Santa Cruz, Ca.–As California works to plug an epic budget shortfall, severe budget cuts are threatening the twin qualities — excellence and access — that have defined the University of California as the world’s leading public research university. At UC Santa Cruz, faculty, students, and staff worry about the impact the state’s financial meltdown is […]
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Spend some time among humanities researchers and it won’t be long before you hear complaints about lack of support. They grumble that while the sciences have countless sources and billions of dollars pouring into their labs and clinics and field work, the humanities have NEH, a smattering of foundations giving fellowships, a handful of humanities […]
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The indispensible FIRE—the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—bestows a regular mock honor on some offending college or university: the Speech Code of the Month. So far this year, the winners have included New York University (which bans, among other things, inappropriate jokes and teasing), the University of Idaho (no “insensitive” actions or communications), Northern […]
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A convicted terror bomber, Raymond Luc Levasseur, invited by a far left center to speak at the University of Massachusetts. Amherst, was disinvited after pressure from police groups and Governor Deval Partrick, then reinvited when the university president Jack Wilson intervened. Levasseur is a former leader of the United Freedom Front a radical group responsible […]
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In May the Illinois State’s Attorney’s office issued a stunningly unusual subpoena. It asked for the student grades, grading criteria, class syllabi, expense reports, and even e-mail messages of undergraduates taking an investigative reporting class at Northwestern University. The class tied into the Medill Innocence Project, a program administered by Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism […]
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Some happy news via Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy – Duke University’s Voltair Press is not only printing a book on the Danish Mohammed cartoon controversy that features the cartoons (imagine that!) but also includes a Statement of Principle that decries Yale University’s censorship of the cartoons in their own volume on the matter. […]
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Grade inflation is one of those realities of the post-60s academic world that most college teachers bemoan but feel powerless to do anything about. It is virtually impossible for any single faculty member to do much to stem the tide of ever rising grade distributions. If a faculty member refuses to go along with the […]
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In the 1950s, Hamilton College, where I now teach, had no marketing arm to speak of, but the New York Times provided a good deal of favorable coverage. A few years ago I stumbled upon one such item in a June 1950 issue. The headline said “Hamilton Program: College Curriculum Is Revised to Provide the […]
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I have the print copy of the October 2009 Modern Language Association Job List, the annual publication in which English departments in research universities and major liberal arts colleges publicize open positions. It doesn’t contain every job opening in English literature at every institution of higher learning, but it is the main source for people […]
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Congratulations to Minding the Campus for its forum on academic freedom. Saying something constructive about academic freedom doesn’t look all that difficult. It is one of the core doctrines of higher education. It has an abundant history, full of colorful characters, eloquent declarations, incisive legal arguments, and enlivening controversies. Yet somehow University of Chicago president […]
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Tomorrow KC Johnson will receive the fifth annual Phillip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. The award honors honors “individuals who advance liberal arts education, core curricula, and the teaching of Western civilization and American history.” KC has undoubtedly advanced these goals. He follows […]
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A recent report from Britain concludes that U.K. universities are “dumbing down” their requirements for majoring in foreign language in order to attract more undergraduate students. “The most widely-reported trend was towards a ‘greater emphasis’ on cultural and film studies, the report said, resulting in a decline in literary studies,” the U.K Telegraph reported regarding […]
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Last year, I supported Barack Obama in part because of his seeming desire to move beyond the Mondale/Dukakis/Clinton era-identity politics—a philosophy that has had devastating effects on higher education. For those hoping that a President Obama would abandon the failed policies of the past, however, the administration’s early months offered little of the promise that […]
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The president of the University of Chicago, Robert J. Zimmer, spoke at Columbia University on October 21st on the topic, “What Is Academic Freedom For?” Minding the Campus invited several academics and other observers of the campus scene to post brief reactions to President Zimmer’s remarks. The comments are from Peter Sacks, Erin O’Connor and […]
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In testimony to how far out of touch the AAUP has become from the people who pay the salaries of college educators, the organization is now demanding that colleges and universities convert currently serving adjuncts into tenure-track professors. The plan would bypass the national searches that normally accompany creation of new, tenure-track positions. There’s some […]
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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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