The nauseating combination of ignorance, self-righteousness, entitlement, and boorishness that characterizes campus politics today was on appalling display yesterday at Brown University, as a massive crowd of students prevented New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly from addressing the school. Kelly had come to Brown to talk about the New York Police Department’s unmatched success in […]
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A hundred or more excited students at Brown University shouted down New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly last night and prevented him from speaking on “Proactive Policing.” Shutting down speakers whose messages are out of favor with the left is common. On campus, free speech is regularly trumped by leftist concerns–in this case resentment […]
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Hadley Arkes is the Edward N. Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions at Amherst College. He is something of an institution himself. He is a brilliant scholar but perhaps known as much for his irascible temper and aggressive style of argument as he is for the substance of his positions. The combination of intellectual […]
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Thanks to Obamacare, the situation of adjuncts and other “contingent faculty” has become much more precarious. “Universities are cutting back on their work hours to comply with Obamacare,” the Daily Caller reports, in order to avoid that law’s requirement of benefits to those who work more than 30 hours a week. “Adjunct college instructors,” the […]
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The College Board has released its annual report Trends in College Prices, and never has a seemingly boring document full of tables and graphs revealed more about American higher education. Five observations culled from the data: The rate of increase in tuition fees moderated a good deal this year, continuing a trend, especially at state universities, […]
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NSA-like surveillance on American campuses? Oh, yes. In a fascinating column for the Guardian, FIRE’s Nico Perrino cites examples ranging from Montana to Occidental to Kentucky to Valdosta State to St. Augustine’s College to Johns Hopkins, noting the prevalence of the anti-privacy pattern. Perrino leads by recalling events from earlier this year at Harvard, when […]
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A fascinating facet of the ongoing deflation of the higher education bubble is the scramble by law schools to adjust to their dropping enrollments. At many schools, this enrollment drop has been enormous. Applications to law schools generally are down by 18% this fall, the third year in a row of double-digit drops. Just looking at my home state […]
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“How Amherst Raises Money from Alums: Calling Them a Bunch of Drunken Lechers.” That was the headline on the blog Stupid Girl citing a Newsweek report that Amherst College sent residence counselors an advisory email that included this warning: “Keep an eye out for unwanted sexual advances. A lot of alums come back for Homecoming […]
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Peter Lawler’s “The Downside of MOOCified Disruption” challenges my op-ed, “Confronting MOOC Melancholy.” Let’s start where he and I apparently agree, and see where the logos leads. First, I argue in my piece that higher education suffers from watered-down standards and ideologically-driven instruction. Lawler agrees, writing, “Political correctness has corrupted the humanities and social sciences.” […]
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On the evening of 19 September, about two weeks before the scheduled appearance of Hillary Rodham Clinton as a “Great Names” speaker at Hamilton College, members of the Hamilton College community received an all-campus email from Amit Taneja, head of Hamilton’s Days-Massolo Center. Mr. Taneja, who had been recently elevated to the position “Director of […]
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Student journalists from George Washington University have uncovered a piece of stunning news: Despite GW’s claims to the contrary, its admissions office has begun to favor wealthier students in the admissions process. Essentially, students who do not rank among the top applicants are wait-listed if admissions officers are unsure whether GW can “afford them.” Students […]
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Cross-posted from the College Conservative. Emily Yoffe, author of the widely respected “Dear Prudence” column at Slate, has decided that “the best rape prevention” is to “tell college women to stop getting so wasted.” She argues that drinking is a choice (duh), drinking to extreme excess makes you unable to protect yourself (duh), and then it gets weird: […]
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Despite a delay caused by settlement talks, Vassar has now filed its response to Peter Yu’s Title IX lawsuit. Unlike St. Joe’s, which at least attempted to defend its actions in a similar Title IX suit, Vassar’s response is blunter: the courts should simply trust that the college correctly handles disciplinary matters, even though the […]
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Last week I published a commentary on affirmative action at Inside Higher Ed that laid down a simple proposal. With 30 percent of first-year college students terming themselves “Liberal” or “Far Left,” 47 percent of them “Middle-of-the-road,” and with only 23 percent of them agreeing that “Racial discrimination is no longer a major problem in […]
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The two most potent and ingenious threats to liberal education in our country today are political correctness and techno-libertarian “disruption.” Political correctness has corrupted the humanities and social sciences and politicized higher education by asserting that all inquiry is to be driven by correct opinions about justice. The great books of the past are authoritatively […]
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The principle that a university president should not speak about his prior political experience to political audiences, lest the public cry out for objectivity, is a strange one. Even stranger is the idea, aired recently, that a nonpartisan speech by that president to a nonpartisan but activist audience is enough to raise concerns about undue politicization […]
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In attending yesterday’s oral argument in a case contesting Michigan’s affirmative action ban, I was struck by the enormous evolution of the civil rights movement away from some of its original principles. At issue in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action was the legality of a state constitutional amendment, adopted by Michigan voters in 2006, by a 58-42% […]
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The Supreme Court heard oral argument yesterday in an important Michigan affirmative action case, and the transcript reveals what a strange argument it was. The case is on appeal from the Sixth Circuit, whose eight Democratic-appointed judges had decided, over the bitter dissents of their seven Republican-appointed colleagues, that Michigan voters violated the 14th Amendment’s […]
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The government shutdown has brought scant good news, but there’s at least one positive development: the investigators at the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) have been deemed non-essential. As a result, OCR has been forced to postpone scheduled inspection visits, including one to Yale. That said, the shutdown at some point will end, and upon […]
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When 2013 SAT scores came out last month and showed no significant change from 2012,many educators may have felt not disappointed or neutral, but relieved. That’s because the overall trend since 2006, when the writing component was added, has been downward. Critical reading has dropped seven points, math four points, and writing nine points. In […]
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Swarthmore received considerable media attention this past spring, after several students filed a complaint against the school, alleging that Swarthmore’s sexual assault policy was so faulty that it discriminated against women in violation of Title IX. Neither the complaint nor most media coverage mentioned the specifics of the policy, which in fact was extraordinarily one-sided […]
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Libertarianism is spreading on our college campuses. An unusually large number of politically-minded, frustrated students, who refer to themselves as the “liberty movement,” believe themselves to be part of a rising tide that will restore the country to greatness. Much of the recent growth in libertarian activism emerged after Ron Paul’s 2008 failed presidential bid, […]
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Is it possible to stop the relentless promoting of anti-Americanism on campus? Let’s forget about donating millions for a patriotic “American Studies” program. Recall the Bass family’s sad experience at Yale–the $20 million donation for this purpose was eventually returned. Similarly forget about a governor (e.g., Mitch Daniels) or trustees trying to meddle in classroom instruction. “Academic […]
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Mark Lilla, an essayist, historian of ideas and professor of the humanities at Columbia University, is best known for his books The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics and The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. He is interviewed here by Dean Ball, a student at Hamilton College and former intern at Manhattan Institute. *** Q: You wrote […]
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Ever since Ronald Reagan tried and failed to abolish the U.S. Department of Education, conservatives have found themselves in a quandary when it comes to reforming public higher education. Some continue to insist, rightly, that the Tenth Amendment places the power over education solely in the hands of the individual states. A different group, however, […]
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Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy probably deserves his own chapter in the history of black intellectuals and black legal scholars. Over the years he has told us a great deal — some of it intentionally, with scholarship and skill; some inadvertently or unwittingly –about how race is regarded and debated in the academy, especially the legal academy. […]
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Academic politics can be vicious and hence an often entertaining spectator sport. Still, it is not altogether clear why Howard University president Sidney Ribeau’s recent announcement that he will resign the end of this year — unexpected and even shocking though it was — has attracted so much press attention, and not just in the usual higher education sources. It is true, as […]
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Cross-posted from See Thru Edu. I often try to temper my colleagues’ enthusiasm for the coming wave of “creative destruction” that is about to hit higher education. Certainly there are going to be big changes, but there are also key aspects of higher education that prove resistant to change. This is especially true about online […]
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The downfall of Hugo Schwyzer, gender studies professor and onetime darling of the feminist blogosphere–now revealed as a self-confessed “monstrous hypocrite” and intellectual fraud–has been one of the more bizarre spectacles to unfold recently on the Internet. His strange case offers depressing insights into the sexual politics of the modern academy and the cultural left, […]
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Here’s another Orwellian intervention at a U.S. university by the Federal Government: in response to feminist pressure about the handling (under Title IX and Title IV) of sexual harassment and sexual assault cases on campus, the University of Montana agreed to accept a resolution agreement with the Department of Justice and the Education Department’s Office […]
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