Some Penn State alumni, outraged over the Board of Trustees peremptory firing of Coach Joe Paterno, are organizing a campaign to elect three new trustees. The objective of Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship is, ultimately, to oust the current Board. The Board fired Paterno, two University officials and the University President for not responding forcefully […]
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In his January 29 Forum piece, Peter Sacks says that I engaged in “nitpicking” in a blog post expressing disdain for President Obama’s higher education agenda. He’s free to call my skeptical view about federal initiatives to lower the costs of college whatever he wants. But in my opinion, it is naive to believe politicians […]
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The denouement of the Times’ coverage of Duke lacrosse came when then-sports editor Tom Jolly apologized for the paper’s guilt-presuming, error-ridden articles on the case. Will the paper ever get around to giving former Yale quarterback Patrick Witt an apology? With a few days perspective, it’s become clear that the Times‘ mishandling of the Witt […]
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The naysayers started their nitpicking the day after President Obama, in his State of the Union Speech, presented his plan to kick-start America’s sputtering system of higher education. George Leef of the Pope Center said “Obama’s talk about getting tough with colleges over tuition is pure political blather.” Hans Bader and others offer another off-center […]
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It’s happening, almost overnight: what could be the collapse of the near-monopoly that traditional brick-and-mortar colleges and universities currently enjoy as respected credentialing institutions whose degrees and grades mean something to employers. The most dramatic development, just a few days ago, was the decision of robotics-expert Sebastian Thrun to resign from his position as a […]
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Cross-posted from Open Market. In his State of the Union Address, President Obama decried skyrocketing college tuition, attempting to take advantage of public anger over the steadily-worsening college tuition bubble. This was ironic, since his own Administration has done much to foster rising college tuitions. For example, it imposed the 90-10 rule, which forced low-cost educational institutions to raise their tuition to […]
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When Justice John Paul Stevens retired from the Supreme Court in 2010 ABC News noted that over the course of his 34 years on the Court he “became a hero to liberals[,] voting to … uphold affirmative action” and other liberal causes. Now he has written an autobiography, Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir, ruminating […]
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Over the past year, FIRE has led a campaign of civil liberties organizations against the Obama administration’s infamous “Dear Colleague” letter, which ordered colleges and universities to lower the burden of proof in their on-campus judicial proceedings. The letter demanded that all universities receiving federal funds employ a “preponderance of the evidence” standard (in other […]
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Mark Emmert, the head of the NCAA, is a man with a mission. A series of unprecedented scandals has eroded confidence in big-time college sports. In fact, some critics contend the NCAA is an enabler that is compromised by the billions of dollars colleges earn through football and basketball programs. Mr. Emmert is intent on […]
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Every decade or so, Charles Murray writes a blockbuster book captivating America. First came Losing Ground, focusing attention on our dysfunctional system of public assistance, and, along with Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve, a controversial but rigorous examination of the role played by cognitive endowments in American life. I suspect his new book, Coming Apart: […]
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What does a young academic need to do to qualify for tenure? For the answer, take a look at this recent survey of provosts. In a set of questions regarding tenure, the key question was, do you agree with this statement?: “Junior faculty today confront rising standards for tenure–standards that many of their senior colleagues […]
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That question was the start of an item I posted yesterday on Facebook, referring to KC Johnson’s excellent essay (above), The Ruinous Reign of Race-and-Gender Historians. It was a question for a reason: the two super techies in our family, my wife Jackie, editor of the quite brilliant financial-business-political site, The Fiscal Times, and my […]
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A recent study by Harvard’s School of Public Health concludes that a third of all American campuses are now officially “dry”–no beer or booze allowed for students. This policy has drawn a lot of support from those who believe it creates communities less focused on drinking. But opponents claim it forces binge-drinking underground, restricts student […]
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In a ruling likely to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Montana Supreme Court last month upheld the state constitution’s prohibition on corporations directly spending on state campaigns. For those concerned with academic matters, the case is important for reasons quite unrelated to political debates about Citizens United. In a significant case involving […]
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Cross-posted from Open Market. A school superintendent has labeled a column in a school newspaper that criticized homosexuality as “bullying.” (The Shawano High School newspaper decided to run dueling student opinion pieces on whether same-sex couples should be able to adopt children; the student article that was labeled as “bullying” answered the question “no.” The […]
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It may be inevitable: “gainful employment” rules for law schools. “Gainful employment” is a term of art coined in the wake of the U.S. Education Department’s regulations last June governing for-profit colleges and similar vocational institutions from which many students emerge with student-loan debt and few prospects for working at jobs they were trained for. […]
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NAS president Peter Wood has defended the organization’s handling of the Jennifer Keeton case, which I have criticized on both legal and, more recently, policy grounds. Though I strongly sympathize with the general ideals of NAS, the organization’s off-base position on Keeton, which Wood’s essay reaffirms, has ended its heretofore consistent–and commendable–resistance to on-campus preferences.
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Cross-posted from NAS. Several weeks ago, KC Johnson–a scholar I much admire, not least for his fearless dedication to principle–published an essay on Minding the Campus under the title, “Keeton Defense Contradicts NAS Principles.” We offered Professor Johnson the opportunity to re-post his article or contribute a further statement on the NAS website. He accepted […]
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A news story here has garnered some attention; it’s about how “Black students at Duke University are angry over a university research paper that found African-American undergraduates at the school are disproportionally more likely to switch from tough majors to easier ones.” There’s not much in it that denies the truth of the paper’s conclusion, […]
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Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for a Massachusetts senate seat may be most known outside the state for this statement she made a few months back: “You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you […]
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On June 28, 2010, the Supreme Court of the United States narrowly ruled in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez that a university’s “all-comers” nondiscrimination policy trumped the right of a Christian student organization to select its leaders according to the group’s religious beliefs. According to the Supreme Court, a Christian student group confronted with […]
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The campus diversity warriors are once again pounding at the gates. This time the pounding comes from on high–the American Political Science Association (APSA) itself. It is a serious clamor: a 76 page report called Political Science in the 21st Century authored by fourteen professors, many from elite research-oriented schools such as Berkeley and UCLA. […]
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FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has attracted important support for its open letter asking the Department of Education to define harassment narrowly enough to allow genuinely free speech on campus. Many colleges and universities ban expression that might be considered “offensive” or cause “embarrassment” or “ridicule.” The January 6 letter, sent to […]
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Last week on its “Working It Out” page, The Atlantic Monthly posed a far-reaching question: Should each college be required to prominently post consumer information for prospective students — a kind of nutrition label for higher ed?
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These are the opening statements of a luncheon debate co-sponsored by the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University and the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. The debate, held January 11 in New York City, pitted George Leef, research director of the Pope Center, against Peter Sacks, economist and author of Tearing […]
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The law school at the University of Iowa, like so many departments at so many institutions of higher learning, has a faculty that is politically pretty much of one mind, with (as of 2007) 46 registered Democrats and only one registered Republican. When instructor Teresa Wagner applied for a professor’s post in her specialty, legal […]
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Minding the Campus readers who follow college basketball doubtless have heard about former St. Joe’s center Todd O’Brien. For others, to recap his story: a few years ago, the NCAA instituted a rule to allow student-athletes who graduate in four years but have one year of athletic eligibility remaining to transfer to another institution, provided […]
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There’s something even worse than undergraduate debt. It’s graduate-school debt. According to the American Student Assistance website, which uses figures from such sources as the National Center for Education Statistics, the College Board, and the nonprofit Finaid.org, 60 percent of recipients of bachelor’s’ degrees borrowed to fund their education during the 2000s, with the average […]
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As I noted previously, a three-judge panel of 11th Circuit made a troubling decision in the Jennifer Keeton case. But it did so not because it declined to reinstate Keeton, a Counseling student who said that she would recommend “conversion therapy” for prospective teenage clients who were gay and lesbian. As the decision noted, Keeton […]
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A central component of the groupthink academy is the law of group polarization–that in environments (such as most humanities and social sciences departments) in which people basically think alike, more extreme versions of the common assumption will emerge. Within the academy, that condition has had the effect of producing more extreme new faculty hires and […]
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