Mark Bauerlein is a professor emeritus of English at Emory University and an editor at First Things, where he hosts a podcast twice a week. He is the author of five books, including The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults.
One of the best tools for gauging the historical knowledge and civic awareness of young Americans is the exam administered to 12th Graders by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in U.S. history and civics. Every few years, students across the country take these low-stakes tests and provide data on how many of them […]
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A few weeks ago, the Regents of the University of Colorado voted to commission a “political climate” survey of the Boulder campus to determine whether ideological discrimination exists there. Not long after, the AAUP issued a letter in response, warning against the threat to academic freedom that the survey poses. The letter is a prime example […]
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As reported here and here, the Regents of the University of Colorado have voted to commission a survey of the political climate on the Boulder campus. I spoke at the meeting, and the discussion was less complicated than one might expect given the history of liberal bias topics at Colorado and elsewhere in the last […]
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This week’s Chronicle of Higher Education has a story on diversity in higher education that begins, “Despite decades of antidiscrimination policies and affirmations of equality, there’s still little racial and ethnic diversity at the top at many of the colleges.” And last year, as legal challenges to affirmative action were building, the Board of Directors […]
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The University of Minnesota has a program of dual enrollment in which high schools create courses that match selected UM first-year courses in content and rigor and students earn UM credits. It’s called College in the Schools, and it offers 22 courses in the humanities and social sciences such as Calculus I, Intermediate French, and […]
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Once again, the youth vote–18-30-year-olds–provided Barack Obama a staunchly reliable bloc in the 2012 election. According to the Center for Information & Research on civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), the youth vote went 67 percent for Obama, 30 percent for Romney. If the youth vote were taken out of the population, Romney would have won […]
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One of the purposes of Common Core, the initiative to draft new standards for math and English, was to align secondary curricula with the demands of college. The presumption was that high school expectations simply fell short of first-year college coursework and the standards it set. Further evidence of mismatch came out this week in […]
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Big news about homework: a new technology allows professors to monitor the reading and studying of their students outside of class. Digital tools record what students do on their e-textbooks: how often they open it and to what pages, whether they highlight or not, whether they take notes. It’s called CourseSmart, and it offers a […]
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Insidehighered.com has an update on the controversy at Florida Atlantic University. The story quickly summarizes the event at the center of the affair, that is, having students write “Jesus” on a piece of paper put it on the floor, then asking them to step on it. The exercise isn’t the instructor’s invention. It comes out […]
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The lesson to draw from the Harvard email episode is simple: a university is a business and everyone who works there is an employee. The Harvard administration combed through email accounts of resident deans in order to track down leaks regarding last year’s cheating scandal. The cheating happened last year when students were discovered to […]
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One of the enduring operative principles of higher education has been reliance upon professors to do their work diligently and conscientiously without the eye of a monitor upon them. Yes, there are tenure reviews and other periodic reviews of faculty performance, but the day-to-day functioning of faculty members in their teaching and research has largely gone […]
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Past MLA President Michael Berube’s speech to the Council of Graduate Schools, a version of which was published this week at the Chronicle of Higher Education, offers a sober account of the terrible condition of the humanities circa 2013. Professor Berube mentions the job market, which “has been in a state of more or less […]
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Heavy pressures for more accountability are descending on colleges. Senators Ron Wyden and Marco Rubio want states to release data on salaries for recent grads of public colleges, and Eric Cantor pledges the same in the House. The information, the argument goes, would help parents and high school seniors make wiser choices, the reasoning goes, […]
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A petition hosted by MoveOn.org is circulating protesting comments made by North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory about the curriculum in colleges and universities in the state. He made his remarks on Bill Bennett’s radio show, and they infuriated faculty members at Chapel Hill and elsewhere. Responding to Bennett’s question about what he plans to do […]
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The National Association of Scholars issued a significant study of U.S. history teaching at the University of Texas-Austin and Texas A & M last month that has evoked heated commentary from the history profession. The report examines basic history instruction and instructors at the two flagship campuses of the Texas university system and determines that […]
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One of the main findings of this year’s American Freshman Survey Is the drift of 2012 first-year college students toward the political center. The report collects 2008 and 2012 results and finds that “in one significant point of comparison, students moved toward the center in self-perceived political orientation, with the ‘middle-of-the-road’ category growing from 43.3% […]
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One reason disparate impact theory has become such a standard element in institutional affairs is that it is so simple. It begins and ends on a basic numerical axiom: if a practice affects an identity group disproportionately, we have some kind of bias at work. It offers as evidence only a ratio, for instance, a […]
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Here’s a statistic that should make every college teacher cringe. From 1976 to 2010, the rate of high school students graduating with an “A” grade–point average doubled. They didn’t increase their work load, and their test scores didn’t rise correspondingly, but their teachers gave them the highest grade possible again and again. The impact of […]
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The Modern Language Association reports a depressing statistic: the estimated number of jobs offered this year for professors of English will drop 3.6 percent from last year. The main issue here is that for the first time in 20 years foreign language openings will exceed those in English, but the actual decline of English jobs is […]
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Two recent stories from the Associated Press and the Chronicle of Higher Education report a disturbing consequence of race-oriented college admissions. More and more Asian American high school students believe that the admissions process is geared against them, and as a result an increasing number do not record their race as “Asian” on the application form. Both pieces begin with […]
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Teresa Wagner’s lawsuit against the University of Iowa law school ended a few weeks ago when a jury declared that the school did not submit her to political discrimination when it rejected her application for a job. Wagner made a second allegation–that her equal protection rights were violated because the law school held her political […]
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This morning in the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes summed up one condition of the Republican Party: “What’s their problem? In Senate races, it’s bad candidates: old hacks (Wisconsin), young hacks (Florida), youngsters (Ohio), Tea Party types who can’t talk about abortion sensibly (Missouri, Indiana), retreads (Virginia), lousy campaigners (North Dakota) and Washington veterans (Michigan). Losers […]
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The September cover of Maclean’s Magazine displayed two youthful faces, a boy and a girl, the former kindly but quietly fearful, the latter openly stressed, perhaps at a breaking point. The text announced: “CRISIS ON CAMPUS: The Broken Generation–A shocking number of Canadian students feel depressed, even suicidal. Why our best and brightest are so troubled.” The […]
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In this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Joseph Cohn, director of policy at FIRE, summarizes the due process implications of a letter sent to colleges and universities last April by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. As was widely reported at the time, the letter instructs schools to adopt the lowest standard of […]
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The release of SAT scores last week gives strong ammunition to proponents of a core curriculum. As reported in the Wall Street Journal , reading scores hit their lowest figure in four decades. Writing scores hit their lowest number since a writing component was added to the exam six years ago; in fact, writing scores […]
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The Daily Texan has reported that a conservative student group at University of Texas-Austin has inaugurated a “watch list” containing the names of professors who “politicize the classroom” and squash “dissenting opinion.” The chapter of Young Conservatives of Texas describes the list as an information resource, providing information on wayward instructors before students sign up […]
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Concordia University in St. Paul made news by cutting regular tuition costs by a hefty 33.7 percent–$10,000–leaving students to pay $19,700 if they receive no assistance or discounts. But the reduction disguises a fact true at Concordia and at most every other private schools: up to half of undergraduates don’t pay the full fee. At […]
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Given all the cases that FIRE has handled over the years that display the same mistake committed by university administrators over and over again, one has to wonder how FIRE staff can avoid a permanent state of exasperation. How many times do they have to say “You cannot base speech policies on the response of […]
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Last month, distinguished Ohio State English professor Brian McHale sent out the following email to colleagues: Colleagues, I’ve been in touch with a couple of campus organizers for the Obama campaign, who have asked me to pass along to all of you a request for access to your classes in […]
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A small controversy surfaced last week at University of Central Florida when a psychology professor sent an email to all his students to berate some of them for “religious bigotry.” According to the professor’s letter, some Christian students in class that evening claimed that their faith is “the most valid religion,” thereby “demonstrating to the […]
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