In the groupthink academy, perhaps the most opaque, but significant, personnel process comes in the hiring of new faculty. In a flawed tenure case (as I came to discover), some precedent exists for the courts (or, in my case, fair-minded senior administrators) intervening to undo an ethically improper outcome. In the typical hiring process, however, […]
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What were the best books of the year on higher education? A panel of ten prominent people in the field, invited to vote by Minding the Campus, picked as their top two choices, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa; and “Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting […]
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I’ve written before of the peculiar case of Brown and Marcella Dresdale. In 2006, Dresdale accused another Brown freshman, William McCormick, of sexual assault. But she didn’t go the local police, and she never filed charges. Instead, she went to the Brown administration–over which, it turned out, her father Richard, a major Brown donor, exercised […]
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By Frank J. Macchiarola and Michael C. Macchiarola As law schools have come under fire on many fronts, the growing cost of tuition has drawn the most attention. This is not surprising, given the shrinking job market for lawyers and tuition increases that have far outpaced the general cost of living for more than two […]
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It’s not often that a university’s personnel decision is so egregious that even the editorial pages of the local newspaper denounce it. That occurred with Hamline University, whose seemingly rescinded appointment to Tom Emmer generated a blistering editorial from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Between 2004 and 2010, Emmer served as a prominent member of the Republican […]
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Both of my parents were public school teachers, and through them I gained an appreciation of the value of teachers’ unions. Though the NEA and AFT can sometimes frustrate public education reforms, they play a critical role in giving teachers a seat at the table in setting education policies. Indeed, perhaps the most objectionable aspect […]
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Crossposted from OpenMarket.org The New York Times featured an excellent news story Sunday by David Segal on the costly white elephant that is legal education in America. He describes how law school is expensive because of government-enforced accreditation standards that prevent law schools from containing costs even if they wanted to (and in truth, most […]
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http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2011/12/the_many_problems_of_online_ed.html
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I’d like to respond to Peter Sacks’ critique of my new study. Something that I think is lacking from Sacks’ critique is any sort of acknowledgement of what the paper is about. So, for those that haven’t read it yet, here is the basic story of my report…
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Correction: The post that appeared here under the name of Robert Weissberg was not written by him. The author, Lennard Davis of the University of Illinois, Chicago, posted it on Huffington Post. December 2.
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When individuals seek higher education, why should all of us have to pay? After all, individuals decide whether to seek a college degree based on their own calculations of expected costs and benefits. That taxpayers must bear the burden of financial aid to these individuals seems unfair. Given the billions of dollars governments pay individuals […]
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Time magazine has named The Protester as its Person of the Year. As a result, my brother Peter, intrepid humor columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, writes to brag that he has now been picked as the magazine’s Person of the Year four times: 1966 (everyone under age 25), 1968 (middle Americans), 2006 (YOU, i.e., everyone […]
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Cross-posted from National Association of Scholars. Climategate, both 1 and 2, are textbook cases of gross lapses in professional ethics and scientific malfeasance. To understand why, one must first understand what science is and how it is supposed to operate. Science is the noble pursuit of knowledge through observation, testing and experimentation. Scientists attempt to […]
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Both Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education have just reported that the U.S. State Department has teamed up with 36 American women’s colleges to launch a program that discriminates against Arab men and U.S. co-ed institutions.
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The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) has done it again. This is the group that effectively drove former Harvard president Lawrence Summers out of office over a 2005 remark of his about possible differences between the sexes that didn’t sit well with hard-line feminists on the Harvard faculty. The FAS voted its “lack […]
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At Bloomberg News, Virginia Postrel writes about how federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable have instead encouraged rapidly rising tuitions, in a column entitled, “U.S. Universities Feast on Federal Student Aid.” Education analyst Neal McCluskey links to four studies showing that increased government spending on student aid results in large tuition increases. As […]
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“Academically Adrift“, a study by two sociologists – Richard Arum of NYU and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia – demonstrated that 36 percent of our college students graduate with little or no measurable gains in their core academic skills – areas like expository writing and analytical reasoning. Their diplomas are literally tickets to […]
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Last week, the incomparable Anne Neal penned a blistering op-ed regarding how the Penn State trustees handled the allegations against former football coach Jerry Sandusky. The ACTA head argued that “the unfolding events of the Penn State sports scandal show a major university that has been more interested in protecting itself than in educating students […]
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When I first began teaching political science in the late 1960s I would routinely assign articles from top professional journals to undergraduates. This is now impossible–without exception, they are incomprehensible, overflowing with often needless statistical complexity. The parallel is not the hard sciences where mathematics replaced philosophical speculation. If anything, these articles reflect a trivialized […]
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Sometimes the left is onto something. Take, for example, the latest twist in the “Occupy” movement: Occupy Student Debt. The new activism front, which began in with a Nov. 21 rally at Occupy Ground Zero, New York’s Zuccotti Park, is trying to collect a million online signatures from debtors pledging to refuse to repay their […]
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Commendably, the trustees of the City University of New York refused to bow to intimidation, and put the best interests of the university first by approving, in a 15-1 vote, a new tuition structure. The new policy grants CUNY the authority to raise tuition by $300 annually for the next five years. The decision, of […]
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At research universities and many liberal arts colleges, too, it is universally assumed that research is an unadulterated good. Research keeps professors fresh in their fields, makes them better teachers, and raises intellectual standards for departments. Who would disagree? In conversations about research in my world of the humanities, though, one doesn’t often hear about one […]
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If college and university officials finally want to solve the longstanding problems ofmediocre retention rates and pitiful graduation rates, then a magic, off-the-shelf solution awaits them. It’s called MyEdu, a private company that claims its website will help colleges solve the problem of disappearing students. How? By allowing students to see such titillating facts as […]
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The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA (HERI) continues its studies of graduation rates with a new report aimed at understanding which factors increase the likelihood of graduating from college. According to the data, 38.9 percent of those entering college can expect to graduate in four years, 56.4 in five years and 61.2 in six […]
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In a recent essay in Minding the Campus, blogger John S. Rosenberg argued that I was too tough on legacy preferences and not tough enough on affirmative action in college admissions. In my support for class-based affirmative action, he says, I’m not sufficiently outraged about racial preferences. And in arguing that legacy preferences are illegal […]
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If you go this web site, you can search the course roster at the University of Wisconsin and find out what grades were given each semester for the last several years. In Spring 2011, the average grade for 792 students in Intermediate Organic Chemistry was 2.8, a B-, while in Introduction to Education, 50 students […]
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In 1895, H. G. Wells concocted an imaginary time machine that hurled people into the future and back to the past. Since then, that device has been re-invented by sci-fi writers, film makers and scientists. They needn’t have bothered. The time machine has already been in existence for more than four hundred years. It’s called […]
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A few weeks ago, I attended a presentation on the state of the university by CUNY chancellor Matthew Goldstein. In the Q&A session, a student asked Goldstein for his opinion on sympathy-protests with Occupy Wall Street that had sprung up on various CUNY campuses. Goldstein gave what seemed to me a reasonable answer. He said […]
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Several years ago Harper’s Magazine ran two articles on “The Uses of Liberal Education.” One article, subtitled “As a weapon in the hands of the restless poor,” was written by Earl Shorris, and describes how poor and underprivileged members of our society were eager to study the great books and benefited from them. He devised a […]
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The scenes that describe certain events or incidents in the course of human events sometimes distort the actuality of those events and incidents; and, thus, leave a flawed portrait as a historical record. For example, while the public saw the “brutality” of the Los Angeles Police Department in the Rodney King incident, they did not see […]
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