Chief Justice Roberts, with the four liberal justices in tow, upheld Obamacare only because it was (or could be construed as) a tax, not a penalty. Try telling that to the University of Virginia or the editors of the Charlottesville Daily Progress, whose lead article March 14, under the big, bold headline “‘Obamacare’ to swallow […]
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John Dewey said the job of education was to free students from the intellectual captivity imposed by “village truths,” the groupthink version of reality they had grown up with. But the irony now is that liberalism, once created in opposition to small-town traditionalism, has generated its own all-encompassing “village truths” creating conformism on today’s campus. Students are now subject to a […]
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A friend recently sent me an article entitled “University Presidents – Speak Out!” published in The Nation, a periodical I mostly avoid. In the article, author Scott Sherman laments that university presidents don’t air their views more often on the “big issues.” His idea of an estimable college leader is someone like Lee Bollinger of Columbia […]
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Can it be that “it is not left-wing academics, but ideologues of the radical right, who are pursuing political correctness in American universities?” No, not really, but that’s what the 1960’s activist and historian, and more recently labor lawyer, Staughton Lynd, argues on The History News Network site. In a hagiographic obituary for historian Herbert Shapiro, Lynd charges that the right has […]
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Nearly two years after the Office of Civil Rights ordered all universities to lower the procedural threshold through which accused students can be found guilty of sexual assault, the New York Times turned its attention to the issue–via a five-person “Room for Debate” item. Superficially, the segment seemed balanced: two essays in favor the policy, […]
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Reposted from Open Market We live in a culture where harsh but truthful criticism, or exposure of wrongdoing, is viewed by some as “bullying,” especially when it affects someone’s inflated “self-esteem.” Some examples: DePaul University has punished a student for publicizing the names of fellow students who admitted vandalizing […]
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The lesson to draw from the Harvard email episode is simple: a university is a business and everyone who works there is an employee. The Harvard administration combed through email accounts of resident deans in order to track down leaks regarding last year’s cheating scandal. The cheating happened last year when students were discovered to […]
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Andrew P. Kelly and KC Deane Despite our better instincts, we looked at Andrew Leonard’s recent piece on the conservative plot to “wreck higher-ed.” He begins with an oft-heard although accurate lament about public colleges: state funding is decreasing while costs and prices continue to climb. However, Leonard’s argument quickly veers into conspiracy-land: There’s a […]
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A recent piece from CNNMoney has noted the deflating value of a bachelor’s degree. Although community college degrees are frequently perceived as less “prestigious” than a four-year B.A., it turns out that nearly 30% of Americans with Associate’s degrees now make more than those with Bachelor’s degrees, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and […]
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Hamilton College has a diversity problem–though it’s not what you think. The college has created a sizable bureaucratic apparatus to enforce its particular brand of “inclusiveness.” The apparatus has grown so vast and intertwined over the years that the college had to establish a “Diversity Coordinating Council” comprised of the Chief Diversity Officer, the Director […]
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My sorry academic discipline, anthropology, has been in the news the last few weeks. Napoleon Chagnon broke his long silence by publishing a memoir, Noble Savages, about his work among the South American Yanomamo Indians and the long nightmare of politically correct recrimination that greeted his work. Chagnon was infamously accused of infamy by a […]
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University of Chicago economics professor Gary Becker, recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize, maintains a consistently interesting blog with the prolific law professor Richard Posner. Recently, Becker responded to a Posner post (on reasons to change our system of legal education) with an argument that “higher education is still a very good investment.” I submit […]
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In 1999, I was a sophomore at the University of Houston when Dr. Ross M. Lence invited me to participate in a small, graduate seminar entirely dedicated to John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. It was an experience I will never forget. During the first few weeks, I found myself utterly unprepared for the rigor […]
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Hateful graffiti at Oberlin College have drawn national attention (NY Times, CNN) and caused turmoil on campus. The graffiti, which included nasty words for blacks and gays, swastikas and “whites only” scrawled on a water fountain, prompted a big anti-hate rally, outpourings of emotion and a one-day cancellation of all classes. Though written slurs can […]
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As part of sex weekend, Yale held a seminar last Saturday on an ever-vexing question– “Sex: Am I normal?” Obvious answer: “Of course you are.” The visiting guarantor of normalcy this year was one Jill McDevitt, billed as “the only person in the world with all three of their degrees–b.a., m.a, ph.d.—- in sex!” (Exclamation […]
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As some readers of Minding the Campus know, since last summer I’ve been embroiled in a legal controversy with Duke. The battle ended last week, when, facing a potential defeat before the US. District Court in Maine, Duke withdrew its subpoenas. The affair spoke volumes about the indifference to First Amendment values at one of […]
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Here’s David Frum hilariously quoting an all-gibberish explanation by Columbia Professor Joseph Massad on why gay rights are a Western imposition on the Muslim world: “…capitalism is the universalizing means of production and it has produced its own intimate forms and modes of framing capitalist relations, these forms and modes have not been institutionalized across […]
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This past weekend the National Association of Scholars celebrated its 25th anniversary with a conference in New York attended by more than 250 guests. The concluding dinner on Saturday night featured Tom Wolfe as the keynote speaker. The […]
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Peter Sacks’s recent piece attacks a straw man. He argues against advocates for eliminating all federal aid to colleges, a powerless faction if there ever was one. In so doing he sidesteps the very real failings of our higher-ed policy. Sacks claims that capitalistic systems requires educated citizens. Far from controversial. However, he contends that since […]
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Inside Higher Ed features a somewhat odd analysis about a study by the AHA comparing words in the titles of dissertations that appeared between 1920 and 1960 with those that appeared in the last 20 years. According to IHE‘s Scott Jaschik, “For the recent titles, some of the analysis may challenge conventional wisdom about the […]
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One of the enduring operative principles of higher education has been reliance upon professors to do their work diligently and conscientiously without the eye of a monitor upon them. Yes, there are tenure reviews and other periodic reviews of faculty performance, but the day-to-day functioning of faculty members in their teaching and research has largely gone […]
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Some critics have called for a near-total rollback of the government’s involvement with higher education, including the end of subsidies to low-income students. Last month, for instance, Jarrett Skorup of Michigan Capitol Confidential.com suggested that state and federal governments should quit subsidizing higher education altogether because the aid fails to improve individual economic prospects or […]
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From the National Association of Scholars’ 100 Great Ideas for Higher Education *** Many colleges and universities today use student evaluation questionnaires to evaluate a teacher’s performance. The origin of this seemingly benign tool has much to do with its abuse as a weapon of conformity. The student protesters of the 1960s demanded greater “participation” in […]
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You’d think that after the recent debacle at Brooklyn College, anti-Israel fanatics would give CUNY a break. Guess again. The CUNY Graduate Center has scheduled for this spring a conference on “pinkwashing.” For the uninitiated, “pinkwashing” is the almost comical claim that that the Israeli government highlights its record on gay rights to detract attention […]
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The math is in. Harvard Law School confirmed today that although women are 51 percent of the nation’s population and 48 percent of the law school’s new students, only 20.4 percent of the school’s board of editors have been found to be female. Yielding to no one in the ceaseless quest to enhance its reproductive-organ […]
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Though many commentators have expressed skepticism over the future of traditional higher-ed, at least one group anticipates a bright future: real-estate developers. The Wall Street Journal reports today that some of the largest developers in the United States are gobbling up land to make way for palatial student dorms. Why? As it turns out, student housing is basically recession-proof: […]
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Indebted college graduates have recently begun to ask whether a four-year college education is worth what it costs. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal on February 11, for example, 23-year-old Bryce Harrison, who graduated last May from Goucher College with a political-science degree and about $100,000 in student loans to repay, is […]
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A new study of what high school achievement tests predict about the performance of California high school graduates in their first year at in-state community colleges has found “disturbing” achievement gaps. The study measured students’ performance on the California Standards Test as high school juniors against their first year community college performance in four areas: […]
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A fantastic New York Times piece yesterday shed light on Thomas Edison State College, an accredited state college in New Jersey. The article highlights TESC’s model of awarding credits to students based on demonstrating competency, not earning credits in situ, as is the norm at many schools. Many TESC students, earn credits by cobbling together […]
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Almost everyone is aware of the statistics-based morality on race and ethnicity: if any admired group does not contain the correct proportion of African-Americans and Hispanics, bias can reasonably be inferred. The same bag of statistical assertions which animated much appropriate (and some inappropriate) legal and social change has, of course, migrated over to discussions […]
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