It’s definitely true, as Tom Friedman recently noted, that many graduates don’t possess the skills that today’s employers seek. Thankfully, some colleges have taken notice. They’re trying to address the skills gap either by boosting faculty-student mentorship programs or partnering with employers to better prepare students for the workforce. Fortunately, these ideas aren’t mutually exclusive. […]
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali spoke at Yale Monday to a packed auditorium of more than 300 people, with hundreds more turned away due to lack of space, and received many standing ovations. The speech’s success was especially heartening in light of the Yale Muslim Students Association’s (MSA) efforts to block it. When the William F. Buckley, […]
Read MoreSee the highly praised new documentary Ivory Tower in New York City Thursday, September 25, 7:30 p.m. at AMC Loews 34th Street theater, 312 West 34th St. Tickets are $12 for the screening, sponsored by the National Association of Scholars. To buy tickets, to watch the trailer for the film, or to donate to NAS, […]
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Goucher College is lowering its application standards even further. Having dispensed with the SAT requirement in 2007, it’s now making transcripts optional, too. Students can now apply to Goucher by sending in two assignments from high school, at least one of them graded, and a video, of no more than two minutes, explaining how the […]
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Cross-posted from Cognoscenti I’m a feminist, or so I have always thought, given my decades of advocacy for unqualified sexual equality and reproductive choice. But according to Gloria Steinem and sociologist Michael Kimmel, I am an “opponent of women’s equality and their right to make decisions about their own bodies.” Why? Because I oppose California’s […]
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A favorite trope of science fiction dystopias is a classroom of students wearing metallic skull caps wired to a blinking, monolithic computer, and staring vacantly into space while the propaganda and “facts” that pass for knowledge and education are downloaded directly into their brains. That scenario may be coming soon to a college campus near […]
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This has been a big year for sleep at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The Shapiro Undergraduate Library cleared away some dusty and disposable books on the first floor and six cots were installed, offering weary students “a safe place for brief spells of restorative sleep,” or “naps,” as they are known in campus […]
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At Ohio State University, to avoid being guilty of “sexual assault” or “sexual violence,” you and your partner now apparently have to agree on the reason WHY you are making out or having sex. It’s not enough to agree to DO it, you have to agree on WHY: there has to be agreement “regarding the […]
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The University of Virginia is boasting again about how well it does by its black students. This is an annual event and some of the boasting has merit. As the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education pointed out last June, U.Va. “consistently posts the highest black student graduation rate of any state-operated university in the […]
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The redoubtable Donna Shalala is retiring as president of the University of Miami, leaving behind a major record of service in higher education and government, as well as a mixed record on censorship and free speech. Before her tenure at Miami she served as Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Clinton Administration; Chancellor […]
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For years, Bill Bennett, former U.S. Secretary of Education, has avoided taking a position on the Common Core K-12 State Standards. But yesterday he declared himself in favor. His essay in The Wall Street Journal, under the headline “The Conservative Case for Common Core,” dwells on the idea that conservatives generally favor good books, shared […]
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The New York Times is late to the game of college rankings, but the paper of record has entered with a splash. Before we get to their system, it’s useful to think about the rankings in the abstract. Maybe it seems obvious but the way an institution or a magazine ranks colleges is an expression […]
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Well, the 2015 U. S. News & World Report rankings are out, and here are the elite Top 10 for “National Universities”: 1. Princeton 2. Harvard 3. Yale 4. Columbia 4. Stanford 4. University of Chicago 7. MIT 8. Duke 8. Penn 10. California Institute of Technology And here are the rankings of the Top […]
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In an expose published in the Weekly Standard, Mark Hemingway describes the waste, irresponsibility, and petty politics that plague student governments. At a small liberal arts college, this kind of student mischief would only cause minor problems. But at large state schools, where student governments control piles of cash larger “than many municipal budgets in […]
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American higher education has seriously misguided priorities. Across the country, schools are lowering their academic standards while increasing amenities. Indeed, given the proliferation of luxurious dorms, world-class student exercise facilities, and gourmet dining halls, one might say that American colleges and universities emphasize recreation over education. Unsurprisingly, students are losing out. In their new book, […]
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In response to pressure from the federal government and campus “activists,” two more high-profile universities are weakening due process protections afforded to students accused of sexual assault (and, regarding campus offenses, only to those students). The Daily Princetonian reports that a Princeton faculty committee has recommended lowering the school’s burden of proof for sexual assault […]
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Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Company once had a policy that the CEO could not make more than five times the amount earned by the lowest entry-level employee, capping the CEO’s salary at $81,000 in the early 1980s. By 1995, though, that policy had been eliminated. It turns out that it was difficult to attract […]
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I’ve often noted the poor, one-sided reporting on campus sexual assault—highlighted by a trio of publications (the Times, BuzzFeed, and Huffington Post) that seem to see their coverage more as advocacy than neutral reporting. In such an environment good journalistic work particularly stands out, as in Robin Wilson’s recent items in the Chronicle. Wilson had […]
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Much has been written about the declining number of tenure/tenure-track faculty (TTF) when considered as a percentage of the total instructional faculty on the nation’s campuses. That percentage was likely more than 75% several decades ago; it is now in the neighborhood of 30%. (It depends upon whether one computes the percentage based on bodies […]
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The Steven Salaita case at the University of Illinois continues to engender controversy. The three most perceptive commentaries came from FIRE and Steven Lubet. In comments with which I entirely agree, FIRE condemned the public statement of Illinois chancellor Phyllis Wise, who justified the revocation of Salaita’s offer on the grounds “we cannot and will […]
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