The long-awaited bill from Missouri senator Claire McCaskill (co-sponsored by seven other senators, two Democrats and three Republicans) has now been introduced in the Senate. Given that McCaskill’s springtime town halls featured no defense attorneys or civil libertarians, it’s unsurprising that the bill contained nothing about the rights of accused students. As FIRE has pointed […]
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Brett Sokolow has been a model of inconsistency in the campus “rape wars.” As president of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management (NCHERM), he has carved out a reputation as a foe of due process, but he surprised almost everyone this past spring by suggesting that he had knowledge of between eight and […]
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Slavoj Žižek is “the world’s hippest philosopher,” according to the UK’s Telegraph. Indeed, the Slovenian-born philosopher has won over adoring fans by combining references to Hegel, Freud, popular culture, and warmed-over postmodernism, and calling it philosophy. His stature is such that students can take classes on his thought and professors can contribute to a peer-reviewed […]
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This article is first in a series on “the year that was” in higher education. This last school year has been more than a little distressing for those who care about free speech and academic freedom on our nation’s college and university campuses. And it’s not because of any change in the legal understanding of free […]
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Trustees shouldn’t step too far out of line, says Richard D. Legon, the President of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, in a recent piece for Inside Higher Ed. Legon refers to the case of Wallace Hall, the University of Texas regent who investigated corruption in the UT system by requesting troves […]
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The issuance of the “Dear Colleague” letter in 2011 triggered a race to the bottom for due process in the Ivy League. The contest began with Yale, which adopted a new sexual assault policy that prevented accused students from presenting evidence of innocence in “informal” complaints and redefined the concept beyond recognition in formal complaints. […]
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William Deresiewicz has a provocative piece of advice in this month’s New Republic: “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League.” Deresiewicz, a Columbia graduate and former Yale professor, argues that elite institutions often produce students who are entitled and lack purpose. He also suggests that elite schools promote inequality by catering mostly to high-income […]
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Colleges are cashing in credential inflation. In a recent essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Kevin Carey notes that many “not-for-profit” colleges operate highly profitable terminal master’s programs in fields such as business administration, education, and public administration that are indistinguishable from the two-year vocational offerings of most “for-profit” colleges. He therefore argues that […]
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Does the University of Wisconsin-Madison have a plan to introduce diversity in grading—making sure that African Americans, Hispanics and other non-Asian minorities get the same proportion of good marks as whites and Asians? No. “Nothing could be further from the truth,’ said Professor Patrick Sims, UW Chief Diversity Officer and interim Vice Provost for Diversity […]
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Earlier this week, Huffington Post’s Tyler Kingkade published an article strongly critical of FIRE’s efforts to shine light on Occidental College’s troubling approach to due process. The article implied—without saying so directly—that FIRE was responsible for alleged harassment towards anti-due process activists on the campus. The underlying skepticism about the free exchange of information might […]
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How would you feel if everyone could see your college GPA? Students generally don’t need to worry thanks to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which prohibits schools from releasing a student’s information without their or their parents’ explicit permission. However, an exception to these regulations threatens student privacy. Consider Emory University, for instance. […]
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Articles by Professor W. Lee Hansen at the Pope Center site and by John Leo here at Minding the Campus attracted wide attention last week by deploring a suggestion in a diversity report at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that called for, among other things, the “proportional participation” of underrepresented racial/ethnic groups “in the distribution of […]
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MTC contributor KC Johnson first made waves with his stunning work on the Duke lacrosse case of 2006. His reporting, which revealed how the accused students were repeatedly denied their due process rights, first appeared on his blog and later in Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, the definitive account of the case […]
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Just as a new conflict breaks out between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East, the professoriate’s bias against Israel is resurfacing in novel, ugly ways. The Washington Free Beacon has exposed an anti-Israel listserv at Brandeis University, where faculty members expressed concerns about Israelis harvesting organs, referred to the President of Brandeis and his wife […]
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Parents considering sending the child to Swarthmore College no longer can claim they weren’t warned. The Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer had a lengthy and quite well-done article examining the increasing lawsuits filed by students accused of sexual assault who were victimized by a lack of due process in campus disciplinary proceedings. Most of the cases the article […]
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Here’s my reaction when I saw the title of “The Great Accreditation Farce,” Peter Conn’s recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Finally, someone’s telling the truth. Our system of accreditation of colleges is indeed a farce, a waste of “millions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours.” To please external examiners, faculty […]
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Politicians and pundits who argue that college today is financially unsustainable and functionally obsolete are not just arguing for greater efficiency and more reliance on educational technology, they are pushing for a kind of higher education rationing. They may not have the courage to say it outright, but what they are really envisioning is a […]
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A remarkable article on the University of Wisconsin (Madison) appeared yesterday on the John William Pope Center site. In it, UW economics professor W. Lee Hansen writes about a comprehensive diversity plan prepared for the already diversity-obsessed campus. The report, thousands of words long, is mostly eye-glazing diversity babble, filled with terms like “compositional diversity,” […]
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The crusade to weaken due process rights of students accused of sexual assault traveled this week to Dartmouth, which is hosting a one-week conference entitled, “Summit on Sexual Assault.” As FIRE’s Peter Bonilla pointed out, the “matter of due process for accused didn’t make the agenda”; the presenters don’t include any civil libertarians or defense […]
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Most of the sturm and drang about discrimination for the past week or two has involved bitter disputes over recent Supreme Court decisions (Hobby Lobby and Wheaton College) that spared a few Christians from being thrown into the lion’s den of Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate. Now comes a rude reminder that the “Diversity” Vampire is still […]
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