This is the slightly edited introduction to the author’s new collection of essays, Decline and Revival in Higher Education ( Transaction Publishers ). Dr. London is president of the Hudson Institute, one of the founders of the National Association of Scholars, and the former John M. Olin Professor of the Humanities at New York University. […]
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In the epilogue of a new compendium volume, Mark Bousquet notes that, “In July 2007, the American Sociological Association reported that one-third of its members felt their academic freedoms were threatened, a significantly higher figure than the one-fifth ratio recorded during the McCarthy years.” Sounds dire, doesn’t it? Well not if you’ve spent the prior […]
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President Botstein’s portrait of Bard College’s summer reading assignments in the context of the college’s curriculum and larger educational aims is winsome and compelling. The college leads its students astutely into reading important books. It attends to the order in which such books should be read—Virgil before Dante. It is mindful of the need to […]
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In the wake of the National Association of Scholars’ report on summer reading for college freshmen—the report found many of the assigned books trivial and politically one-sided—we asked Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, to explain his institution’s unusually rigorous approach to summer reading. For the past two years, Bard College has asked first-year students […]
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What books do colleges and universities ask incoming freshmen to read over the summer? “Beach Books,” a study by the National Association of Scholars, has an answer: it turned up 180 books at 290 institutions and concluded that the book choices are unchallenging, heavily pitched to themes of alienation and oppression, and overwhelmingly reflect liberal […]
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Many colleges assign incoming freshmen a book to read over the summer. The original idea was to give new students a shared taste of what intellectual life is like. Over the years, the books came to reflect the dominant faculty obsession with race-class-gender group grievance and the idea that America is a grossly unfair nation—Barbara […]
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Many critical observers of humanities education believe that various left-leaning trends such as multiculturalism and cultural relativism become stronger the higher you rise on the education ladder. In graduate school, the focus is relentless in one seminar after another, with students composing thousands of dissertations each year that presume group identity outlooks as a matter […]
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Given that it’s been 30 years since I left graduate studies in English Lit, I don’t spend much time reading up on the field. Still, when I saw the provocative headline, “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind,’” on a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education I knew immediately that this […]
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Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University is a short, provocative book that raises many more questions than it answers. Its greatest contribution is that it clearly delineates the development of the American university from its origins in the late 19th century to the many absurdities that characterize it […]
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“Who are you kidding?” I wanted to get up and ask the English professor who was giving a talk at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association convention in November. He was analyzing a graphic novel, the spaces between panels, the line widths of the panels, the lettering inside the “speech bubbles.” Maybe he was trying […]
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Cary Nelson, current president of the American Association of University Professors, has a new book dealing with academic freedom and its relationship to broader structural problems in higher education. No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom is interesting and important, but also frustrating. It provides remedies to the problems confronting academic freedom at the […]
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Matthew Levinton, a student at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote us with some encouraging news about a new book club at that school, which he currently serves as President. Read his account: Last fall at the University of Texas at Austin, a new great books program began its mission to realize Thomas Jefferson’s […]
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Less than 60 percent of students at our four-year colleges complete their studies and graduate. That depressing statistic has drawn many critics, and now it has occasioned a book, Crossing the Finish Line, by three well-connected members of the academic establishment–William Bowen, Matthew Chingos, and Michael McPherson (hereafter, BCM). The authors obtained some data on […]
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By Maurice Black & Erin O’Connor Review of John C. Cross and Edie Goldenberg’s Off-Track Profs: Nontenured Teachers in Higher Education. (Cambridge: MIT Press): 2009. According to the AAUP, 48 percent of faculty are part-timers, and 68 percent of all faculty appointments take place off the tenure track. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) cites […]
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High schools appear to be steadily dumbing down summer reading assignments, if this Boston Globe report is any indication. One teacher: ..created a cheeky list with titles like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith and Our Dumb World by The Onion. The former is a spoof on the Jane Austen classic that has […]
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Whenever David Horowitz issues a broadside against leftwing bias in higher education, academics have a ready reply. He packs his sallies with pointed illustrations but the record is feeble, they say. He cherry-picks evidence and magnifies a few bad cases into an epidemic of malfeasance. He relies on indirect documents (for instance, course descriptions) but […]
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I don’t know who coined the phrase “a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage” as a pedagogic principle, but when I ran the words through Google, I got 196,000 links. The adage is the cornerstone of the teaching style variously known as “cooperative,” “collaborative,” “interactive,” or “student-centered” learning—part of the educational […]
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You say you’re an English major—but you’ve never read a word of Chaucer, you don’t know which century Dickens wrote in (wasn’t he the author of “Scrooged”—or was that Bill Murray?), and you think “The Rape of the Lock” is about a guy with a sexual fixation involving keyholes. Guess where you go to college? […]
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We’ve documented the foolishness of most “Freshmen Reading” assigments in the past. Looking through the dreck, Charlotte Allen discovered a ray of hope in Cornell’s assignment this year of Gary Wills’ Lincoln At Gettysburg. Now that the assignent is completed, what did Cornell students think? The Cornell Daily Sun reports: “I thought it was awful […]
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It’s July, and there’s one safe bet to be made about the 2.8 million or so new high school graduates who will be entering college as freshmen in just six or seven weeks: Few of them are likely to have even started reading the “one book” that the adminstrators at their chosen college have likely […]
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“I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behavior.” – Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, 1928 Those were the days. A novelist could teach for a year or two and emerge with enough satire to fill a library. Alas, the Academy […]
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By Roger Rosenblatt (Harper Collins, $23.95) “Don’t bother to come home if you still have a job,” Livi Porterfield called to her husband as he shoved their two groggy children into the 243,000-miles-and-still-rattling Accord, to drive them to school. He blew her a kiss. The job she referred to was on the faculty of Beet […]
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The University of Texas at Austin has just approved the formation of a field of study for the recently-established Program In Western Civilization and American Institutions. This enables the center to begin offering great books-based classes on Greek and Roman Philosophy, literature, and the American founding, among other topics. It’s a broad step forward for […]
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Color and Money: How Rich White Kids are Winning the War Over College Affirmative Action by Peter Schmidt Reviewed by George C. Leef Exactly how important is a college degree from a prestige school? Many believe that having such a degree is extremely important – a virtual guarantee of success in life. The higher education […]
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The Manhattan Institute’s Center For the American University is hosting a conference today here in New York celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Allan Bloom’s The Closing Of The American Mind. The book was an astonishing best-seller on the misdirection of the University, and the Center for the American University has assembled Robert George, Mark Steyn, […]
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“Bloom’s Closing Revisited” It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself. Introduction: Fifteen years after his death, Allan Bloom still commands a rapt audience. This past April, his thoughts once again filled a University of Chicago lecture hall. Though he was a brilliant essayist, translator, and educator in his own […]
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Many college freshmen face their first academic task before they even set foot in a classroom – the freshman summer reading project. Many colleges now select a single volume for all incoming freshmen to read, and construct discussion groups and attendant orientation activities around the book. Temple University’s explanation of its program is fairly representative: […]
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Donald Lazere offers a breezy and factless hatchet job on Allan Bloom today at Inside Higher Ed. At first he seems about to offer a detailed critique of his works, asserting that they are “lofty-sounding ideological rationalizations for the policies of the Republican Party from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush.” Stern words; Lazere follows […]
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