The joke goes like this: When Brezhnev first became President he invited his elderly mother to come up and see his suite of offices in the Kremlin and then put her in his limousine and drove her to his fabulous apartment there in Moscow. She spoke not a word. Then he put her in his […]
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Sixty-six percent of the graduates of my alma mater earn more than people who have only a high-school diploma. This fact comes courtesy of the U.S. Department of Education’s new “College Scorecard.” I took advantage of the online interactive system to see how well Haverford College alumni stack up in the race to achieve financial […]
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In the week that a new organization, Heterodox Academy, was established to press for more ideological diversity in academic life, the learned association in my own profession showed how much it is needed. The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) sent around a notice of its prospective annual meeting, highlighting its most prominent speakers. Of the […]
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The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has dismissed the longstanding discrimination complaints of Asian Americans, giving Ivy League and other institutions a green light to continue chromatically contouring the results of their “holistic” admissions processes so that applicants who are black or brown or red consistently are admitted with lower academic scores than […]
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The College Fix published an interesting article, “Department of Education shredded for lawless overreach in Senate hearing.” It was about Congress getting annoyed with the Education Department for illegally imposing mandates on colleges and schools out of thin air, without even going through rulemaking or the notice and comment required by the Administrative Procedure Act […]
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On September 17 a committee of the Regents of the University of California discussed at their regular meeting a proposed “Statement of Principles against Intolerance” that had been drafted and offered for their approval by President Janet Napolitano and her staff. The Regents resoundingly rejected the draft, by implication questioning Napolitano’s judgment that it was […]
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The often-debunked statistic on campus sexual assault, that one in five women can expect to be attacked, has reappeared, inflated once more–this time to 23 percent–in a survey by the Association of American Universities (AAU), with the expected headlines from the expected quarters, such as The New York Times. The general critiques of previous campus […]
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A bizarre incident happened last week at University of Buffalo. Someone posted signs reading “White Only” or “Black Only” at the entrance to bathrooms and above drinking fountains around campus. Students were shocked and outraged, USA Today and other outlets reported. Police were called in to remove the signs and investigate. The Black Student Union called a […]
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Last week came two more court decisions involving due process and campus sexual assault. The first, which involved a student at Case Western Reserve University, had Judge Christopher Boyko (a George W. Bush appointee) ruling that it was plausible the accused student was innocent and the CWRU had manufactured inculpatory evidence—but there was nothing he […]
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School is back in session but not much has changed in the world of higher education. Tuition continues to become less affordable, student debt continues to rise, and students increasingly face poor career prospects. Also resuming is the barrage of policy proposals claiming to offer silver-bullet solutions to all that ails higher education. The latest […]
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Many American campuses are caught up in a great new utopian project – protecting students from speech, writings, images, or anything else that they might find upsetting. Because of the spreading mania for trigger warnings and “protecting” students from micro-aggressions, schools are moving away from their focus on education – which, after all, almost inevitably […]
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Student activists pressing universities to divest from fossil fuels are of two minds about free speech. They want it for themselves, but don’t seem keen on allowing it for opponents. The divestment movement didn’t invent free-speech hypocrisy, but divestment activists offer a range of old and new reasons as to why opposing views should not […]
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At a House oversight hearing last week, Representative Jared Polis (D-Colorado) seemed deeply troubled by two arguments raised by FIRE’s Joseph Cohn: that trained police, rather than campus bureaucrats, are better equipped to investigate felony offenses; and that the current campus tribunals deny meaningful due process for students accused of sexual assault. In response, Polis […]
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On Friday, a federal court filing revealed that University of Michigan had settled its lawsuit with Drew Sterrett. The case, first exposed by Emily Yoffe in her sensational Slate article, featured Michigan branding Sterrett a rapist despite overlooking critical exculpatory evidence (including from the roommates of Sterrett and the accuser) and very troubling conduct by […]
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A group of professors and researchers, about half of them psychologists, launched a web site today –Heterodox Academy–to promote “viewpoint diversity” in academe. The group includes Harvard Psychologist Steven Pinker, Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt of NYU’S Stern School of Business, Wharton Professor of Management and Professor of Psychology Philip Tetlock, Sociologist Carlotta Stern of the […]
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The Education Department, where I used to work, is becoming more and more extreme in how it misinterprets and misapplies federal law. For example, the Education Department has thumbed its nose at federal court rulings by wrongly creating entitlements for people who make false discrimination and harassment complaints—even though such baseless complaints can make life […]
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There is no shortage of silly proposals on college campuses. We have, for instance, the University of Tennessee Office for Diversity and Inclusion asking students to use gender-neutral pronouns such as ze in order to create a more welcoming campus. Transgender people, you see, don’t fit this gender binary, and so a foundation stone of […]
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And then there were none. In early August Psi Upsilon, the sole remaining residential fraternity house at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, was suspended for the 2015-2016 academic year over an investigation by law enforcement over alleged illegal drug activity inside its house. Until the fall of 2014, there were three fraternity houses at Wesleyan, […]
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This is an excerpt from a September 8 article published by Vox, “I Have One of the Best Jobs in Academia. Here’s Why I’m Walking Away.” Despite all the finger-pointing directed at students (“They’re lazy! They’re oversensitive! They’re entitled!”), and the blame heaped on professors (“Out of touch and irrelevant to a man”), the real […]
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However harmful the effects of the “Dear Colleague” letter to colleges and universities from the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, the document is a floor, not a ceiling, to OCR’s efforts to weaken campus due process. Resolution letters between OCR and various universities have allowed the agency to go well beyond the “Dear Colleague” […]
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Michael Derrick Hudson, a white guy from Indiana, wrote a poem that was rejected 40 times by various publishers. Then he started sending the oft-spurned work around under the name Yi-Fen Chou, causing it to be snapped up for the 2015 edition of The Best American Poetry. Sherman Alexie, the author and poet who guest […]
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Einstein, as everyone knows, famously defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. Science is the mirror image of insanity (which is not to say there are no mad scientists). It expects — indeed, requires — the same results when scientists do the same experiments or calculations over and over. Thus, […]
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Total students enrolled (2013): 20,375,521 (f: 11,514,975, m: 8,860,546). Most students enrolled: U. of Phoenix-online: 212,044 Most students enrolled (public, doctoral): U. of Central Florida., 59,589. Most expensive: Sarah Lawrence, $65,480 (list price, tuition, rm, bd & fees) Avg. Return on college endowments (2014): 15.5% Avg. freshman tuition discount rate (2014): 46.4% Most spending by research […]
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This article was published originally in Commentary In February 2015, Columbia University—currently ranked the fourth most distinguished academic institution in the United States by U.S. News and World Report—announced that all its students, undergraduate and graduate alike, would be obliged to take part in a “Sexual Respect and Community Citizenship Initiative.” This “new, required programming,” the […]
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