Brown University is famous for having the loosest graduation requirements in the Ivy League. In fact, there are almost no graduation requirements at all, for although Brown undergrads do have to major in something in order to qualify for a degree, they are free to design their own majors. As for anything else in the […]
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With its $34 billion endowment growing at the rate of nearly 20 percent a year thanks to astute investments, Harvard University is probably the richest university on earth. But that didn’t stop Harvard from raising its undergraduate tuition 3.5 percent for the 2008-2009 academic year, to a record $32,557. When you figure in room, board, […]
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Fewer and fewer high school students are taking the SAT exam these days—possibly because fewer colleges are requiring the submission of SAT scores as part of the admissions process. According to the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FairTest), an organization that admittedly opposes standardized tests, only 46 percent of graduating seniors in the […]
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How do you thwart an anti-affirmative action ballot measure likely to be overwhelmingly approved by state voters? Let me count the ways in which racial-preference boosters (typically college administrators, liberal state officials, and ethnic advocacy groups) have thwarted or tried to thwart anti affirmative action activist Ward Connerly’s hopes for a “Super Tuesday” this November […]
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Back in June, the American Political Science Association entertained—and then rejected—a proposal by some of its gay and lesbian members to change the locale of its 2012 annual meeting, on the ground that the currently scheduled site, the city of New Orleans, is located in a state, Louisiana, that has a constitutional amendment banning gay […]
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Sociology, an academic field that’s been in slow decline for decades after its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s with the likes of social critics Talcott Parsons and C. Wright Mills, has recently gotten a new lease on life – because one of its subfields, criminology, is now one of the most popular majors on […]
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The efforts of some of the University of Chicago’s faculty to derail a planned research institute named after the university’s Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006) is full of delicious ironies. In a June 6 letter to Chicago’s president, Robert Zimmer and its provost, Thomas Rosenbaum, more than 100 professors—not a single one from Chicago’s […]
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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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In 2003 Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, decided that the one-year curriculum at the university’s historic Graduate School of Journalism wasn’t intellectual enough, because it focused on the acquisition of practical skills such as reporting, editing, and broadcast techniques rather than training fledgling journos for what many of them would rather be: public intellectuals. […]
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Times are tough these days for self-styled progressive colleges. Last week Antioch College, the venerable liberal-arts institution in Yellow Springs, Ohio, that never recovered from the 1960s, shut its doors and laid off the last of its faculty members who had served an ever-dwindling number of students. And now, the New College of California in […]
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So, which news stories about the College Board’s new report on the addition of a writing section to the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) do you believe? Here’s the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “The results echo preliminary findings, released in April, that the new exam is just about as good as high school grades – and in some […]
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A recently released report that claims to poke holes in the idea of Asian-American students as the “model minority” – excelling academically and outperforming white students in mathematics, engineering, and the sciences – looks more like the latest phase of a long-running effort by Asian-American activists to persuade college administrators to establish admissions quotas and […]
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There’s good news coming out of the state of Georgia’s public universities. The University System of Georgia, which sets standards for the state’s 35 public colleges, recently jettisoned its controversial top-down plan to replace its core-curriculum requirements for undergraduates with a vaguely defined interdisciplinary program that was supposedly aimed at training students to live in […]
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Here’s a field of academic endeavor that I’ll bet you’ve never heard of (and may not even want to know about): “waste studies.” And it’s not the study of sewage systems or waste-processing plants, either. It’s about, as its founder, Susan Signe Morrison, an English professor at Texas State University’s San Marcos campus, explained to […]
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The only concern I have about the brouhaha at Washington University in St. Louis over its decision to award an honorary doctorate to one of its most famous alumni, Phyllis Schlafly, is: how come it took Washington so long? Schlafly has more than enough academic credentials: she graduated with honors and a Phi Beta Kappa […]
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Confirming what college administrators have known for years, Education Sector has released a report based on U.S. Department of Education figures detailing huge gaps between the college graduation rates of white students and those of blacks. The gap (measured by failure to graduate within six years from a four-year institution) averages about 20 percent, although […]
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Priya Venkatesan will go down in history as the Dartmouth professor who decided to sue her students because they gave her lousy course evaluations. A few days later Venkatesan, who was hired by Dartmouth in 2005 to teach four sections of Writing 5, the semester-long standard freshman-composition class, told reporters she was withdrawing her planned […]
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The one thing that can be said about Aliza Shvarts, the Yale art major who either did or did not give herself a series of artificial inseminations followed by abortions as part of her senior project, is that she is only about 22 years old. That might explain her apparent unawareness of the health hazards […]
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The Harvard English Department appears on the verge of changing its official name, from the “Department of English and American Literature and Language” to the “English Department.” This sounds like a good thing, a bucking of a trend that started nearly 30 years ago toward renaming university English departments in order to make them appear […]
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In today’s smorgasbord world of offbeat college courses, it can be hard to persuade atudents to sign up for plain-vanilla offerings in, say, physics or philosophy. So some professors have discovered a way to attract bodies to their classrooms: add the name “Harry Potter” to the course title. One of the pioneers of this strategy […]
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You’ve just started your freshman year in college, so one of your first stops is the campus bookstore to pick up your textbooks. You signed up for Econ 101, where your professor has assigned one of the top-selling basic textbooks in the field: Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw’s 936-page Principles of Economics (South-Western/Thomson), now in […]
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U.S. universities pride themselves on their tolerance – religious, ethnic, gender-based, sexual orientation-based, whatever. But when it comes to lucrative consulting fees for partnering with universities in Mideastern countries where none of the above categories of toleration seems to exist, the campus open-mindedness apparently evaporates, and a strange variety of mulitculturalism takes over. Case in […]
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In 2005 Columbia University came under fire over allegations of anti-Israel bias among professors teaching in its Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department. Columbia’s response was to set up… yet another department that already seems tilted in the direction of anti-Israel bias. According to the New York Sun, Columbia appointed as new director […]
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Antioch College, the famously progressive institution in Yellow Springs, Ohio, is again slated for shutdown at the end of this academic year, despite months of negotiations and frantic fundraising by its alumni in a last-ditch effort to keep its doors open after an earlier announcement that it would close. It’s sad, because Antioch, founded in […]
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Only in California… can you take college courses aimed at training you for the medical marijuana business. Oaksterdam University, with campuses in Oakland, Calif., and Los Angeles, offers a full range of basic and advanced-level classes in such subjects as horticulture, distribution, and operating a dispensary to serve the 18,000-odd Californians licensed to smoke homegrown […]
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Charlotte Allen, who you will likely recognize from her work in Lingua Franca, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times, is joining Minding The Campus as a contributing editor. She’ll be contributing regularly to the blog, and writing occasional articles for us. In addition to her writing she’s currently finishing […]
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In a recent Washington Post Magazine, Emmett Rosenfeld, an English teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School in Northern Virginia’s Fairfax County wrote a 4,000-word first-person article complaining that he he had failed to win advanced professional certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. The reason Rosenfeld didn’t earn the minimum score that would […]
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Although the mainstream media would have you believe he was a martyr to religious fundamentalists and moral Pecksniffs, Gene Nichol lost his job as president of the College of William and Mary in Virginia for only one reason: he was a lousy administrator who seemed not to be able to get it into his head […]
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