Since 2011, as part of its settlement with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, Yale has published biannual reports that provide brief summaries of each sexual assault allegation at the university. (Yale is the only university in the country to have such an obligation.) I’ve analyzed each of these reports, issued by the […]
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The annual controversy over books assigned to freshmen as summer reading is upon us. Spoiler alerts. Odysseus makes it home. Hamlet dies. The Whale wins. Oh, not those books. We are talking more about White Girls (by Hilton Als, 2013) and Purple Hibiscus (by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2003). White Girls, as one reviewer puts it, is “an inquiry into otherness” by a […]
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A disappointing report says African-American students score low on college readiness even when they successfully complete coursework intended to prepare them for college. The report, The Condition of College and Career Readiness 2014: African American Students comes from ACT and the United Negro College Fund. It shows that 62 percent of ACT-tested African American students […]
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I previously wrote about the new AP U.S. History guidelines (APUSH). The guidelines generated considerable criticism—in so small part because they seemed intent on evading state guidelines regarding the instruction of U.S. history. Basically: the earlier guidelines heavily emphasized themes of race, class, and gender, at the expense of more “traditional” types of U.S. history […]
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A study by Vanderbilt suggests that the university spent $150 million complying with federal regulations during 2013-14. Although the details of how Vanderbilt arrived at these alarmingly figures have yet to be released, they should nonetheless be viewed as additional validation that the federal government’s overweening supervision of higher education is making college less affordable […]
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Despite criticism from all overthe politicalspectrum, so-called “yes means yes” sex rules are on the march. After California, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a law on July 7 requiring all of the state’s universities to adopt an affirmative consent policy for sexual assault cases. Similar rules are set to go into effect at the […]
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If there were a Heisman Trophy for the most articulate angry black undergraduate, Sy Stokes, a recent UCLA graduate, would surely have won. Subject of a fawning, sprawling 3200-word profile by Eric Hoover in the Chronicle of Higher Education (“A Young Man of Words” — access may require subscription), Stokes made a name for himself […]
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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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The Closing of the American Mind dealt with the way academic relativism has failed our democracy, but it did not spark the kind of fruitful conversation that Allan Bloom hoped for; much less did it inspire a systematic effort to rectify the errors of modern academia. Today’s college students say they believe in democracy but […]
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As the movement in academia to boycott and sanction Israel grows more virulent, it threatens to infect mainstream politics, too.
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Amherst is being sued –and rightly so–in one of the most egregious of the many campus sex cases. In brief, this is what happened. After heavy drinking, two Amherst students had sex. The male involved was the boyfriend of the female’s roommate. Her friends made nasty comments about her or abandoned her for cheating on […]
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Professor Robert D. Putnam argued in his influential book Bowling Alone that since the 1960s, the U.S. had undergone an unprecedented collapse in civic, social and political life–a finding he modified in 2010 by noting that the trend had turned the other way. In this interview, Putnam discusses his new book, Our Kids: The American […]
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After several troubling court decisions on the handling of college sex cases, a state judge in California has issued a ringing defense of due process. The ruling by Judge Joel Pressman, first reported by Ashe Schow, held that the University of California-San Diego (UCSD), had provided a fundamentally unfair procedure to a student accused of […]
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When I was in college I got a job one summer blasting, scraping, and sanding the corroded sides of dry-docked ships. It sounded like nasty, if well-paid, work. But before I could don gloves and mask in my war on barnacles, some union called a strike and my job was wiped out. I ended up […]
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“There may be good cause to learn about those topics, but when they become the dominant trend for summer reading programs over multiple years, one starts to wonder what really is the intent of these programs. Such consistent pounding away at similar themes, given the entire vast array of books from which to choose, suggests the programs […]
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The federal government is now admitting that its own financial aid is partly to blame for rising tuition, reports Blake Neff in The Daily Caller: A new report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has found that the massive investment in grants and student loans by the federal government is a major contributor […]
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I’m a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college classes for nine years now. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student evaluations. I am not a world class teacher by any means, but I am conscientious; I attempt to put teaching […]
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Since March of 2014, federal and state courts have produced a run of decisions favorable to due process in campus sex cases. But in recent months, this welcome development has been reversed—most spectacularly in the deeply troubling decision in the Vassar case, but also in two recent decisions involving cases at Columbia and Miami (Ohio). […]
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Here are two troubling developments regarding campus due process from the Upper Midwest: Inside Higher Ed featured remarks from Susan Riseling, chief of police at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, regarding the intersection between campus police and Title IX responsibilities. Riseling told attendees at the International Association of College Law Enforcement Administrators conference that police chiefs […]
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America’s universities are collapsing into a miasma of nihilism, postmodernism, political correctness, multiculturalism, affirmative action, bureaucratization, and skyrocketing costs—and no one seems able to do anything about it. With the exception of a few “Great Books” colleges, the overarching vision of higher education that once sustained the West for centuries seems all but dead. American […]
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