The New Criterion The social scientist Neil Gross made a splash last year with his book Why Are Professors Liberal, and Why Do Conservatives Care?, which, among other things, attempted to refute the claim that conservatives face ideological discrimination in academic hiring. There is some quantitative evidence (with more on the way soon) of ideological discrimination, […]
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The long-awaited bill from Missouri senator Claire McCaskill (co-sponsored by seven other senators, two Democrats and three Republicans) has now been introduced in the Senate. Given that McCaskill’s springtime town halls featured no defense attorneys or civil libertarians, it’s unsurprising that the bill contained nothing about the rights of accused students. As FIRE has pointed […]
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Brett Sokolow has been a model of inconsistency in the campus “rape wars.” As president of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management (NCHERM), he has carved out a reputation as a foe of due process, but he surprised almost everyone this past spring by suggesting that he had knowledge of between eight and […]
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Slavoj Žižek is “the world’s hippest philosopher,” according to the UK’s Telegraph. Indeed, the Slovenian-born philosopher has won over adoring fans by combining references to Hegel, Freud, popular culture, and warmed-over postmodernism, and calling it philosophy. His stature is such that students can take classes on his thought and professors can contribute to a peer-reviewed […]
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This article is first in a series on “the year that was” in higher education. This last school year has been more than a little distressing for those who care about free speech and academic freedom on our nation’s college and university campuses. And it’s not because of any change in the legal understanding of free […]
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Trustees shouldn’t step too far out of line, says Richard D. Legon, the President of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, in a recent piece for Inside Higher Ed. Legon refers to the case of Wallace Hall, the University of Texas regent who investigated corruption in the UT system by requesting troves […]
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The issuance of the “Dear Colleague” letter in 2011 triggered a race to the bottom for due process in the Ivy League. The contest began with Yale, which adopted a new sexual assault policy that prevented accused students from presenting evidence of innocence in “informal” complaints and redefined the concept beyond recognition in formal complaints. […]
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William Deresiewicz has a provocative piece of advice in this month’s New Republic: “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League.” Deresiewicz, a Columbia graduate and former Yale professor, argues that elite institutions often produce students who are entitled and lack purpose. He also suggests that elite schools promote inequality by catering mostly to high-income […]
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Colleges are cashing in credential inflation. In a recent essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Kevin Carey notes that many “not-for-profit” colleges operate highly profitable terminal master’s programs in fields such as business administration, education, and public administration that are indistinguishable from the two-year vocational offerings of most “for-profit” colleges. He therefore argues that […]
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Does the University of Wisconsin-Madison have a plan to introduce diversity in grading—making sure that African Americans, Hispanics and other non-Asian minorities get the same proportion of good marks as whites and Asians? No. “Nothing could be further from the truth,’ said Professor Patrick Sims, UW Chief Diversity Officer and interim Vice Provost for Diversity […]
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Earlier this week, Huffington Post’s Tyler Kingkade published an article strongly critical of FIRE’s efforts to shine light on Occidental College’s troubling approach to due process. The article implied—without saying so directly—that FIRE was responsible for alleged harassment towards anti-due process activists on the campus. The underlying skepticism about the free exchange of information might […]
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How would you feel if everyone could see your college GPA? Students generally don’t need to worry thanks to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which prohibits schools from releasing a student’s information without their or their parents’ explicit permission. However, an exception to these regulations threatens student privacy. Consider Emory University, for instance. […]
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Articles by Professor W. Lee Hansen at the Pope Center site and by John Leo here at Minding the Campus attracted wide attention last week by deploring a suggestion in a diversity report at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that called for, among other things, the “proportional participation” of underrepresented racial/ethnic groups “in the distribution of […]
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MTC contributor KC Johnson first made waves with his stunning work on the Duke lacrosse case of 2006. His reporting, which revealed how the accused students were repeatedly denied their due process rights, first appeared on his blog and later in Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, the definitive account of the case […]
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Just as a new conflict breaks out between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East, the professoriate’s bias against Israel is resurfacing in novel, ugly ways. The Washington Free Beacon has exposed an anti-Israel listserv at Brandeis University, where faculty members expressed concerns about Israelis harvesting organs, referred to the President of Brandeis and his wife […]
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Parents considering sending the child to Swarthmore College no longer can claim they weren’t warned. The Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer had a lengthy and quite well-done article examining the increasing lawsuits filed by students accused of sexual assault who were victimized by a lack of due process in campus disciplinary proceedings. Most of the cases the article […]
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Here’s my reaction when I saw the title of “The Great Accreditation Farce,” Peter Conn’s recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Finally, someone’s telling the truth. Our system of accreditation of colleges is indeed a farce, a waste of “millions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours.” To please external examiners, faculty […]
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Politicians and pundits who argue that college today is financially unsustainable and functionally obsolete are not just arguing for greater efficiency and more reliance on educational technology, they are pushing for a kind of higher education rationing. They may not have the courage to say it outright, but what they are really envisioning is a […]
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A remarkable article on the University of Wisconsin (Madison) appeared yesterday on the John William Pope Center site. In it, UW economics professor W. Lee Hansen writes about a comprehensive diversity plan prepared for the already diversity-obsessed campus. The report, thousands of words long, is mostly eye-glazing diversity babble, filled with terms like “compositional diversity,” […]
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The crusade to weaken due process rights of students accused of sexual assault traveled this week to Dartmouth, which is hosting a one-week conference entitled, “Summit on Sexual Assault.” As FIRE’s Peter Bonilla pointed out, the “matter of due process for accused didn’t make the agenda”; the presenters don’t include any civil libertarians or defense […]
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Most of the sturm and drang about discrimination for the past week or two has involved bitter disputes over recent Supreme Court decisions (Hobby Lobby and Wheaton College) that spared a few Christians from being thrown into the lion’s den of Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate. Now comes a rude reminder that the “Diversity” Vampire is still […]
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Since the 19th century, regionally-based accrediting bodies that use peer-based evaluation have determined which colleges and universities can stay open. Knowing the power that these agencies hold, schools usually march in lockstep to accommodate them. After all, the consequence of losing accreditation means a loss of federal funds (most commonly, student loan dollars). The mission […]
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Here’s some good news for those of us concerned about the lack of due process on campus sexual assault cases. Three women whose sons were brought to campus tribunals on charges of sexual misconduct have just launched Families Advocating for Campus Equality (FACE), an organization committed to “ensuring fairness and due process for all parties […]
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After the Titanic struck the iceberg, the ship’s captain and senior executives were said to be unworried. How could their mighty ship sink? The hubris and arrogance of the ship’s captain and senior officers was astonishing. They seemed to believe that because they were handsomely recompensed, resplendent in their uniforms and saluted by their toadies, […]
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Moody’s Investors Service has a new report on the state of American public higher-education, and it isn’t pretty. Among the negative trends it discusses: The decline in enrollment. Moody’s reports that more than half of America’s public universities saw no growth or declines in fall 2013. The growing importance of tuition. Tuition now constitutes almost half of public […]
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What does the state of on-campus housing tell us about the state of American higher-ed? A lot, as it turns out. Last week NBC News described the growth of a market in palatial student dormitories. Critics have long known that in promoting themselves, colleges tend to highlight their luxurious facilities—not their academic programs. Students, in […]
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Sunday’s New York Times ran a lengthy story on what appears to be a mishandled allegation of sexual assault at Hobart and William Smith. (This was one of at least a dozen articles the Times has run on the topic, even as the “paper of record” has yet to run even one article on any […]
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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) provider Coursera wants to change the way we think about the revolutionary learning platform. In response to arguments that MOOCs are too impersonal, in November it announced partnerships with nine institutions that would create thirty “learning hubs,” where students taking the same MOOC could physically meet to discuss the course […]
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The news media took little notice when 14 organizations and religious leaders, including Rick Warren, Christianity Today and Catholic Charities, sent a letter to President Obama last week seeking religious exemptions from his forthcoming executive order barring federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. But the Boston Globe and gay activists noticed […]
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Over the past several months, Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri) has emerged as the Senate’s most ferocious opponent of campus due process. One of the upper chamber’s unequivocal defenders of the Office for Civil Rights, McCaskill also attempted to browbeat the American Council of Education for representing its members, and convened several town hall sessions on campus […]
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