Is a MOOC more like an ATM or an American Express Centurian card? The former provides a service to everyone with a bank account. The latter serves a smaller niche of the prosperous few. Like an ATM, MOOCs are automated dispensers providing accessible, on-demand service to thousands of users. They faithfully output course material, input […]
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Peter Wood’s article “New York’s Left-Most Mayor Takes Over” was cross-posted by City Journal, where it drew a protest from the CUNY administration and a response from the author. Michael Arena, CUNY: Peter Wood is inaccurate when he states that Mayor Bloomberg conceived of CUNY’s Pathways general education framework. Unfortunately, the writer did not check […]
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On two issues a chasm exists between the academic mainstream and views outside the campus walls. The first, of course, is using racial and ethnic preferences in faculty hiring procedures and (except for Asians and Asian-Americans) in elite university student admissions. A virtual article of faith in the academy, the use of racial preferences attracted […]
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Janet Napolitano left her post as Secretary of Homeland Security in July to become the president of the University of California. The decision of the UC Regents to appoint her surprised me. As I wrote at the time, she had “no discernible qualification” for the position–other than a politician’s ability to raise money and a […]
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An important victory for FIRE in the organization’s efforts to encourage the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to return to a position of respecting the due process rights of the nation’s college students. Last week, the OCR (which under 1st-term Obama appointee Russlynn Ali consistently ignored FIRE) sent a rather churlish letter to FIRE president […]
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Most readers of Minding the Campus are well aware of the phenomenon of “mismatching” in colleges first brought to national attention in regard to African American students by Cornell economics professor Thomas Sowell in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Sowell showed that many of the black students at Cornell, who often had scores on national exams […]
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Brandeis University gave a surprising good-bye present to former president Jehuda Reinharz: a post-retirement compensation package of $600,000 a year for little apparent work. Indeed, Reinharz is earning another $800,000 annually in a full-time job for the Mandel Foundation (a Cleveland-based charity that has generously supported Brandeis). These kinds of deals are increasingly common in higher education. […]
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The heavily publicized campaign by gay activists against University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus is back in the news, this time with more ominous implications for peer review and academic freedom. A Florida court has ordered that records of confidential peer reviews of scholarly articles be turned over to a self-styled “investigative journalist.” It is […]
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The Yale Daily News has an interesting scoop today–it turns out that the university has the authority to access a student’s e-mail account, without informing the student. The paper interviewed 73 students on campus; only three, according to the Daily News, “were aware of the specifics of Yale’s policy.” The paper’s report further indicates that […]
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Demographics are working against our colleges and universities. The number of graduating seniors, especially those from families who can pay full tuition, is dropping. So colleges and universities have more seats than there will be students to fill them. This story has been told again and again, so it’s difficult to make it interesting. But […]
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One of the architects of the MOOC revolution has decided that the movement should go in a different direction. In a lengthy interview with Fast Company, Sebastian Thrun, the inventor of the MOOC platform Udacity, announced that he’s shelving his original goal to displace traditional higher education by delivering free online courses to millions of […]
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New York City is bracing for the arrival of its new mayor, Bill de Blasio, whose policy preferences are rooted in the left-wing thinking prevalent in our universities. In his successful mayoral campaign, de Blasio, who collected 73 percent of the vote, had much to say about K-12 education and pre-K education. De Blasio expressed […]
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Asian and Asian-American students, an increasing presence in our college campuses, are carrying a crucial message that the rest of Americans have trouble hearing: that college costs too much time and money to be devoted predominantly to fun and games. Americans generally underestimate the salience of education in most Asian cultures. Take Korea. South Korea […]
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In Cathy Young’s excellent article on the “campus rape that wasn’t” at Ohio University, she referenced an open letter, penned by 34 Ohio University professors, expressing “deep concern” about the purported assault. You’d think, in light of the experience of Duke’s Group of 88, college faculty would be reluctant to pen open letters about sexual […]
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The perceived threat of a MOOC tsunami presumes that vast numbers of students will opt for supersized online courses in place of smaller, traditional classrooms. And so far, millions have already enrolled in MOOCs. The platform is versatile and the course offerings broad. Mid-career professional development? Check. Remedial classes at community colleges? Check. Elite DIY-Ivies […]
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Perhaps because of my experience with the Group of 88 in the Duke lacrosse case, I’m always a little suspicious when I see an open letter signed by dozens of professors at an elite school attacking their institution’s student-athletes. Recently, 63 professors at Colgate signed an open letter insinuating–though never quite coming out and making […]
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Champlain College in Vermont has been receiving national accolades for its thoughtful curriculum. For many of those unhappy with the vagaries of more famous colleges and universities, Champlain is starting to pop up in parental discussions, right after the question, “Then where would you be willing to send your son or daughter?” The college combines a decent core curriculum with career-oriented […]
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Christina Paxson, Brown’s president, is displaying an admirable commitment to free speech in the wake of the Ray Kelly heckling incident. In contrast to college presidents who let censorious protests slide, Paxson is calling for a serious investigation into the events of October 29, when Brown students and Providence community members prevented Kelly from speaking. […]
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“We should be seeing 12,500 cases a year.” So spoke Jennifer Hammat, Title IX coordinator for the University of Texas. As FIRE’s Peter Bonilla tweeted, “That quote put differently: ‘we should be seeing 250-300 rapes/sexual assaults per week.’” Does anyone (apart, it seems, from Hammat) believe that there are 300 rapes each week at UT? […]
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If a satirist had set out to write a scathing parody of the campus crusade against rape, he could not have come up with anything more bizarre, or more ridiculous, than the real-life comedy-drama that unfolded last month at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. The scandal started, like many scandals do these days, in the social […]
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This is an excerpt from the article, “What Dido Did, Satan Saw and O’Keeffe Painted,” from the November issue of The New Criterion. The full text is here. Starting in June, a flurry of reports and commentaries appeared, projecting a dim present and dark future for the fields (of the humanities). A Harvard report warned […]
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The New York Times has a Room for Debate forum on the humanities this week, and one of the contributors, Ben Schmidt, takes the opportunity to chide those who repeat “the persistent idea that the humanities are imploding in on themselves.” Citing numbers from the U.S. Department of Education and the Modern Language Association, he […]
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In Fisher v. University of Texas the Supreme Court held that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had given too much deference to the university’s conclusion that the nature and extent of its racial discrimination in admissions was essential to promote sufficient “diversity,” and it returned the case to that court for further review. The brief just filed by the Department […]
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As Georgia Tech gears up for its new MOOC-like master’s degree program slated to launch this spring, the Wall Street Journal reports that applications from would-be students are dramatically outpacing fall ’13 applications to Georgia Tech’s residential program. Offered jointly by the Georgia Institute of Technology and Udacity, with financial support and “advice” from AT&T, […]
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“As Interest Fades in the Humanities, Colleges Worry,” said the headline in the New York Times. True enough. But the long front-page story described only half of the problem–that the rise of the computer culture and the recession have turned many students away from the traditional curriculum. On his blog, Via Meadia, Walter Russell Mead […]
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A speech to the 55th reunion of the Harvard Law School class of 1958, October 26, 2013. I graduated from Harvard Law School in 1967. Very early in my career, I represented many students in Administrative Board cases growing out of their protests against the Vietnam War. I represented (with Alan Dershowitz) one group of students accused […]
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A few months ago, a lawyer for the State University of New York (SUNY) penned a startling column about the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) “blueprint,” introduced for the University of Montana as a national model for dealing with sexual assault and sexual harassment on campus. In the “blueprint,” the OCR […]
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Can public universities offer racially restrictive programs and scholarships, i.e., for which threshold eligibility is determined by the race of the applicants? No, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Podberesky v. Kirwan (1994), based on its “constitutional premise that race is an impermissible arbiter of human fortunes.” Some will regard it as ironic […]
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People under 40 years of age don’t remember what it was like in the humanities circa 1990. The academic theater of the Culture Wars was tense and vibrant, with national publications debating what was going on in English departments. Books decrying trends in the humanities by Allan Bloom and Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza were […]
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