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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Senator Tom Harkin continued his relentless attack on for-profit higher education this week by releasing a report condemning the sector. Specifically, Harkin laments for-profits’ success in enrolling military veterans and earning their Post 9/11 GI Bill revenues. Despite federal efforts to slow the sector’s growth, it successfully enrolled 31% of all veterans in 2012, up […]
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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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