For years, efforts have been made, legal and illegal, to get around the provisions of California’s Prop 209. That’s the 1996 measure that prevents consideration of gender, race or ethnicity in public education, employment or contracting. But for many weeks, it has seemed likely that the overwhelmingly Democratic California legislature would vote to exempt education from […]
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A Chronicle of Higher Education article this week was headlined “Minority Male Students Face Challenge to Achieve at Community Colleges,” and it discussed various successes and failures in that eponymous arena. Particularly intriguing was this passage: And instead of offering small, “boutique” programs for minority students that attract just a few dozen students, [one […]
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Are American colleges really the best in the world? One group that really matters–the business leaders who want to hire college graduates–seem skeptical. A recent poll conducted by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation found that while 37 percent of business leaders believed that the United States has the best system of higher-education, a sizable 32 […]
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College fundraising was up 9 percent last year, says the Council for Aid to Education, but there’s a worrisome statistic: 17 percent of the $34 billion raised went to ten already wealthy institutions. The poorest of the ten is NYU, which already has an endowment of about $3 billion, 28th richest among American colleges and universities. Inequality among […]
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Last week, in the first post of a series chronicling my experiences in the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign’s MOOC “Introduction to Sustainability,” I noted the Darwinian structure of the course. Now more than half-way through the class, I tweak that statement slightly. Survival of the fittest isn’t the right metaphor to describe the winnowing of […]
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Free speech has finally returned to Modesto Junior College. One can only hope that other schools will follow suit. Last September, MJC students Robert Van Tuinen and Megan Rainwater attempted to hand out copies of the U.S. Constitution outside MJC’s student center. It was Constitution Day, after all, and Van Tuinen and Rainwater hoped to […]
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One of the criticisms of affirmative action acknowledged even by many liberals is that the preferential treatment it bestows tends to benefit those who need it least. For example, it is hard to imagine a group of minority students less in need of special, career-enhancing assistance than graduate students in STEM fields at Stanford, Caltech, […]
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In a major victory for academic quality, CUNY students’ ability to complete their degrees in a timely fashion, and basic common sense, New York Supreme Court judge Anil Singh has dismissed a lawsuit filed by the CUNY faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), seeking to eliminate the Pathways curricular initiative. (I wrote about the […]
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An update regarding the issue of campus due process and sexual assault allegations in California: FIRE has a powerful statement condemning SB 967, the California bill designed to codify (and go beyond) the anti-due process approach of the OCR’s “Dear Colleague” letter. FIRE correctly observes that while campus administrators “are neither qualified nor equipped to […]
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“Real learning takes place outside the classroom,” the late communist history professor Howard Zinn famously said. Zinn practiced what he preached and led his students at Spelman College and Boston University on marches and protests. The 1960s saw plenty of teach-ins and marches by students and some radical professors. But even then it would have […]
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By now, Ms. Sandra Y. L. Korn must be wondering whether she picked her words wisely. On Monday, February 17, Ms. Korn, a Harvard senior, published an essay in The Harvard Crimson, titled “The Doctrine of Academic Freedom,” with the explosive sub-head, “Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice.” The Crimson has […]
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The idea that sexual consent requires an explicit “yes”–one step beyond “no means no”–has long been the dogma of feminist anti-rape activists. In the early 1990s, when Ohio-based Antioch College incorporated this principle into its code of student conduct to mandate verbal consent to each new level of intimacy, it was widely ridiculed as political […]
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On Monday, a columnist at the Harvard Crimson came out against academic freedom, because it often interferes with “something I think much more important: academic justice.” Her name is Sandra Y.L Korn, class of 2014, and she is unwilling to tolerate research that threatens her political goals. She writes: “If our university community opposes racism, […]
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In a recent string of tweets, Lindsay Rosenthal, formerly of the Center for American Progress and now at the Ms. Foundation for Women, compared concerns about insufficient due process protections on college campuses to the heavily partisan efforts to impose increased voter restrictions or to level fact-free allegations of “anchor babies”–a comparison, she added, that […]
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Does the college classroom have a “carrying capacity”? The term refers to the theoretical maximum population that a particular environment can nourish (or carry) for an extended period. I’ve been learning about it in “Introduction to Sustainability,” an eight-week MOOC offered on Coursera by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I’m taking the MOOC both because I’m interested in the sustainability dogma on college campuses, and because I’d […]
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Cross-posted from Open Market “The Wandering Dago food truck wants to park and sell food at various events on New York State property. The state says no, because the name is offensive. Does that violate the First Amendment?” The answer is probably yes, says UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh at this link. He recently discussed […]
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The academic left has created a great deal of mischief by appropriating wholesome words for unwholesome ends. This game has been perfected with diversity, inclusion, social justice, and sustainability–all words that mean roughly the opposite of what they sound like. Diversity on college campuses denotes both lockstep conformity on identity group politics and radical stereotyping of people by race. Inclusion means excluding […]
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Is majoring in the liberal arts a bad economic decision? Debra Humphreys and Patrick Kelly don’t think so. In their recent study for the Association for American College and Universities (AACU), they show that liberal arts majors enjoy comparable long-term career prospects as students who obtain degrees in more “useful” fields. Students who study the […]
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“Why could we not expel a student based on an allegation?” That astonishing question was posed at a conference on how colleges respond to sexual assault issues by Amanda Childress, Sexual Assault Awareness Program coordinator at Dartmouth. According to Inside Higher Ed, Childress continued: “It seems to me that we value fair and equitable processes […]
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On February 6 the Maine Heritage Policy Center sponsored a small conference in Brunswick, Maine. The idea was to present a follow-up to the National Association of Scholars’ lengthy study, What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students, by following one of its many threads. KC Johnson, one of the speakers, published […]
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Critics of American higher education usually focus on the deficiencies of college graduates —for example, their critical thinking isn’t much better than that of college freshmen, or they increasingly end up in relatively low-paying jobs requiring few high-level skills. Yet an indefatigable retired South Carolina college professor, sometime state legislator and relentless purveyor of collegiate […]
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Speaking at the nation’s largest community college (Miami Dade), Senator Marco Rubio proposed some very specific ideas on higher education that deserve serious consideration. Rubio recognizes that our federal student financial assistance program has enabled colleges to raise fees: “these hiked tuition rates….form a free subsidy for colleges…which use the funds to finance a myriad […]
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An unusual article appears in the Education Life section of Sunday’s New York Times. The headline is disturbing: “If She Can’t Stop Him, YOU CAN. Bystander intervention may be the best hope to reduce sexual assault on campus.” The strong implication here, and in the article, is 1) that rape is out of control on […]
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The Maine Heritage Policy Center, coordinating with the National Association of Scholars, hosted an event last Thursday continuing the conversation regarding the NAS’ comprehensive report on what Bowdoin does (and does not) teach. The event, in which I participated, focused on the theme of global citizenship. In his dismissive response to the NAS report, Bowdoin […]
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In 2011, I published The Fall of the Faculty pointing to the problem of accelerating administrative bloat at America’s colleges and universities. The book’s reception exceeded my expectations with professors throughout the United States (as well as Canada and Europe) writing to me with stories of mismanagement, administrative incompetence, bureaucratic waste and fraud and the sheer […]
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Karen Straughan, a soft-spoken Canadian activist, gave a controversial speech last night at Ryerson University in Toronto. Her topic was, “Are Men Obsolete? Feminism, Free Speech and the Censorship of Men’s Issues.” This is not a favored topic at Ryerson. Last March, the Ryerson Student Union banned the formation of any campus group dealing with […]
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By Andrew P. Kelly and Awilda Rodriguez Last fall, President Obama unveiled a controversial plan to promote college affordability by changing the way the federal government distributes student financial aid. The proposal calls for a new system of federal college ratings that would measure how well colleges perform on measures of access, affordability, and student […]
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Yale has released the latest of its biannual reports regarding sexual assault claims handled through the university’s due process-unfriendly disciplinary system. The report testifies to some interesting changes, strongly suggesting that Yale adjudicates sexual assault claims less on a principle of justice and more out of a concern with avoiding negative public relations. The background […]
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By Peter Augustine Lawler The president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, was asked by The Wall Street Journal to defend the skyrocketing cost of attending her university. The total residential cost, now $60,000, has risen much more quickly than the rate of inflation. She assures us that not only Harvard but the other relatively nonelite […]
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By Ron Lipsman The essays that appear on this site are often critical of academic faculty. The criticism is frequently legitimate, as faculty are oftentimes complicit in the formulation and execution of academic policies that should garner disapproval. Alas, faculty are too often found at the forefront of efforts to: install speech constraints on the […]
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