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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The long-term decline of graduation rates is one of the most intractable problems facing American Higher Education. Trustees at the University of Arkansas are now mulling what appears to be the most popular solution to the problem – simply lower requirements. Under a current proposal, a requirement for 66 core credits would be reduced nearly […]
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Ohio governor Ted Strickland believes America’s public systems of higher education “strengthen our people” and “provide ideas that our [nation] needs to grow.” I agree that they should do this. After serving as a trustee of The Ohio State University at Mansfield for the past nine years though, I have begun to wonder whether, in […]
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On 19 April, the board of trustees of Shimer College in Chicago, by an 18 to 16 vote, ousted Dr. Thomas Lindsay from the presidency after little more than a year of service. For sixty years, tiny Shimer (about ten faculty and 100 students) has touted itself as a Great Books college on the Robert […]
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E. D. Hirsch, famed literary critic and educator, founder of Core Knowledge Foundation and author of Cultural Literacy, has a new book out. It’s called The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools , and the arguments there are worth repeating again and again. While the preferred academic approach to American history and society is […]
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For several decades, conservative critics of higher education have argued against trends toward the elimination of “core” curricula and with equal ferocity against their replacement by “distribution requirements” or even open curricula. They have, in particular, defended a curriculum in “Great Books,” those widely-recognized texts in the Western tradition authored by the likes of Plato, […]
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In the contemporary battle within the social sciences between free market think tanks and liberal- dominated universities, the former labor under a huge disadvantage: they lack students. Think-tank based scholars may daily issue erudite policy analyses, write incisive op-ed columns galore, dominate talk radio, publish in widely admired magazines like City Journal but the half-life […]
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On 2 December 2009 the curtain of Harvard’s famed Agassiz Theater rose on a production of Avrom Goldfaden’s Shulamis, one of the most famous plays in the Yiddish repertoire. An operetta set in the Land of Israel in late biblical times, it was last performed in Warsaw in 1939, and forcibly shut down by the […]
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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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At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, students can minor in social and economic justice without taking a single economics course.—Reported by E. Frank Stephenson on the Division of Labor blog.
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Recently, a colleague forwarded to me a copy of an exam from an introductory sociology class found lying in a room at a public college in the east. It was graded 100%. The exam deserves to be quoted at length, as parts of it are virtually indistinguishable from the old Soviet agitprop of the Fifties: […]
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In an unintentional, if powerful, commentary on the grip that groupthink has on some quarters of the economy, LeMoyne professor Dolores Byrnes informed readers of the NEA’s Thought & Action that “some professors of education recently told me during a department retreat: ‘We are all Marxist, it doesn’t even need to be said.’” No wonder […]
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As the senior class of Yale College prepares for its final semester and reflects on the Bright College Years so swiftly gliding by, I have heard one phrase repeated with surprising frequency: “I wish I had done Directed Studies.” It’s a statement that doesn’t accord with the stereotype of Yale seniors as either careerists shaking […]
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The Obama administration – along with many in the opinion elite – is looking to the nation’s two-year community colleges as the primary vehicle to ramp up future Americans’ level of post-secondary educational attainment. A down payment in this direction are the billions of dollars of direct and indirect community college aid included in the […]
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By Sandra Stotsky and Ze’ev Wurman Every year seems to produce a burst of attention to a particular crisis in education. In 2009, the most publicized crisis is likely the staggering number of post-secondary students with severe debilities in reading and math. Estimates of those needing remedial classes before taking credit courses range from 30% […]
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Jean Quam, a professor of social work who is dean of the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development, has wholeheartedly defended her school’s proposed “cultural competence” curricular redesign—in an op-ed for the Star-Tribune that provides a glaringly misleading description of the critics’ argument. Most of Quam’s op-ed consists of little more than […]
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If there’s anything uniting faculty on different sides of the aisle nowadays it’s disapproval of large lecture courses. To the Left, lectures are authoritarian; to the Right, they are lowbrow. Better the egalitarian or members-only atmosphere of the seminar, they say. To anyone who is just “agin’ the guv’ment,” lecture courses suffer the stigma of […]
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A recent report by American Council of Trustees and Alumni entitled “What Will They Learn?” makes clear that the steady deterioriation of general education at the best colleges continues apace. The report studied general education requirements at 100 top schools and found that “Topics like U.S. government or history, literature, mathematics, and economics have become […]
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The University of Chicago met widespread national opposition ten years ago after it instituted a new, less demanding core curriculum to make way for more electives. It was part of a plan to make the curriculum significantly less demanding (more “fun”) to attract more students and improve the school’s bottom line. Instead of 21 required […]
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In the 1950s, Hamilton College, where I now teach, had no marketing arm to speak of, but the New York Times provided a good deal of favorable coverage. A few years ago I stumbled upon one such item in a June 1950 issue. The headline said “Hamilton Program: College Curriculum Is Revised to Provide the […]
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A recent report from Britain concludes that U.K. universities are “dumbing down” their requirements for majoring in foreign language in order to attract more undergraduate students. “The most widely-reported trend was towards a ‘greater emphasis’ on cultural and film studies, the report said, resulting in a decline in literary studies,” the U.K Telegraph reported regarding […]
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ACTA’s latest publication, “For the People: A Report Card on Public Higher Education in Illinois” has unearthed more of the usual disappointments. In a series of rankings, General Education requirements earned an F, with only three public universities (out of eight) indicating a foreign language requirement “and not a single institution received credit for Literature […]
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While this year has become best known as the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, it was also forty years ago that the first African-American Studies department was established, at San Francisco State University. Forty-one fall semesters later, there are hundreds of such departments. Has what they teach evolved with the march of time? What should the […]
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Fourteen Columbia professors are protesting the university’s apparent decision to award tenure to Joseph A. Massad, a controversial anti-Israel professor of Arab studies. The professors are from the schools of law, business and public health. They expressed their concern in a five-page letter to the incoming Provost, Claude M. Steele. The letter asserts that the […]
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In a recent interview with Mars Hill Audio Magazine, Stanley Fish insists on a distinction bound to vex his colleagues. Professors must remember, he says, the difference between academic judgment and political judgment. In a classroom situation, academic judgment is the application of academic training to materials within the purview of a discipline, for instance, […]
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The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has released a trustee guide Restoring a Core as a follow-up to What Will They Learn, their recent survey of core curricula (more about that here) Take a look at the “How Will A Core Benefit My Institution” section beginning on page 4 for some interesting examples from […]
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Last semester, in an unguarded moment, I did what literature teachers should never do. I told a student her interpretation of a poem was wrong. From that moment I was regarded as an enemy to freedom. I invited my students to engage with me in online debate on whether an interpretation could be wrong. What […]
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“If I couldn’t study something that’s about myself then I wouldn’t want to be here,” the black sophomore once told me, explaining how crucial to him it was to be able to major in African-American Studies. It always stuck with me. The African-American Studies department he was a major in was one of about 300 […]
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Last November, Rob Koons, director of the Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions at the University of Texas, was abruptly fired from that position. In swift succession, the name of the program and its leadership was changed to conform more closely to the ideological tastes of the faculty of the College of Liberal Arts. […]
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The National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) seems finally to have perceived what was in plain view to many people: that most of America’s ed schools are mediocre at best, offering curricula that mix lightweight courses, ivory-tower ideology, and minimal clinical exposure of student teachers to real-life classrooms. NCATE has revised upwards […]
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