As Georgia Tech gears up for its new MOOC-like master’s degree program slated to launch this spring, the Wall Street Journal reports that applications from would-be students are dramatically outpacing fall ’13 applications to Georgia Tech’s residential program. Offered jointly by the Georgia Institute of Technology and Udacity, with financial support and “advice” from AT&T, […]
Read More
“As Interest Fades in the Humanities, Colleges Worry,” said the headline in the New York Times. True enough. But the long front-page story described only half of the problem–that the rise of the computer culture and the recession have turned many students away from the traditional curriculum. On his blog, Via Meadia, Walter Russell Mead […]
Read More
A speech to the 55th reunion of the Harvard Law School class of 1958, October 26, 2013. I graduated from Harvard Law School in 1967. Very early in my career, I represented many students in Administrative Board cases growing out of their protests against the Vietnam War. I represented (with Alan Dershowitz) one group of students accused […]
Read More
A few months ago, a lawyer for the State University of New York (SUNY) penned a startling column about the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) “blueprint,” introduced for the University of Montana as a national model for dealing with sexual assault and sexual harassment on campus. In the “blueprint,” the OCR […]
Read More
Can public universities offer racially restrictive programs and scholarships, i.e., for which threshold eligibility is determined by the race of the applicants? No, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Podberesky v. Kirwan (1994), based on its “constitutional premise that race is an impermissible arbiter of human fortunes.” Some will regard it as ironic […]
Read More
People under 40 years of age don’t remember what it was like in the humanities circa 1990. The academic theater of the Culture Wars was tense and vibrant, with national publications debating what was going on in English departments. Books decrying trends in the humanities by Allan Bloom and Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza were […]
Read More
For over a year, Dixie State University senior Indigo Klabanoff has been fighting to start a local sorority at her public Utah university. The sorority would be dedicated to providing services for the community and learning opportunities for its members. But Dixie State administrators have flatly stated that Indigo’s sorority, Phi Beta Pi, will not […]
Read More
In a wide-ranging policy address on Tuesday, Utah Senator Mike Lee laid out a proposal to change how the federal government regulates access to more than $150 billion in student financial aid. Since 1965, the federal government has farmed this gate-keeping job out to third-party accreditation agencies that are closely allied with existing higher education institutions. So […]
Read More
The nauseating combination of ignorance, self-righteousness, entitlement, and boorishness that characterizes campus politics today was on appalling display yesterday at Brown University, as a massive crowd of students prevented New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly from addressing the school. Kelly had come to Brown to talk about the New York Police Department’s unmatched success in […]
Read More
A hundred or more excited students at Brown University shouted down New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly last night and prevented him from speaking on “Proactive Policing.” Shutting down speakers whose messages are out of favor with the left is common. On campus, free speech is regularly trumped by leftist concerns–in this case resentment […]
Read More
Hadley Arkes is the Edward N. Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions at Amherst College. He is something of an institution himself. He is a brilliant scholar but perhaps known as much for his irascible temper and aggressive style of argument as he is for the substance of his positions. The combination of intellectual […]
Read More
Thanks to Obamacare, the situation of adjuncts and other “contingent faculty” has become much more precarious. “Universities are cutting back on their work hours to comply with Obamacare,” the Daily Caller reports, in order to avoid that law’s requirement of benefits to those who work more than 30 hours a week. “Adjunct college instructors,” the […]
Read More
The College Board has released its annual report Trends in College Prices, and never has a seemingly boring document full of tables and graphs revealed more about American higher education. Five observations culled from the data: The rate of increase in tuition fees moderated a good deal this year, continuing a trend, especially at state universities, […]
Read More
NSA-like surveillance on American campuses? Oh, yes. In a fascinating column for the Guardian, FIRE’s Nico Perrino cites examples ranging from Montana to Occidental to Kentucky to Valdosta State to St. Augustine’s College to Johns Hopkins, noting the prevalence of the anti-privacy pattern. Perrino leads by recalling events from earlier this year at Harvard, when […]
Read More
A fascinating facet of the ongoing deflation of the higher education bubble is the scramble by law schools to adjust to their dropping enrollments. At many schools, this enrollment drop has been enormous. Applications to law schools generally are down by 18% this fall, the third year in a row of double-digit drops. Just looking at my home state […]
Read More
“How Amherst Raises Money from Alums: Calling Them a Bunch of Drunken Lechers.” That was the headline on the blog Stupid Girl citing a Newsweek report that Amherst College sent residence counselors an advisory email that included this warning: “Keep an eye out for unwanted sexual advances. A lot of alums come back for Homecoming […]
Read More
Peter Lawler’s “The Downside of MOOCified Disruption” challenges my op-ed, “Confronting MOOC Melancholy.” Let’s start where he and I apparently agree, and see where the logos leads. First, I argue in my piece that higher education suffers from watered-down standards and ideologically-driven instruction. Lawler agrees, writing, “Political correctness has corrupted the humanities and social sciences.” […]
Read More
On the evening of 19 September, about two weeks before the scheduled appearance of Hillary Rodham Clinton as a “Great Names” speaker at Hamilton College, members of the Hamilton College community received an all-campus email from Amit Taneja, head of Hamilton’s Days-Massolo Center. Mr. Taneja, who had been recently elevated to the position “Director of […]
Read More
Student journalists from George Washington University have uncovered a piece of stunning news: Despite GW’s claims to the contrary, its admissions office has begun to favor wealthier students in the admissions process. Essentially, students who do not rank among the top applicants are wait-listed if admissions officers are unsure whether GW can “afford them.” Students […]
Read More
Cross-posted from the College Conservative. Emily Yoffe, author of the widely respected “Dear Prudence” column at Slate, has decided that “the best rape prevention” is to “tell college women to stop getting so wasted.” She argues that drinking is a choice (duh), drinking to extreme excess makes you unable to protect yourself (duh), and then it gets weird: […]
Read More