In response to questions from the Washington Examiner’s Ashe Schow, a spokesperson for Iowa senator Charles Grassley made a telling admission that has received insufficient attention. “The university,” the spokesperson noted, “will be responsible for any new requirements in the bill and be responsible to find the funds within its budget, whether that be from […]
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History News Network In 2012, the College Board released a new set of standards for the Advanced Placement United States History (APUSH) course. APUSH vanishes some figures who would seem indispensable to any basic history of the United States. This is American history seemingly without Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. “Seemingly” is a key word. If you […]
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There’s nothing wrong with the first sentence of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s new report, “Affirmative Action and Human Capital Development,” which defines affirmative action as “the practice of granting preferential treatment to under-represented (UR) demographic groups,” but it’s down hill from there. The descent begins in the second sentence, which states that “It […]
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As student debt continues to climb and reform fails to materialize, it’s not surprising that some politicians are capitalizing on their constituents’ frustration. In fact, some of the brightest stars on both sides of the partisan divide are taking up the cause of student loan reform. Senator Marco Rubio, who seems likely to run for […]
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A group chaired by CUNY Board of Trustees chairman Benno Schmidt recently published a report entitled, “Governance for a New Era.” (I was part of the group, which included a variety of trustees, presidents, administrators, and faculty members.) The report, which has received considerable attention, urges trustees (and, working under the direction of trustees, senior […]
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Examiner Scheming politicians, opportunists, and grifters have latched onto the recent panic over a supposed “rape culture” on college campuses to clamp down on activities having nothing to do with rape. In some cases, they have imposed regulations that take away student opportunities and harm small businesses. Never mind that, as Wikipedia recently noted, there has been a […]
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Scores of colleges, from Goucher to Harvard, now feature “Undead Studies,” that is, academic work on zombies and vampires. Depending on your point of view, this is either yet another indicator of the debasement of higher education, or a playful way to attach serious thinking to not very serious expressions of popular culture. Frivolous or not, it takes […]
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In a speech delivered to a joint session of Congress fewer than two weeks after September 11th, the much maligned President Bush repeatedly distinguished between the radical Muslims who had attacked us and Muslims in general. Toward the end of the speech, he reminded Americans not to single out Arabs or Muslims for the actions of a […]
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The Republican National Committee adopted a resolution on August 8 criticizing the College Board’s new Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) course and exam. The RNC called for the College Board to “delay the implementation” of APUSH for one year and convene a committee to draft a new framework “consistent with” the traditional mission of the […]
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Apart from the Steven Salaita affair (best analyzed by Northwestern law professor Steven Lubet) and the occasional, if typical, borderline anti-Semitic comment from a member of Columbia’s Middle Eastern studies department, the summer has been surprisingly quiet, given events in the region, in academic denunciations of Israel. Until now. A group of 45 historians prepared […]
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In the fourth consecutive court ruling of its type (following Xavier, St. Joe’s, and Duke), a federal judge in Vermont has sided with an accused student in a due process lawsuit. In a previously below-the-radar filing, a student named Luke Benning sued Marlboro College after the school suspended him for three semesters for sexual assault. […]
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Hardly a day goes by that policymakers, educational leaders and corporate executives don’t lament the “STEM crisis,” the alleged shortage of American workers trained in science, technology, engineering and math. These warnings come so often that the “crisis” is now perceived as an uncontested fact. Tapping America’s Potential (TAP), for instance, a group of some […]
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To the surprise of many, three Republican U.S. senators have joined the Democrats in supporting the weakening of due process rights of students accused of rape and sexual assault in campus hearings. Along with earlier answers from Marco Rubio, the offices of two additional Republican senators, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Chuck Grassley of […]
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Library of Law and Liberty Tim Groseclose has confirmed that he is one of America’s leading conservative commentators with the publication of Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA. It may seem an odd role for Groseclose, for six years the Marvin Hoffenberg Chair of American Politics at UCLA and a […]
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The “Room for Debate” section at the New York Times recentlyexamined the issue of campus claims of sexual assault. But the “debate” more accurately an imbalanced exchange—perhaps unsurprising given the Times’ almost wholly one-sided coverage of this issue in its news pages. FIRE’s Samantha Harris made a typically compelling case for the importance of due […]
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The University of Florida (UF) recently eliminated its last remaining speech code, removing all restrictions on constitutionally protected expression from its student policies. This does more than earn UF the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s (FIRE) highest, “green light” rating for free speech; it allows students at the university to comfortably express themselves and […]
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The big academic news this week is that Princeton seems to be abandoning its war against grade inflation. It really wasn’t a war against inflation, because grades actually stabilized at a high level a while ago. The effort was to stop giving most students A’s. Princeton had barely achieved its goal, with 43% of students “earning” […]
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From City Journal: “How good-natured joshing turned two college football teammates—one black, one white–into pariahs. Rarely does the modern Left’s humorlessness, authoritarianism, and subversion of its own goals come together as starkly as in this case.”
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You should formulate your response to the case of Steven Salaita cautiously. Salaita, a professor at the University of Illinois, was unhired following public outcry over his declamations against Israel, Jews, and defenders of Israel on Twitter. If you don’t defend him, you can’t defend right-wingers who express themselves in similarly strong language. “No individual loses […]
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This article is third in a series on “the year that was” in higher education. The first two articles are here and here. Campus activism is, by and large, the world of make-believe. Whenever students occupy a president’s office, Tinkerbell is not far away. Whenever faculty demand a boycott, Professor Dumbledore winks at Professor Snape.
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Liberty Unyielding It is a conflict of interest — and sometimes a violation of the Constitution — for a fine to go to the very unit of government that employs the judge or official who imposed the fine. That gives the official an incentive to find the accused guilty in order to enrich the official’s […]
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When my daughter Jessie was applying to graduate school, I asked one of my tennis buddies with a PhD from Caltech whether he thought Caltech would give Jessie any preference since there are so few women in physics. He replied cautiously that his impression was that Caltech had remained pretty steadfastly meritocratic, so she was […]
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The OCR’s “Dear Colleague” letter (2011) from the Obama Department of Education can be seen as a convenient starting point for the current war on campus due process for accused students—but a handful of elite schools actually made moves earlier.
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“Will Wesleyan Be the Next School to Do Away With Frats?” That was the headline that ran on a Newsweek story in March. And the most likely answer to that question is “Yes.” As Newsweek staff writer Zach Schonfeld, himself an alumnus of the elite 183-year-old liberal-arts college in Middletown, Connecticut, wrote, there’s now “a […]
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This is an edited version of a talk sponsored by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy and published Aug. 6 on the Pope Center site. The talk was given on Milton Friedman Day, July 31 in Wilmington, North Carolina. *** Too often, American college students face a one-question test, one based not […]
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For anyone still in doubt, a deeply statistical analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research— complete with “Epanechinikov kernels” and “Silverman bandwidths” — of the effect of banning racial preferences in admission to the the UC Berkeley (Boalt Hall) and UCLA law schools demonstrates that eliminating racial preference reduces the numbers of previously preferred […]
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This is an excerpt from Roger Kimball’s Wall St. Journal review of “Seeking the North Star,” a collection of essays by the late John R. Silber, academic reformer and president of Boston University. *** Silber was often labeled “conservative.” In fact, and as he always insisted, he was a liberal of the old school. He […]
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The College Fix When news broke that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would be paid $225,000 to address an October fundraiser for the UNLV Foundation, you could only imagine student reaction. Recent tuition hikes on UNLV students, including a four-year, 17 percent hike passed a few weeks earlier, only compounded the outrage. For students working to afford the […]
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This article is second in a series on “the year that was” in higher education. The 2013-4 academic year featured a steady assault on campus due process, resulting from a loose alliance between the Obama administration (especially its Office for Civil Rights) and self-appointed “activists,” their faculty supporters, and a handful of higher-ed journalists. The year concluded […]
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Two updates on the congressional efforts to mandate weakened due process protections on campus. First, the Washington Examiner’s Ashe Schow sent a list of questions to the eight co-sponsors of the Senate “Campus Accountability and Safety Act.” Only one office—that of Marco Rubio (R-Florida)—appears to have responded. The spokesperson’s comments would do little to reassure […]
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