In the current New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell entertainingly explains why computing a unidimensional ranking of educational quality from multidimensional indicators is a fool’s errand. In the case he examines, the…
…If ratings were paramount and included retention, however, Reed would just play it safe and slip into staid conventionality. And if average faculty compensation is the yardstick, any clever administrator…
…in the humanities (nearly 5,000 of them in 2009) said they had definite commitments for jobs or postdoctoral study, with 86 percent of them saying those commitments were for positions…
…35 percent of first-year community college students who don’t return for their second year, or the 33 percent of students at four-year institutions who don’t complete a bachelor’s degree within…
…on.” And Michelle Malkin opened her commentary with “Whaddya know. Academia did something right and honorable for once.” One can easily understand their endorsement. Finally, Ayers got a come-uppance. Finally,…
…into, of all things, mathematics. (See Sol Stern’s “The Propaganda in Our Ed Schools”: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/10/the_propaganda_in_our_ed_schoo.html ) The list of potential subjects for radicalization is vast; so enter art education. Though…
…informed godspy.com of the article. Charlotte Allen is listed as a contributor on that site. Mrs. John F. (Bridget) Murphy, Board President The Down Syndrome Guild of Greater Kansas City…
…concerns. That Albany purports to be a quality university (and is, in fact, one of SUNY’s better branches) makes Philip’s move all the more unjustifiable. At nytimes.com, Stanley Fish appropriately…
…feeling comfortable, or not hearing challenging words or ideas—threats, simply put, to one’s emotional state and level of comfort. This disparity transcends linguistics. It speaks to how the modern university…
…same way digital technology forced record companies to change how they sell music. This is the perfect postmodern prescription: no more hierarchy, no core curriculum, no shared knowledge or common…
Forbes has issued its 3rd annual College Rankings, delivering its crown to Williams College. Comparison to the U.S. News and World Report list is inevitable so let’s not delay in…
…laughter, outrage, smart comebacks, and strategizing were in ample supply. Since FIRE’s founding in 1999 by Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate, co-authors of the 1998 book The Shadow…
…18 to 40 percent higher in countries for which there were significant sample sizes — Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Spain and the United States. The general pattern…
To continue the commentary on the Cry Wolf project . . . In the final sentences of the story on the project at InsideHigherEd.com, Peter Dreier offers this remarkable defense…
Two law-school professors, Vikram David Amar and Kevin R. Johnson, recently published a piece in FindLaw.com on “Why U.S. News and World Report Should Include a Diversity Index in its…
…Martin Wiener, a Professor of History at Rice University observed in a comment at Inside Higher Ed.com, “the level of argument linking the two would surely have been given a…
…the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Common among these codes are, for example, prohibitions against “offensive environments for working or learning.” Even if fitting for a workplace, these types of…
…According to the NACUBO study, co-sponsored by Commonfund, U.S. colleges and universities lost a total of $93 billion in endowment value during fiscal year 2009. The average loss was 18.7…
…more likely to have landed outside of academia. For example, in Anthropology/Sociology, 43% of the Republican scholars were working outside academia, compared with only 24% of Democrat scholars. In History,…
…by Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (www.thefire.org). (Some of them may have been altered by now, but the fact that they ever existed is sufficient cause for response.) At…
At InsideHigherEd.com, Richard Whitmire has an interesting discussion entitled “Soon-to-Be Open Secret” on the delicacies of the “boy problem” on college campuses. The problem itself is simple. An achievement gap…
…institutions such as Duke, Stanford, or Pomona. Stuart Rojstaczer, a geology professor at Duke who has compiled extensive statistics on grade inflation (see his website www.gradeinflation.com), reports that about half…
…from the previous year, “the steepest annual decline in its 34-year history,” InsideHigherEd.com reported. This year looks no better. In particular, if candidates wrote a dissertation on Milton, Dickens, even…
…baccalaureate college had completed a four-year degree, compared with 51.3 percent in 2007. As the proportion of Americans seeking degrees has grown, inevitably we are receiving applications from more and…
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has unveiled a new site, www.whatwilltheylearn.com, that provides a survey of core curriculum requirements at 100 American Universities. They evaluate the existence of…
…alumni sign their nomination forms. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, student and alumni activists pushed Harvard to divest endowment holdings in companies doing business with the white-supremacist apartheid…
…partisanship: “The Right in These Times: Understanding and Combating Contemporary Shifts to the Right.” So does the cast of characters. They include David Harvey, a Marxist geographer at CUNY; Columbia…
…Woodward and Bernstein went to work for the Washington Post. Only this coming fall term, under Bill Grueskin, a former managing editor at WSJ.com who is new dean of academic…
…been posted at http://www.harvard.edu/alumni/candidates_overseers.php. This was not the first time I’d noticed the importance, to the administration, of its control over the means of communication to alumni (and even to…
…been struggling with her sexuality, faced the fact that she was bisexual and had come to the conclusion that Christian belief is compatible with a homosexual life. The Group said…