I’m not sure whether student loan debt is exaggerated on other campuses, but here at Brooklyn College the amount of debt is surely overstated. The faculty of CUNY, which includes BC, has consistently protested tuition hikes, on grounds that student debt is unacceptably high. But my new survey of BC students found that few have […]
Read More
The New York Daily News had a question yesterday about the coming anti-Israel hatefest in the city: “Why is Brooklyn College’s political science department officially sponsoring a one-sided event that calls for divestment, boycotts and sanctions against Israel?” As they have done on other campuses, anti-Israel activists talk colleges into sponsoring events featuring rabid Israel haters (in […]
Read More
Standardized tests are often about as popular as the messenger murdered for bringing bad news — and if it were up to their critics, would meet the same fate. Their “disparate impact” on minorities (most recently discussed here) provides one of the standard justifications for continuing affirmative action. Now their use seems to be seeping […]
Read More
I accepted some warm invitations from the Federalist Society chapters at law schools in the chilly Midwest and spoke last week at Indiana University, Notre Dame, and the University of Michigan about Fisher v. University of Texas, the case before the Supreme Court challenging the use of racial preferences in university admissions. Here’s an edited […]
Read More
Two university presidents are in the news. Mitch Daniels, until recently Governor of Indiana, became Purdue’s president amidst much publicity. Arguably the most important leader in American higher education, Mark Yudof, announced he is retiring as the head of the University of California, having previously run the universities of Minnesota and Texas. Just recently, another […]
Read More
Most of the controversy over affirmative action in higher education concerns undergraduate admissions, but the American Educational Research Association has just published what it calls “important findings on the impact of banning affirmative action” in six fields of graduate study — natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, business, education, and humanities – in four states that […]
Read More
The New York Times is featuring a debate of sorts, marred somewhat by structuring matters so that all six debaters are on the same side. The topic, “Is Divestment an Effective Means of Protest?,” refers to campus protests against “big oil.” The arguments yielded no disagreement on whether oil and gas companies are contemptible villains–that […]
Read More
Why are recent college graduates underemployed?, asks a report out today from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP). The answer, says the report, is that “a growing disconnect has evolved between employer needs and the volume and nature of college training of students, and that the growth of supply of college-educated labor is […]
Read More
Brooklyn College – my home institution — doesn’t exactly enjoy the best reputation for fair-mindedness regarding Israel. A few years ago, the institution embarrassed itself by requiring incoming freshmen to read one and only one book, written by Moustafa Bayoumi, containing unsubstantiated, inflammatory attacks on U.S. policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. To its credit, the […]
Read More
One of the main findings of this year’s American Freshman Survey Is the drift of 2012 first-year college students toward the political center. The report collects 2008 and 2012 results and finds that “in one significant point of comparison, students moved toward the center in self-perceived political orientation, with the ‘middle-of-the-road’ category growing from 43.3% […]
Read More
Sen. Marco Rubio spoke out again this week on the importance of higher education as a support for the middle class. Unlike many other high-profile proponents of higher ed reform, he believes Washington lacks an appreciation for technical education. So he proposed making federally-backed student loans available to those seeking technical degrees online as well […]
Read More
For the past 20 years, most of our history departments have had an almost monomaniacal emphasis in on the issues of race, class, gender, and ethnicity in American history. Meanwhile, there has not been enough attention paid to the history of American politics, economics, culture, and the military. Having taught at the University of Texas […]
Read More
Troy Duster, a past president of the American Sociological Association and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Warren Institute for Law and Social Policy, has a long Chronicle of Higher Education article that is usefully if unwittingly revealing and instructive because it so perfectly reflects both the profound misunderstanding of their critics […]
Read More
Despite the billions of dollars showered on our schools, American public education is poor to mediocre and likely to remain so. Only 7% of our grade 8 students reach the Advanced level in mathematics, suggesting why little advanced coursework in mathematics and science can be taught in our high schools. In contrast, from 27 to […]
Read More
One reason disparate impact theory has become such a standard element in institutional affairs is that it is so simple. It begins and ends on a basic numerical axiom: if a practice affects an identity group disproportionately, we have some kind of bias at work. It offers as evidence only a ratio, for instance, a […]
Read More
Last week we posted Heather Mac Donald’s criticism of an off-beat student project at Phillips Andover Academy on”The Perversion of the American Dream: Deconstructing Media Portrayals of Sex Workers through Analysis and Real Narratives.” The student, Nikita Singareddy, writing on Facebook, protested the article and Heather Mac Donald responds here. *** Nikita Singareddy: Normally, I wouldn’t […]
Read More
Not Bhaskar Sunkara, the 23-year-old founder of Jacobin magazine. He’s marshaled allies from within the university to convince the American people otherwise. The New York Times recently featured a flattering profile of Sunkara, an alumnus of George Washington University who founded his magazine while on medical leave in his sophomore year. The piece, which notes […]
Read More
Stanford Law School has opened the nation’s first law clinic for the defense of religious liberty. As examples of the type of cases it will handle, the school cited Seventh-day Adventists fired by Fed Ex for refusing to work on Saturdays, a Muslim group challenging land-use laws that prohibit building of mosques, and a Native […]
Read More
The new report from Moody’s Investors Service, casting doubt on the financial state of affairs in higher education, has provoked a good deal of anxiety. The report referenced five revenue streams affecting all public universities. Two (philanthropy and endowments) deal primarily with broad, macro-economic trends over which university leaders have little, if any, control. On […]
Read More
In 2004, the Duke Conservative Union conducted a study of the political affiliations of the Duke humanities faculty, finding an overwhelming (142-8) tilt toward the Democrats. In and of itself, this discovery had many plausible explanations, though the overwhelming partisan discrepancy did raise eyebrows. (Full disclosure: I’m a registered and strongly partisan Democrat.) But reaction […]
Read More
College campuses abound in silly sentiments and enthusiasm for actions that make zealous students, professors, and administrators to feel good about themselves, but accomplish nothing. The current push to compel colleges and universities to divest their stock holdings in companies that produce fossil fuels — discussed in this article in The Chronicle of Higher Education […]
Read More
The impulse to impose Sarbanes-Oxley on universities is tempting. Indeed, formal legal mandates on conflicts of interest and the other attributes of good governance might be even more appropriate for universities than for public corporations, as universities lack many of the safeguards of good governance, such as the ability to measure performance through profitability and […]
Read More
San Jose State University in California is teaming up with Udacity, the for-profit pioneer of massive open online courses (MOOCs), to start a pilot program that will create three introductory mathematics courses online that can be taken for credit from San Jose State if the enrollee chooses. The courses sound like a godsend to high-school […]
Read More
Harvey Silverglate and Greg Lukianoff are speaking at a Manhattan Institute book forum on January 23. If you’re interested in attending, please call Debbie Ezzard at (646)839-3370.
Read More
Here’s a statistic that should make every college teacher cringe. From 1976 to 2010, the rate of high school students graduating with an “A” grade–point average doubled. They didn’t increase their work load, and their test scores didn’t rise correspondingly, but their teachers gave them the highest grade possible again and again. The impact of […]
Read More
As a staffer with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the early 1970’s, would-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. penned his historic, if awkwardly titled, memo, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.” In that August 1971 “confidential memorandum,” to the Chamber’s board of directors, Powell called for an unprecedented effort on behalf of […]
Read More
Need any further evidence of the insularity and obtuseness of the academic left – of its stubborn and unreflecting conviction of its own virtue and superiority, its breathtaking incomprehension of and condescension toward those who don’t share its ideology? Me neither. Nonetheless, a new book entitled Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives (Princeton University […]
Read More
A pop quiz: Where might a student most likely research the following topic: “The Perversion of the American Dream: Deconstructing Media Portrayals of Sex Workers through Analysis and Real Narratives”? At Smith, perhaps? Possibly Brown? Actually, Phillips Andover, one of the country’s oldest and most august prep schools, recently sponsored a student project in this […]
Read More
From the National Association of Scholars One of the distinguishing features of America from the founding throughout our history has been classlessness. In recent years, especially since 2009, there has been a relentless assault by the progressive left on what it considers the unfair income distribution between the rich and others, propounded particularly in academia […]
Read More
Kudos to NAS, for a thoroughly-researched–and deeply troubling–report regarding instruction of U.S. history at Texas’ two flagship public universities, the University of Texas and Texas A&M. The overall finding: U.S. history faculty members at both institutions, and especially at the University of Texas, are dominated by advocates of race, class, and gender. As a result, […]
Read More