Last week, James Taranto penned an extraordinary exposé of the continuing war on due process in college sexual assault tribunals. (“This is the kind of story I became a journalist to write,” he tweeted.) Taranto told the story of Joshua Strange, an Auburn student expelled for sexual assault, based on thin, arguably non-existent, evidence, and […]
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A story in the Harvard Crimson last week reported on a meeting at the university that produced an exchange that should surprise nobody. Professor Harvey Mansfield rose in the midst of a session with faculty and administrators to pose a discomfiting question: “A little bird has told me that the most frequently given grade at […]
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The wolf at the door of American higher education is online instruction. Traditional residential colleges hear it snuffling at the threshold. They know they are vulnerable. They cannot compete on price. Online is intrinsically cheaper. They compete awkwardly on utility. Online instruction is a more efficient way to convey knowledge and skills in a lot […]
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Posted by Jared Meyer and Franziska Kamm Cross posted from E21. As student loan debt has almost tripled since 2004, start-up companies such as Upstart and Pave offer a solution. These firms allow those with excess money to invest in people and their careers. Graduate students from competitive universities are especially attractive targets for investors. As their […]
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From the bowels of academia comes news that the National Council of the American Studies Association has voted in favor of boycotting Israeli institutions. The boycott resolution goes to the full membership for an up or down vote. The National Council’s vote has been hailed as a huge victory for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions […]
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The disappointing early performance of MOOCs has tempered predictions of academia’s wholesale collapse. So where will these behemoths find their place in the landscape of higher-ed? Well-financed by investors, relatively popular among administrators, and attractive to millions of course registrants, MOOCs are not likely to face extinction. Their future probably lies somewhere between adapting to […]
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The most common mark given at Harvard College these days is an A, and the median grade is A-. This information, from Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris, came out in response to a question from Professor Harvey Mansfield at the monthly meeting yesterday of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Mansfield is […]
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Here, in a nutshell, is the human toll of the student-loan mess: it is forcing many recent grads to defer marriage and having children; it is hobbling many prospective entrepreneurs that our economy badly needs and may well delay the retirement of new grads by 11 or 12 years. The total student-loan debt hit $1 trillion dollars […]
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Michelle Obama would like more students to attend college. In a speech on November 12, which was immediately recognized by the media as a major shift in policy emphasis, Mrs. Obama told students at a Washington, D.C. high school that the administration would work hard to increase the number of low-income students who pursue college […]
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Most parents, college graduates, or even legislators could be excused for lacking a detailed sense of the state of affairs on college campuses today, since higher education policy issues rarely emerge in the mainstream media. This pattern makes the one-sided coverage in the one newspaper–the New York Times–that regularly covers higher-ed issues especially objectionable. A […]
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Like compulsive Las Vegas gamblers, many university presidents like to make big bets hoping for large payoffs. And like most gamblers, they usually lose. But they have a big advantage over those going to Vegas: they are gambling with other people’s money. The most famous form of higher education gambling involves football and basketball, where […]
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Is a MOOC more like an ATM or an American Express Centurian card? The former provides a service to everyone with a bank account. The latter serves a smaller niche of the prosperous few. Like an ATM, MOOCs are automated dispensers providing accessible, on-demand service to thousands of users. They faithfully output course material, input […]
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Peter Wood’s article “New York’s Left-Most Mayor Takes Over” was cross-posted by City Journal, where it drew a protest from the CUNY administration and a response from the author. Michael Arena, CUNY: Peter Wood is inaccurate when he states that Mayor Bloomberg conceived of CUNY’s Pathways general education framework. Unfortunately, the writer did not check […]
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On two issues a chasm exists between the academic mainstream and views outside the campus walls. The first, of course, is using racial and ethnic preferences in faculty hiring procedures and (except for Asians and Asian-Americans) in elite university student admissions. A virtual article of faith in the academy, the use of racial preferences attracted […]
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Janet Napolitano left her post as Secretary of Homeland Security in July to become the president of the University of California. The decision of the UC Regents to appoint her surprised me. As I wrote at the time, she had “no discernible qualification” for the position–other than a politician’s ability to raise money and a […]
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An important victory for FIRE in the organization’s efforts to encourage the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to return to a position of respecting the due process rights of the nation’s college students. Last week, the OCR (which under 1st-term Obama appointee Russlynn Ali consistently ignored FIRE) sent a rather churlish letter to FIRE president […]
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Most readers of Minding the Campus are well aware of the phenomenon of “mismatching” in colleges first brought to national attention in regard to African American students by Cornell economics professor Thomas Sowell in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Sowell showed that many of the black students at Cornell, who often had scores on national exams […]
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Brandeis University gave a surprising good-bye present to former president Jehuda Reinharz: a post-retirement compensation package of $600,000 a year for little apparent work. Indeed, Reinharz is earning another $800,000 annually in a full-time job for the Mandel Foundation (a Cleveland-based charity that has generously supported Brandeis). These kinds of deals are increasingly common in higher education. […]
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The heavily publicized campaign by gay activists against University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus is back in the news, this time with more ominous implications for peer review and academic freedom. A Florida court has ordered that records of confidential peer reviews of scholarly articles be turned over to a self-styled “investigative journalist.” It is […]
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The Yale Daily News has an interesting scoop today–it turns out that the university has the authority to access a student’s e-mail account, without informing the student. The paper interviewed 73 students on campus; only three, according to the Daily News, “were aware of the specifics of Yale’s policy.” The paper’s report further indicates that […]
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