At Salon Magazine, Bill Moyers has an essay penned in direct response to criticism of Barack Obama for his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. People have assailed Obama for his scolding tone, bad timing , poor history, and moral equivocation. And here is Bill Moyers expanding President Obama’s point, an opinion piece entitled: “When […]
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Yale runs one of the strangest systems of handling sexual assault (“economic abuse” has been counted as a sexual attack, and proceedings can start without the alleged victim’s consent) so its semiannual reports on the subject are well worth studying. I’ve analyzed each of the previous six, all done as part of a settlement with […]
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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker just made an unforced error. He proposed—then backed away from—a change in the mission statement for the University of Wisconsin. I admire Walker and view him as among the more attractive candidates for the Republican nomination. And in that spirit, I’d like to offer him some friendly advice on a potentially […]
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Swarthmore is again in the news over campus speech. Just yesterday, Hussein Aboubakr, an Egyptian political refugee who’s written about anti-Semitism among Egyptian Muslims, spoke at an event sponsored by Swarthmore’s pro-Israel groups. According to Swarthmore’s Students for Israel, some of the students who attended the event came only to scoff: “As [Aboubakr] tearfully recalled […]
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Cathy Young’s must-read piece on the Columbia case made famous by accuser Emma Sulkowicz triggered a furious backlash, including a twitter hashtag campaign and a Mic article that cast aspersions without challenging a single fact that Young presented. Three elements of the reaction to the article deserve further comment. First, victims’ rights advocates have dismissed […]
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As expected, anti-Israel activist and purported American Indian Studies expert Steven Salaita has filed a lawsuit against the University of Illinois. My take on the merits of Salaita’s case remains essentially the same: (1) FIRE is absolutely correct in the chilling effects of Illinois’ “civility” standard; and (2) the Salaita case is most comparable to […]
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Wisconsin governor Scott Walker made headlines last week by demanding that academics work harder. In response to criticism of his proposal to cut $300 million from the University of Wisconsin system while giving it more autonomy from the state, Walker contended that faculty could help make up the shortfall by teaching extra classes. Professors have […]
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KC Johnson and Adam Kissel have written insightfully about the case of Steven Salaita for MTC. Briefly, this August the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign withdrew its offer to Salaita of a tenured position in American Indian Studies. The offer was withdrawn after Chancellor Phyllis Wise and the Board of Trustees became aware of […]
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A recent Inside Higher Ed story documented an alarming trend in the English departments at University of Maryland, George Mason University, and Florida State University. The numbers of English majors there have plummeted in the last few years. Maryland lost 88 majors in 2012, 79 majors the next year, and 128 majors 12 months later, the story […]
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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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