George Leef is director of editorial content at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on May 16, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. The Martin Center opposes the Biden administration’s new loan-forgiveness rules for two basic reasons: They are outside of the Department of Education’s authority, and they will have adverse consequences. Legal Authority Economists […]
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It’s by now a commonplace story: State universities in “red” states, where most of the voters and legislators dislike progressive ideology, are being infiltrated by administrators and faculty who insist on implementing radically leftist policies and courses. Earlier this year, for example, the Martin Center published this article by Jonathan Small on the ways that […]
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Shawnee State University in southern Ohio (cross the bridge and you’re in Kentucky) is an open-admissions school that opened in 1986. It’s very little known, but the school’s administrators are as politically attuned to progressive sensibilities as any across the nation. A case that has arisen at Shawnee threatens to set a terrible precedent for […]
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Many college professors and administrators are eager to turn their students into ideological clones of themselves in hopes of ensuring that the U.S. will have the kind of governmentally controlled, collectivistic society they desire. Sometimes their “success” in that becomes spectacularly evident, such as the furious, vitriolic attack by the Oberlin College community against a […]
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In the Summer 2019 issue of Cato Institute’s Regulation magazine, Professor Dennis Weisman of Kansas State University offers a benign view of college admissions preferences. In “What Constitutes ‘Discrimination’ in College Admissions?” Weisman argues that since colleges admit many students for reasons other than their high degree of academic ability, there’s no good reason to […]
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Over the last half-century, higher education in America has been transformed from a quiet backwater with relatively little influence or cost into a powerful system responsible for or at least deeply complicit in numerous deleterious trends that are today wreaking havoc on the nation. A bill of indictment would have to include the following. The […]
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You might think that higher education leaders, who have almost all been steeped in the academic traditions of the free exchange of ideas, would uniformly stand up for free speech. Learning about those traditions is, after all, a key part of what college should be about for students. Sadly, college officials often bow down to […]
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The college accreditation system is supposed to uphold academic quality and integrity. Many Americans assume that if a college or university is accredited, that is equivalent to the Underwriter’s Laboratories (UL) seal on appliances – that it has been tested and found to be of good quality. Accreditation is a reliable stamp of approval, isn’t […]
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Jason Riley, one of my favorite writers, is black and opposes racial preferences (for all groups) on the grounds that they don’t solve underlying problems, sow discord, and become a source of political chicanery. A few years back, he wrote a very illuminating book entitled, Please Stop Helping Us in which he explained why the […]
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California voters made racial preferences illegal by passing Proposition 209 in 1996, but many university officials have ignored the law, especially at the state’s top law schools. Among such officials, it is a deeply ingrained belief that social justice demands measures to close statistical gaps between “underrepresented” groups (particularly blacks and Hispanics) and “overrepresented” groups […]
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James Madison University, a public university in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, is probably not a school you would think of as one where rampaging ideology against male students would lead to a huge legal fight. But that’s what happened a few years ago. Now, a student who was wrongfully punished is on the verge of collecting almost […]
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Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC is a selective school with a faculty that has a considerable number of, to use Roger Kimball’s phrase, tenured radicals. Just about two hours to the east in Raleigh is Wake Tech Community College, a typically unpretentious school offering lots of “practical” education. Recent events at the two schools […]
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Many leftist academics have denounced the recent spate of riots and shouting down of non-progressive speakers on college campuses – and good for them – but you knew that there were others who were glad to see students fighting back against such supposedly dangerous people as Charles Murray. One of them has put his thoughts […]
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Every so often, someone in the higher ed establishment does a bit of cheerleading for the team –proclaim that college degrees are so beneficial that the country should try to put far more young people through college. The most venerable such effort is a report that the College Board puts out every three years entitled […]
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A paper recently published in Econ Journal Watch, “Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology,” shows what almost everyone believes to be true – that college faculties in the social sciences are predominantly left of center. More than that, it shows that this is truer in some fields and geographic regions than […]
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One of the pillars of our education establishment, The Education Trust, recently published a report meant to pressure colleges and universities with large endowments into spending more of their earnings on one of its pet causes – very low or even free tuition for students from poorer families. The study, “A Glimpse Inside the Coffers: […]
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After the death of Justice Scalia, most people who have been following the protracted Fisher v. University of Texas case (myself included) expected that the Court would let the university’s racial preference system stand. It did that in a 4-3 decision released on June 23. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Ginsburg, […]
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Decades ago, American professors largely stuck to teaching their subjects and kept their political passions separate from their academic work. Read, for example, Alan Kors’ account of a graduate school experience of his, where a decidedly leftist professor rebuked the class for just writing what they thought he wanted to hear and assigned the students […]
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Jane Mayer is a writer for The New Yorker who knows her audience. It consists mostly of elitist progressives who like reading that their enlightened transformation of America is imperiled by greedy conservative villains. She has written many articles and most recently, a book entitled Dark Money on that theme. The February 26, 2016 issue […]
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By George Leef: With the surge in online education over the past few years, one course at the University of California has been exceptional. “Learning How to Learn” with an enrollment of 1,192,697 since it was initially offered last year, is the world’s most popular online course, according to The New York Times, narrowly beating […]
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America’s higher education system works like this. The government dangles lots of easy-to-get money for college in front of every high-school graduate, nearly all of whom have heard repeatedly that a college degree is essential for a decent life. Without “higher education,” their lives will be nothing but low-paid drudgery. Salvation lies in enrolling in […]
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College officials usually wait until there has been some “crisis” – most often imaginary, based on a hoax or misapprehension – before they introduce new measures meant to “improve diversity” on campus. At Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, however, the administration recently introduced a new “bias incident response team” (BIRT) as a way to […]
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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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We have clearly oversold higher education. Through subsidies and political hype, we have prodded huge numbers of students to flock into colleges and universities. Naturally, those institutions also expanded in number and in the volume of students. Now that it is becoming evident that a college degree isn’t necessarily a good investment and for many […]
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In the fall of 1980, towards the end of my first semester of college teaching, I received a memo saying that on the last day of class I was to hand out the course evaluation forms for students to complete and return. A few weeks later, the packet of forms they had filled out was […]
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Fresh off completing her doctorate at the University of Michigan, Saida Grundy has landed a job on Boston University’s faculty – Assistant Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies. What can B.U. students anticipate from her? Editors at the site SoCawledge dug into Grundy’s thinking and found a lot of tweets that resemble those of Steven […]
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Frank Bruni is a New York Times columnist who has figured out something important – many Americans are completely caught up in the costly, pointless, and often damaging obsession with getting their children into our supposedly elite colleges and universities. His new book, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, is his effort at […]
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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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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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One of the most revealing statements of 2014 was made by comedian Chris Rock, who told interviewer Frank Rich that he no longer appears on college campuses because “everything offends students these days.” (Read about that here.) In case you think Rock was exaggerating, a recent incident at the University of Michigan shows how correct […]
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