The third round of a very engaging and amiable debate on affirmative action is here on the National Association of Scholars site. The debaters are James P. Sterba, professor of philosophy at Notre Dame and author of “Affirmative Action for the Future” (pro) and George Leef, a frequent writer here, director of research for the […]
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Vartan Gregorian once said the way to become a successful college president is simple: stand up, give a speech on “diversity,” then sit down. Richard Levin, president of Yale, is the longest-lasting president of an Ivy League university, and following Gregorian’s sage advice is surely one reason why. Whenever a serious incident occurs at Yale, […]
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(The following is a transcript of a new podcast) JOHN LEO: I’m John Leo, Editor of Minding the Campus, and I’m here today with Professor Andrew Hacker, the well-known sociologist and public intellectual and author of many excellent reviews in New York Review of Books. He’s also the co-author, with Claudia Dreifus, of the recent […]
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The phrase “dominant narrative” is a sure sign that a postmodern, anti-Western or anti-male story line is about two seconds away. It appears early in a flattering Harvard Gazette profile of Susan Greenhalgh, “the newest professor of anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences” at Harvard. The profiler, Katie Koch of the Harvard Gazette […]
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Two former students of Thurgood Marshall School of Law are suing the school for giving them poor marks. Walter Olson of overlawyered.com offered this comment: “Doesn’t it sort of prove you deserve the bad law-school grade when you bring a frivolous lawsuit over it?”
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That question was the start of an item I posted yesterday on Facebook, referring to KC Johnson’s excellent essay (above), The Ruinous Reign of Race-and-Gender Historians. It was a question for a reason: the two super techies in our family, my wife Jackie, editor of the quite brilliant financial-business-political site, The Fiscal Times, and my […]
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FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has attracted important support for its open letter asking the Department of Education to define harassment narrowly enough to allow genuinely free speech on campus. Many colleges and universities ban expression that might be considered “offensive” or cause “embarrassment” or “ridicule.” The January 6 letter, sent to […]
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What were the best books of the year on higher education? A panel of ten prominent people in the field, invited to vote by Minding the Campus, picked as their top two choices, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa; and “Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting […]
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Time magazine has named The Protester as its Person of the Year. As a result, my brother Peter, intrepid humor columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, writes to brag that he has now been picked as the magazine’s Person of the Year four times: 1966 (everyone under age 25), 1968 (middle Americans), 2006 (YOU, i.e., everyone […]
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The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA (HERI) continues its studies of graduation rates with a new report aimed at understanding which factors increase the likelihood of graduating from college. According to the data, 38.9 percent of those entering college can expect to graduate in four years, 56.4 in five years and 61.2 in six […]
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Victor Davis Hanson has a brilliant essay here on how dysfunctional our colleges and universities have become. Here are two excerpts: “I noticed about 1990 that some students in my classes at CSU were both clearly illiterate and yet beneficiaries of lots of federal cash, loans, and university support to ensure their graduation. And when one […]
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The overwrought anti-bullying crusade has come in for heavy and very specific criticism from Hans Bader, the lawyer and writer who played a key role in keeping out a dangerous provision of a proposed federal law on how colleges must deal with campus sexual assault. Though Washington officials call bullying a “pandemic,” in reality, Bader […]
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In April, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights outlined a policy shift that represented perhaps the gravest threat to civil liberties on campus in a generation. Worse, Sen. Patrick Leahy inserted a provision in a draft of the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2011 that would have made the dubious new policy part […]
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The American Association of University Women, the voice of hard-line campus feminism, published a survey today showing that 48 percent of American 7th to 12th graders were sexually harassed during the last school year, with 87 percent of those harassed suffering negative effects such as absenteeism, poor sleep and stomach aches. These are alarming numbers, but then, the AAUW […]
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Columnist Mike Adams has some fun today with the strange decision of his college, the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, to lump together two serious academic departments (because of a shortage of funding) while once again expanding the campus diversity bureaucracy (for which no funding shortage ever seems to appear). As Adams figures it, the university […]
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A new report on higher education from the American Enterprise Institute, out today, contains an eye-catching finding likely to generate a lot of headlines: the more selective a school is, and the fewer low-income students it serves, the larger its taxpayer subsidy. Calling this system of funding “perverse,” the report says: “Average taxpayers provide more […]
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The occasionally violent mob protests at the University of Wisconsin, and the role of a university administrator in egging on the disrupters, have barely raised a ripple in the mainstream press. But commentary here by Robert Weissberg, KC Johnson and Roger Clegg, has circulated widely on the Internet. Today Donald Downs, a professor at the […]
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In 2009, reeling from the shrinkage in its $32 billion endowment, Harvard moved to slash costs by cutting back on the cookies served at faculty meetings. Eliminating the cookies, we were told, saved $500 per meeting, thus raising the obvious question of whether the Harvard faculty was obtaining its pastries from the wholesaler who supplied […]
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Our own Charlotte Allen has a wonderful piece in the Weekly Standard on campus events marking the anniversary of 9/11. While some of the events are rational enough and a few seem moving, the general tone reflects the fact that after a decade, our campuses are still as out of sync with the rest of […]
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The strange case of Antonio Calvo, the Princeton lecturer who slashed himself to death last April, is the subject of long front-page article in the July 1 Chronicle of Higher Education. After his suicide, Princeton put out a formal statement saying that Calvo had been on leave from the university. That was not true. Princeton […]
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Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) displayed a fascinating range of opinion over the recent City University of New York decision to award Tony Kushner an honorary degree. First the Board of the group issued a statement deploring the award as “politicization of the university.” This drew a vehement letter denouncing the SPME […]
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On Inside Higher Ed today “MathProf,” an anonymous poster, raised an original objection to multiple-choice tests: they are packed with lies. He said one student “pointed out to me that multiple-choice tests are inherently deceptive, featuring wrong answers deliberately designed to appear plausible. Is this really the skill we want to teach and reward: not knowledge, […]
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Mark Bauerlein’s article on papers delivered at academic conferences (above) reminds me of the day I discovered the awful truth about such texts. Arriving in San Francisco in the summer of 1967 to cover the annual sociological convention for the New York Times, I headed for the press room and asked for a copy of […]
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The controversy over Tony Kushner’s honorary degree is yet another reminder of how far from mainstream America our cultural elites are. Support for Israel is extraordinarily high across the country (The American people sympathize more with Israel than with the Palestinians by 63 percent to 17 percent, according to Gallup) but that is not the […]
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“Why They Cheered,” an article on Inside Higher Ed, explored the possible explanations of why crowds, mostly made up of college students, surged into the streets Sunday night to celebrate the end of Osama bin Laden. Though some of us think the explanation is entirely obvious, the IHE article did not. It had the puzzled […]
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A few days ago, I received two similar letters from parents asking a very common question, if the quality of college education is declining as rapidly as many people say, where do you think my daughter or son should go to school? I sent a note putting this question to Peter Wood, president of the […]
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John Allison, former CEO of BB&T bank was, instead, referred to as ‘the late banker’ in the April 25th story here on big donors to colleges and universities. He is very much alive. The error was mine. My apologies.
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Yesterday’s brief account here on Bowdoin College and the apparent disarray of its history department drew a lot of attention, though we did not link to the full original article. The reason we did not link is that the text from the Claremont Review of Books appeared to be proprietary–sent only to subscribers for their […]
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A column by Katherine Kersten of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports that the financially strapped Lakeville, Minn., school district (94 teachers let go) found enough money to send a delegation to the annual state “White Privilege Conference” now going on in Bloomington. Carol Iannone at Phi Beta Cons picked up the story, as did blogger Hans […]
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“There are any number of courses that deal with some group aspect of America, but virtually none that deals with America as a whole. For example, there is African-American history from 1619 to 1865 and from 1865 to the present, but there is no comparable sequence on America. Every course is social or cultural history that looks at the world […]
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