As reported here and here, the Regents of the University of Colorado have voted to commission a survey of the political climate on the Boulder campus. I spoke at the meeting, and the discussion was less complicated than one might expect given the history of liberal bias topics at Colorado and elsewhere in the last […]
Read More
From the National Association of Scholars’ 100 Great Ideas for Higher Education It would be great and interesting for all concerned if every college student had to present a one-hour talk on some topic on which he had recently done research and written a substantial paper. Too few college students–if any other than the salutatorian and […]
Read More
As the 20th century drew to a close, women had started to outpace men on university campuses, and as doctors, lawyers, psychologists, biologists and managers. As a group, they lived longer and epidemiologists described them as healthier and happier. Yet a raft of books about professional women published around the millennium placed them firmly […]
Read More
What is valuable, one-of-a-kind and can’t be copied while retaining its original worth? The high-end art market. It contains thousands of works of art whose value is determined by what any individual or group is willing to pay. As the prices for such works of art escalate, something almost magical happens: the value pushes most […]
Read More
Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin has posted a critique of my Minding The Campus commentary worrying that the Supreme Court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas could have the paradoxical effect of entrenching racial preferences for decades. Ilya makes reasonable points, and he may turn out to be right. I respectfully disagree, as […]
Read More
In a previous post on this site I announced a plan for the creation of MOOA, or massive, open, online administrations that would supplant the thousands of separate administrations currently managing the affairs of America’s colleges. The MOOA idea was, of course, satire. However, I must report that two educational consultants contacted me to offer […]
Read More
Among the several “the sky is falling!” arguments we hear about higher education is that the current generation is “in danger” of being the first generation of Americans that will be “less educated” than the generation before it. In that formulation, “less educated” means having fewer years of formal education. With a somewhat smaller number […]
Read More
As a critic of the current regime of very large racial preferences, I hope that Fisher v. University of Texas opens the way for a healthy shift of the focus in such lawsuits from legal abstractions to the growing body of evidence that large preferences harm many intended beneficiaries and reduce socioeconomic diversity. I detailed […]
Read More
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a 7-1 majority (Justice Kagan recused herself), disappointed both left and right today with his opinion for the Court in Fisher v. Texas, vacating the Fifth Circuit’s decision and remanding it “[b]ecause the Fifth Circuit did not hold the University to the demanding burden of strict scrutiny” required, he said, […]
Read More
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has just issued the Heart of the Matter, a 61-page report (plus appendices) aimed at persuading Congress to spend more money on the humanities. This is one of the report’s immediate goals, phrased of course in the financial imperative, “Increase investment in research and discovery.” The report as […]
Read More
Quitting school is suddenly popular. The “un-schooling movement,” which claims that school is too expensive, too disengaged from the job market, and too elitist for smart, independent youth, has become the darling of hipsters, free spirits, and do-it-yourself-ers everywhere. Take Dale Stephens, the twenty-year-old entrepreneur who was home-schooled until age twelve and educated himself using […]
Read More
Professor Benjamin Ginsberg’s plans for MOOA (Massive Open Online Administrations) are moving along. The MOOA will first tackle the issue of mission statements. Surprisingly, many schools failed to develop mission statements until recently. For instance, the University of Rochester lacked a mission statement until 2009. Ginsberg said he was personally surprised that a school without […]
Read More
Sophisticated consumers of higher education always understood that unless they were very wealthy they would rarely have to pay the full sticker price of college. By contrast, information-poor students, often from lower income families, were often unaware that a college’s stated price was not really the price. Believing that high-priced schools were clearly unaffordable, many high-achieving […]
Read More
This is an excerpt from “The Higher Education Scandal,” an article by Harvey C. Mansfield in the Spring issue of The Claremont Review of Books. He is professor of government at Harvard and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. *** It seems that liberals, even those critical of American education, are not inclined to […]
Read More
Tablet has a typically superb exposé by Jamie Kirchick of the “pinkwashing” conference, held late in the spring semester at the CUNY Graduate Center. I had previously written about the concept; the “pinkwasher” theorists allege, without evidence, that Israel uses its generally positive record on gay rights to obscure its allegedly evil treatment of the […]
Read More
Two recent academic-tinged scandals in college athletics seem saturated in political correctness. At the University of North Carolina, some student-athletes (as well as some non-athletes) benefited from taking no-show classes. The university brought in former governor Jim Martin to conduct a blue-ribbon review; Martin’s report indicated that the problem was solely on the academic side […]
Read More
As a professor of political science, I can’t help but be concerned with all the enthusiasm about “civic engagement” as some radically transformative, disruptive, “Copernican” revolution in higher education. All the literature that makes such bogus claims is rife with management-speak barely masking progressive ideology. It makes the agenda-driven proclamation that the point of higher […]
Read More
As colleges begin using massive open online courses (MOOC) to reduce faculty costs, a Johns Hopkins University professor has announced plans for MOOA (massive open online administrations). Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg, author of The Fall of the Faculty, says that many colleges and universities face the same administrative issues every day. By having one experienced group […]
Read More
In the ideal world, academic unions stand as guardians of academic freedom. In the real world, too often they cling to the status quo, resisting needed reforms, opposing meritocracy, and working to stifle campus dissent. Then there’s the CUNY faculty union (the Professional Staff Congress), whose leading figures act as if their goal in life […]
Read More
Articles touting “diversity” often tell us more than they intend to, frequently by casual comments off the main topic or by what is not said at all. Three articles from the past few days provide good examples of the subtext being more interesting, and more revealing of the nuts and bolts of “diversity,” than the […]
Read More
Inside Higher Ed reporter Allie Grasgreen has a piece today lionizing the students who’ve filed Title IX complaints to minimize the already weak due process protections for students accused of sexual assault on campus. (Richard Pérez–Peña covered this exact same topic and in some instances the exact same people, albeit in an even more fawning fashion, a […]
Read More
For forty years I labored in the groves of Academe as professor and dean. Though I learned many lessons in this four decade period, three of them are worth noting. NYU, the place I called academic home, transformed itself from a “commuter school” into a “world class university” with campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai […]
Read More
This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education has a story on diversity in higher education that begins, “Despite decades of antidiscrimination policies and affirmations of equality, there’s still little racial and ethnic diversity at the top at many of the colleges.” And last year, as legal challenges to affirmative action were building, the Board of Directors […]
Read More
The growing fossil-fuel divestment movement on campus is the “first effective opposition” to the fossil fuel industry, according to writer and activist Bill McKibben. Across the country, students alarmed about climate change are urging their colleges to disinvest their endowment funds (“divest”) from petroleum-extracting companies. They have been garnering headlines in recent months, and, according […]
Read More
Quite a few people have built careers in higher education around the supposed need to study how different groups compare, and when the inevitable disparities are discovered, setting up programs to address the “underrepresentation problem.” To get a sense of just how deeply ingrained such thinking is, consider this piece from Inside Higher Ed, “The […]
Read More
Odysseus, in Homer’s Odyssey, orders himself tied to the mast of his ship so he can hear the beautiful song of the Sirens without risking the usual gruesome fate of those who sail too close to the singers. This lesson – if you know you are going to make a bad decision you should tie […]
Read More
In the search for substance in the sea of edifying platitudes in commencement addresses, I came upon Ben Bernanke’s thoughtful list of ten suggestions or observations on life after graduation he gave at Princeton’s tradition-laden Baccalaureate. It’s the rare graduation address that’s clearly worthy of commentary, analysis that inevitably generates some criticism. Here is one […]
Read More
Gordon Gee’s sudden retirement from Ohio State (after a widely reported, off-the-cuff slur on Catholics) probably ends a remarkable career of academic leadership almost without parallel in American higher education. For a university president to survive 10 years as president of one institution or 25 years in total as president is very unusual, yet Gee […]
Read More
Joseph Urgo, the President of St. Mary’s College of Maryland, has resigned after a major embarrassment: under his leadership the incoming freshman class is so small–nearly a hundred student fewer than expected–that the school faces a $3.5 million budget shortfall. That shortfall comes after St. Mary’s, a secular private college, greatly simplified its application and […]
Read More
In a letter dated May 9, the federal government dramatically expanded the definition of sexual harassment on campus. In the 31-page letter, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education, informed the president of the University of Montana, Royce […]
Read More