A sign of the times: Yale, Penn, and George Washington University are now suing their former students for defaulting on their student loans. The loans in question are Perkins loans, which are set aside for poor students and disbursed by colleges rather than the federal government and. This news broke shortly after the Wall Street […]
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Let us look at the typical liberal/progressive American who supported President Obama in 2012, who enthusiastically favors raising taxes on the affluent, and who supports most federal programs designed to help economically disadvantaged Americans. My guess is this individual also probably supports vastly expanding federal financial aid to college students, favors increased state appropriations for […]
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It seems that higher education reform has found its voice. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor gave a speech earlier today at the American Enterprise Institute on the role of the federal government in creating economic opportunities for families, and he devoted a good amount of attention to the failings of our higher education system. He […]
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The Intercollegiate Review has news: To fulfill the religion requirement at the Jesuit-run College of the Holy Cross, students can study “Gardens and World Religions,” learning about world foliage instead of actual faiths. We can think of other hard-hitting religion courses Holy Cross could add: How about “The Phrase ‘Holy Moley’ in Batman and Robin: […]
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Connecticut governor Daniel Malloy recently made a splash with a plan to spend $1.5 billion expanding the University of Connecticut’s science, technology, engineering and math programs, thus–he thinks — turning his state into a magnet for high-tech employers. Alas, the idea of using educational central planning to boost the economic fortunesof a state is beset with problems. […]
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American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times defending online higher education by appealing to his own experience with distance-learning and correspondence schools. As a nontraditional student, he enrolled in Thomas Edison State College, a distance learning university, and he also received college credits through correspondence schools. As […]
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It turns out that “easy A” classes can lead to complications–even at Harvard. Last week the university announced that around 60 students were asked to withdraw for one to two years after a cheating scandal emerged from the much-derided “Introduction to Congress” course. The students who enrolled in the course last Spring did so on […]
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The National Association of Scholars issued a significant study of U.S. history teaching at the University of Texas-Austin and Texas A & M last month that has evoked heated commentary from the history profession. The report examines basic history instruction and instructors at the two flagship campuses of the Texas university system and determines that […]
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In early 2012, Yale University admitted that its campus grounds are a hotbed of violent crime–far more dangerous, in fact, than the surrounding high-crime areas of New Haven. That, at least, was the finding of a document produced by Deputy Provost Stephanie Spangler, who claimed to offer a “comprehensive, semi-annual report of complaints of sexual […]
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Professor Benjamin Ginsberg’s concern over the burgeoning administrative bureaucracies on many campuses is well-placed, but I fear that his proposed remedy of applying the provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) in the academy would be doomed from the outset and might even exacerbate the problem. SOX was designed to prevent corporate malfeasance and outright fraud […]
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I’m not sure whether student loan debt is exaggerated on other campuses, but here at Brooklyn College the amount of debt is surely overstated. The faculty of CUNY, which includes BC, has consistently protested tuition hikes, on grounds that student debt is unacceptably high. But my new survey of BC students found that few have […]
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The New York Daily News had a question yesterday about the coming anti-Israel hatefest in the city: “Why is Brooklyn College’s political science department officially sponsoring a one-sided event that calls for divestment, boycotts and sanctions against Israel?” As they have done on other campuses, anti-Israel activists talk colleges into sponsoring events featuring rabid Israel haters (in […]
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Standardized tests are often about as popular as the messenger murdered for bringing bad news — and if it were up to their critics, would meet the same fate. Their “disparate impact” on minorities (most recently discussed here) provides one of the standard justifications for continuing affirmative action. Now their use seems to be seeping […]
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I accepted some warm invitations from the Federalist Society chapters at law schools in the chilly Midwest and spoke last week at Indiana University, Notre Dame, and the University of Michigan about Fisher v. University of Texas, the case before the Supreme Court challenging the use of racial preferences in university admissions. Here’s an edited […]
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Two university presidents are in the news. Mitch Daniels, until recently Governor of Indiana, became Purdue’s president amidst much publicity. Arguably the most important leader in American higher education, Mark Yudof, announced he is retiring as the head of the University of California, having previously run the universities of Minnesota and Texas. Just recently, another […]
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Most of the controversy over affirmative action in higher education concerns undergraduate admissions, but the American Educational Research Association has just published what it calls “important findings on the impact of banning affirmative action” in six fields of graduate study — natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, business, education, and humanities – in four states that […]
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The New York Times is featuring a debate of sorts, marred somewhat by structuring matters so that all six debaters are on the same side. The topic, “Is Divestment an Effective Means of Protest?,” refers to campus protests against “big oil.” The arguments yielded no disagreement on whether oil and gas companies are contemptible villains–that […]
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Why are recent college graduates underemployed?, asks a report out today from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP). The answer, says the report, is that “a growing disconnect has evolved between employer needs and the volume and nature of college training of students, and that the growth of supply of college-educated labor is […]
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Brooklyn College – my home institution — doesn’t exactly enjoy the best reputation for fair-mindedness regarding Israel. A few years ago, the institution embarrassed itself by requiring incoming freshmen to read one and only one book, written by Moustafa Bayoumi, containing unsubstantiated, inflammatory attacks on U.S. policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. To its credit, the […]
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One of the main findings of this year’s American Freshman Survey Is the drift of 2012 first-year college students toward the political center. The report collects 2008 and 2012 results and finds that “in one significant point of comparison, students moved toward the center in self-perceived political orientation, with the ‘middle-of-the-road’ category growing from 43.3% […]
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Sen. Marco Rubio spoke out again this week on the importance of higher education as a support for the middle class. Unlike many other high-profile proponents of higher ed reform, he believes Washington lacks an appreciation for technical education. So he proposed making federally-backed student loans available to those seeking technical degrees online as well […]
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For the past 20 years, most of our history departments have had an almost monomaniacal emphasis in on the issues of race, class, gender, and ethnicity in American history. Meanwhile, there has not been enough attention paid to the history of American politics, economics, culture, and the military. Having taught at the University of Texas […]
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Troy Duster, a past president of the American Sociological Association and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley’s Warren Institute for Law and Social Policy, has a long Chronicle of Higher Education article that is usefully if unwittingly revealing and instructive because it so perfectly reflects both the profound misunderstanding of their critics […]
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Despite the billions of dollars showered on our schools, American public education is poor to mediocre and likely to remain so. Only 7% of our grade 8 students reach the Advanced level in mathematics, suggesting why little advanced coursework in mathematics and science can be taught in our high schools. In contrast, from 27 to […]
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One reason disparate impact theory has become such a standard element in institutional affairs is that it is so simple. It begins and ends on a basic numerical axiom: if a practice affects an identity group disproportionately, we have some kind of bias at work. It offers as evidence only a ratio, for instance, a […]
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Last week we posted Heather Mac Donald’s criticism of an off-beat student project at Phillips Andover Academy on”The Perversion of the American Dream: Deconstructing Media Portrayals of Sex Workers through Analysis and Real Narratives.” The student, Nikita Singareddy, writing on Facebook, protested the article and Heather Mac Donald responds here. *** Nikita Singareddy: Normally, I wouldn’t […]
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Not Bhaskar Sunkara, the 23-year-old founder of Jacobin magazine. He’s marshaled allies from within the university to convince the American people otherwise. The New York Times recently featured a flattering profile of Sunkara, an alumnus of George Washington University who founded his magazine while on medical leave in his sophomore year. The piece, which notes […]
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Stanford Law School has opened the nation’s first law clinic for the defense of religious liberty. As examples of the type of cases it will handle, the school cited Seventh-day Adventists fired by Fed Ex for refusing to work on Saturdays, a Muslim group challenging land-use laws that prohibit building of mosques, and a Native […]
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The new report from Moody’s Investors Service, casting doubt on the financial state of affairs in higher education, has provoked a good deal of anxiety. The report referenced five revenue streams affecting all public universities. Two (philanthropy and endowments) deal primarily with broad, macro-economic trends over which university leaders have little, if any, control. On […]
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In 2004, the Duke Conservative Union conducted a study of the political affiliations of the Duke humanities faculty, finding an overwhelming (142-8) tilt toward the Democrats. In and of itself, this discovery had many plausible explanations, though the overwhelming partisan discrepancy did raise eyebrows. (Full disclosure: I’m a registered and strongly partisan Democrat.) But reaction […]
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