Did you know you can get a degree in your pajamas? It’s true, the company EdConnect assures us–thousands of students are doing it every day. Meanwhile, in California, the legislature and governor are cooking up a “faculty free” college experience: just take exams to get a degree. Too lazy to take your own exam? Maybe […]
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Over at The American Conservative, Samuel Goldman has a sharp response to the National Association of Scholars’ Bowdoin report: The authors’ tin ear for readers’ sensibilities is in evidence throughout the report. In particular, the report shows no sympathy for students who doubt, with some justification, that old Bowdoin had room for them. Acknowledging such […]
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From the National Association of Scholars’ 100 Great Ideas for Higher Education *** Many popular proposals to improve higher education would actually weaken it. Faculty are letting academic standards slip–in the name of academic enrichment–and increasingly giving students academic credit for activities that are “academic” in only a lax sense. Not everything taught or learned is […]
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To the careful observer of American higher education, the questions Neil Gross raises in Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? might seem self-explanatory. Indeed, such an observer could reason, everyone knows that American universities are run by left-wing academics who bar conservative students and faculty from moving up the ranks. In addition, he might say, […]
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Peter Berkowitz, Real Clear Politics: The body of the report demonstrates that left-leaning ideology permeates the college; the report’s preface explains the harm this does to students and the nation.The problem is not that Bowdoin teaches contemporary progressivism — that is, the idea that government’s chief aims include securing substantial social and economic […]
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It is difficult to know if MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are a conspiracy to undermine the academy or a way to open the avenues of higher education. However one sees it, though, a revolution is certainly taking place: millions of people are already taking on-line courses. It seems that the U.S. Department of Education […]
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The Supreme Court decided last week to review the Sixth Circuit’s decision in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, whose majority opinion (joined by all 8 Democratic appointees, opposed by all 7 Republican appointees) held that the 14th Amendment bars the people of Michigan from amending their state constitution to prohibit preferential treatment based […]
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Very few people who enroll in MOOCs (massive open online courses) tell us about the experience. I just took one and learned these lessons: Lesson One: Professors need to start phasing out in-class lecturing now. Based on my own experience as a student and as an adjunct professor, the vast majority of professors spend much […]
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Yesterday the Manhattan Institute sponsored a panel on the National Association of Scholars’ report on the decline of Bowdoin College. It featured Peter Wood, Thomas Klingenstein, and William Bennett. You can watch the video below:
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Today the National Association of Scholars is releasing the results of its long, in-depth study of Bowdoin College, “What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students.” Among the findings: Bowdoin, in a retreat from its past, stresses global citizenship (with declining emphasis and on and concern for the United States). Multi-culturalism, […]
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There are many paths to becoming a Columbia University professor, but Kathy Boudin’s is probably unique. In 1970, she fled naked or nearly naked from an explosion in a Greenwich Village townhouse, which she and her Weather Underground friends were using as a bomb factory. Later she was convicted as the get-away driver in a […]
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The Student Government Association at Johns Hopkins University has denied official recognition to a pro-life student organization. The Daily Caller reports that the SGA voted10-8 to reject the group—cutting it off from student activities funding and building access for meetings, apparently on grounds that demonstrations and counseling attempts outside abortion clinics amounted to harassment. … […]
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Insidehighered.com has an update on the controversy at Florida Atlantic University. The story quickly summarizes the event at the center of the affair, that is, having students write “Jesus” on a piece of paper put it on the floor, then asking them to step on it. The exercise isn’t the instructor’s invention. It comes out […]
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Wayward reporter Richard Perez–Pena, who covers campus sex codes and hearings for the New York Times, recently examined events at four campuses: Amherst, Yale, the University of North Carolina, and Occidental, offering readers positive portraits of “activists” who seek to decimate due process protections for students accused of sexual assault. A hallmark of the Times‘ coverage of college sexual assault questions has […]
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Cross-posted from Concurring Opinions Books have lined the shelves of the offices of all my colleagues at every school where I have worked. In my early days of teaching, or when spending a term as a visitor, I’d wander into a learned neighbor’s office to get acquainted. The titles and content of those books announced […]
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Remarks delivered upon acceptance of the Bradley Foundation‘s Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Award, March 15. *** Commitment to the principles of academic freedom was tested when new forces of politically correct censorship […]
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Defenders of affirmative action must work hard to explain away a serious problem: the tendency for the students admitted due to preferences to do relatively poorly in their coursework. When the class average in a calculus course is 85 but the average among the students who were preferentially admitted is 65, people start asking the […]
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FIRE notes that The Student Group Protection Act has passed in Virginia, ending, in one state at least, left-wing activists’ practice of penalizing campus religious and ideologically-oriented groups with which they disagree. Under some college anti-discrimination rules, student Evangelical groups have been defunded or forced off campus for not allowing the election of leaders who reject […]
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By Harvey Silverglate, Juliana DeVries, and Zachary Bloom There’s been a lot of head-scratching of late about how and why a clutch of Harvard administrators searched the email accounts of 16 “resident deans” in a Nixonian effort to find and then plug a leak of utterly inconsequential information about the so-called Harvard “cheating scandal.” But […]
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The year of the extremist continues at CUNY’s Brooklyn College. Fresh off the anti-Israel BDS fiasco, the college has announced that the prestigious Charles Lawrence Memorial Lecture will be delivered by the chairman of Duke’s sociology department, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. Such high-profile figures as John Hope Franklin, Eugene Genovese, William Julius Wilson, and Herbert Gans have […]
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Glenn Reynolds, perhaps the leading libertarian critic of the higher education bubble, has yet another idea for popping that bubble: What if you unbundled the “hotel” functions of a college — classrooms, dorms, student center, etc. — from the teaching function? You could basically have a college without faculty: Get your courses via MOOC, have […]
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Accreditation is rapidly changing. Instead of remaining just a mildly annoying and inefficient barrier to innovation and change in higher education, it is evolving into a major impediment. Increasingly outrageous decisions by power hungry accreditation czars are becoming a serious problem. I have recently written about this issue here, but the problem is growing so […]
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My fellow mammal in residence, Sparky the Orange Cat, wanted out at a party at my home one cold and rainy night, but I knew what would happen–the ritual cat delay in the doorway: a long period of staring and hesitation while I shivered in the cold, followed by his running back into the warm […]
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Richard Pérez-Peña, an unusually shaky New York Times reporter who covers campus sexual misconduct cases and gets many of them wrong, has been corrected by his bosses, though the Times didn’t announce it as a correction and managed to introduce a new error while altering the inaccurate wording of the March 19 story. At issue is […]
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In December, after extended controversy and protest, Michigan passed a right-to- work-law allowing employees to opt out of mandatory union membership and dues. The law goes into effect March 27, leaving all earlier contracts unaffected. Rushing to beat that deadline, Wayne State University has signed a new eight-year contract with its faculty union, and the […]
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New York Times reporter Richard Pérez-Peña has had a disturbing record of slanted coverage of campus sexual assault issues, but he brought his performance to new lows in an article posted to the Times website Tuesday afternoon. MTC readers will doubtless remember Pérez-Peña’s name; he authored the wildly slanted Times exposé on former Yale quarterback […]
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Steven Hayward has accepted a one-year appointment as Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Hayward, who holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Claremont Graduate School, is the author of several books, including volumes on Reagan and Churchill, and has held positions at the American Enterprise Institute, Pacific […]
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In the Sunday New York Times Opinion Section Dan Slater asks, “Does Affirmative Action Do What It Should?” However, his over-2000 word piece provides no semblance of an answer because he misrepresents affirmative action. “Affirmative action policies attempt to compensate for the country’s brutal history of racial discrimination by giving some minority applicants a leg […]
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The end of higher education as we know it is no myth. Say you have three children and they’ll come of college age about two years apart. That’s a lot of money. But what if the college were to make you a deal? Buy one college education at full price, get the next college education […]
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For John Sexton, president of New York University, March came in a like a lion. In one aggravating week Sexton found himself the subject of two biting stories in the press: a no-confidence vote from faculty and focus on $72 million in unexplained NYU loans to Jack Lew and many others. The first was merely […]
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