This is the headline today on Joe Asch’s Dartblog, an established and very readable blog about Dartmouth: Breaking: Frats Survive (for now); Hard Liquor Goes; Moral Education Returns The reference is to a plan by University president Phil Hanlon to deal with Dartmouth’s outstanding reputation for binge-drinking, feminist accusations of “rape culture,” and angry faculty […]
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These days, Americans are talking a lot about underinflated footballs and overinflated student debt loads. In the latter camp you’ll find the president of Purdue University (and former governor of Indiana) Mitch Daniels. On January 28, he contributed an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled “How Student Debt Harms the Economy.” Daniels points […]
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CEI Bad things can happen when an agency (like the Education Department) throws caution to the wind and regulates based on slanted media coverage from National Public Radio, rather than facts and evidence. Checks and balances exist for a reason. When agencies impose new obligations on the institutions they regulate, they are supposed to first […]
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As a former journalist who joined academe, I was often struck by the obscurity of administration-faculty communication. Murkiness prevailed, along with the absence of clear subjects and verbs, and worse: the absence of clear meaning and intention. “Say what you mean and mean what you say” was more like “say it sort of like you […]
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Last year, when the White House campus sexual assault task force issued its due process-unfriendly recommendations, the document excluded one critical item: how colleges and universities should coordinate with local law enforcement agencies. That item was promised at a later date; it now has appeared. As expected, the document gave little reason to believe that […]
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In the latest college to settle a due process lawsuit instead of defending its policies in court, MassLive reports that Amherst College reached a settlement with an anonymous male student who sued the school after Amherst withheld his degree. The case was unusual in a couple of respects: first, the allegation involved a same-sex rather […]
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On January 14—a Wednesday—Duke University announced its decision to broadcast a Muslim call to prayer (the adhan) on campus at 1:00 every Friday afternoon. An uproar ensued, fueled in part by Franklin Graham (son of Billy Graham) writing about the decision on his Facebook page. The next day, Duke backed down, canceling its plan to issue the amplified adhan from […]
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Inside Higher Ed has a great story today about our friends at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). In July, FIRE’s attorneys launched a legal campaign–the “Stand Up for Speech Litigation Project”– to eliminate campus speech codes. According to the piece, their efforts have already garnered $200,000 in settlements. In these cases, FIRE […]
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Apart from Claire McCaskill, no senator has more aggressively advocated weakening due process protections for students accused of sexual assault than New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand. She continued her anti-due process crusade in two high-profile moves this week. First, Gillibrand invited Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz as her special guest for the State of the Union […]
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If you take a MOOC in statistics to demonstrate your mastery of regression analyses and forecasting, you might get promoted at work. You might also become a statistic yourself. MOOC providers and their third-party consultants collect and mine the massive amounts of data their courses generate. Accordingly, parents, teachers, and legislators are increasingly concerned about […]
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“We don’t live in a rape culture, but ours is a society saturated with gender propaganda.” That’s the opening line of the latest in the “Factual Feminist” series of brief videos by Christina Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute. Here she discusses the gender discourse so prevalent on our campuses.
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Education Views We know that average American students today are not ready for college from two different sources: (1) Renaissance Learning’s latest report on the average reading level of what students in 9-12 choose to read or are assigned to read, and (2) the average reading level of what colleges assign incoming freshmen to read. From […]
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e21 When I finally decided to attend Swarthmore College, a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, my friends and family were scared that I would become “one of those liberals” and proceeded to gift me with elephant-patterned pillows and other dorm decorations as relics of my political standing. After all, they knew Swarthmore as the […]
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The President’s remarks on his free community college proposal didn’t address the concerns raised by higher-ed analysts; in fact, it simply created new ones. When he initially unveiled the plan, President Obama stated that free community college would be limited to students who maintain a 2.5 GPA and make good progress towards completing their degrees. However, […]
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In an intriguing, and encouraging, recent pattern, publications beyond those associated with higher education or civil liberties have started paying attention to the dangerous diminution of due process on campus. Two pieces particularly stand out. First, writing in American Prospect, Harvard law professor and retired federal judge Nancy Gertner vehemently denounced both the new Harvard […]
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As examples of what my academic field, anthropology, has sunk to, here are four responses to the shooting and riots in Ferguson appearing in the current issue of Anthropology News. Each is a retelling of what might be called the left’s canonical myth of Ferguson: facts submerged in a sea of fiction. Pem Davidson Buck, […]
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Perpetuating the journalistic debacle of its hit job on CUNY, The Atlantic has made major corrections to its “article”—yet it refuses to formally withdraw the piece. I had previously critiqued the article, which argued that CUNY’s (allegedly) excessively high admissions standards threatened the university’s central mission and harmed students of color. The thesis was fatally […]
Read MoreAround a decade ago, the leaders of CUNY’s faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress, denounced plans to eliminate remediation at CUNY senior colleges. (This move was part of a pattern in which the PSC opposed virtually every reform proposed by former chancellor Matthew Goldstein.) The move was elitist and harmful to students of color, the […]
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e21 For nearly four years, students at universities across the United States have been fighting to divest their schools’ endowments from the fossil fuel industry. Divestment activists want universities to sell all of their shares in companies involved in fossil fuel extraction and distribution. They claim that divestment will spark a national debate about climate […]
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I’ve been saying for years that American higher education ought to be free, but I’m far from sanguine about President Obama’s college plan. Here’s why: the plan to offer many students two free years at community college fails to take into account the general state of education in this country, from real costs to college […]
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Brian Ferguson, a 20-year-old autistic student, has been suspended from special-needs classes at Navarro College in Texas for mistakenly hugging a woman he did not know and kissing her on the top of her head, according to the student’s mother, Staci Martin. She said, “And then they labeled it ‘sexual assault’ because of the kissing,” […]
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The University of Chicago, on January 6, released a strong report on free expression “articulating the University’s overarching commitment to free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation among all members of the University’s community.” Good. But what did The Maroon, the student newspaper, think of a call for robust free speech? You guessed it—not much. […]
Read MoreLoaded questions — “Have you stopped beating your wife?” — are usually objectionable, but in the case of new rules the University of Virginia just adopted in response to a fraudulent article in Rolling Stone describing a gang rape that did not happen on a night the accused fraternity did not have a party, it […]
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The new year offers an opportunity for campuses across the country to improve their free-speech record. In 2014, the University of Iowa censored a professor’s art display because it caused controversy and offense by commenting on racism, then justified its decision with a self-congratulatory message to the campus community that will surely chill even more […]
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At its early January annual session, the American Historical Association, in a procedural vote, decided not to debate two anti-Israel resolutions proposed by a group called “Historians Against the War.” (Given Hamas’ tendency to wage war against Israel, an outsider might have speculated that the group would be pro-Israel.) For the best analysis of the […]
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Defenders of the higher education establishment often show little understanding of the arguments critics make. As a recent example, I give you this December 22 Washington Post piece by Tufts University professor Daniel Drezner, “I’d like to take this opportunity to triple-dog-dare Peter Thiel.” Thiel is the super-wealthy guy who has been funding sharp and […]
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“The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: if they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades, it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them […]
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Inside Higher Ed has yet another sob story about yet another report — this one from Harvard’s Voices of Diversity project — lamenting that “[w]omen and students of color continue to encounter psychologically damaging racism and sexism on college campuses, creating a climate where students struggle to graduate and are unsure who to turn to […]
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The Fiscal Times Sometimes, the world feels as though it would be better off if everyone went back to kindergarten. At least when I attended that grade, the teachers made us learn a mantra that has stuck with me ever since — Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. […]
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Today (Jan. 7) the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) endorsed the free speech policy statement produced by the Committee on Freedom of Expression at the University of Chicago. Yesterday, the Committee, chaired by esteemed law professor Geoffrey R. Stone, released this powerful new report on the importance of freedom of expression on campus. […]
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