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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In 2005, amidst the Harvard faculty’s ultimately successful effort to purge President Larry Summers, Columbia president Lee Bollinger announced that his university would launch its own “diversity” hiring initiative. Bollinger committed $15 million to “add between 15 and 20 outstanding women and minority scholars to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences over the next three […]
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Open a marketing brochure for any college or university in the United States and you’ll find an info-graphic touting the variety and number of degree programs that the institution offers. The more options, the rationale goes, the more likely a student will find a desired specialty. The distinction between programs can be subtle, for instance […]
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By Duke Cheston Originally Posted from the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy About a year and a half ago, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro attempted to hire a new chief diversity officer. The university sought an administrator who would focus on increasing appreciation for racial differences on campus–even though UNCG already had […]
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The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has entered into its latest Title IX-related agreement with Xavier University. Unlike the OCR’s agreement with Yale, which used a manufactured controversy to weaken the due process rights of the university’s students, at least at Xavier the OCR involved itself only in response […]
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The ongoing controversy over University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus is a textbook example of how a legitimate scholarly dispute can turn into a political witch-hunt. Regnerus, an associate professor of sociology at Texas’s flagship campus in Austin, published a peer-reviewed paper in June in the journal Social Science Research concluding that the adult children […]
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Cross-Posted from Open Market New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn wants to kick Chick-fil-A out of New York because its CEO, Dan Cathy, opposes gay marriage. Accordingly, she informed the head of New York University (which leases space to the one Chick-fil-A restaurant in New York City) that “Chick-fil-A is not welcome in New York […]
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President Obama issued an executive order on Thursday that created an specific educational initiative for African-Americans. Dubbed the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African-Americans, the program aims to increase black children’s access to quality instructors and educational programs from kindergarten to college. While Obama’s professed goal of equal access to a quality education […]
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The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions released a massive and negative report today on the for-profit college industry. In explaining why more than half of students leave for-profit colleges after a median of four months, the report’s main contention is that “Congress has failed to counterbalance investor demands for increased financial returns with […]
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First it was gender quotas for the sciences–and now it’s gender quotas for philosophy. Two philosophy professors are calling on their colleagues to boycott academic conferences that don’t feature at least one woman as a keynote speaker.
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For a half century I’ve vehemently opposed racial preferences in higher education. Opposition was partially ideological–I believe in merit–and partly based on sorrowful firsthand experience with affirmative action students and faculty. Though my principles remain unchanged I am now ready to concede defeat, throw in the towel and raise the white flag. Abolishing racial preferences […]
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UCLA’s “Academic Freedom Committee” has delivered an important document that appears to give carte blanche to professors to introduce unrelated political advocacy into their classrooms–in apparent violation of Regents’ policy. The case involved David Delgado Shorter, a UCLA professor in the “Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.”(His dissertation was entitled, “SantamLiniamDivisoriam/Holy Dividing Lines: Yoeme Indian […]
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Here’s a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the unionization of graduate students at private universities, an issue soon to be decided by the National Labor Relations Board. It seems that the whole matter comes down to a definition: are graduate students students or employees? The American Council on Education says, “Students enroll […]
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(Picture: UC Chico’s 2011 Sustainability Report) California State University at Chico takes sustainability seriously. Yahoo listed it last year as one of the top five ‘green’ colleges in America. The university has made creating “environmentally literate citizens” an official strategic priority, and it has elaborated its general education program to include a “sustainability studies” track. […]
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College is supposed to last four years, right? However, only 31 percent of entering freshmen at U.S. colleges and universities manage to graduate in four years, and only 53 percent obtain their bachelor’s degrees within six years. Indeed, the six-year figure–which typically entails a 50 percent increase in overall tuition–has become so common that it’s […]
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How do you reduce the growing mountain of student loan debt? Stop subsidizing higher education? End the notion that ‘any degree’ is better than ‘no degree’? Teach kids that paying off $12,000 in loans isn’t a cakewalk? No, no, let’s just tell them again how much it costs and hope they make the best of […]
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A Wall Street Journal editorial today took a very negative view–rightly, in my opinion–of President Obama’s proposal to let student borrowers discharge private student loans through bankruptcy. By law, repayment of federally guaranteed loans cannot be avoided this way. But the Journal wrote: “If there’s not a great outcry over letting borrowers stiff private lenders, eventually […]
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Writing in the New York Times, University of Virginia English professor Mark Edmundson argues that online education is never going to be as good as live education with a real professor in a real classroom. In a sense, he’s right. There’s nothing like a top teacher: someone who can not only present complex material lucidly and […]
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MTC contributor Richard Vedder punctures many myths about American universities in his new report, “Twelve Inconvenient Truths about American Higher Education.” Among other issues, he investigates whether a college degree guarantees success, if students actually make good use of their time in college, and whether freedom of expression truly exists on American campuses. It’s a […]
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J.M. Anderson has offered an increasingly common defense of Common Core’s standards for English language arts and mathematics. They can help us to achieve any utopian educational goals one could wish for. The only fly in the ointment is the quality of our teaching corps. In actuality, 46 states have bought some very expensive snake […]
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The Boston Herald is a scrappy, politically conservative tabloid that normally rants and rails against excessive regulations and good-for-nothing government bureaucrats. Yet in an editorial on the Penn State child molestations, titled “Keeping campuses safe,” the Herald called for a heavily expanded bureaucratic response. It excoriated “the football program staff” of Penn State who, quoting […]
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Joe Paterno’s statue at Penn State was taken down not because it was “divisive,” at the university’s new president foolishly said, but because Paterno was morally obtuse and unworthy of the honor. So far so good. But what should we think of the NCAA’s flabbergasting decision to erase history–vacating 13 years of football wins? As […]
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< I argued yesterday that the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) is both necessary and a good thing–but I must add that it just can’t work now. It has the potential to transform American K-12 education, but the plain fact is that it is destined to fail because current teacher education programs neither prepare […]
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Not one college or university that I know of has resisted the notorious “Dear Colleague” letter’ urging a lowering of the burden of proof in campus sexual assault cases. Reasons for this timidity include the fact that powerful forces within the academy fully support the attack on due process by the Department of Education’s Office […]
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In 2006, the Duke lacrosse case featured an extraordinarily high-profile intersection of college athletics, academic culture, and the criminal justice system. Six years later, the tragedy at Penn State far surpassed events in Durham in the annals of campus scandal. There were clear differences between the two cases (chiefly, of course, that at Penn State, […]
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Over at NRO yesterday Jay Hallen proposed a few solutions to easing the student-loan bubble. Though his impulses are correct his recommendations fall flat. Hallen first proposes that the Department of Education move to a “risk-based pricing” system in which it would consider a student’s high-school GPA or intended major in determining the loan price. […]
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It’s no secret that most high school graduates are unprepared for college. Every year, 1.7 million first-year college students are enrolled in remedial classes at a cost of about $3 billion annually, the Associated Press recently reported. Scores on the 2011 ACT college entrance exam showed that only 1 in 4 high school graduates […]
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An article co-published by the New York Times and Chronicle of Higher Education reports that several universities now engage in student data mining. Electronic monitoring systems collect bits of digital information to create databases of profiles by tracking, timing, and tallying student activities like swiping ID badges or working on online assignments. The data collected […]
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Speaking of business and management majors, Douglas Campbell and James E. Fletcher argue in A Better Way to Educate Professionals that their students “should have a strong base in the traditional liberal arts and the physical sciences….to effectively work with people to understand and solve problems as well as to accomplish individual, organizational, and social goals.” […]
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On July 16 Coursera–one of the new ventures by prestigious universities or their professors that offer free-of charge MOOCs (massive open online courses) to the general public–announced that twelve more institutions have joined the Coursera consortium that initially consisted of Stanford, Princeton, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania. One of the new […]
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