In settling a dispute at the University of Montana, the federal government decided to impose a “blueprint” that envisioned speech codes at virtually all American universities. An outcry arose from all ideological quarters. George Will criticized the arrangement–but so too did the liberal editorial page of the Los Angeles Times and such usual defenders of […]
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At many large universities with an undergraduate college of education, the education school is regarded by students and faculty alike as the weak link, sometimes something of an embarrassment. None of the top dozen or so universities in rankings compiled by magazines like US News or Forbes typically even has an undergraduate ed school, in contrast […]
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When I began by academic career in 1965 as a graduate student in political science, the social sciences seemed on the verge of curing the world’s problems. We were scientists; we had statistics and computers, every student studied scientific methodology, and the National Science Foundation funded our endeavors. Alas, a half century later, pessimism prevails. […]
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Earlier this spring, CUNY scored a coup when it announced that David Petraeus, former Director of Central Intelligence and commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, would be joining the CUNY faculty as a visiting professor of public policy, in the Macaulay Honors College. (The Honors College, one of the most important legacies of […]
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The Sunday New York Times this week included one of those impressive (and expensive) full-page ads that appear when an interest group wants to make a Big Statement. The new ad, sponsored by the Washington Higher Education Secretariat (WHES), is addressed to all of us. It declares in all-caps, “DIVERSITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION REMAINS AN […]
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The City University of New York’s “Black Male Initiative” is inherently segregative and discriminatory against whites, Asians, other non-whites and all women. In protest, I sent the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) substantial documentary evidence of how programs at three CUNY colleges, in violation of civil rights laws, had specified that their […]
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As reported here and here, the Regents of the University of Colorado have voted to commission a survey of the political climate on the Boulder campus. I spoke at the meeting, and the discussion was less complicated than one might expect given the history of liberal bias topics at Colorado and elsewhere in the last […]
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From the National Association of Scholars’ 100 Great Ideas for Higher Education It would be great and interesting for all concerned if every college student had to present a one-hour talk on some topic on which he had recently done research and written a substantial paper. Too few college students–if any other than the salutatorian and […]
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As the 20th century drew to a close, women had started to outpace men on university campuses, and as doctors, lawyers, psychologists, biologists and managers. As a group, they lived longer and epidemiologists described them as healthier and happier. Yet a raft of books about professional women published around the millennium placed them firmly […]
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What is valuable, one-of-a-kind and can’t be copied while retaining its original worth? The high-end art market. It contains thousands of works of art whose value is determined by what any individual or group is willing to pay. As the prices for such works of art escalate, something almost magical happens: the value pushes most […]
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Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin has posted a critique of my Minding The Campus commentary worrying that the Supreme Court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas could have the paradoxical effect of entrenching racial preferences for decades. Ilya makes reasonable points, and he may turn out to be right. I respectfully disagree, as […]
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In a previous post on this site I announced a plan for the creation of MOOA, or massive, open, online administrations that would supplant the thousands of separate administrations currently managing the affairs of America’s colleges. The MOOA idea was, of course, satire. However, I must report that two educational consultants contacted me to offer […]
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Among the several “the sky is falling!” arguments we hear about higher education is that the current generation is “in danger” of being the first generation of Americans that will be “less educated” than the generation before it. In that formulation, “less educated” means having fewer years of formal education. With a somewhat smaller number […]
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As a critic of the current regime of very large racial preferences, I hope that Fisher v. University of Texas opens the way for a healthy shift of the focus in such lawsuits from legal abstractions to the growing body of evidence that large preferences harm many intended beneficiaries and reduce socioeconomic diversity. I detailed […]
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Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for a 7-1 majority (Justice Kagan recused herself), disappointed both left and right today with his opinion for the Court in Fisher v. Texas, vacating the Fifth Circuit’s decision and remanding it “[b]ecause the Fifth Circuit did not hold the University to the demanding burden of strict scrutiny” required, he said, […]
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The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has just issued the Heart of the Matter, a 61-page report (plus appendices) aimed at persuading Congress to spend more money on the humanities. This is one of the report’s immediate goals, phrased of course in the financial imperative, “Increase investment in research and discovery.” The report as […]
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Quitting school is suddenly popular. The “un-schooling movement,” which claims that school is too expensive, too disengaged from the job market, and too elitist for smart, independent youth, has become the darling of hipsters, free spirits, and do-it-yourself-ers everywhere. Take Dale Stephens, the twenty-year-old entrepreneur who was home-schooled until age twelve and educated himself using […]
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Professor Benjamin Ginsberg’s plans for MOOA (Massive Open Online Administrations) are moving along. The MOOA will first tackle the issue of mission statements. Surprisingly, many schools failed to develop mission statements until recently. For instance, the University of Rochester lacked a mission statement until 2009. Ginsberg said he was personally surprised that a school without […]
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Sophisticated consumers of higher education always understood that unless they were very wealthy they would rarely have to pay the full sticker price of college. By contrast, information-poor students, often from lower income families, were often unaware that a college’s stated price was not really the price. Believing that high-priced schools were clearly unaffordable, many high-achieving […]
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This is an excerpt from “The Higher Education Scandal,” an article by Harvey C. Mansfield in the Spring issue of The Claremont Review of Books. He is professor of government at Harvard and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. *** It seems that liberals, even those critical of American education, are not inclined to […]
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Tablet has a typically superb exposé by Jamie Kirchick of the “pinkwashing” conference, held late in the spring semester at the CUNY Graduate Center. I had previously written about the concept; the “pinkwasher” theorists allege, without evidence, that Israel uses its generally positive record on gay rights to obscure its allegedly evil treatment of the […]
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Two recent academic-tinged scandals in college athletics seem saturated in political correctness. At the University of North Carolina, some student-athletes (as well as some non-athletes) benefited from taking no-show classes. The university brought in former governor Jim Martin to conduct a blue-ribbon review; Martin’s report indicated that the problem was solely on the academic side […]
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As a professor of political science, I can’t help but be concerned with all the enthusiasm about “civic engagement” as some radically transformative, disruptive, “Copernican” revolution in higher education. All the literature that makes such bogus claims is rife with management-speak barely masking progressive ideology. It makes the agenda-driven proclamation that the point of higher […]
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As colleges begin using massive open online courses (MOOC) to reduce faculty costs, a Johns Hopkins University professor has announced plans for MOOA (massive open online administrations). Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg, author of The Fall of the Faculty, says that many colleges and universities face the same administrative issues every day. By having one experienced group […]
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In the ideal world, academic unions stand as guardians of academic freedom. In the real world, too often they cling to the status quo, resisting needed reforms, opposing meritocracy, and working to stifle campus dissent. Then there’s the CUNY faculty union (the Professional Staff Congress), whose leading figures act as if their goal in life […]
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Articles touting “diversity” often tell us more than they intend to, frequently by casual comments off the main topic or by what is not said at all. Three articles from the past few days provide good examples of the subtext being more interesting, and more revealing of the nuts and bolts of “diversity,” than the […]
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Inside Higher Ed reporter Allie Grasgreen has a piece today lionizing the students who’ve filed Title IX complaints to minimize the already weak due process protections for students accused of sexual assault on campus. (Richard Pérez–Peña covered this exact same topic and in some instances the exact same people, albeit in an even more fawning fashion, a […]
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For forty years I labored in the groves of Academe as professor and dean. Though I learned many lessons in this four decade period, three of them are worth noting. NYU, the place I called academic home, transformed itself from a “commuter school” into a “world class university” with campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai […]
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This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education has a story on diversity in higher education that begins, “Despite decades of antidiscrimination policies and affirmations of equality, there’s still little racial and ethnic diversity at the top at many of the colleges.” And last year, as legal challenges to affirmative action were building, the Board of Directors […]
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The growing fossil-fuel divestment movement on campus is the “first effective opposition” to the fossil fuel industry, according to writer and activist Bill McKibben. Across the country, students alarmed about climate change are urging their colleges to disinvest their endowment funds (“divest”) from petroleum-extracting companies. They have been garnering headlines in recent months, and, according […]
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