Some cautious (and perhaps unexpected) good news from the Department of Education. Inside Higher Ed reports that the new DOE rules regarding the Clery Act are not nearly as troublesome as many, including me, had feared. (I formally commented on the rules here.) The new rules contain two positive items. The first, and most important, […]
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It seems as if periods emerge where sexual assault issues tend to focus on a single university. Even in the aftermath of the lacrosse case, attention remained on Duke–in part because of the civil suits, in part because the university, rather than learning from its mistakes, adopted a new policy that could brand a student […]
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The Common Core State Standards have their critics, left and right, and some of the objections are worth listening to. Although the Common Core train has left the station, we still don’t know whether it will reach its destination of producing more literate and knowledgeable citizens. So it would be useful to have an informed debate about […]
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By Greg Lukianoff and Ari Cohn The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) receives countless requests from professors claiming that they’ve suffered in hiring and promotion because of their political or personal viewpoints. These cases are notoriously hard to prove and to win–and that’s why University of North Carolina-Wilmington professor Dr. Mike Adams’ court […]
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If you take a train from Spain to France, you’ll halt at the border, exit the train, and board another train on the other side. The stop isn’t an exercise in border security. There’s a much smaller reason: 237 millimeters, to be exact. In Spain, most trains run on a gauge of 1672 millimeters, while in […]
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A freshman in a sociology class at the University of Wisconsin (Whitewater) recorded “a guest lecturer denouncing many Republicans as racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, and dishonest.” To his surprise, he–rather than the Republican-bashing lecturer–became the issue. Since the 1970s, the university has required permission to record and distribute classroom discussion, and now seems bent on […]
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For decades critics have lamented that big time college sports have a corrupting influence on college and university campuses. Big time sports push aside the educational goals of the university, recruit athletes to campus who have little interest or aptitude for learning, turn football and basketball coaches into national celebrities, and in general create a […]
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BuzzFeed is uncritically fascinated with “rape culture.” Combine that with Occidental, a college where a male student can be branded a rapist even if his partner says “yes,” and the result is an article by Jessica Testa. Her BuzzFeed article, which reads as if it comes from the Onion, provides an unintentional commentary into how […]
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Here’s some more evidence for those who wonder whether a college degree is “worth it.” The online job portal CareerBuilder announced last week that more employers are requiring their employees to hold an associate’s or bachelor’s degree. 27 percent of the surveyed employers said that they increased “educational requirements” for obtaining a job in the past five years, […]
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If you’re interested in the worrisome growth of student debt, check out my new essay for National Affairs. I explain how the student debt crisis came about, explore some of the suggested reforms, and offer my own solution. In short, I argue that the federal government should stop calculating loan awards on the basis of individual colleges’ cost of […]
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E21 The excitement of the NCAA tournament continues this weekend with the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight, but the final four schools in terms of athletic subsidies have already been decided. While all of their teams lost in the second round of the basketball tournament, the universities of Massachusetts Amherst, Delaware, Western Michigan, and New […]
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The Gettysburg Address is just over 300 words long, while the Declaration of Independence is 1,137 and entire U.S. Constitution is 4,400 words. But the Obama Administration’s new rules pertaining to “gainful employment,” applicable to many higher-education institutions, including virtually all “for-profit” ones, run about 185,000 words and 841 pages, slightly longer than the Bible’s […]
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The reason that Sandra Y.L. Korn’s article in the Harvard Crimson went viral is that she audaciously wrote what so many sophisticated Americans now think: that “academic justice” should be privileged over “academic freedom.” The Harvard undergraduate contends that self-evidently unjust opinions contradicting both the findings of academic studies and politically correct university policy should be banned […]
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From Volokh: A patient police interrogator tries hard to draw some common sense from the mind of a feminist studies professor.
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A philosophy professor and a journalism student are involved in an unusual he-said she-said sex case at Northwestern. The student filed a federal Title IX lawsuit last month, alleging that professor Peter Ludlow sexually assaulted her two years ago and that the school took no disciplinary action, despite finding that he had engaged in “unwelcome and inappropriate […]
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Cross-posted from SeeThruEdu New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently set off a firestorm by saying he wants to reintroduce state-funded college classes in state prisons. He wants classes in 10 prisons as a trial. Such classes were defunded in the 1990s. Meanwhile bipartisan federal legislation would give time credit for prisoners in education programs. Cuomo’s proposal does raise interesting […]
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Cross-posted from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity The subject matters of arts and humanities, like philosophy and English, are often viewed as being too far removed from daily life to be useful outside of the academic world. Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, claims that a student not in a STEM field […]
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Anyone who follows the contemporary media closely is doubtless familiar with the suddenly ubiquitous phrase “rape culture.” In the context of higher education, the phrase implies two interlocking beliefs. First: despite crime statistics showing sexual assault (as well as all violent crimes) to be very uncommon on campus, colleges and universities are, in fact, hotbeds […]
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Changes in the SAT, announced on March 5 by the College Board, adjust the test to the ongoing decline in the nation’s public schools. The new test lightens vocabulary and math and eliminates the penalty for bad guessing. The new SAT grows out of and accommodates the Common Core State Standards, the controversial set of […]
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A college commencement is a splendid time to celebrate student achievement. But it’s “disinvitation season” again, as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education observes: the time when intolerant students and faculty advocate against their school’s choice of commencement speaker, sometimes causing the speaker to be disinvited. These power-hungry protesters demonstrate how little they have learned […]
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This week I watched the eighth and final set of lectures for “Introduction to Sustainability,” the Coursera MOOC I’ve been taking and chronicling over the past few weeks. This week’s topic was “measuring sustainability.” Seated before a camera, a photo of Utah’s Arches National Park behind him, Professor Tomkin opened his lecture just as he’s […]
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More often than one might think, Americans on the “Right” agree with Americans on the “Left” when it comes to higher education. A few years ago, the Pope Center hosted an event that brought together three critics from each wing of the political spectrum to explore the intersection of their views. I suspect that there will be […]
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In something close to a first-of-its-kind decision (in a similar case filed against Holy Cross, the judge sided with the university; comparable cases against Vassar and St. Joe’s remain pending), U.S. District Court judge Arthur Spiegel has upheld much of the lawsuit filed by former Xavier basketball player Dez Wells against the university. A gender […]
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Twenty years ago, critics such as Christina Hoff Sommers, Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, and Karen Lehrman described the bizarre “therapeutic pedagogy” in many women’s studies classrooms, where female students were frequently encouraged to share traumatic or intimate experiences in supportive “safe spaces.” Today, at many colleges, academic therapism has spread to other fields. Welcome to the age of the trigger […]
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Another day, another report on “gender inequities” in STEM fields. Early Academic Career Pathways in STEM: Do Gender and Family Status Matter? , just released by the American Institutes for Research, begins by summarizing the familiar litany of laments: not enough women on STEM faculties, and the few there “are more likely than men to be […]
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This is an excerpt from remarks by Professor Robert Paquette, co-founder of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, on winning the Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick Prize for Academic Freedom, Friday, March 7, at the CPAC convention in Maryland. The award is sponsored by the American Conservative Union Foundation and the Lynde and […]
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A major theme of my Duke lacrosse blog has been the almost complete lack of accountability for statements and judgments on the case made by academics and journalists. Duke’s trustees awarded the institution’s feckless president, Richard Brodhead, another five-year term. No fewer than four members of the Group of 88–the faculty who rushed to judgment […]
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The College Board is reformulating the SAT. Again. The new changes, like others that have been instituted since the mid 1990s, are driven by politics. David Coleman, head of the College Board, is also the chief architect of the Common Core K-12 State Standards, which are now mired in controversy across the country. Coleman’s initiative in revising the […]
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When you stop and think, it’s unfair to the many writers at the New York Times who produce columns that don’t have an ideological edge, to tar them with the brush that is rightly applied to its overwhelmingly unfair and unbalanced editorial pages. Just because the most conspicuous part of a newspaper is terribly slanted […]
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One of the biggest challenges MOOCs face is facilitating community and conversations among students. The MOOC I’m taking, “Introduction to Sustainability,” has three main kinds of discussion forums where students can start conversation “threads” and respond to others: 1) one for general discussion in which people post about anything they think is relevant; 2) video […]
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