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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When I attended Northwestern beginning in the late 1950s, most students paid exactly the same tuition, room and board fees. Today, only a minority of college students pay full tuition (“the sticker price”) from their own funds. At exclusive private schools, some students pay nothing for tuition, room and board, but others pay $50,000 or […]
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When I attended Northwestern beginning in the late 1950s, most students paid exactly the same tuition, room and board fees. Today, only a minority of college students pay full tuition (“the sticker price”) from their own funds. At exclusive private schools, some students pay nothing for tuition, room and board, but others pay $50,000 or […]
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Columbia president Lee Bollinger has announced a new commitment to transparency in reporting sexual assault cases on campus, and used the occasion to reveal a new university website detailing revised sexual assault procedures at Columbia. The new policy’s specifics won’t come as any surprise. As has almost become routine, Columbia’s policy violates basic principles of due process […]
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The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) has a new State of College Admission Report that “provides a detailed look at some of the long-term trends observed in data collected by NACAC over the last ten years” as well as “a recap of some shorter-term observations.” For some unstated reason its release has been delayed, but […]
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Cross-posted from E21 President Obama delivered a mixed performance on higher-education issues in his State of the Union address. As college tuition continues to grow, debt loads increase, and delinquency and default rates on that debt rise accordingly, it’s more important than ever that students come out of college with promising employment prospects. To that […]
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Recent studies say two things about the liberal arts. They’re very important…and they’re in a parlous state. To figure out why they’re in trouble, ACTA looked at America’s finest liberal arts colleges in our new report, Education or Reputation? In addition to classic ACTA topics such as general education and academic freedom, we report on […]
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As the Obama Administration steps up the federal effort against an alleged epidemic of campus rape, some states are contemplating measures of their own. A recent Newsweek story on a bill pending in the California State Assembly, discussed by K.C. Johnson on Minding the Campus, raises a number of troubling issues: among them, potential spillover from the campus crusade […]
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The following is a letter to Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, and other campus officials by two student leaders of a campus libertarian group: We are writing to you to voice our concerns about the state of the intellectual climate on campus. Last week, Provost Pollack addressed an email to the […]
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On January 9th, Minding the Campus and the Manhattan Institute hosted Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit fame) for a lecture on his recently released book, The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. C-SPAN was there to film his talk, and has just made it available online here.
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The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is on the warpath again. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that the OCR has launched an investigation of Penn State. And while Penn State is an institution that is hardly deserving of sympathy, given the exposés of the Freeh Report, the OCR’s move has to raise eyebrows. The Penn State […]
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Clayton Christensen’s 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, posed the question, why do good companies fail? In industries ranging from computers to telephones to cameras to stock markets, the companies that monitored market trends, tended to their customers, and invested in high-returning capital capsized in a sea of start-up innovations (PCs, cell phones, digital cameras, and online markets, in these cases). […]
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Wednesday’s announcement of a White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault is the culmination of the Obama Administration’s years-long efforts in support for the feminist crusade against campus rape. It is too early to tell what new remedies for sexual assault on campus the task force will propose. So far, however, the initiative relies on the […]
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The National Institutes of Health is worried that it, or somebody, is discriminating against blacks. According to a long article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, NIH “shocked itself in 2011 with a study that found a wide race-based variance in its grant awards,” and it is still struggling to explain that variance. That 2011 […]
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I’ve written previously about the scandal at the University of North Carolina, where for several years, students (who were disproportionately members of UNC athletics teams) took no-show courses in the Department of African and Afro-American Studies. UNC has, not altogether convincingly, maintained that the scandal is solely an academic scandal and is solely confined to […]
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The MLA meeting of the delegate assembly to debate the resolution criticizing Israeli policies has received ample publicity, including Cary Nelson’s vehement opposition in the Wall Street Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Nelson’s statement elicited a reply at the Chronicle by one of the sponsors of the resolution, Bruce Robbins of Columbia University, […]
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Conservative critics have long argued two related points against liberals: 1) that modern liberalism has turned its back on what for generations, even centuries, was one of its foundational principles, that individuals should be treated by the state “without regard” to race, creed, or color, and 2) that its abandonment of that principle was so […]
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By now the arguments for and against “diversity” are so numerous, so heatedly argued that squabbling pro- and anti-diversifiers have become the academic equivalent of the prisoners who memorized their joke book and hence no longer need actually to tell the jokes; simply stating “No. 14” or “No. 36” is sufficient. (As an example, I am particularly […]
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Some updates on two of the Title IX lawsuits filed by male students accused of sexual assault and disciplined through college tribunals. In the Vassar lawsuit, discovery has commenced, and Vassar has until February 3 to turn over material to Peter Yu’s attorneys. Presumably this material will include documents on the shadowy organization–the Interpersonal Violence […]
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Readers of the New York Times might be forgiven for experiencing a bit of whiplash. Last year, when Brooklyn College’s political science department voted to officially support an event demanding a boycott of Israeli academics, the Times hailed the department as a heroic defender of academic freedom. Earlier this week, however, the paper portrayed the […]
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By Jonathan Marks The Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association narrowly passed a resolution last Saturday urging the State Department to “contest Israel’s denial of entry to the West Bank by U.S. academics who have been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian universities.” The anti-Israel movement within academia will try to […]
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The ongoing hype over MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) parallels the cold fusion debacle of 1989. The technology sounded like a panacea, a cheap and endless source of energy. Then it flopped. Another great notion down the drain. Similarly, educational entrepreneurs once believed that massive online courses would revolutionize higher education. MOOC providers, partnering with […]
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Cross-posted from Open Market Crime rates are not the same for different racial groups, and student misconduct rates aren’t, either. The Supreme Court ruled many years ago that such racial disparities don’t prove racism or unconstitutional discrimination. But in guidance issued last week by the Justice and Education Departments, the Obama Administration signaled that it will hold school districts […]
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