By Jonathan B. Imber Until 1969, on the campus where I teach, all students were required to take two semester s of Bible, which made the Department of Religion a central force in the life of the institution. When I arrived twelve years later, with no Bible requirement any longer in place, the only remnant […]
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At Stanford, according to the “alternative misconduct review process” guidelines offered on the university’s website, a student accused of sexual misconduct doesn’t have the right to cross-examine his accuser–or any other witnesses in his case. He cannot offer exculpatory evidence on his behalf, but can only “request” that the university’s assigned “Investigator contact individuals who […]
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I recently posted an essay here about a racial hoax at the University of Virginia Law School that quickly became an issue implicating the University’s honor code. Briefly, Johnathan Perkins was an attractive third year UVa law student from what could be described as a civil rights family inasmuch as both his father and grandfather wrote […]
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Reprinted from City Journal. California’s budget crisis has reduced the University of California to near-penury, claim its spokesmen. “Our campuses and the UC Office of the President already have cut to the bone,” the university system’s vice president for budget and capital resources warned earlier this month, in advance of this week’s meeting of the university’s […]
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The cost of higher education in America spirals out of control. Tuition and fees have increased fourfold in real terms in the last two decades, far outstripping the rise in the cost of medical care. At the same time, the quality of instruction plummets, thanks to declining standards, grade inflation, and the hollowing out of […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education has published the results of
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English professors have long been straying far afield from literary studies, expanding into women’s studies, disability studies, ethnic studies, even fat studies. Recently they have migrated into animal studies. An ambitious professor might be working on a paper for “Cultivating Human-Animal Relations Through Poetic Form,.” a panel scheduled for the November South Atlantic Modern Language […]
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It’s a constant skirmish between donors seeking to fund specific scholarly projects at universities and the universities’ administrators, who would typically like to see as much of that money as possible go to “unrestricted” uses–that is, whatever the administrators, not the donors, deem the best use of the funds. And nowadays, with universities’ endowment values falling during the […]
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Jamie Kirchick pens what’s likely to be the definitive account of Yale’s controversial decision to terminate the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism (YIISA). Kirchick convincingly demonstrates how a toxic combination of anti-Israel sentiments from some key faculty members combined with Yale’s desire to cultivate Middle Eastern donors (as part of the university’s […]
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For yet another glimpse of what’s wrong with higher education, read “Teaching Them How To Think,” the story of George Plopper, associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. After attending a conference on teaching and learning in 2004, Plopper had an epiphany of sorts, and now uses Bloom’s Taxonomy to assess […]
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What you may have heard coming out of Nashville recently is not the twang of country music but the shrill trill of academic controversy provoked by the decision of historically black Tennessee State University to eliminate two programs from opposite ends of the curriculum, physics and Africana studies. According to Inside Higher Ed, Administrators said the reorganization […]
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A divided three-judge panel from the 6th Circuit has issued a remarkable decision striking down the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, which prohibited state institutions from contracting.” In 2006, Michigan voters had approved the measure, by a 16-point margin. Voters in other blue states, such as California and Washington, have endorsed similar measures. Judges Guy Cole and […]
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Readers of Minding the Campus may have noted the story in Inside Higher Ed entitled “Not Just Florida State” (see here). The piece cites “sizable grants” given by the Koch Foundation to universities to support the study of “capitalism and free enterprise.” These agreements are, one assumes, to be added to the Florida State grant […]
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Are for-profit colleges and universities getting a raw deal from the government compared to their more elitist peers in the private non-profit sector of American higher education? Vance H. Fried, writing in a recent policy analysis brief published by the libertarian think-tank, the Cato Foundation, argues just that. Fried is a former private-practice attorney, oil […]
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The writer is a student and former residential assistant at DePauw University and a summer intern at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Her comments here are excerpted from a FIRE fund-raising letter – JL *** During the week-long series of RA training events, my fellow RAs and I were lectured repeatedly about white […]
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The strange case of Antonio Calvo, the Princeton lecturer who slashed himself to death last April, is the subject of long front-page article in the July 1 Chronicle of Higher Education. After his suicide, Princeton put out a formal statement saying that Calvo had been on leave from the university. That was not true. Princeton […]
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Almost lost in the welter of legislation to make it through the New York State government policy mill in its closing minutes was some help for New York’s two public universities – CUNY and SUNY. Having endured hundreds of millions of dollars of cuts in state support over the last three years, they are finally […]
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Just exactly how far will the left go to interfere with religious liberty and common sense? Right after John Garvey, president of Catholic University, announced that the university would return to single sex dorms, GW Law professor John Banzaf, a highly credentialed member of the hard left legal establishment, sent a notice of intent to […]
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In Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz the Wizard says he wants an educated populace, “so by the power vested in me I will grant everyone out.” My guess is if a university president were completely honest today, he might say the freshman bring almost nothing in and leave by taking nothing out. The question […]
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Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) displayed a fascinating range of opinion over the recent City University of New York decision to award Tony Kushner an honorary degree. First the Board of the group issued a statement deploring the award as “politicization of the university.” This drew a vehement letter denouncing the SPME […]
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John Garvey, the new President of Catholic University, announced last week that the university will return to single sex dorms. Many feathers were ruffled. It is a measure of the unisex madness in which we have become enmeshed that a Catholic university’s decision to house unmarried young men and women in separate dorms could be described […]
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The Center for Diversity in Engineering at the University of Virginia is sponsoring a “Discover the joy of engineering” summer camp, but boys need not apply. Program Description Enjoy Engineering is a camp designed to help girls discover the joy of engineering. It will provide hands-on activities, lab tours, and creative engineering design projects in a […]
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A few weeks ago, Yale announced that it had terminated the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-semitism (YIISA). The official version of events, according to university spokespersons, cited two reasons: (1) an alleged failure by Yale professors affiliated with the institute to produce a sufficient level of scholarship; and (2) an alleged lack […]
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On Inside Higher Ed today “MathProf,” an anonymous poster, raised an original objection to multiple-choice tests: they are packed with lies. He said one student “pointed out to me that multiple-choice tests are inherently deceptive, featuring wrong answers deliberately designed to appear plausible. Is this really the skill we want to teach and reward: not knowledge, […]
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Recently, colleges have been floating three-year bachelor’s degrees to undergraduates. Many students enter with AP credits and a need to reduce tuition costs, so why not concentrate their studies and head into the real world a year sooner? The university, too, would benefit. As a story in the Los Angeles Times last year put […]
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If you are a college student today enrolled in four classes during any given semester, it is likely that only one of your teachers is employed by your school in a permanent position that comes with a middle-class salary, job security, and benefits. The other three are contingent faculty, often called “adjuncts”; they have job […]
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Today’s New York Post features a strong editorial praising the work of CUNY chancellor Matthew Goldstein, whose record of improving quality over the past decade is virtually unparalleled among university heads nationally. The Chancellor’s proposal, called Pathways, seeks to establish common general-education requirements at CUNY’s senior and community colleges, largely to smooth the transfer process […]
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The Center for College Affordability and Productivity has published an important report, “Faculty Productivity and Costs at the University of Texas at Austin,” based on data recently made available to the public, thanks to the efforts of reform-supporting regents at the UT system. Co-authored by Richard Vedder (the Ohio University economist), Christopher Matgouranis and Jonathan Robe, the report uses […]
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Possibly because it is saving its fire for review of the Arizona immigration law, the Supreme Court has passed up a chance to rule on the legality of lower in-state college tuition for illegal immigrants, a policy now in 11 states. Federal law prohibits granting in-state tuition to illegal immigrants at publically financed state institutions, unless the […]
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Mark Bauerlein’s article on papers delivered at academic conferences (above) reminds me of the day I discovered the awful truth about such texts. Arriving in San Francisco in the summer of 1967 to cover the annual sociological convention for the New York Times, I headed for the press room and asked for a copy of […]
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