A college commencement is a splendid time to celebrate student achievement. But it’s “disinvitation season” again, as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education observes: the time when intolerant students and faculty advocate against their school’s choice of commencement speaker, sometimes causing the speaker to be disinvited. These power-hungry protesters demonstrate how little they have learned […]
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This week I watched the eighth and final set of lectures for “Introduction to Sustainability,” the Coursera MOOC I’ve been taking and chronicling over the past few weeks. This week’s topic was “measuring sustainability.” Seated before a camera, a photo of Utah’s Arches National Park behind him, Professor Tomkin opened his lecture just as he’s […]
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More often than one might think, Americans on the “Right” agree with Americans on the “Left” when it comes to higher education. A few years ago, the Pope Center hosted an event that brought together three critics from each wing of the political spectrum to explore the intersection of their views. I suspect that there will be […]
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In something close to a first-of-its-kind decision (in a similar case filed against Holy Cross, the judge sided with the university; comparable cases against Vassar and St. Joe’s remain pending), U.S. District Court judge Arthur Spiegel has upheld much of the lawsuit filed by former Xavier basketball player Dez Wells against the university. A gender […]
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Twenty years ago, critics such as Christina Hoff Sommers, Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, and Karen Lehrman described the bizarre “therapeutic pedagogy” in many women’s studies classrooms, where female students were frequently encouraged to share traumatic or intimate experiences in supportive “safe spaces.” Today, at many colleges, academic therapism has spread to other fields. Welcome to the age of the trigger […]
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Another day, another report on “gender inequities” in STEM fields. Early Academic Career Pathways in STEM: Do Gender and Family Status Matter? , just released by the American Institutes for Research, begins by summarizing the familiar litany of laments: not enough women on STEM faculties, and the few there “are more likely than men to be […]
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This is an excerpt from remarks by Professor Robert Paquette, co-founder of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, on winning the Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick Prize for Academic Freedom, Friday, March 7, at the CPAC convention in Maryland. The award is sponsored by the American Conservative Union Foundation and the Lynde and […]
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A major theme of my Duke lacrosse blog has been the almost complete lack of accountability for statements and judgments on the case made by academics and journalists. Duke’s trustees awarded the institution’s feckless president, Richard Brodhead, another five-year term. No fewer than four members of the Group of 88–the faculty who rushed to judgment […]
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The College Board is reformulating the SAT. Again. The new changes, like others that have been instituted since the mid 1990s, are driven by politics. David Coleman, head of the College Board, is also the chief architect of the Common Core K-12 State Standards, which are now mired in controversy across the country. Coleman’s initiative in revising the […]
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When you stop and think, it’s unfair to the many writers at the New York Times who produce columns that don’t have an ideological edge, to tar them with the brush that is rightly applied to its overwhelmingly unfair and unbalanced editorial pages. Just because the most conspicuous part of a newspaper is terribly slanted […]
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One of the biggest challenges MOOCs face is facilitating community and conversations among students. The MOOC I’m taking, “Introduction to Sustainability,” has three main kinds of discussion forums where students can start conversation “threads” and respond to others: 1) one for general discussion in which people post about anything they think is relevant; 2) video […]
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Cross-posted from See Thru Edu There is some sort of poetic justice or perfect symmetry in the recent discovery that a Duke University student is paying her tuition by working as a porn star. There are certainly schools with more Bacchanalian social structures than Duke; many of its students are quite serious about their educations […]
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In the United States and every other advanced society today, the share of the population with some level of postsecondary education (college in ordinary parlance) is a key indicator of its educational stature. Here, as in every other aspect of formal education, America once led the way. Sadly, today America is losing its edge. We […]
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Rutgers’s faculty and campus newspaper are offering one final lesson for its seniors: don’t engage with opposing views. On the recommendation of its Board of Governors, New Jersey’s flagship public university has invited Condoleezza Rice to address the graduating class of 2014. Dr. Rice, of course, is both an accomplished scholar and dedicated public servant. […]
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This is an excerpt from an essay in The American Conservative by Patrick Deneen on the Harvard Crimson column by Harvard senior S.V. Korn,”The Doctrine of Academic Freedom” which argued for dispensing with longstanding commitments to “academic freedom” in favor of what she calls “academic justice.” *** What is particularly telling in Ms. Korn’s article is that she […]
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The Wall Street Journal editorial page has been under heavy fire for running James Taranto’s February 10 column criticizing the double standard in campus policies that treat the man as a criminal and the woman as a victim when they have drunken sex–widely and egregiously misinterpreted as “if a drunk woman is raped, it’s as […]
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“What is it about Berkeley that stands out?” asks a woman who appears to be a professor at the beginning of Frederick Wiseman’s new four-hour documentary At Berkeley. She talks about making quality education available to all and transforming the future of both California and the country’s “diverse population.” But she is not identified. At Berkeley does not […]
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The “White House Task Force To Protect Students from Sexual Assault,” an initiative that thus far has elected not to engage civil liberties groups, invited public comment on its work and the issue of the administration’s response to campus sexual assault allegations. Below is the comment that I submitted: Since the Task Force has invited public my concerns […]
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Question: When is an obnoxious expression of a point-of-view a crime in our supposedly free society? Answer: When college administrators and federal law enforcement officials find it in their career interests to appeal to political correctness and play holier-than-thou, all at the expense of liberty, as the latest controversy at the University of Mississippi demonstrates. On […]
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For years, efforts have been made, legal and illegal, to get around the provisions of California’s Prop 209. That’s the 1996 measure that prevents consideration of gender, race or ethnicity in public education, employment or contracting. But for many weeks, it has seemed likely that the overwhelmingly Democratic California legislature would vote to exempt education from […]
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