John Leo is the editor of Minding the Campus, dedicated to chronicling imbalances within higher education and restoring intellectual pluralism to our American universities. His popular column, "On Society," ran in U.S.News & World Report for 17 years.
Victor Davis Hanson has a brilliant essay here on how dysfunctional our colleges and universities have become. Here are two excerpts: “I noticed about 1990 that some students in my classes at CSU were both clearly illiterate and yet beneficiaries of lots of federal cash, loans, and university support to ensure their graduation. And when one […]
Read More
The overwrought anti-bullying crusade has come in for heavy and very specific criticism from Hans Bader, the lawyer and writer who played a key role in keeping out a dangerous provision of a proposed federal law on how colleges must deal with campus sexual assault. Though Washington officials call bullying a “pandemic,” in reality, Bader […]
Read More
In April, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights outlined a policy shift that represented perhaps the gravest threat to civil liberties on campus in a generation. Worse, Sen. Patrick Leahy inserted a provision in a draft of the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2011 that would have made the dubious new policy part […]
Read More
The American Association of University Women, the voice of hard-line campus feminism, published a survey today showing that 48 percent of American 7th to 12th graders were sexually harassed during the last school year, with 87 percent of those harassed suffering negative effects such as absenteeism, poor sleep and stomach aches. These are alarming numbers, but then, the AAUW […]
Read More
Suppose you are the president of Brown University or a member of the Brown corporation and, for some reason that eludes most sentient adults, you want to maintain your ban on ROTC on campus. You are in a tough spot, since all the other Ivy League schools, President Obama, the national political establishment, and the […]
Read More
Columnist Mike Adams has some fun today with the strange decision of his college, the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, to lump together two serious academic departments (because of a shortage of funding) while once again expanding the campus diversity bureaucracy (for which no funding shortage ever seems to appear). As Adams figures it, the university […]
Read More
A new report on higher education from the American Enterprise Institute, out today, contains an eye-catching finding likely to generate a lot of headlines: the more selective a school is, and the fewer low-income students it serves, the larger its taxpayer subsidy. Calling this system of funding “perverse,” the report says: “Average taxpayers provide more […]
Read More
The occasionally violent mob protests at the University of Wisconsin, and the role of a university administrator in egging on the disrupters, have barely raised a ripple in the mainstream press. But commentary here by Robert Weissberg, KC Johnson and Roger Clegg, has circulated widely on the Internet. Today Donald Downs, a professor at the […]
Read More
In 2009, reeling from the shrinkage in its $32 billion endowment, Harvard moved to slash costs by cutting back on the cookies served at faculty meetings. Eliminating the cookies, we were told, saved $500 per meeting, thus raising the obvious question of whether the Harvard faculty was obtaining its pastries from the wholesaler who supplied […]
Read More
Our own Charlotte Allen has a wonderful piece in the Weekly Standard on campus events marking the anniversary of 9/11. While some of the events are rational enough and a few seem moving, the general tone reflects the fact that after a decade, our campuses are still as out of sync with the rest of […]
Read More
The strange case of Antonio Calvo, the Princeton lecturer who slashed himself to death last April, is the subject of long front-page article in the July 1 Chronicle of Higher Education. After his suicide, Princeton put out a formal statement saying that Calvo had been on leave from the university. That was not true. Princeton […]
Read More
Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) displayed a fascinating range of opinion over the recent City University of New York decision to award Tony Kushner an honorary degree. First the Board of the group issued a statement deploring the award as “politicization of the university.” This drew a vehement letter denouncing the SPME […]
Read More
On Inside Higher Ed today “MathProf,” an anonymous poster, raised an original objection to multiple-choice tests: they are packed with lies. He said one student “pointed out to me that multiple-choice tests are inherently deceptive, featuring wrong answers deliberately designed to appear plausible. Is this really the skill we want to teach and reward: not knowledge, […]
Read More
Mark Bauerlein’s article on papers delivered at academic conferences (above) reminds me of the day I discovered the awful truth about such texts. Arriving in San Francisco in the summer of 1967 to cover the annual sociological convention for the New York Times, I headed for the press room and asked for a copy of […]
Read More
The controversy over Tony Kushner’s honorary degree is yet another reminder of how far from mainstream America our cultural elites are. Support for Israel is extraordinarily high across the country (The American people sympathize more with Israel than with the Palestinians by 63 percent to 17 percent, according to Gallup) but that is not the […]
Read More
“Why They Cheered,” an article on Inside Higher Ed, explored the possible explanations of why crowds, mostly made up of college students, surged into the streets Sunday night to celebrate the end of Osama bin Laden. Though some of us think the explanation is entirely obvious, the IHE article did not. It had the puzzled […]
Read More
A few days ago, I received two similar letters from parents asking a very common question, if the quality of college education is declining as rapidly as many people say, where do you think my daughter or son should go to school? I sent a note putting this question to Peter Wood, president of the […]
Read More
John Allison, former CEO of BB&T bank was, instead, referred to as ‘the late banker’ in the April 25th story here on big donors to colleges and universities. He is very much alive. The error was mine. My apologies.
Read More
Yesterday’s brief account here on Bowdoin College and the apparent disarray of its history department drew a lot of attention, though we did not link to the full original article. The reason we did not link is that the text from the Claremont Review of Books appeared to be proprietary–sent only to subscribers for their […]
Read More
A column by Katherine Kersten of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that the financially strapped Lakeville, Minn., school district (94 teachers let go) found enough money to send a delegation to the annual state “White Privilege Conference” now going on in Bloomington. Carol Iannone at Phi Beta Cons picked up the story, as did blogger Hans […]
Read More
“There are any number of courses that deal with some group aspect of America, but virtually none that deals with America as a whole. For example, there is African-American history from 1619 to 1865 and from 1865 to the present, but there is no comparable sequence on America. Every course is social or cultural history that looks at the world […]
Read More
Art Robinson, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for Congress last fall in Oregon’s 4th district, is making very serious allegations against Oregon State University—that as payback for his campaign, the university is moving to expel three of his grown children from Ph.D. programs, and in two of these cases, allowing other scholars to take over their […]
Read More
Controversy has descended on Skidmore College, where how-to-masturbate posters hang inside restroom stalls at the campus library. A unisex stick figure on the poster features arrows helpfully pointing to various parts of the body that the sponsor, the college’s Center for Sex and Gender Relations, considers worthy of erotic attention. The posters, also put up […]
Read More
When radical professor Frances Fox Piven said she wanted to see protest riots in America like those in Greece and Britain (considerable damage and four people dead in Greece) academics and academic associations spoke out. Not to deplore her call for violence, but to denounce Glenn Beck’s over-the-top criticism of her on Fox News and […]
Read More
At first glance, John Tierney’s report in the New York Times on the liberal-conservative imbalance of faculty looks like just another account of a very familiar subject. But read it twice and you can see why it became one of the most talked-about articles on higher education in months. How did this happen? First, it […]
Read More
Who knew the American Sociological Association was this bad? The Association put out a pompous and wrongheaded statement in defense of radical sociologist Frances Fox Piven, who has been under attack from Glenn Beck. In the 60’s, Piven made a name for herself by urging people to flood onto the welfare rolls to overload and […]
Read More
I can’t recall a book on higher education that arrived with so much buzz, and drew so much commentary in the first two days after publication. The book is Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by Richard Arum, and Josipa Roksa (University of Chicago Press). Arum is a professor of sociology and education at […]
Read More
Richard Vedder calls it “the single most scandalous statistic in higher education,” an assessment that doesn’t sound overstated to us. Writing on the Chronicle of Higher Education site, Vedder says “a small army of researchers and associates” gathered by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) shows that “approximately 60 percent of the increase […]
Read More
Ward Connerly, founder and chairman of the American Civil rights Initiative, a group opposed to race and gender preferences, spoke yesterday at Wesleyan University, in the wake of controversy over an affirmative action bake sale there satirizing preferences in college admissions. He spoke without a text, but we asked for an account of what he […]
Read More
Wesleyan University’s affirmative action bake sale, staged by two students on October 26th, has generated more sputtering controversy than most, largely because one professor, Claire Potter, intemperately called the event racist. Late yesterday, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, published a remarkable discussion of the controversy and the uses of the word […]
Read More