Charlotte Allen blogs for the Los Angeles Times and writes frequently about cultural trends for the Weekly Standard.
The executive council of the Modern Language Association (MLA), the leading organization for English and foreign-language professors, issued a statement on Wednesday decrying the rising debt levels of college students. Well, sure, who isn’t against student debt? But I think that the MLA statement is more than just pious boilerplate. It’s a statement of panic–that […]
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This past Monday I delivered a speech at the Delta Kappa Epsilon house at Wesleyan University. I had been invited to speak by DKE and another fraternity at Wesleyan, Beta Theta Pi, because I had written an op-ed article in June for the Los Angeles Times titled “War Waged on College Fraternities.” That was the […]
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Institutions from charter schools to the White House are pushing hard for more young people to go to college, but with almost half of students at four-year colleges destined to leave without a degree, a counter-trend is starting to take hold: a loose coalition of people in the credentialing, training, and grant-making businesses are working […]
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The Catholic University of America is, um, a Catholic university. So–surprise, surprise–its Washington, DC campus, like those of most other Catholic institutions of higher learning, has a lot of Catholic stuff around. Chapels, priests and nuns on the faculty, crucifixes in the classrooms, statues of the saints, and a gigantic church dedicated to the Virgin […]
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I disagree with Kenneth L. Marcus’s post here approving the Education Department’s pending investigation of Columbia University for allegedly “steering” a Jewish student at Barnard College away from a course taught by Joseph Massad. While I’m in sympathy with Marcus’s efforts to show up Massad for the unreconstructed ideologue and tiresome non-scholar that he is, […]
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Let the wars over “rape culture” begin! Since the 1970s the annual “Take Back the Night” anti-rape march, organized by campus feminists and featuring phalanxes of females carrying signs saying things like “Claim Our Bodies, Claim Ourselves,” was as solid a college tradition as Homecoming Week, even though the ranks of protesters have lately gotten […]
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In his comment on my Sept. 19 essay, “The Feminist War Against Fraternities,” Duke Cheston has abandoned the argument he made in a Sept. 13 essay for the Pope Canter that college fraternities are incubators of rape–and hence should be abolished. Indeed, he quotes with approval from Heather Mac Donald’s “The Campus Rape Myth,” her […]
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The Pope Center’s Duke Cheston has issued what is essentially a call for the abolition of college fraternities, adding a conservative battle cry to a war which hitherto has been largely waged by liberals: feminists, political correctness-besotted campus administrators, and, lately, the Obama administration’s Education Department. In an essay for the Pope Center’s website he […]
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How easy do some college professors have it? Here is a paragraph from an Aug. 28 story in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the effect of recession-hit Nevada’s higher-education budget cuts at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas: One person who hasn’t spent much time on the campus since May is [Lynn] Comella. Sitting behind a […]
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It’s hard to tell whether it’s a news story or a media meme: Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott, a fan of Texas Republican Gov. (and current GOP presidential candidate) Rick Perry, is reportedly considering foisting on Florida’s public universities the same much-criticized reform proposals that Perry has been trying to foist on public universities in […]
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Curbing for-profit colleges has been a goal of the Obama administration’s department of education. The plan was to erect regulatory hurdles to a very profitable product: online courses. In pursuit of that plan, the department issued a regulation last October requiring institutions offering Internet classes to seek permission from every state in which they enroll […]
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Consider the disturbing case of Lawrence Connell, a criminal-law professor at Widener University’s law school who was suspended for a year without pay on Aug. 8 despite having been cleared of allegations of sexual and racial harassment in his classroom lodged by two female black students. The case can be best understood as a story […]
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Here’s a disturbing news item from North Carolina: The state university system uses its well-regarded medical school and its generous taxpayer subsidies to purchase, compete with, and potentially crowd out private non-profit hospitals and health systems. This is the story that Duke Cheston, a writer for the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, tells in […]
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The firing of a controversial aide to the University of Texas system has triggered a full-blown debate over the productivity of teachers and whether “star” professors who teach few classes are really worth the cost to the public. Rick O’Donnell, dismissed on April 19 after only 49 days on the job as special adviser to […]
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It’s a constant skirmish between donors seeking to fund specific scholarly projects at universities and the universities’ administrators, who would typically like to see as much of that money as possible go to “unrestricted” uses–that is, whatever the administrators, not the donors, deem the best use of the funds. And nowadays, with universities’ endowment values falling during the […]
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The state of Indiana has just launched a new program, the brainchild of the state’s Republican governor Mitch Daniels, that will allow high school students to skip their senior year and move straight to college after their junior year if they have completed the core requirements. The money the state would have spent to help […]
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Though civil liberties groups have been slow to react, there’s a disturbing aspect to the Education Department’s new “gainful employment” rules pertaining to for-profit colleges: Starting in 2015, the Social Security Administration (SSA) will start turning over its data on the earnings of individual students at career colleges to the Education Department. This is so […]
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A good deal of outraged reaction greeted “Fat City: Thank You, Illinois Taxpayers, for My Cushy Life,” an article posted on the Weekly Standard’s website on Friday by David Rubinstein, a recently retired (after 34 years) sociology professor at the publicly funded University of Illinois-Chicago. The article was a hoot and a half. Rubinstein chronicled in detail the […]
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The embarrassing decision by the Monitor Group, the worldwide consulting firm founded by Harvard professors, to register retroactively as a foreign lobbyist organization over $3 million worth of work it did from 2006-2008 for Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan government, is the culmination of a story with two morals. The first is that even Harvard professors, high […]
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Delta Kappa Epsilon–the “Dekes”–whose pledges’ allegedly sexist chant during a hazing ritual at Yale last October so offended campus feminists that the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights office is now conducting a full-blown investigation of Yale for sexual harassment under Title IX of the federal Civil Rights Act. They were marched blindfolded through the Old […]
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From reading news stories about multimillion-dollar gifts to universities, it’s easy to get the impression that the donors are mostly rich people with pronounced ideological agendas–or else they wouldn’t open their wallets so readily. In April 2010, for example, the billionaire-financier George Soros, known for his funding of progressive causes and his efforts to defeat George […]
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Back in 2009 the Medill Innocence Project, a program administered by Northwestern University’s highly regarded Medill Journalism School, looked like a victim of a vindictive and over-zealous prosecutor at the Illinois state’s attorney’s office Students enrolled from 2003-2006 in an undergraduate investigative reporting class at the journalism school that tied into the Innocence Project–which is […]
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If you care about free speech on college campuses, there could hardly be a more sympathetic figure than Jonathan Lopez. A student at Los Angeles City College (LACC) in 2008, when California voters rejected Proposition 8 , he was one of the first victims of the rage of gay-rights advocates and their academic allies: a […]
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In recent years Syracuse University has decided to make its undergraduate student body more “diverse” and “inclusive”–code words for racial preferences that translated into a freshman class for the fall of 2010 that was 30 percent black and Latino. The class of 2014 was also 26 percent eligible for federal Pell grants to low-income students. […]
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The year was 1996. Bill Clinton was serving his first term as president. Barack Obama was a civil-rights attorney in Chicago who had yet to hold any public office. It was that long ago. According to J. Patrick Kelly, vice dean of the Widener University School of Law, 1996 was the year that Professor Lawrence […]
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I’ve argued that there’s a way for-profit colleges to increase their credibility as genuine educational institutions rather than dropout factories running on federal student aid: they could focus their efforts and investment dollars on creating high-quality courses and courseware that the non-profit world might respect. And now, one for-profit institution, Capella University, seems to be […]
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“If I don’t succeed in academe, I’ll die!” So read the anguished headline of a Jan. 23 cri de coeur to Salon magazine’s advice columnist, Cary Tennis. The writer was a woman who had apparently spent eight years acquiring a Ph.D. in anthropology, plus another seven years trying unsuccessfully to get an entry-level tenure-track professor’s […]
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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit not only upheld racial preferences in college admissions decisions on Jan. 18 but upheld them with a vengeance. The Fifth Circuit’s three-judge panel unanimously agreed, in Fisher vs. University of Texas at Austin, that UT’s flagship campus in Austin could consider an applicant’s race and ethnicity […]
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For-profit colleges are having a tough time these days, thanks to the Obama Education Department’s looming new “gainful employment” rules that threaten federal aid cutoffs to an industry that derives 87 percent of its revenue from government loans and grants to its students—along with steep declines in new enrollments (due partly to new federal caps […]
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What if all college professors were forced to be higher-education entrepreneurs, with salaries pegged to the number of students they attract to their classes? That’s the model recently proposed by a Texas professor who styled himself “Publius Audax” on a Pajamas Media blog. Publius launched his proposal, he wrote, as the solution to a projected […]
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