Quite a few people have built careers in higher education around the supposed need to study how different groups compare, and when the inevitable disparities are discovered, setting up programs to address the “underrepresentation problem.” To get a sense of just how deeply ingrained such thinking is, consider this piece from Inside Higher Ed, “The […]
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Odysseus, in Homer’s Odyssey, orders himself tied to the mast of his ship so he can hear the beautiful song of the Sirens without risking the usual gruesome fate of those who sail too close to the singers. This lesson – if you know you are going to make a bad decision you should tie […]
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In the search for substance in the sea of edifying platitudes in commencement addresses, I came upon Ben Bernanke’s thoughtful list of ten suggestions or observations on life after graduation he gave at Princeton’s tradition-laden Baccalaureate. It’s the rare graduation address that’s clearly worthy of commentary, analysis that inevitably generates some criticism. Here is one […]
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Gordon Gee’s sudden retirement from Ohio State (after a widely reported, off-the-cuff slur on Catholics) probably ends a remarkable career of academic leadership almost without parallel in American higher education. For a university president to survive 10 years as president of one institution or 25 years in total as president is very unusual, yet Gee […]
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Joseph Urgo, the President of St. Mary’s College of Maryland, has resigned after a major embarrassment: under his leadership the incoming freshman class is so small–nearly a hundred student fewer than expected–that the school faces a $3.5 million budget shortfall. That shortfall comes after St. Mary’s, a secular private college, greatly simplified its application and […]
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In a letter dated May 9, the federal government dramatically expanded the definition of sexual harassment on campus. In the 31-page letter, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education, informed the president of the University of Montana, Royce […]
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In the academic world, the rules on “diversity” hires generally remain unspoken. Public colleges and universities–and private schools that care about their reputations–can’t well advertise new positions with the tagline, “No white males need apply.” Beyond the legal ramifications, such a move would abandon any pretense that colleges want the best possible faculty for all […]
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Leon Wieseltier has offered a welcome and inspiring set of reflections for the graduating class of Brandeis University and for many beyond that campus. In a time when nearly every campus is experiencing a collapse in confidence in the role of the humanities, and a corresponding rush to justify education purely in terms of narrowly-conceived […]
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This is an excerpt from Dr. Smith’s new book, “Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood and the American Dream-And Why It Matters.” If women were fleeing the nation’s universities and colleges, we would have a national uproar, but men are now fleeing in large numbers and society barely notices. Numbers tell the […]
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Egalitarians never run out of things to complain about. Any statistical disparity between groups causes them to wring their hands and call for action to remedy the “inequity.” The latest outbreak of egalitarian fever has to do with higher education in America, specifically the alleged “rich kid problem.” Jordan Weissman of The Atlantic recently penned […]
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Since Stephen Colbert and Cory Booker occupy divergent spheres of American life, they unsurprisingly chose to deliver very different commencement addresses. Colbert, who spoke at the University of Virginia on May 18, devoted much of his address to taking the University down a few pegs. In addition to ribbing UVA’s founder, Thomas Jefferson–who, Colbert joked, […]
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Eugene Volokh posts a counterintuitive argument (from a civil libertarian’s standpoint) defending the OCR-imposed preponderance-of-evidence standard for campus allegations of sexual assault. Since Volokh advances a much more compelling argument for the change than did the OCR’s “Dear Colleague” letter, the post is worth reading in full. His basic argument: campus allegations of sexual assault […]
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Like a creeping mildew on a shower wall, student fees easily go unnoticed. Yet they grow relentlessly until, one day, you look down in total disgust and there they are. What are student fees next to the mountains of cash poured into tuition, room and board? A few hundred wasted dollars every year among tens […]
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My colleague Richard Vedder once described former Undersecretary of the Department of Education Robert Shireman as “the only guy I ever met whose very appointment to public office destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars in wealth.” Of course, Vedder was referring to the rapid devaluation of publicly traded higher education firms’ stock prices that followed Shireman’s […]
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In the last few months, there’s been a flurry of articles in the mainstream press acknowledging the same problem: a paucity of high-achieving, low-income students at elite colleges. “Better Colleges Failing to Lure Talented Poor,” says the New York Times. ABC tells us “Colleges Struggle to Connect With High-Achieving Poor Students.” Likewise, NPR is concerned […]
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One of the things that strikes me about modern universities is the inordinate amount of lying that goes on -both by institutions and members of the university communities- and how little is done about it. As respect for moral absolutes is replaced with a mushy moral relativism, perhaps a decline in honesty is to be expected. But […]
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The Washington Post notes today that though President Obama’s commencement address at Morehouse College received a “rousing response” from the audience, some of his African-American supporters are less than pleased. Amazingly, they argue that the President has devoted too much time to discussions of black accountability and responsibility. They also suggest that Jesse Jackson has […]
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It’s hard to find a “serious” commencement speech that isn’t about remembering that there’s more to life than power and money. And that the secrets of a successful life include following your passion and finding purpose, not to mention giving back to your community. The president’s speech at Morehouse had a few of these insipid […]
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“F*** Your Constructive Dialogue” reads the headline of an article by Kate Aronoff that’s posted on a website that “seeks to facilitate the discussion of political, cultural, and social issues that are often left out of mainstream discourse.” (The asterisks, as Stanley Kurtz nicely put it, are not in the original.) Ms. Aronoff is a […]
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A few months ago, a post with a shocking claim about misogyny in America began to circulate on Tumblr, the social media site popular with older teens and young adults. It featured a scanned book page section stating that, according to “recent survey data,” when junior high school students in the Midwest were asked what […]
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Columbia professor Joseph Massad has made the news yet again. Small wonder: his recent essay in al Jazeera, entitled “The Last of the Semites,” linked Zionism to Nazism and claimed that all of the good, anti-Zionist Jews perished in the Holocaust, Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg congratulated al Jazeera for having “posted one of the most anti-Jewish screeds in recent […]
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“FIRE is right to note that fair, inclusive enforcement of this mindlessly broad policy is impossible. But I doubt it’s intended to be fairly enforced. I doubt federal officials want or expect it to be used against sex educators, advocates of reproductive choice, anti-porn feminists, or gay rights advocates, if their speech of a sexual […]
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As the Supreme Court prepares its opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas (in which that school’s use of racial and ethnic admissions preferences is challenged), and as our bien pensants continue as always to agonize about the state of race relations in the United States (which are actually quite good, by the way), a […]
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According to a new report released by the American Association of University Professors, the gap between the salaries of faculty at private and public universities is widening. The “Annual Report on the Status of the Profession” found that at the public institutions, full professors averaged $118,054 and assistant […]
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Socioeconomic preferences can be a better proxy for race than race preferences, according to an Inside Higher Ed report this morning on a new study to be published this summer in the Harvard Law & Policy Review. More precisely, the authors, Matthew N. Gaertner, a researcher at Pearson’s Center for College and Career Success and […]
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As everyone but members of the National Ostrich Society now knows, Washington, D.C. is beset by three actual or potential scandals: the Benghazi matter; the IRS’s politicization; and the wiretapping of the Associated Press by the DOJ. These matters are important and call for genuine investigation and concern. But there is another controversy emanating from […]
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By Harvey Silverglate and Juliana DeVries In a breathtakingly bold move, the civil rights offices of both the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have mandated the effective abolition of free speech on college campuses, as well as the almost certain conviction of large numbers of students, many of whom will be innocent, […]
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The Obama administration is currently embroiled in two political scandals, and a third, understandably overshadowed by Benghazi and the IRS, is brewing on our campuses. The Civil Rights offices of both the Education Department and the Justice Department have issued a flabbergasting and clearly unconstitutional assault on free speech, ruling that colleges must eliminate and punish […]
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Cross Posted from the Volokh Conspiracy The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is telling universities to institute speech codes. And not just any old speech codes: Under these speech codes, universities would be required to prohibit students from, for instance, 1. saying “unwelcome” “sexual or […]
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Students at Stanford are the latest to fall victim to the assault on due process mandated by the “Dear Colleague” letter. Last week, the university’s faculty senate approved the “Alternative Review Process,” an across-the-board diminution of due process rights for Stanford students accused of sexual assault. The Office of Civil Rights’ “Dear Colleague” letter, to […]
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