Here’s an instructive exercise: The next time you read an article about “diversity” (see, e.g., the interview with the University of Wisconsin’s diversity honcho in Inside Higher Ed today), mentally substitute the letters “BS” for “diversity” every time the latter appears. It’s amazing how much more accurate and understandable the article becomes! (It’s even better […]
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At some point the demands for federal investigations into our colleges’ supposed indifference to accusers in sexual assault cases will reach the point of parody. In fact, that point might already have been reached with two recent developments. First, celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred, an attorney who never met a TV camera she didn’t like, has […]
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The Association for Asian American Studies just made news by becoming the first American academic organization to support a boycott of Israeli universities. In case you were wondering, the AAAS did not also call for a boycott of any other Asian universities located in countries with less-than-stellar human rights records. They seemingly believe that Israel is […]
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Those eager to see a shredding of political correctness on campus should sample this interview between HBO’s Bill Maher and Brian Levin, a professor at California State-San Bernardino who directs the school’s Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism. Levin’s apparent goal in the interview was to suggest that all major religions are equally inclined toward politically-oriented […]
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We’ve learned this week that Chelsea Clinton and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky have spent $10 million on a 100-foot-long condo opposite Madison Square in Manhattan. This seems to be a rare example of an NYU administrator whose lavish housing is not subsidized by NYU, which has handed out so many questionable loans–$72 million to 168 people. […]
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A big divide is showing up between conservative and libertarian criticisms of higher education. Conservatives–and I am among them–argue that higher-ed has become too vocational and libertarians say it is not vocational enough. Professor Michael Hepner of the University of Dubuque, part of an influential and cutting-edge effort to think through the causes of the […]
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What more can the “diversity” movement do to our colleges and universities? How about mandatory indoctrination? According to an official faculty proposal, Northwestern University is considering a move “to enhance the educational opportunities” of students by installing a diversity course requirement for all undergrads so that the students will “recognize their own positionality in systems […]
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Last week Amherst College rejected an offer from online education company edX to develop MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) featuring its faculty. Though we do not know the full details of Amherst’s deliberations, it is clear that its faculty recognized several important implications of this new technology. Some faculty members expressed concern that middle-tier and […]
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By Greg Lukianoff and Robert Shibley It’s no longer a matter of much debate that America’s college campuses are not the beacons of free and open discussion they were intended to be. In its 14 years of existence, our organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has documented hundreds of cases of gross […]
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Two trains carrying loads of conflicting values, requirements, and prohibitions affecting college admissions and hiring are hurtling rapidly toward each other, but no one seems aware of the impending collision. On one track, the Supreme Court is probably poised to impose new restrictions on race- and ethnicity-conscious policies in Fisher v. University of Texas and […]
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California legislators appear smitten with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). In response to the high demand for classes and long waiting lists in California’s public colleges and universities, they have proposed a bill that would force schools to give credit for faculty-approved online courses completed by students unable to enroll in lower-division courses. Unfortunately, the […]
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One of the purposes of Common Core, the initiative to draft new standards for math and English, was to align secondary curricula with the demands of college. The presumption was that high school expectations simply fell short of first-year college coursework and the standards it set. Further evidence of mismatch came out this week in […]
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One of the more annoying tropes of the left is that while it may be all right for profit-oriented businesses to function in many markets – I have yet to hear anyone demand that dry cleaning, for example, be done by non-profit entities – they shouldn’t be in “helping” fields like health care and education. […]
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Originally run as a Manhattan Institute Policy Brief. The growth of student-loan debt has raised a vexing question: Is a college degree still a good investment? No segment of American higher education has faced greater scrutiny than for-profit colleges and universities. For-profits differ from traditional institutions in important respects. They are accountable chiefly to […]
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Gone are the days when the liberal press covered the Federalist Society as if it were a mysterious and sinister cult. Now (April 17) the Chronicle of Higher Education features a largely favorable feature article hailing the Federalist Society’s history as “a story of how disaffection, bold ideas, commitment to principle, and enlightened institution-building have […]
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Another day, and another awful consequence of our student debt problem has come to light. The New York Fed just released data showing that growing levels of student debt have impacted homeownership and car purchasing patterns. In the past, 30-year-olds who at some point owed student debt were more likely than those who didn’t to […]
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Easy question. Administrators do. Odd as it may sound today, faculties have long assumed the right and duty to set the campus agenda–to establish admission standards, control research and curriculum, run visiting speaker programs, and set the academic and professional criteria on which promotions, prizes and appointments are based. Historically, the faculty actually did control […]
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If you’re worrying about your child’s student debt obligations, you might want to check up on your parents, too. The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports that adults over 60 have the fastest growing student-loan debt and that their growing delinquencies are leading the Department of Education to garnish Social Security checks. Stung by the Great […]
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I am writing in response to Dr. Lawler’s post here. First, to clear up one important point that Dr. Lawler addresses – libertarians (such as myself) have no desire to make liberal arts courses be more expensive than STEM course. Indeed, as he rightfully notes, because liberal arts degrees are associated with lower lifetime earnings, […]
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I’m writing in response to Yevgeniy Feyman’s challenging comments to my conservative defense of liberal education: We see more and more libertarian nudging in higher education. Consider the proposal, coming out of Florida, to incentivize students to choose the most demonstratively productive majors. They are, of course, the STEM majors–science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Tuition […]
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This past February, in the final act of Brooklyn College’s BDS fiasco, four Jewish students were kicked out of the talk. (Brooklyn’s Political Science Department had formally voted to affiliate itself with the talk, which featured two speakers who advocated a nationality-based boycott against Israelis, divestment from Israel, and international sanctions against the Jewish state.) […]
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From the National Association of Scholars’ 100 Great Ideas for Higher Education *** The great scandal of American education is that students can complete their schooling without learning to write correct prose. Even at the college level, and at good schools, most students cannot write even a page of text without committing some error of […]
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Universities enjoy a privileged position in our society and lots of independence from political and economic forces, partly to provide an environment where diversity of views reigns -where conformist, stifling uniformity is suppressed in favor of a “free market in ideas.” Coupled with that historically has been a sense of meritocracy -the academy is an […]
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The Manhattan Institute has just published my new report on the promise of for-profit colleges. I argue that though these institutions face greater scrutiny than any other sector of the higher-ed industry, we should celebrate their potential to accommodate untraditional students. I acknowledge for-profits’ shortcomings; however, I conclude that if the Department of Education is concerned about loan repayment, completion […]
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Inside Higher Ed reports this morning on the Success for ‘Holistic’ Med School Admissions at Boston University: Boston University has demonstrated the success of “holistic” admissions for medical school, according an analysis published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Under such admissions, grades and test scores aren’t accorded the same dominant role they have […]
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Plenty of liberals–and not just liberal professors–think there is a conservative conspiracy to use online education and MOOCs, to destroy genuinely higher education in this country. I see no organized conspiracy, and much of the liberal paranoia amounts to whining about the results of legitimate political defeats. Nonetheless, there is something to the thought that hostility to […]
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“Intellectual Diversity in Legal Academe” was the subject of an April 5th conference sponsored by the Harvard Federalist Society at the university’s law school. The videos of the one-day meeting are now available here. You can watch the first panel, entitled “Is There a Lack of Intellectual Diversity in Law School Faculties?,” below. Among […]
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Fareed Zakaria, in his new Time magazine column, “The Thin-Envelope Crisis,” does some hand-wringing over the supposed complicity of our colleges and universities in the decline of economic mobility in our country. He writes, “The institutions that have been the best at opening access in the U.S. have been its colleges and universities. If they […]
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Writer Christopher Shea argued in the Washington Post that the problems associated with student loans – and by extension, the cost of college – are overstated. Contrary to many of the sob stories in the media, says Shea, “…it’s almost always well worth what it does cost — assuming that you graduate and, if your loans […]
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Big news about homework: a new technology allows professors to monitor the reading and studying of their students outside of class. Digital tools record what students do on their e-textbooks: how often they open it and to what pages, whether they highlight or not, whether they take notes. It’s called CourseSmart, and it offers a […]
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