——————————————- This piece appeared originally in the June 2010 issue of Liberty ——————————————— Women can’t get any satisfaction these days. Yet another report, this by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), asks why there are so few women in the STEM professions. (For those outside the education community, this acronym refers to the prestigious […]
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The College Board has issued another of its reports on student loan debt, focusing this time on the 17 percent of students who graduate from four-year colleges with “high debt levels”—that is, more than $30,500 worth of education loans. The average debt load for those high -borrowing students, one out every six graduates with bachelor’s […]
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One of the most popular assessment tools in higher education is the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), a questionnaire administered each year to some 300,000 first-year and senior students at diverse institutions across the country. It has items on how many books students read, how many papers they write, how often they meet with […]
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A few weeks ago I discussed The Misguided Push for STEM Diversity, noting that every month or so (or so it seems) a new report appears pointing with alarm to the “underrepresentation” of women or blacks or Hispanics or Aleuts (or usually all of the above) in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, math […]
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Although my years of service on the University of California (UC) Board of Regents were the most tumultuous years of my life, my pride in the Board and the university that it serves has, until now, never wavered. But, a recent meeting and action by the Board has caused that feeling of pride to diminish. […]
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According to a short news item in Inside Higher Ed today, “The American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association of American Universities have issued a new handbook with detailed legal resources to help colleges recruit and retain faculty members and students in science fields. The handbook notes legal challenges to some forms […]
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During a conversation at an academic conference, a professor from an Ivy League school refers to two female graduate students as “black bitches.” After the students report the incident, the professor apologizes — but it takes another two months, and vociferous protests from the campus black community, for the university officials to acknowledge the issue […]
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A few years ago, the University of Iowa’s History Department conducted a search for a new hire in U.S. foreign relations. After the department denied a preliminary, or screening, interview to Mark Moyar—a highly qualified (B.A. summa cum laude in history from Harvard, Ph.D. In history from Cambridge), but also clearly conservative, historian—it came to […]
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On Monday the Supreme Court heard arguments in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, a case that pitted the right to free association against the principle of non-discrimination. Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, part of the University of California system, has a policy stating that recognized student organizations “shall not discriminate unlawfully on the […]
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Earlier this month the United States Commission on Civil Rights issued a series of recommendations on Title IX enforcement. Chief among their analysis was the idea that the Model Survey promoted by the Bush Administration “currently provides the best method available” for measuring student interest, which has been a method of Title IX compliance since […]
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At a time when every major bill coming out of Congress seems to push 2,000-plus pages, it is easy to forget that arguably the most sweeping and controversial piece of higher education policy in history, Title IX, was a mere 36 words in the Higher Education Amendments Act of 1972. Some laws, it turns out, […]
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If only Carole Carrier and her peers felt more aggrieved, the new report released by the American Association of University Women on women in science would make more sense. On the day the AAUW report was released, Carrier, a 34 year-old mechanical engineer who works part-time, was walking down the street in early spring with […]
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Sometimes it seems as though the most heavily researched, richly funded area of American science today involves studies of why there aren’t more women in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and efforts to induce, recruit, and retain more of them. In her article for Minding the Campus, Susan Pinker deftly punctures the omissions […]
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The Obama administration has weighed in on behalf of the University of Texas’s use of racial and ethnic preferences in its undergraduate admissions, filing an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, as reported here. This is unfortunate if not surprising, but the scope of the brief is noteworthy in […]
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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 Ranking of Law Schools.” Early on, the piece notes a research finding that, by including in its law-school index the LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs […]
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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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Growing Anti-Semitism On The Campus The sad evidence that American campuses have been the site of rising anti-Semitism is truly an alarming phenomenon. Anti-Semitism has come from various sources: African-American student organizations; the Muslim Student Association at various colleges and universities, and the widespread movement on behalf of disinvestment in Israel, whose sponsors regularly compares […]
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People who have followed the effort to put initiatives on state ballots eliminating racial preferences from college admissions might remember this advertisement from 2008, which set Ward Connerly in Klan regalia. Two years before, a group called Think Progress posted a video on its web page under the headline “Leader of Michigan Initiative To End […]
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A graduate of Wesleyan sent word that his alma mater now has a “Campus Climate Log” to chronicle “hate incidents and acts of intolerance” and help move “the entire campus towards a hate-free learning environment.” The project, wrapped in conventional diversity rhetoric, is overseen by the Dean of Diversity and Student Engagement as well as […]
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Anyone who follows college sports knows the basic outlines of the fiasco that befell Binghamton University’s men’s basketball team. A few years after making the transition to Division I and building a new arena, Binghamton hired a new coach, Kevin Broadus, who recruited low-character, academically challenged “students” who happened to be talented basketball players. The […]
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10. Justice O’Connor now suggests that the social-science evidence on which it was based is shaky. 9. The social-science evidence on which it was based is getting shakier, as more and more disinterested research is done. 8. There should not be a social-science exception to the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause anyhow. 7. In a variety […]
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Two researchers offer a new twist on an old question—why do college professors overwhelmingly lean to the left? Bias against conservatives is not the main reason, nor are the allegedly higher IQs of liberals, say Neil Gross of the University of British Columbia and Ethan Fosse of Harvard. Instead they suggest a theory of “path […]
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The death of feminist philosopher, theologian and former Boston College professor Mary Daly earlier this month at the age of 81 received fairly little notice in the media. What attention Daly did receive, however, was almost entirely of the positive kind. Time magazine ran a short obituary by fellow radical feminist Robin Morgan, who eulogized […]
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A Chicago study on “Assessing the Impact of Eliminating Affirmative Action in Higher Education” comes to this conclusion: black and Hispanic representation at all 4-year colleges is predicted to decline modestly—by 2%—if race-neutral college admissions policies are mandated nationwide. However, race-neutral admissions are predicted to decrease minority representation at the most selective 4-year institutions by […]
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Should universities weigh race and ethnicity in deciding whom to hire for their science departments? The American Association for the Advancement of Science thinks so, according to a recent National Journal article. “Science and engineering should look like the rest of the population,” says AAAS’s Daryl Chubin, and if hiring decisions don’t yield the right […]
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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 between male and female high school students has opened, and it’s pushing college enrollments nationally toward 60-40 proportions (in many schools and systems, women already […]
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Allegations of tenure discrimination have recently been leveled against Emerson College on grounds of race and against DePaul University on grounds of sex. At Emerson, two black scholars were denied tenure, the local chapter of the NAACP became involved, and an investigation has been launched by the Massachusetts Commission against Discrimination. The school has agreed […]
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KC Johnson has spoken well of the Minnesota teacher education initiative, and his analysis of the op-ed by the dean of the College of Education, Jean Quam, identified the thorough disregard of claims of indoctrination made by columnist Katherine Kersten in the Star-Tribune. Quam’s defense is so feeble and misleading, in fact, that it deserves […]
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My article yesterday on this site, “Decoding Teacher Training,” discussed the efforts of the University of Minnesota’s Education Department to purge prospective public school teachers deemed politically incorrect on “diversity” matters. A report stresses the seemingly banal concept of “cultural competence,” which people from outside the Ivory Tower might suspect is simply making students and […]
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Thanks to the efforts of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—and a rare, if welcome, instance of Congress standing up for students’ rights in higher education—the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) abandoned its de facto “social justice” criterion. Yet while the development made […]
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