Higher education and its comfortable inhabitants on campus have long been hotbeds of support for Obama and Obamacare. Now, along with business and labor, i.e., the other inhabitants of what passes for the real world, they are about to become victims of one of its high “Cadillac” tax on generous health plans. In 2009 President […]
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Thomas Bender, NYU professor of history and the humanities, laments that historians have “lost their public.” Economics, he notes, “has an audience in corporate and government circles; sociology and psychology have important roles in the social services. But historians generally have not had a similar targeted audience, except in schools. They have aspired to reach […]
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Hans Bader has a perceptive post analyzing the University of Virginia’s new “affirmative consent” policy. Rather than learning from Rolling Stone and stressing due process, the site of the year’s biggest campus rape hoax has redefined sexual assault to include routine contact that no one off campus would deem criminal conduct. As Bader notes, UVA […]
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By Edward Morrissey The University of Michigan swerved away from folly yesterday by reversing a decision not to show the popular film American Sniper on campus after 300 students protested its depiction of the late Chris Kyle. In a statement written by a group called Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) and the Muslim Students Association, protesters had […]
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How Accusers Play the Drinking Game at Washington and Lee As you’ll see from the this list of stories, the male students who have the resources to challenge the illegal bullying of their constitutional rights do so by filing a due process lawsuit, like the one facing Washington and Lee. The facts, by this point, […]
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By Taylor Schmitt I have some confessions to make: I am a liberal. I am pro-choice. I favor the legalization of gay marriage and marijuana. Given supreme authority, I would drastically cut our military budget and use the money to institute a single-payer healthcare system (certainly not something many of my colleagues at the Independent would agree […]
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The long-awaited Columbia Journalism Review report of Rolling Stone’s UVA article, which ostensibly takes the magazine to task for falsely reporting a rape that never happened, sparked a new outcry from both the media and students on America’s college campuses. They’re horrified that the report could have a chilling effect on students reporting sexual assaults. No […]
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One of the most important elements of a senator’s power comes in the tradition of recommending district court judicial nominations in the senator’s home state. And so it perhaps should come as little surprise that the Senate’s most ardent opponent of campus due process, Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York), would have recommended the author of the […]
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Stop giving every student a loan. That’s Megan McArdle’s advice on Bloomberg View. Talking about accredited four-year schools as well as for-profit colleges, she says: “…stop making the loans directly, then invite private companies back into the student-loan market — and force them to eat some of the losses.” So the companies will have to do […]
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The University of Houston, a public university, is proud to have snagged actor Matthew McConaughey as its 2015 commencement speaker. The University says that McConaughey has “the kind of star power that adds muscle to the University of Houston’s bold reputation campaign “Welcome to the Powerhouse.”” I understand that colleges and universities are fighting for […]
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If you can’t beat them, join them. So seems to be the MOOC mantra now that “tsunami” hype is fading. Gone is talk of do-it-yourself education replacing credit hours and diplomas en masse. Now MOOC providers are developing elements of the structure of the traditional institutions they once challenged, and focusing predominantly on niche tech […]
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Over the more than 25 years that I have been writing articles and giving talks critical of racial preferences at American universities, I think I have learned something about the contours of the public debate on this issue, especially as it pertains to the more selective institutions. Here are four salient conclusions
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Back in 2008, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, wrote here that on campus, the word ”sustainability” was moving away from its normal English meaning (prudent use of resources with the needs of future generations in mind) toward a usage with heavy ideological baggage: “sustainability” (definition 2) – a condition that arises […]
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Kevin Carey hates college. Or rather, he hates the higher education industry, the system, the establishment. An encounter on page 39 of his new book, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere indicates one reason why. Carey sits down at a Starbucks in Washington, DC, with a junior at […]
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A campus debate on sexual assault was too much for Emma Hall, a junior at Brown, She had to retreat to a “safe space” because “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs.” Exposure to ideas you don’t already have is problematic on the […]
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Cornell is the latest university to face a due process lawsuit; last week, attorney Andrew Miltenberg filed a suit in New York’s Northern District. (You can read the complaint here.) The specifics are depressingly familiar—though with something of a twist, since Cornell featured one of the earliest post-“Dear Colleague” letter battles over due process. In […]
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The politics of campus due process are most unusual. Since the emergence of crime as a major (federal) political issue in the 1960s, Republicans have tended to be the tough-on-crime party, Democrats more concerned with the rights of the accused, especially when the accused are poor or racial minorities. (Obviously there have been exceptions in […]
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In her new book, Harvard Law Professor Lani Guinier attacks “testocracy,” the over-reliance on standardized tests in deciding who gets into college, who has the chance to attend America’s premier institutions, and who is relegated to the cheap seats of community colleges and for-profit schooling. Unfortunately, Guinier’s “Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in […]
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Hillel is an unrivaled center of Jewish life on college campuses. Swarthmore College students decided this week to give up the Hillel name, and thereby break from the organization, because they thought it absolutely critical that its chapter host speakers and cooperate with organizations that denigrate Zionism and wish to expel Israel from the family […]
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Jordan Schneider, like many part-time college instructors, teaches on two community college campuses in order to cobble together a living. He earns a paltry $21,000 per year with no benefits for teaching a larger-than-normal load of four courses per semester. Non-tenure track full-time professors earn $47,000. Established professors’ salaries have remained flat, at between $60,000 […]
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