Wesleyan University of Middletown, Connecticut: Barron’s Guide to the Most Competitive Colleges is the driest of the […]
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I have written elsewhere on how academic unions tend to attract the most extremist voices even in an academy that overwhelmingly tilts to one side ideologically. Within the category of extremist academic unions, however, the CUNY union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), stands out. Since 2000 headed by a faction called the New Caucus, the […]
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