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.
At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, students can minor in social and economic justice without taking a single economics course.—Reported by E. Frank Stephenson on the Division of Labor blog.
Read More
Andrew Gillen of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity wrote this note to Charlotte Allen to clarify comments of his in Allen’s article today on student loans: Charlotte, I saw your article on student loans is up at Minding The Campus. I liked it, but at the very end, you have a long quote […]
Read More
Kara Miller, who teaches rhetoric and history at Babson College, is the latest professor to decry the laziness of American college students. You can read her Boston Globe op-ed here. Miller is careful to say that some native-born students work hard, but the gap she sees between American and international students is large. She says […]
Read More
An unusually bitter academic argument of 2000 came up again at the American Anthropological Association annual convention in Philadelphia. At issue was the long and famous (critics would say, notorious) work of Napoleon Chagnon among the Yanomamo Indians of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil and Venezuela. The Yanomomi are not among the most endearing […]
Read More
“Trustees Approve Free Speech Policy,” said the November 30th headline in the Tufts student newspaper. This purports to be good news, but this is Tufts, a university addicted to bragging about free expression on campus while introducing yet another version of its long-discredited speech code. The one-page “Declaration on Freedom of Expression at Tufts University” […]
Read More
Santa Cruz, Ca.–As California works to plug an epic budget shortfall, severe budget cuts are threatening the twin qualities — excellence and access — that have defined the University of California as the world’s leading public research university. At UC Santa Cruz, faculty, students, and staff worry about the impact the state’s financial meltdown is […]
Read More
The indispensible FIRE—the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—bestows a regular mock honor on some offending college or university: the Speech Code of the Month. So far this year, the winners have included New York University (which bans, among other things, inappropriate jokes and teasing), the University of Idaho (no “insensitive” actions or communications), Northern […]
Read More
A convicted terror bomber, Raymond Luc Levasseur, invited by a far left center to speak at the University of Massachusetts. Amherst, was disinvited after pressure from police groups and Governor Deval Partrick, then reinvited when the university president Jack Wilson intervened. Levasseur is a former leader of the United Freedom Front a radical group responsible […]
Read More
Abby Thernstrom famously called our colleges and universities “islands of repression in a sea of freedom,” meaning, of course that for some twenty years, no other American institutions have worked harder to repress free speech. Consider these recent adventures in the long campus campaign against free expression: – After a peaceful protest over budget cuts […]
Read More
At the tenth anniversary dinner last night for FIRE—the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education—I asked Robert Sibley of the group if they were still winning 97% of their cases filed for student freedom. Greg Lukianoff, head of fire, gave me that statistic two or three years ago. “It may have dropped down a notch […]
Read More
Patrick Deneen, professor of government at Georgetown and founder of Georgetown’s Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy, spoke September 23rd at a luncheon in New York sponsored by the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University. The following is an excerpt. The full text will appear in the winter issue of The New […]
Read More
Does it matter which college guide a high-school student consults? Yes indeed. They all differ in poundage, cost and frankness. To illustrate the various approaches, and the various levels of candor, here are five guides discussing one school, Wesleyan University of Middletown, Connecticut: Barron’s Guide to the Most Competitive Colleges is the driest of the […]
Read More
Every now and then an American university sponsors a conference on Israel and Palestine that appears to be an open and fair-minded event, but turns out to be a one-sided anti-Israel rally. Wesleyan University, for example, sponsored one such conference in 2004, with much anti-Semitic commentary and some printed material covered in swastikas. The Toronto […]
Read More
Yet another act of censorship by yet another college. St. Louis University is banning David Horowitz as a campus speaker. According to the College Republicans, who had invited the conservative activist to give a talk on October 13, Dean of Students Scott Smith said he could not allow the speech because Horowitz might “insinuate that […]
Read More
The script is almost always the same: a campus conservative group invites a speaker who opposes illegal immigration; angry leftist students denounce him as a white supremacist and shout him down, knocking over tables or breaking a window; the president or chancellor of the university promises to investigate, but no penalty descends on the censors. […]
Read More
In an effort to show which colleges are reaching out to low-income students, U.S. News & World Report has published “economic diversity” rankings of American colleges and universities. That sounds ambitious, but the rankings are based solely on the percentage of students at each institution who receive federal Pell grants, which mostly go to applicants […]
Read More
A few notes on the preposterous decision by the Yale University Press to censor the Muhammad cartoons in a book it is publishing about the Muhammad cartoons, The Cartoons That Shook the World. – In a one-line comment on the Inside Higher Ed web site, Mark Bauerlein of Emory University asks to know that names […]
Read More
John Rosenberg (Discriminations) and Mickey Kaus (Kausfiles) note that the slippery term “cultural competence” pops up often in the health care bill passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Once a harmless term in medical literature referring to the need to understand and communicate with patients of different races and ethnicities, “cultural competence” mutated […]
Read More
As expected, President Obama’s plan to aid community colleges, to the tune of $12 billion, drew impressive praise. “Dean Dad,” who blogs at Inside Higher Ed called the president’s Macomb Community College speech in Michigan, which outlined the program, “by far the most intelligent presidential discussion of higher education I’ve ever seen.” But there were […]
Read More
Liberty University made a mistake in revoking recognition of its student Democratic club. But the argument put forth by the conservative Christian institution had some substance to it. Mathew Staver, dean of the university, and John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute both argued that religious freedom trumps questions of political balance. That’s true. A religious […]
Read More
Two years ago, I pointed out that UCLA seemed to be having trouble coping with its many identity-group graduations. Crowded into a single weekend, these ceremonies tend to overlap, though the good news was that multiple graduations were possible: a few students were eligible to graduate four or five times in three days. For instance, […]
Read More
Last Friday, a 6-hour conference at the City University of New York (CUNY) graduate center examined “rightist efforts, from fiscally or socially conservative movements to hate groups.” It apparently raised no eyebrows, though if the meeting had set out to examine “leftist efforts, from fiscally and socially liberal movements to the Unabomber and animal rights […]
Read More
Every few weeks or so a new marginalized group is discovered on campus, requiring new bursts of emotional inclusion and sometimes a demand for special housing and curriculum change as well. At Cornell the latest people revealed to be suffering discomfort are transfer students. “Study Finds Transfers Feel Marginalized on Campus,” said the headline in […]
Read More
Don’t miss this video on the notorious freshman indoctrination program at the University of Delaware. It was produced by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and is in the running to make the top ten most-watched videos of the month. It includes the program’s leading hits, including mandatory hatred of America, the importance […]
Read More
This is a letter to the editor of the Cornell Daily Sun, responding to a Sun report today about a campus Christian group apparently violating anti-discrimination rules by not allowing a gay student to become a leader. To the Editor: Alex Berg (“Outcry Erupts from Alleged Homophobia” April 23) seems to think the Chris Donohoe […]
Read More
Virginia Tech has backed down from its attempt to force a diversity loyalty oath on its faculty. The credit goes to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the National Association of Scholars (NAS), with a strong assist from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Under proposed guidelines, Virginia Tech faculty […]
Read More
In the early 90s we noticed that Brown and Yale were conducting separate freshman orientations for non-white students. Since then this casual segregation of new students has spread widely and has come to be seen as normal. Typically minority students arrive a week early and are instructed on how to cope with a historically white […]
Read More
The nine-campus University of California system is reducing the number of freshman admissions because of the financial crisis. But “underrepresented groups”—non-Asian-American minorities—shouldn’t worry at all. Apparently all the cuts will come from white and Asian-American applicants. Down in the ninth paragraph of a 13-paragraph Associated Press story in the San Jose Mercury News, we learn […]
Read More
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) took its customary bystander role in the Ward Churchill case, as it regularly does when academic integrity is the issue and the evidence of malfeasance is obvious. But among the many mealy-mouthed statements by AAUP president Cary Nelson, one was surely true: “Colorado knew what it was getting […]
Read More
We belatedly came across two free-speech articles this morning, one a year old, the other a week old. The year-old story is vaguely similar to the current Obama-at-Notre-Dame issue. John Corvino, a gay ex-Catholic who teaches philosophy at Wayne State, was invited to speak on gay rights at Aquinas College, a Catholic institution in Grand […]
Read More