ACTA has published its 2011-2 edition of What Will They Learn?, a study that examines, in basic terms, what 1007 colleges and universities around the country require from their students. The entire study is worth reading–and features an easy-to-use website–but I consider two aspects of ACTA’s findings particularly significant. First, military academies fare quite well […]
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This article appeared on the National Association of Scholars site on August 30th. Eros is notorious for its power to thwart our better judgment and to baffle the rational mind. It can draw us to destinations we would do better to avoid and can prompt forms of resistance that are themselves out of balance and […]
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The newest member of the Hamilton College English and Creative Writing department is Visiting Assistant Professor Alessandro Porco, who has published two books of pornographic poetry, including a repellent poem on his fantasy of having sex with the twin daughters of Laura and George W. Bush. One indulgent reviewer praises Porco’s first collection, The Jill […]
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Elmhurst College, in what is apparently a first, will ask this question on its admissions application: “Would you consider yourself a member of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) community?” Answering the question will be optional; applicants may chose “yes” or “no” or “prefer not to answer.” Those answering yes to the LGBT question will […]
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Sandy Hingston has captured, in an article of extraordinary importance, the fruits of political correctness in the Dept of Education (the insistence that colleges make it almost impossible for men to be found innocent of charges of sexual misbehavior), the infantilization of women; the grotesque joining of careerism, cynicism, and ideological blinders to actual justice […]
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J. M. Barrie’s famous 1904 play, Peter Pan o
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For a variety of reasons, but mainly because of cost, tenure has become a focus of debate in recent months. Given the trends in hiring and working conditions, though, one wonders why, for the fact is that tenure has been squeezed into an ever-smaller portion of the instructional employee population for years. Two charts in the Chronicle […]
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It’s hard to tell whether it’s a news story or a media meme: Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott, a fan of Texas Republican Gov. (and current GOP presidential candidate) Rick Perry, is reportedly considering foisting on Florida’s public universities the same much-criticized reform proposals that Perry has been trying to foist on public universities in […]
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Another day, another bunch of dollars thrown at studies lamenting “the gender gap in science and technology fields.” The most recent comes from the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation. From its Executive Summary: Our science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workforce is crucial to America’s innovative capacity and […]
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Grade inflation has been a prime topic of debate at least since Harvey Mansfield’s Chronicle essay a decade ago. Despite my general admiration for Mansfield’s critique of academic matters, I’ve never considered the issue among the more serious problems confronting the academy, partly because it seemed to me that grade inflation has resulted not just from […]
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Curbing for-profit colleges has been a goal of the Obama administration’s department of education. The plan was to erect regulatory hurdles to a very profitable product: online courses. In pursuit of that plan, the department issued a regulation last October requiring institutions offering Internet classes to seek permission from every state in which they enroll […]
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The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) made its name as a respectable association dedicated to promoting the interests of the academy and protecting the academic freedom of professors. Now, judging from its regular publications, it has morphed into something quite different—an association dedicated to promoting the agenda of the academic left. The July-August issue […]
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The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, by Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring, $32.95, Jossey-Bass, 475 pages. Online college courses are a “disruptive technology” destined to drive profound changes in higher education in the United States and around the world. This is not an especially new idea. […]
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The AAUP has now completed the final version of what NAS’ Peter Wood aptly termed a “firewall,” designed to protect academics from outside criticism, especially from conservatives and supporters of Israel. The organization’s new standards now face their first test–but from a most unexpected source. In the left-leaning New Republic, Alex Klein has a blog […]
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A rift is building between, on one side, university professors and, on the other side, university administrators (including finance officers), politicians, and parents. The rift doesn’t fall into one of the usual conflicts over ideology (for example, leftist faculty vs. moderate or conservative others) or educational mission (for example, social justice vs. workforce training). It […]
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The American Association of University Professors has now issued its final report on “Ensuring Academic Freedom in Politically Controversial Academic Personnel groups.”) The basic principle is as unobjectionable as it is admirable: professors should not be hired, fired, or disciplined on the basis of their political beliefs. Yet the AAUP’s report is basically unchanged from […]
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Consider the disturbing case of Lawrence Connell, a criminal-law professor at Widener University’s law school who was suspended for a year without pay on Aug. 8 despite having been cleared of allegations of sexual and racial harassment in his classroom lodged by two female black students. The case can be best understood as a story […]
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Of the criticisms directed toward the contemporary academy, the charge of “indoctrination” strikes me as the most overhyped. The phenomenon certainly occurs; the most obvious recent example came in the “dispositions” controversy, when education students around the country could choose between agreeing with their professors’ political opinions and finding another career path. But it’s relatively […]
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Here’s a disturbing news item from North Carolina: The state university system uses its well-regarded medical school and its generous taxpayer subsidies to purchase, compete with, and potentially crowd out private non-profit hospitals and health systems. This is the story that Duke Cheston, a writer for the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, tells in […]
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For more than a decade, universities have forced Christian student groups to fight a rather puzzling battle. In a campus environment where it’s assumed that Democratic student groups can reserve leadership for Democrats, environmentalist groups can be run by actual environmentalists, and socialist groups can have socialist leaders, Christian groups have been fighting for the […]
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One of the frequent complaints one hears from humanities professors and figures in the “softer” social sciences is that students and a growing number of higher education officials, consultants, and commentators regard college more and more as a job-training program. While driving across the country this week, I heard Rush Limbaugh declare that the only […]
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(This is the text of a speech delivered July 16 to the Campus Freedom Network conference at Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pa.) Not many years ago, just about every college student loved liberty. Except for some die-hard Marxists (who opposed not only liberty of speech, but liberty as such), it was hard to find […]
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Andrew Breitbart has shot onto the media-and-politics scene in the last two years with several well-publicized stories and controversies. What many people may not realize is the extent to which Breitbart’s adversarial approach to the media was formulated out of his college education. When Breitbart sat down with Peter Robinson for his show Uncommon Knowledge […]
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A huge brouhaha has erupted over the release and interpretation of data about the faculty of the University of Texas, centering on whether a relatively few individuals are doing most of the teaching at the system’s flagship institution, UT-Austin. Two reports drew most of the fire, one by my organization, the Center for College Affordability and Productivity […]
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It seems only yesterday that a few colleagues and I gathered every night in the back of the newsroom of New York Times, then on West 43rd Street, to create the first edition of the Fiske Guide to Colleges. It’s hard to believe that the appearance of the 2012 edition this month marks the 30th […]
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It’s no secret that America’s colleges and universities have become bastions of political rectitude. This is often attributed to the left-liberal political orientation of the faculty. Typically, however, the administration, not the faculty, is the driving force behind efforts to promote campus diversity, to build multicultural programming and to regulate campus speech. The president of […]
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In his blog commentary, KC Johnson of Brooklyn College questions the results of a new American Historical Association survey, which found that more historians are focusing on diplomatic and military history than in recent times. “In contrast to critics (including me) who have suggested that the profession has aggressively diminished approaches to history deemed ‘traditional,’” Johnson […]
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Last week, the American Historical Association released a members’ survey regarding how historians classify themselves. In contrast to critics (including me) who have suggested that the profession has aggressively diminished approaches to history deemed “traditional,” Inside Higher Ed reports that “designations of military history are up by 39 percent over the decade, for instance. Diplomatic […]
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The firing of a controversial aide to the University of Texas system has triggered a full-blown debate over the productivity of teachers and whether “star” professors who teach few classes are really worth the cost to the public. Rick O’Donnell, dismissed on April 19 after only 49 days on the job as special adviser to […]
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Robert Klein Engler, an adjunct professor at Roosevelt University, told a small joke in his “City and Citizenship” class in 2010: “There was a sociological study done in Arizona, and they discovered that 60 percent of the people in Arizona approved of the immigration law and 40 percent said, ‘no habla ingles.’” His class was […]
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