With election season well under way, the Obama administration now finds itself up against lawsuits brought by several of the nation’s most prominent religious universities. Catholic University and the University of Notre Dame have already filed suit in opposition to the now-infamous federal requirement that insurance companies provide no-fee coverage of a slew of contraceptive […]
Read More
The new Sallie Mae-Gallup survey of attitudes toward higher education, “How America Pays for College 2012,” shows that Americans are becoming increasingly resistant to rising college prices. Some people who were saying “I want the best college money can buy” a few years ago, are now saying “We aren’t going to pay sky-high tuition when […]
Read More
Yale’s brand-new college in Singapore, a joint venture with the National University of Singapore (NUS), is “the first new college to bear Yale’s name in 300 years–and the first attempt to start a liberal-arts school in one of Asia’s leading financial centers,” the Wall Street Journal reports. But here’s one key way in which Yale […]
Read More
UCLA’s Proyecto Derechos Civiles — also known as the Civil Rights Project — has just published a useful new study suggesting the extent of racial discrimination in graduate school admissions. It examined minority graduate enrollments in four states with bans on racial preferences — California, Florida, Washington, and Texas (where the ban is no longer […]
Read More
The City College of San Francisco, the largest college in California with 90,000 students, appears to be on the brink of closing. California’s Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges put it on probation and gave it just eight months to demonstrate why it should stay in business. Without accreditation, City College will be ineligible […]
Read More
The New York Times piece John Leo referenced earlier cites a startling statistic: while almost 40% of births to college-educated women are out-of-wedlock, the figure for women who haven’t graduated college is over 90%. Another figure from same study indicates that though a third of women who hold only a high school diploma have had children with […]
Read More
Under the headline “Diversity’s Evidences.” Len Niehoff’, described as a “professor from practice” at the University of Michigan law school, offered an almost humorously pathetic defense of “diversity on Inside Higher Ed today. He served on the legal team that defended Michigan in Grutter, which he claims the Court got “exactly right,” and his essay […]
Read More
As many critics have noticed, the gap between Page One news coverage of social issues in the New York Times and the editorial response inside is often not a spacious one. Yesterday the Times ran a huge news article (more than two full pages), “Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do,” on the economic and social […]
Read More
Professors with tenure have lifetime appointments that can only be revoked after some egregious transgression, summarized by such formal labels as moral turpitude, gross negligence or dereliction of duty. In effect, the only tenured professors who get the sack are those who have robbed a bank, raped a co-ed or pistol-whipped a colleague. Why would […]
Read More
Mark Regnerus is a tenured associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas, Austin. He published a paper in the peer-reviewed sociological journal Social Science Research. The paper, detailing the results of a study of children growing up in households headed by same-sex couples, concluded that those children may be at disadvantage “when it comes […]
Read More
From MyBudget360, a sobering reminder of explosive student loan growth:
Read More
Andrew, I understand that you were critiquing the accreditation system in general. I agree that it’s not perfect and could focus more directly on what students actually learn rather than on inputs and processes. I do think, though, that when a university doesn’t even have an adequate system in place for monitoring and assessing student […]
Read More
The past few months have been troubling for those who believe that Trustees must exercise more aggressive oversight roles on today’s college and university campuses. At the University of Virginia, the board of regents (temporarily, it turns out) sacked President Teresa Sullivan, yet struggled to articulate a reason for doing so. Then, when they did […]
Read More
Charlotte Allen‘s response to my recent piece on the denial of accreditation for Ashford contains some good material, but some misunderstanding. My piece is not about whether the Ashford decision itself was flawed–I never stated that WASC was wrong to deny Ashford accreditation and flatly stated: “It is certainly possible that Ashford doesn’t deserve accreditation…” […]
Read More
Today the law firm of Freeh Sporkin & Sullivan (FSS) released its report on Penn State’s negligence in the case of Jerry Sandusky’s extensive abuse of minors. After a seven-month investigation, The Freeh Report assigns greater blame to Joe Paterno than was originally assumed, claiming that in conjunction with Penn State’s President, Senior Vice-President for Finance and […]
Read More
I agree with Andrew Gillen that a large segment of entrenched academia reflexively opposes for-profit colleges and online education. These people don’t even like the MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses) started by MIT and Harvard! That said, I don’t see any evidence that the WASC acted unfairly when it refused accreditation to Ashford University’s massive, […]
Read More
Tablet brings news of the unfortunate case of Sheherazad Jaafari, who was admitted to Columbia‘s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) despite her background as a public relations aide for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The admission raises important questions of standards and program policies.
Read More
The world of higher education is abuzz with the news that a for-profit university, Ashford University, whose Iowa campus holds accreditation from the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, has been denied accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) for its online headquarters. Denial of accreditation for schools that already have […]
Read More
Credentialing informal learning and experience is the next big push in higher education, with initiatives like Open Badges, Skills.to, Degreed, or LearningJar granting students credentials for skills and knowledge gained outside of school. Even traditional colleges are being pressured to accept credit by exam, portfolio, work experience, and other informal education, rather than reserving credit […]
Read More
As one who has spent nearly four decades in the academy, let me confirm what outsiders often suspect: the left has almost a complete headlock on the publication of serious (peer reviewed) research in journals and scholarly books. It is not that heretical ideas are forever buried. They can be expressed in popular magazines, op-eds […]
Read More
When college women study science, they tend to gravitate toward biology—about 58 percent of all bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in biology go to women. In contrast, women earn some 17 percent of bachelor’s degrees in engineering and computer science and just over 40 percent of bachelor’s degrees in physical sciences and mathematics. The likely reason for this, found in the study The Mathematics […]
Read More
My editors at the Chronicle last week declined to permit me to publish my last piece on the same-sex marriage debate. They pointed out, reasonably enough, the topic is “too far afield from and tangential to academe and academic policy to run on Innovations.” That topic has, of course, had plenty of play on another Chronicle blog, Brainstorm, but I understand […]
Read More
In the last few months, the highest-profile administrative skirmish has occurred at the University of Virginia. The affair was depressing in that an important principle (the need for aggressive oversight by trustees) appears to have been used to advance a rather weak agenda.
Read More
A few weeks ago, controversy erupted after a diversity report prepared by two CUNY committees identified a “White/Jewish” category among the university’s faculty. (There was and is absolutely no reason to believe that this new designation reflected the thinking of either Chancellor Matthew Goldstein or the Board of Trustees, nor was there any reason to […]
Read More
Colleges–both on the undergrad and graduate levels–typically admit students and encourage them to take on onerous amounts of debt, without first giving those prospective students the actual data about their chances of finding work in that major field afterwards. This is just as true, by the way, for non-profit as it is for for-profit schools. […]
Read More
Back in 2010, University of Illinois, Chicago, Professor and former Weatherman radical Bill Ayers gave a presentation on Public Pedagogy at the American Education Research Association annual meeting. Ayers, then a member of AERA’s governing board, made the claim that he, Bill Ayers, was really not a terrorist. Ten of the first 11 sentences in […]
Read More
The post-mortem continues on the two weeks of turmoil that included the abrupt forced resignation and the equally abrupt reinstatement of University of Virginia president Teresa Sullivan. Everyone on all sides of the dispute over Sullivan’s ousting seems to agree that the Board of Visitors, UVa’s trustees, behaved secretively, discourteously, and ham-handedly when it handed […]
Read More
What does one do when a culture of corruption is so pervasive that graduate students openly cheat and professors give out answers on exams? According to allegations at the Baruch (Zicklin) School of Business in the City University of New York, “cheating is their bread and butter.”
Read More
By any ordinary standard, Teresa Sullivan is the kind of university president conservatives love to hate. In 2010, after the Board of Visitors unanimously elected her the first female president of the University of Virginia, one of her first acts was to endorse and publish the UVA Diversity Council’s statement expressing commitment in–what else?–diversity. Sullivan […]
Read More
A professor posts excerpts from a book through the university’s electronic reserves for his class – an innocent enough practice that is fairly common in colleges across the country. Recently, 23 professors at Georgia State University (GSU) were alleged to have engaged in copyright infringement for doing just that.
Read More