The anti-Republican classroom rant of Michigan State professor William Penn has attracted considerable attention in the last few days. (A student surreptitiously recorded Penn criticizing the Romneys, attendees to the 2012 Republican National Convention, and the election law recently passed on a party-line vote in North Carolina’s GOP-controlled legislature.) Three lessons come to mind about […]
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In a revealing incident at the beginning of Michigan State’s new academic year, writing professor William Penn went off on a rant aimed at Republicans. Fortunately, a student captured it on video, which is included in this story on Inside Higher Ed. Among Professor Penn’s comments were such ideas as these: “If you go to […]
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The great transformation of higher education may be under way. Two indicators: First, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that enrollments at America’s universities in 2012 fell for the first time in years. What the Census did not stress was that the decline was fairly substantial, about 500,000 students, or roughly three percent. Rather the Census, […]
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A strange story out of Swarthmore involving anti-due process activist Mia Ferguson, who was last in the news in April, when she joined several fellow students in filing a Title IX complaint against Swarthmore, on grounds that college procedures insufficiently protected the rights of sexual assault accusers. (Ferguson claimed that she was raped by another […]
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The Washington Post is currently running a series of research pieces on the economics of higher ed entitled “The Tuition Is Too Damn High.” Last week, I criticized Washington Post blogger Dylan Matthews’ assertion that paying for a college education is uniformly worth it, arguing that although aggregate data on employment and wages suggests that […]
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That sounds like a slogan of progressives, who often justify their critique of the United States, organized religion, patriotism, Western civilization, and other traditional institutions on the grounds that the purpose of higher education is to instill critical thinking about prevailing norms and beliefs. But the phrase above actually comes from a blog post by […]
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Buzzfeed has a must-read story about the challenges facing colleges that seek to undermine the higher-ed status quo. Altius Education, a for-profit education company, partnered with the non-profit Tiffin University to create “Ivy Bridge College,” a program within Tiffin that offered associates degrees in practical fields. Atius and Tiffin designed Ivy Bridge hoping that its […]
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College is becoming the new high school–and in many respects, already is. Colleges and universities are remediating more and more students in basic skills, and increasingly teaching them content material that they should have learned in high school. The proliferation of dual-credit/dual-enrollment courses has helped to accelerate this trend while further blurring the distinction between […]
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Tepid. Even disapproving. That’s the state of many professors’ attitudes towards MOOCs, according to Inside Higher Ed‘s 2013 Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology, released on the IHE website on Tuesday. That reaction isn’t surprising, given fears that MOOCs will wipe out hordes of academic jobs. Plus, I’d like to think, professors who’ve spent their […]
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There’s nothing as western as West Texas, its sky a vast inverted bowl, its land austere and boundless, its people tough, terse, and hard working. These aren’t images that readily bring to mind the Parthenon or Temple Mount, but they do suggest what makes West Texas’ landscape a signifier for the achievement of Western civilization […]
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The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a rising trend among employers of recent college graduates. To determine a job applicant’s skills and knowledge, many of them have started to rely on a test instead of the graduate’s grade point average. Some of them, such as General Mills, have crafted their own job-applicant examinations, while […]
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Mark Twain once commented that Richard Wagner’s music “isn’t as bad as it sounds.” Despite daily sob stories of student debt, joblessness, and emotional disappointment, many defenders of higher education insist that college is absolutely worth it, for everyone. This is a simple reduction of the argument that deceives many. Nobody disputes that college graduates […]
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Recently, two male students sued colleges that expelled or suspended them over allegedly false claims of sexual misconduct. Citing school officials’ repeated violation of rules contained in student handbooks and college regulations, they argue that Vassar College and Saint Joseph’s University violated their contractual rights, Title IX (which bans sex discrimination), and anti-fraud laws.Their legal claims seem plausible to […]
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Reporting on a first-in-the-nation law passed in North Carolina, Inside Higher Ed’s Allie Grasgreen spoke to three administrators in the UNC system, plus a “Dear Colleague” letter defender. The law will require colleges to allow most students accused before public university disciplinary panels to be represented by an attorney. (Duke, naturally, will continue to deny […]
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As I wrote last week on National Review Online, President Obama’s higher education reform agenda acknowledges that decades of increasing government subsidies aren’t lowering the price of college. In fact, they have pushed prices to astronomical levels. This theory is known as the Bennett Hypothesis, after former Secretary of Education (and my boss) Bill Bennett, who first noticed […]
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For the third time in as many months, a student whose college deemed him a rapist has filed suit in federal court, this time against Xavier University. But the case filed by former Xavier student Dez Wells differs in two important respects. First, Wells’ accuser, Kristen Rogers, went to the authorities–who after thoroughly reviewing the […]
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As suggested here last March, the apparent wave of racist graffiti at Oberlin College was yet another campus hoax. So were the anti-Semitic and anti-gay graffiti and the reported sighting of a white-sheeted Klansman on campus. The sightings seemed unlikely at the time, yet they caused a day of class cancellations and fostered much hand-wringing […]
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The White House yesterday unveiled what it is billing as an ambitious new plan to tackle college affordability. President Obama’s wish list amounts to an expansion of centralized state control over higher education, containing a hodge-podge of special-interest items masqueraded as reform First is a government college ranking system to be based on measures of […]
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What do college students read? According to one survey Shades of Gray, the sado-masochistic novel, was the most widely read book outside the classroom. Another survey indicated that The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, dealing with her battle with cancer and racial grievance, was the most popular book. But as the recent publication of the […]
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In this heart-rending L.A. Times piece, we see how educational malpractice from early school on to freshman year at the University of California – Berkeley has damaged a young black student, Kashawn Campbell. Kashawn was one of the very few male students who showed any interest in his studies and for that reason, the school […]
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