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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Student activists pressing universities to divest from fossil fuels are of two minds about free speech. They want it for themselves, but don’t seem keen on allowing it for opponents. The divestment movement didn’t invent free-speech hypocrisy, but divestment activists offer a range of old and new reasons as to why opposing views should not […]
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At a House oversight hearing last week, Representative Jared Polis (D-Colorado) seemed deeply troubled by two arguments raised by FIRE’s Joseph Cohn: that trained police, rather than campus bureaucrats, are better equipped to investigate felony offenses; and that the current campus tribunals deny meaningful due process for students accused of sexual assault. In response, Polis […]
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On Friday, a federal court filing revealed that University of Michigan had settled its lawsuit with Drew Sterrett. The case, first exposed by Emily Yoffe in her sensational Slate article, featured Michigan branding Sterrett a rapist despite overlooking critical exculpatory evidence (including from the roommates of Sterrett and the accuser) and very troubling conduct by […]
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A group of professors and researchers, about half of them psychologists, launched a web site today –Heterodox Academy–to promote “viewpoint diversity” in academe. The group includes Harvard Psychologist Steven Pinker, Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt of NYU’S Stern School of Business, Wharton Professor of Management and Professor of Psychology Philip Tetlock, Sociologist Carlotta Stern of the […]
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The Education Department, where I used to work, is becoming more and more extreme in how it misinterprets and misapplies federal law. For example, the Education Department has thumbed its nose at federal court rulings by wrongly creating entitlements for people who make false discrimination and harassment complaints—even though such baseless complaints can make life […]
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There is no shortage of silly proposals on college campuses. We have, for instance, the University of Tennessee Office for Diversity and Inclusion asking students to use gender-neutral pronouns such as ze in order to create a more welcoming campus. Transgender people, you see, don’t fit this gender binary, and so a foundation stone of […]
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And then there were none. In early August Psi Upsilon, the sole remaining residential fraternity house at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, was suspended for the 2015-2016 academic year over an investigation by law enforcement over alleged illegal drug activity inside its house. Until the fall of 2014, there were three fraternity houses at Wesleyan, […]
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This is an excerpt from a September 8 article published by Vox, “I Have One of the Best Jobs in Academia. Here’s Why I’m Walking Away.” Despite all the finger-pointing directed at students (“They’re lazy! They’re oversensitive! They’re entitled!”), and the blame heaped on professors (“Out of touch and irrelevant to a man”), the real […]
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However harmful the effects of the “Dear Colleague” letter to colleges and universities from the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, the document is a floor, not a ceiling, to OCR’s efforts to weaken campus due process. Resolution letters between OCR and various universities have allowed the agency to go well beyond the “Dear Colleague” […]
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Michael Derrick Hudson, a white guy from Indiana, wrote a poem that was rejected 40 times by various publishers. Then he started sending the oft-spurned work around under the name Yi-Fen Chou, causing it to be snapped up for the 2015 edition of The Best American Poetry. Sherman Alexie, the author and poet who guest […]
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Einstein, as everyone knows, famously defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. Science is the mirror image of insanity (which is not to say there are no mad scientists). It expects — indeed, requires — the same results when scientists do the same experiments or calculations over and over. Thus, […]
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Total students enrolled (2013): 20,375,521 (f: 11,514,975, m: 8,860,546). Most students enrolled: U. of Phoenix-online: 212,044 Most students enrolled (public, doctoral): U. of Central Florida., 59,589. Most expensive: Sarah Lawrence, $65,480 (list price, tuition, rm, bd & fees) Avg. Return on college endowments (2014): 15.5% Avg. freshman tuition discount rate (2014): 46.4% Most spending by research […]
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This article was published originally in Commentary In February 2015, Columbia University—currently ranked the fourth most distinguished academic institution in the United States by U.S. News and World Report—announced that all its students, undergraduate and graduate alike, would be obliged to take part in a “Sexual Respect and Community Citizenship Initiative.” This “new, required programming,” the […]
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Academic “consensus” is in the news. Stetson University professor of psychology Christopher Ferguson, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education,recently gave a run-down on how the American Psychological Association supposedly compromised itself by manipulating a task force into endorsing harsh interrogations of prisoners. Ferguson says the APA “crafted a corrupted ‘consensus’ by excluding those who […]
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Readers of the higher education press and literature may be forgiven for supposing that there is more research on why there are not more women in STEM fields than there is actual research in the STEM fields themselves. The latest addition to this growing pile of studies appeared a few months ago in Science, and […]
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The College Board’s new AP U.S. history standards (APUSH) remain in the news. A recent piece by Stanley Kurtz suggests that despite the revisions, the standards remain unsatisfactory and will prevent the instruction of more traditional topics in U.S. history. A piece in EDWeek, on the other hand, has quotes from historians mostly praising the […]
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Wesleyan University made national news this past February when 12 students were hospitalized for drug overdoses and five were arrested on drug-related charges, amid fears that the drug culture was far advanced at the school. The university chose last month–a nice, quiet time, with no students on campus–to ramp up its long-term war on fraternities […]
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Nearly everyone recognizes that student debt has risen to a level that will be difficult to sustain in the future given the nation’s slow growing economy and the sagging incomes of too many college-educated Americans. Nearly 40 million Americans are carrying some form of student debt; more than 7 million are in default on their […]
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The best ranking of undergraduate institutions by their general education is ACTA’s What Will They Learn? project. The evaluation looks at seven core subjects (composition, literature, foreign languages, U.S. government or history, economics, math, and science) and tallies whether schools require all students to show sufficient knowledge and proficiency in each one. The ACTA approach goes […]
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