The University of Virginia Law School held its commencement on May 22, and not a moment too soon. “Not since Teddy Kennedy was speeding through town and picking up reckless driving tickets in the late 1950s,” The Hook, a Charlottesville weekly, reported, “has UVA Law School seen so much scandal.” Since those scandals involved race […]
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Tuition pricing for college is a strange business, combining a big sticker price (which few people actually pay) with big discounts in the form of institutional grants (which most people should know enough to negotiate). College pricing is even stranger than the car business. Automobile dealerships aren’t likely to give one customer a sales discount […]
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The New York Times had a fairly long online colloquy over the weekend on a very short study titled “Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing.” Prepared by Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School and Samuel R. Sommers of Tuft University’s Department of Psychology, the study appeared in Perspectives on Psychological Science. It […]
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Among the many troubling findings cited by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in Academically Adrift is this remarkable note on grade inflation: —–55 percent of college students have a B+ grade average or higher (3.3 and higher) —–85 percent of college students have a B- grade average or higher (2.7 and higher) Those numbers demonstrate what most everybody […]
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By Harvey Silverglate and Kyle Smeallie The Department of Education is currently investigating Yale University for allegedly maintaining a sexually hostile environment. No one can deny that the New Haven Ivy is in a difficult position. To wit, Yale enacted changes last month to lower the standard of proof in sexual assault cases, and last week, College Dean Mary Miller announced that a fraternity would be banned for […]
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New Pew Research Center data show that a large majority of Americans think U.S. colleges and universities offer only fair or poor value for the financial cost -but college presidents strikingly disagree, with a majority of them thinking college offers at least a good value (though college presidents are overwhelmingly pessimistic about the quality of American higher education compared to the […]
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In predictable fashion, Inside Higher Ed has reported on “The Vanishing West,” the National Association of Scholars’ study on the virtual disappearance of Western Civ courses from our colleges, by quoting only critics. But the criticisms are the same ones I’ve been hearing for the 20 years I’ve been in academia. Princeton Professor and president of the American Historical Association Anthony […]
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A few years ago, under intense pressure from Congress, NCATE (the national organization that accredits Education programs) abandoned its requirement that, in order to obtain accreditation, Education schools needed to measure the “disposition” of each and every prospective public school teacher to promote social justice. (The mandate didn’t apply to schools that don’t list promotion […]
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A growing chorus of critics says a college education is finished as the ticket to economic success and a middle-class life. The economy of the future, these critics suggest, actually requires far fewer college-educated citizens, because the U.S. economy is generating tens of thousands of jobs that require little or no higher education. In essence, the […]
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If you happened to attend college back in the day, the term “Western Civilization” was common currency among most undergraduates: it was something you expected to wrestle with, usually during your freshman year. In one way or another, “Western Civ.” covered the intellectual, cultural, artistic, religious and political heritage of European civilization, erected on the […]
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Ron Howell (Yale, ’70), a journalism professor at Brooklyn College, writesin the current issue of the Yale alumni magazine that over the years I have from time to time floated the idea that some racist scientist had slipped poison into our milk, after our births or while we were at Yale. Others, not easily inclined […]
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Inside Higher Ed reports that a workshop at the University of Washington is attempting to reduce the number of women who work in STEM fields in industry. Neither the IHE article nor the organizers of the workshop put it quite that way, of course, but that nevertheless is clearly the workshop’s purpose. “The organizers of the On-Ramps […]
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It’s always amusing to find professors confront the fruits of their ideological views. Ponytailed colleagues who had protested and marched in the grand old 1960s have often shared with me their dismay at the deteriorating writing of students. In similar fashion, writing instructor Kim Brooks in a recent Salon […]
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Professor of English Mark Bauerlein of Emory University reports on a harmonious conference on the humanities. Harmony is all very well, but perhaps the conference might have done better to raise embarrassing questions that might have made it more contentious – such as that English Departments have shifted away from offering traditional literature and instead […]
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The controversy over the Koch Foundation program at Florida State in which the Foundation has some input on hiring is so overdone that one is tempted to ignore it. (Here’s a sample editorial from the Orlando Sentinel which quotes one anonymous observer as terming the program “shocking.” At the same time, the double-standard is hard […]
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There is an old saying in politics that “They don’t scream unless you hurt them.” When your adversaries scream, it is a good sign that your measures have been effective. Judged by this standard, the Koch Brothers (David and Charles) have been very effective in recent years in advancing their causes of limited government and […]
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The embarrassing decision by the Monitor Group, the worldwide consulting firm founded by Harvard professors, to register retroactively as a foreign lobbyist organization over $3 million worth of work it did from 2006-2008 for Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan government, is the culmination of a story with two morals. The first is that even Harvard professors, high […]
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It’s rare that poetry explications are done on Fox News, but guests weighed in on the depth of meaning in a line like “burn a [George W.] Bush for peace” and a panegyric to convicted cop-killer and Black Panther Assata Shakur with “May God bless your soul.” The “poet” in question was the rapper Common, invited to the […]
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The controversy over Tony Kushner’s honorary degree is yet another reminder of how far from mainstream America our cultural elites are. Support for Israel is extraordinarily high across the country (The American people sympathize more with Israel than with the Palestinians by 63 percent to 17 percent, according to Gallup) but that is not the […]
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At the beginning of 2011 the portfolio of the federal government for education loans was nearly one trillion dollars. The portfolio consisted of loans for students currently in college extended either directly by the Department of Education or loans from financial institutions like Sallie Mae and banks with repayment guaranteed by the United States Treasury […]
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Writing for Campus Watch, Canadian journalist Barbara Kay has exposed the Islamist organizations behind the $2 million funding of a new chair in Islamic studies at Huron University College, an affiliate of the University of Western Ontario. The two principal donors are Muslim Association of Canada and the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), both […]
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Below, Mark writes about the remarkable case of Jonathan Perkins, the third-year law student at the University of Virginia who fabricated an incident of racial profiling–and, at least as it now appears, has faced no consequences for doing so. Shortly after Perkins spun his tall tale, and before the UVA police had verified that an incident of […]
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A psychiatrist once told me, “When people do something wrong, you’ve got to tell them.” She meant it not as a moral point, but a psychological one. If people don’t hear somebody else say, “That’s wrong,” an essential element of psychological advancement is missing. The principle bears upon a case in Virginia reported today […]
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The New York Times reports that on Monday, the executive committee of the City University of New York Board of Trustees will likely approve Tony Kushner for an honorary degree. If I were on the board, I’d endorse the position articulated by Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld and oppose the motion. It seems to me hypocritical, as […]
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Let’s face it, our noble efforts to detoxify today’s PC-infected university have largely failed and the future looks bleak. This is not to say that the problem is incurable–though it is–but it calls for a solution different from the current approach. Here’s how. Begin by recognizing that all our proposed cures impose heavy burdens on […]
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“Why They Cheered,” an article on Inside Higher Ed, explored the possible explanations of why crowds, mostly made up of college students, surged into the streets Sunday night to celebrate the end of Osama bin Laden. Though some of us think the explanation is entirely obvious, the IHE article did not. It had the puzzled […]
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Over the past year, it seems as if faculty at the City University of New York have done everything they can to make it seem as if hostility to Israel is the institution‘s official policy. First came Brooklyn College‘s decision to assign as the one and only required book for all incoming students a book […]
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Delta Kappa Epsilon–the “Dekes”–whose pledges’ allegedly sexist chant during a hazing ritual at Yale last October so offended campus feminists that the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights office is now conducting a full-blown investigation of Yale for sexual harassment under Title IX of the federal Civil Rights Act. They were marched blindfolded through the Old […]
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Governor Andrew Cuomo proposes giving the four SUNY research universities (Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo and Stony Brook) $140 million in economic development funds and – perhaps, if the legislature agrees – permission to levy higher tuition. The governor is right in viewing SUNY campuses, and especially its most senior ones, as economic engines; indeed, outside of […]
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May 28, 2020, was a good day for the American economy and a momentous one for traditional colleges and universities. President Jodie Foster, the sixth Yale graduate to reach the White House, announced that the congressional agreement on Medicare and Social Security had finally begun to reduce the country’s debt, and the disastrous bout of […]
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