“8 Tuition-Free Colleges” from Mental Floss
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In recent years the stakes for entrance to the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities have risen to absurd heights, with students (or, their families) not only now paying significant sums for private school tuitions (or the entry cost into good school districts, namely expensive housing), SAT training, and coaching for application writing, but increasingly […]
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Last week the Wall Street Journal asked several college Presidents to answer an essay question from their own application. Presidents from Barnard to Wesleyan participated. Take a look at their entries. Would you admit these students?
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Donald Downs appeared here in New York at an event co-sponsored by the Pope Center and the Manhattan Institute on academic freedom, presenting his fascinating new paper “Academic Freedom: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and How to Tell the Difference.” Listen to John Leo interviewing Donald Downs in a new podcast.
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Like Caesar’s Gaul, President Obama’s plan for higher education is divided into three parts: 1) Every American should have postsecondary educational training, and within a few years we should again lead the world in the proportion of young graduates with bachelor’s degrees; 2) Federal financial assistance to pay for college should become an entitlement like […]
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Last Friday, a 6-hour conference at the City University of New York (CUNY) graduate center examined “rightist efforts, from fiscally or socially conservative movements to hate groups.” It apparently raised no eyebrows, though if the meeting had set out to examine “leftist efforts, from fiscally and socially liberal movements to the Unabomber and animal rights […]
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Newspapers are folding right and left—the Rocky Mountain News in February, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in March, the Boston Globe any day now, it would seem—and, according to the American Journalism Review, some 15 percent of the newsroom jobs, about 5,000 of them, last year (with another 7,500 vanishing so far this year) at newspapers across […]
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Every few weeks or so a new marginalized group is discovered on campus, requiring new bursts of emotional inclusion and sometimes a demand for special housing and curriculum change as well. At Cornell the latest people revealed to be suffering discomfort are transfer students. “Study Finds Transfers Feel Marginalized on Campus,” said the headline in […]
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In theory, e-mail should make it easier to organize for social and political change. But, as recent events in my campaign as a petition candidate for Harvard’s Board of Overseers have shown, new means of communication can be used to relegate would-be reformers of the academy to dead-ends, and to keep the outsiders outside. If […]
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill finally got it right. Instead of letting radical protesters chase an invited conservative speaker out of his lecture hall–as they did with former U.S. Congressman Tom Tancredo on April 14– when the radicals tried the same stunt a little over a week later, on April 22, against […]
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Don’t miss this video on the notorious freshman indoctrination program at the University of Delaware. It was produced by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and is in the running to make the top ten most-watched videos of the month. It includes the program’s leading hits, including mandatory hatred of America, the importance […]
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By John McWhorter Debra Dickerson said of the Cornell students who took over Willard Straight Hall at Cornell in 1969, “What they actually wanted was beyond the white man’s power to bestow.” Even after they were granted a Black Studies department as they demanded, a core of black students remained infuriated at Cornell as still […]
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This is a letter to the editor of the Cornell Daily Sun, responding to a Sun report today about a campus Christian group apparently violating anti-discrimination rules by not allowing a gay student to become a leader. To the Editor: Alex Berg (“Outcry Erupts from Alleged Homophobia” April 23) seems to think the Chris Donohoe […]
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Forty years ago this week, an armed student insurrection erupted on the Cornell campus. I was a sophomore on campus at the time and later wrote a book on the events, Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. To some the drama represented a triumph of social justice, paving the way for […]
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Yesterday, our own John McWhorter participated in a debate on Affirmative Action hosted by the Miller Center. Other participants included Julian Bond and Lee Bollinger. You can watch it here.
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The flap over the New School occupation last Friday continues apace this week, with a letter from New School President Bob Kerrey to the New York Times, pointing out omissions in their reporting. Your account of what happened at the New School on Friday glossed over some very critical information that puts the whole event […]
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Virginia Tech has backed down from its attempt to force a diversity loyalty oath on its faculty. The credit goes to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the National Association of Scholars (NAS), with a strong assist from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Under proposed guidelines, Virginia Tech faculty […]
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This morning Todd Zywicki briefly noted at the Volokh Conspiracy, that he had been denied a second term on the Dartmouth Board of Trustees. It’s difficult not to conclude that Dartmouth is pruning board dissenters. Zywicki’s personal statement about the decision on his website provides a history of the source of his removal: ..From 1891 […]
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This is the text of an open letter about the student occupation and police intervention last weekend at the New School in New York City. It was sent to members of the New School community by James Miller, professor of political science and liberal studies at the school. Miller is a former member of Students […]
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In the early 90s we noticed that Brown and Yale were conducting separate freshman orientations for non-white students. Since then this casual segregation of new students has spread widely and has come to be seen as normal. Typically minority students arrive a week early and are instructed on how to cope with a historically white […]
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In a recent article that received a fair bit of buzz, The New York Times spun a story of the supposed new reality in the recession-plagued U.S.—Students from more well-off families being given admissions preference at increasingly cash-strapped universities. But the Times article misses the larger point. Lawrence University, Colby College and Brandeis (some of […]
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Here’s a sign of colleges’ desperate need for tuition cash to make up for shrunken endowments and less generous donors in today’s economic downturn: many institutions are slinking away from their vaunted “need-blind” admissions policies that admits applicants deemed qualified regardless of their ability to pay and makes up any shortfalls with scholarships and other […]
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Students occupied a New School building early this morning and police have now entered, with the evident aim of removing the occupants, the New York Times reports. They seem to have followed the lead of February’s NYU protesters in advancing a list of highly disparate demands: The students adopted a list of eight demands including […]
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The nine-campus University of California system is reducing the number of freshman admissions because of the financial crisis. But “underrepresented groups”—non-Asian-American minorities—shouldn’t worry at all. Apparently all the cuts will come from white and Asian-American applicants. Down in the ninth paragraph of a 13-paragraph Associated Press story in the San Jose Mercury News, we learn […]
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Finally, it would seem, colleges are doing something realistic to cut costs in this era of tight budgets and shrunken endowments: they’re scaling back or declining to expand their Ph.D. programs. Inside Higher Education reported last week that a range of institutions, including Emory, Columbia, Brown, New York University, and the University of South Carolina […]
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The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) took its customary bystander role in the Ward Churchill case, as it regularly does when academic integrity is the issue and the evidence of malfeasance is obvious. But among the many mealy-mouthed statements by AAUP president Cary Nelson, one was surely true: “Colorado knew what it was getting […]
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In his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer distills the betrayal of trust by corrupt public servants into a memorable expression: “If gold rust, what shall iron do?” This is the metaphor that his honest parson lives by, and it reflects on the venal churchmen among the pilgrims who betray the ideals of the […]
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A modified version of this piece appears today in the Washington Examiner Georgetown University, like many colleges and universities hit by the current economic downturn, is in what look like dismal financial straits. The value of Georgetown’s endowment shrank 25.5 percent last year, to $833 million, the annual deficit it has been running is estimated […]
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We belatedly came across two free-speech articles this morning, one a year old, the other a week old. The year-old story is vaguely similar to the current Obama-at-Notre-Dame issue. John Corvino, a gay ex-Catholic who teaches philosophy at Wayne State, was invited to speak on gay rights at Aquinas College, a Catholic institution in Grand […]
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Several years ago, in a seminal Chronicle of Higher Education essay, Mark Bauerlein lamented a campus in which “the simple trappings of deliberation make academics think that they’ve reached an opinion through reasoned debate—instead of, in part, through an irrational social dynamic. The opinion takes on the status of a norm. Extreme views appear to […]
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