How do the fine arts fit with the liberal arts? Not as well as one might think. Painting, music, photography, and other arts are often part of today’s jumbled curriculum, but they seldom have the academic status of disciplines such as English and art history. The situation is reversed when it comes to public status, where having a prize-winning […]
Read More
“It has come to this,” Justice Scalia begins his devastating concurring opinion in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, referring with near-boiling incredulity to the fact that the Court was required to “confront a frighteningly bizarre question: Does the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbid what its text plainly requires? Needless to […]
Read More
Graduate education in the humanities is in a deep crisis. The causes are complicated, but the basic reality is simple: there are more and more applicants for fewer and fewer positions on the tenure-track, or even with multiyear contracts. In my own field of political theory, which is technically in the social sciences but functions more […]
Read More
Dear Azusa President Jon Wallace, I read with interest that you have disinvited the distinguished scholar Charles Murray as a speaker tomorrow at your university, Azusa Pacific. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Cancelling speeches is a hallowed campus tradition, like pantie raids were in the 1950s. But have you done it the wrong way […]
Read More
I was scheduled to speak tomorrow to you and your fellow students at Azusa Pacific University. I was going to talk about my new book, “The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting Ahead,” and was looking forward to it. But it has been “postponed.” Why? An email from your president, Jon Wallace, to my employer, the American […]
Read More
Dartmouth president Philip Hanlon recently gave a state-of-the-college address concerning disciplinary matters on campus. Dartmouth clearly wanted the address to receive attention—the college leaked the full text to the Washington Post, which dutifully reproduced it online and did a lengthy article about it. In highly charged language, Hanlon charged that “Dartmouth’s promise is being hijacked […]
Read More
President Obama and three of his predecessors and assorted civil rights luminaries (Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, John Lewis) gathered recently at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and, belatedly, to honor the memory of Lyndon Johnson, who engineered its passage. (For years Democrats fled […]
Read More
As a child I relished picking through rocks to find fossils of the lush tropical swamp that once covered my corner of southwest Pennsylvania. On trips to Ohio I collected specimens of the briny brachiopods that littered the floor of an inland ocean. Climate changes. I knew that by age seven. Whether it is changing […]
Read More
The other day, the New York Times published a lengthy investigative piece on Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston. Much of the article, written by Walt Bogdanich, has little to do with higher education, per se–the Tallahassee Police Department comes across very poorly. Winston come across even worse, since the Times reveals that he was involved […]
Read More
For years, Washington has failed to make universities accountable to the students and taxpayers funding them. This failure was epitomized by the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act, which forbade the Department of Education from creating a “student unit record system, an education bar code system, or any other system that tracks individual students over time.” The bill, argued the […]
Read More
I couldn’t miss the eye-catching headline on Diane Ravitch’s influential blog: “Schneider Schools Sol Stern on the Common Core.” Mercedes Schneider, a Louisiana teacher, is one of Ravitch’s loyal allies in the education-reform wars. Ravitch thinks she’s a great investigator and often cites her work. Actually, what Schneider excels at is promulgating conspiracy theories and […]
Read More
“As Erin Ching, a student at 60-grand-a-year Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, put it in her college newspaper the other day: ‘What really bothered me is the whole idea that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.’ Yeah, who needs that? There speaks the voice of a generation: celebrate […]
Read More
Five years ago, I told the sad tale of curricular decline at the University of Chicago, whose core curriculum changes had met widespread national criticism ten years earlier. I am disappointed to report that the university’s offerings have declined further since 2009. The University of Chicago’s Core was once the gold standard in higher education. Though it went through many changes, when it […]
Read More
Minding the Campus’s recent symposium on the liberal arts’ troubles was enlightening and timely. Many of the contributors offered stirring defenses of a classical, liberal arts education that emphasized the indispensability of the humanities to pursuing a rich and vibrant intellectual life. I’d like to add several points to the discussion. Symposium contributors properly shared […]
Read More
In an unexpected burst of common sense, Oberlin College has tabled its new policy on “trigger warnings,” the alerts that were scheduled to be given to sensitive students about upcoming class material that might traumatize them. The warnings directly concerned sex, violence and racism, but were called for across the board “to anything that might […]
Read More
This past weekend, the Florida State football team held its spring football game. Most of the media attention focused on quarterback Jameis Winston, who had also spent much of his spring playing for the FSU baseball team. Winston, of course, is by this point also well-known for events off the football field or the baseball […]
Read More
Here’s a scary statistic about American higher-ed: more than 40 percent of college students don’t graduate. But that number hides enormous variations in drop-out behavior. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center has issued a “state supplement” report filled with interesting statistics; Here are some: Completion rates are vastly lower for part-time students relative to full-time ones; Students […]
Read More
It’s an old canard that Asian students outperform Americans on international tests of math, science, and reading skills because their schools emphasize rote memorization. In contrast, American schools are said to foster creative thinking, which supposedly leads to better problem-solving skills. However, new research upends this narrative. The New York Times reports that while American […]
Read More
Cross-posted from the Volokh Conspiracy In a previous post, I noted that Brandeis University had previously declined to disinvite a controversial commencement honoree (Tony Kushner), on the grounds that Brandeis honors people for their achievements without vetting their political views. This conflicts with Brandeis’s stated rationale for disinviting Hirsi Ali; Brandeis acknowledges that it continues […]
Read More
Today’s respondents to our symposium question, “Should we be unhappy that the liberal arts are going down?,” are Patrick Deneen, Peter Wood, and Peter Lawler. * * * .Patrick Deneen, Notre Dame We should be unhappy that the liberal arts are “going down” in theory but not in fact. Because the liberal arts, of course, have already […]
Read More
Do you need a college degree to get elected president? Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who doesn’t have one, wants to know. As Walker begins contemplating his 2016 presidential bid, John Fund reports, his incomplete education is raising concerns among Republicans. Walker started college at Marquette University but dropped out to join the Red Cross. […]
Read More
Cross-posted from Open Market Earlier, we wrote about a Wisconsin town whose ordinance holds parents liable for bullying by their children, including certain speech. We and law professor Eugene Volokh noted that this raised serious First Amendment issues. Now, a New Jersey judge has done the same thing by judicial construction, by allowing New Jersey school districts to drag […]
Read More
As students and their families rethink the value of the liberal arts, defenders of traditional education are understandably ambivalent. On the one hand, the diminished stature of the liberal arts seems long overdue, and this critical reevaluation might lead to thoughtful reform. On the other, this reevaluation might doom the liberal arts to irrelevance. To that […]
Read More
Sensibly enough, the Wall Street Journal berated Phil Hanlon, the president of Dartmouth, for mishandling the two-day takeover of the university administration building by a small group of diversity-obsessed students. Instead of the obvious move–having the protesters tossed out–Hanlon met with them, then announced: “Their grievance, in short, is that they don’t feel like Dartmouth […]
Read More
For this exchange I accept Peter’s characterization that I made ten major points in my original rebuttal and will proceed accordingly. 1. The issue of evidence Peter doesn’t really dispute my claim that his critique of the Common Core was supported by little evidence and no citations from the actual Common Core document. […]
Read More
Fisher v. University of Texas was the most eagerly (or anxiously) anticipated Supreme Court case of the last several years. Opponents of affirmative action hoped (and supporters feared) that it would, finally, fire a silver bullet into the heart of racial preference policies. It did not, but what it did do (if anything) has been […]
Read More
These are slightly edited remarks delivered by Professor Mead at a Manhattan Institute luncheon on April 1 in New York City. He is James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and he currently teaches American foreign policy at Yale. He has served as Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and […]
Read More
My friend Sol Stern has published a rejoinder here to two essays I recently published about the Common Core K-12 State Standards. Sol had quite a bit to say and I have replied point by point in an essay on the National Association of Scholars website. What follows is an abbreviated account. Sol makes, by […]
Read More
The conventional wisdom among higher education historians is that government was uninvolved in the development of American higher education before the Civil War. In “Myth Busting: The Laissez Faire Origins of American Higher Education,” published recently in The Independent Review, I refute this view using a framework that compares the actual political economy during the […]
Read More
Sometimes it is hard to take affirmative action seriously, or to distinguish it from parody (or often, tragedy). A case in point is a recent decision by a three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upholding the dismissal of a discrimination complaint by Dr. Marvin Thrash, a former faculty […]
Read More