Yesterday Harvard University announced its investigation of about 125 undergraduates who are believed to have improperly collaborated on a take-home final examination last spring. It is tempting to use this case to generalize about an Ivy League sense of entitlement, declining student morals in general, or perhaps the failure of Harvard and other universities to […]
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As part of its series on higher ed issues in the 2012 campaign, the Chronicle of Higher Education has a long opinion piece in the form of a news article accusing Republicans of hypocrisy. In “Self-Sufficient, With a Hand From the Government,” author Scott Carlson claims to find “a striking dissonance” between the moving “pull-oneself-up-by-the-bootstraps […]
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To predictable outrage among anti-Israel activists worldwide, a Haifa court ruled Tuesday that former U.S. college student Rachel Corrie’s 2003 death was an accident. Corrie, a member of the fanatic International Solidarity Movement, was in Gaza at the time, trying to obstruct the work of the Israeli Defense Force; she was killed as she tried […]
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Originally posted at Open Market The Washington Times takes note of the burgeoning higher education bubble in a recent editorial: The cost of a college education has soared far in excess of the cost of health care. This is in spite of — or, more accurately, because of — massive government involvement in subsidizing […]
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A small controversy surfaced last week at University of Central Florida when a psychology professor sent an email to all his students to berate some of them for “religious bigotry.” According to the professor’s letter, some Christian students in class that evening claimed that their faith is “the most valid religion,” thereby “demonstrating to the […]
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KC Johnson drew our attention to an extraordinary development at UCLA, where the faculty senate of a major campus is now on record approving use of a class to promote an instructor’s personal political agenda. The practice itself is not new, but to date objections have been met either with obfuscation or outright denial. The […]
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Earlier this month Annette Clark, dean of Saint Louis University’s law school, abruptly resigned from her job via e-mail after only a year. She left after accusing the Jesuit university and its president, Rev. Lawrence Biondi, of looting the law school in order to fund other, non-law-related programs on the Saint Louis campus. This was […]
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The Obama Administration filed an amicus brief last week advising the Supreme Court to uphold the University of Texas’ policy of factoring race into admissions decisions. The related case, Fisher v. University of Texas, is the result of a lawsuit filed by a white applicant to the institution who was not granted admission, and who […]
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By Robert Weissberg America’s huge investment in higher education has always had a democratic justification: everyone should be able to attend college because this opportunity would flatten the social pyramid. Yes, a North Dakota State and Harvard degree differ in prestige, but at least the North Dakota State graduate can join the game. Put ideologically, […]
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As if you needed any more proof that the 2012 campaign will fail to take higher education issues seriously, the New York Times reported yesterday that President Obama is using his stops in swing states to assail Mitt Romney for his supposed views on financing college tution. Obama, the article notes, argued that Romney “would cut student loans and […]
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Today Professor William Jacobson (of Legal Insurrection fame) launched College Insurrection, a new website devoted to higher education. The site, according to Professor Jacobson, will help “conservative/libertarian students…find out what is going on with like-minded students on other campuses, and understand that they are the many, not the few, no matter what they are told.” […]
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Why go to college? Go back fifty years, and the answer commonly given was, “To become a well-rounded person who has a grasp of our civilization’s history, science, and art.” Go back about twenty-five years and the answer commonly given was, “So you’ll be able to get a good job.” And now one authoritative source […]
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The Atlantic recently declared that the 2012 presidential campaign is “no longer about the economy”; that is to say, given the dire economic straits in which we still find ourselves, it is surprising how much attention the candidates are giving to peripheral issues such as Medicare, welfare, and most importantly for our purposes, student loans. […]
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Browsing through the collection of over 70 pro-“diversity” amicus briefs submitted on behalf of the University of Texas in the Fisher case, I am reminded, as I often am, of how eerily the current defense of “taking race into account,” i.e., preferential treatment based on race, resembles the old Southern arguments in defense of segregation. […]
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I chair the Governing Board at Grantham University in Kansas City, Missouri, an on-line, for-profit institution. Grantham diverges from Congress’ caricature of for-profits. More than ninety percent of its students have a military background; in fact, most of these students remain in active service as they pursue their degrees. Most are also first generation college […]
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When critics of higher education complain about a lack of “intellectual diversity,” mostly what they deplore is the shortage of conservative professors. But there is much more at stake than that. Consider climate change: As I write this, parts of the nation have endured sweltering heat, serious drought, and treacherous storms, at one point leaving […]
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Why is it admirable to “target” women and minorities for some educational programs but a violation of federal civil right laws to “target” them in others? That’s the question that must be asked about a federal lawsuit filed by seven Mississippi women, five of them African-American, against for-profit Virginia College, […]
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Now that Paul Ryan has joined the Republican ticket, it’s worth considering how his much-discussed budget changes higher education. Ryan wants to cap the maximum amount of Pell Grant awards at the current level of $5,550, eliminating the automatic increase according to inflation. Ryan would also shore up the eligibility requirements, adding a maximum income […]
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How to attend UCLA on the cheap? Be an illegal immigrant. Actually, be a leftist illegal immigrant. UCLA’s Center for Labor Research and Education and the union-subsidized National Labor College in Maryland have teamed up to establish “National Dream University” for the undocumented. The tuition is low: just $65 per credit hour, in contrast to […]
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In explaining why the American Jewish Committee had (with his help) supported Alan Bakke’s lawsuit against the University of California but also supported the University of Michigan’s racial preferences in Gratz and Grutter, Alan Dershowitz wrote that We feared that our hard-earned right to be admitted on the merits would be taken away. The WASP […]
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This week featured some interesting political news regarding campaign contributions: confirming the partisan shift on Wall Street, Business Week revealed that around 70 percent of Goldman Sachs employees who have donated to this year’s presidential campaign send funds to Mitt Romney. The contrast to 2008, when about 75 percent who made contributions had donated to […]
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If African American students are disciplined in schools at a higher rate than are white students, the obvious reason is that African American students commit a disproportionate number of infractions. Not according to “disparate impact” (or “disparate outcomes”) thinking, however. Any time one sees significant gaps in black and white treatments or results–suspensions, test scores, […]
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I recently wrote here about the unwarranted optimism that the dawn of distance learning brought to higher education in the 1990s. That trip down memory lane might–and probably should–throw cold water on the enthusiasm about online education today. Arguably, the troubles with online education now are no different from those of the old distance learning […]
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The University of Texas has filed its main brief in Fisher v. University of Texas, and it’s a doozy. It argues, among other oddities, that the continuing “underrepresentation” of blacks and Hispanics requires the continued use of racial preferences to increase their numbers, but that the reason for increasing their numbers has nothing to do […]
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Over the past several years, a number of studies have shown that registered Democrats far outnumber registered Republicans in the academy, or in particular academic departments (history, for instance) that would seem to have no reason to have wide partisan imbalances. Invariably, the most interesting thing about these studies is not the finding itself–which, after […]
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Think back. What was the revolutionary technological advance of the 1990s that we thought pointed the way to the future of higher education? It was “interactive television,” of course! Interactive television was at the center of the revolution in education called “distance learning.” It would connect classrooms within a city, state, or even (with some […]
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Scott Rose’s 1,085-word letter to the editors of Minding the Campus does not contest–or find any factual error in–my Aug. 1 article titled “Regnerus and the ‘Liberal War on Science.‘” My subject was the academic hysteria over University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus’s article in the journal Social Science Research concluding that the adult children of […]
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To the Editors: It is quite the laughable bit of hypocrisy, that you hold up Allen Bloom as an intellectual hero, at the same time that you are supporting the unscientific garbage pumped out by Mark Regnerus. Regnerus’s “study” is a control-group, test-group study, in which there is no valid comparison between a test and […]
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Columbia is not the only elite university promoting exclusionary hiring in a big way. The University of Pennsylvania has just announced that it will spend $100 million over the next five years “on hiring and retaining more diverse faculty members.” George Leef asks a very good question: “Why does it cost so much money to simply screen […]
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Just a few lawyerly thoughts to add to KC Johnson’s excellent post yesterday on Columbia University setting aside $30 million to hire female and minority faculty. It was clear enough all along that Columbia’s hiring would be racially discriminatory, if not racially exclusive; and, as Professor Johnson points out, even the pretext that sometimes a (politically […]
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