Despite a delay caused by settlement talks, Vassar has now filed its response to Peter Yu’s Title IX lawsuit. Unlike St. Joe’s, which at least attempted to defend its actions in a similar Title IX suit, Vassar’s response is blunter: the courts should simply trust that the college correctly handles disciplinary matters, even though the […]
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Last week I published a commentary on affirmative action at Inside Higher Ed that laid down a simple proposal. With 30 percent of first-year college students terming themselves “Liberal” or “Far Left,” 47 percent of them “Middle-of-the-road,” and with only 23 percent of them agreeing that “Racial discrimination is no longer a major problem in […]
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The two most potent and ingenious threats to liberal education in our country today are political correctness and techno-libertarian “disruption.” Political correctness has corrupted the humanities and social sciences and politicized higher education by asserting that all inquiry is to be driven by correct opinions about justice. The great books of the past are authoritatively […]
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The principle that a university president should not speak about his prior political experience to political audiences, lest the public cry out for objectivity, is a strange one. Even stranger is the idea, aired recently, that a nonpartisan speech by that president to a nonpartisan but activist audience is enough to raise concerns about undue politicization […]
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In attending yesterday’s oral argument in a case contesting Michigan’s affirmative action ban, I was struck by the enormous evolution of the civil rights movement away from some of its original principles. At issue in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action was the legality of a state constitutional amendment, adopted by Michigan voters in 2006, by a 58-42% […]
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The Supreme Court heard oral argument yesterday in an important Michigan affirmative action case, and the transcript reveals what a strange argument it was. The case is on appeal from the Sixth Circuit, whose eight Democratic-appointed judges had decided, over the bitter dissents of their seven Republican-appointed colleagues, that Michigan voters violated the 14th Amendment’s […]
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The government shutdown has brought scant good news, but there’s at least one positive development: the investigators at the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) have been deemed non-essential. As a result, OCR has been forced to postpone scheduled inspection visits, including one to Yale. That said, the shutdown at some point will end, and upon […]
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When 2013 SAT scores came out last month and showed no significant change from 2012,many educators may have felt not disappointed or neutral, but relieved. That’s because the overall trend since 2006, when the writing component was added, has been downward. Critical reading has dropped seven points, math four points, and writing nine points. In […]
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Swarthmore received considerable media attention this past spring, after several students filed a complaint against the school, alleging that Swarthmore’s sexual assault policy was so faulty that it discriminated against women in violation of Title IX. Neither the complaint nor most media coverage mentioned the specifics of the policy, which in fact was extraordinarily one-sided […]
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Libertarianism is spreading on our college campuses. An unusually large number of politically-minded, frustrated students, who refer to themselves as the “liberty movement,” believe themselves to be part of a rising tide that will restore the country to greatness. Much of the recent growth in libertarian activism emerged after Ron Paul’s 2008 failed presidential bid, […]
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Is it possible to stop the relentless promoting of anti-Americanism on campus? Let’s forget about donating millions for a patriotic “American Studies” program. Recall the Bass family’s sad experience at Yale–the $20 million donation for this purpose was eventually returned. Similarly forget about a governor (e.g., Mitch Daniels) or trustees trying to meddle in classroom instruction. “Academic […]
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Mark Lilla, an essayist, historian of ideas and professor of the humanities at Columbia University, is best known for his books The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics and The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. He is interviewed here by Dean Ball, a student at Hamilton College and former intern at Manhattan Institute. *** Q: You wrote […]
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Ever since Ronald Reagan tried and failed to abolish the U.S. Department of Education, conservatives have found themselves in a quandary when it comes to reforming public higher education. Some continue to insist, rightly, that the Tenth Amendment places the power over education solely in the hands of the individual states. A different group, however, […]
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Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy probably deserves his own chapter in the history of black intellectuals and black legal scholars. Over the years he has told us a great deal — some of it intentionally, with scholarship and skill; some inadvertently or unwittingly –about how race is regarded and debated in the academy, especially the legal academy. […]
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Academic politics can be vicious and hence an often entertaining spectator sport. Still, it is not altogether clear why Howard University president Sidney Ribeau’s recent announcement that he will resign the end of this year — unexpected and even shocking though it was — has attracted so much press attention, and not just in the usual higher education sources. It is true, as […]
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Cross-posted from See Thru Edu. I often try to temper my colleagues’ enthusiasm for the coming wave of “creative destruction” that is about to hit higher education. Certainly there are going to be big changes, but there are also key aspects of higher education that prove resistant to change. This is especially true about online […]
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The downfall of Hugo Schwyzer, gender studies professor and onetime darling of the feminist blogosphere–now revealed as a self-confessed “monstrous hypocrite” and intellectual fraud–has been one of the more bizarre spectacles to unfold recently on the Internet. His strange case offers depressing insights into the sexual politics of the modern academy and the cultural left, […]
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Here’s another Orwellian intervention at a U.S. university by the Federal Government: in response to feminist pressure about the handling (under Title IX and Title IV) of sexual harassment and sexual assault cases on campus, the University of Montana agreed to accept a resolution agreement with the Department of Justice and the Education Department’s Office […]
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The Department of Education released new information about student loan defaults yesterday, and it isn’t pretty. A dismaying 10 percent of student borrowers are now defaulting on their student loans within two years of repayment, and nearly 15 percent are defaulting within three years. These are the highest default rates since 1995. The data bear […]
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The Huffington Post brings news of faculty complaints at Occidental College. The background: Several months ago, students filed an OCR complaint, alleging that the school’s process for investigating sexual assault complaints was so biased against accusers that it violated Title IX. That process (which nearly all news media ignored) denies the accused student a right […]
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