The Chicago Tribune’s Ron Grossman writes: I took a quick survey in the newsroom the other day, something between a Rorschach test and a pop quiz, asking younger colleagues to identify an iconic photograph of World War II. While some instantly recognized the image, others couldn’t quite place it. “I know I ought to know […]
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John Derbyshire, a frequent contributor to National Review, has made a surprising discovery: San Francisco State University has a department of Raza studies, and the department has thirteen full-time faculty members. Derbyshire writes on NRO’s The Corner: What goes on in a Raza Studies Department? Let them tell us. “Roberto [Rivera] is presently finishing a […]
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A February 26 debate on the subject is online here. The event was sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Former secretary of education Margaret Spellings and Michael Lomax, president and C.E.O. of the United Negro College Fund, are on the pro side of the topic, “To remain a […]
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Edward Albee, Woody Allen, Maya Angelou, Wally Amos, Jane Austen, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Joan Baez, Warren Beatty, David Ben-Gurion, Sonny Bono, Rick Bragg, Richard Branson, Albert Brooks, David Byrne, James Cameron, Raymond Chandler, Coco Chanel, John Cheever, Sean Connery, Walter Cronkite, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michael Dell, Princess Diana, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bob […]
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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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Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, quit the board of directors of Goldman Sachs, citing the “increasing time requirements associated with her position as President.” What she didn’t cite were the two or three weeks of steady criticism from financial analysts and students and the student newspaper in response to belated awareness of her lucrative […]
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Candace de Russy’s January 7 post here, “Hate-America Sociology,” understandably attracted a lot of attention. It cited a 10-question Soc 101 quiz at an unnamed eastern college, complete with accusatory leftish questions and some simple-minded answers by a student who drew a mark of 100 for agreeing with the politics of his professor. A few […]
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Apologies to Time education correspondent Gilbert Cruz, who is not the author of the quote, “I’m, pretty sure you’d have to shoot somebody not to graduate from Harvard.” That line came from Kevin Carey, policy director of the think tank Education Sector, in an interview with Cruz.
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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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Andrew Gillen of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity wrote this note to Charlotte Allen to clarify comments of his in Allen’s article today on student loans: Charlotte, I saw your article on student loans is up at Minding The Campus. I liked it, but at the very end, you have a long quote […]
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Kara Miller, who teaches rhetoric and history at Babson College, is the latest professor to decry the laziness of American college students. You can read her Boston Globe op-ed here. Miller is careful to say that some native-born students work hard, but the gap she sees between American and international students is large. She says […]
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An unusually bitter academic argument of 2000 came up again at the American Anthropological Association annual convention in Philadelphia. At issue was the long and famous (critics would say, notorious) work of Napoleon Chagnon among the Yanomamo Indians of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil and Venezuela. The Yanomomi are not among the most endearing […]
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“Trustees Approve Free Speech Policy,” said the November 30th headline in the Tufts student newspaper. This purports to be good news, but this is Tufts, a university addicted to bragging about free expression on campus while introducing yet another version of its long-discredited speech code. The one-page “Declaration on Freedom of Expression at Tufts University” […]
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Santa Cruz, Ca.–As California works to plug an epic budget shortfall, severe budget cuts are threatening the twin qualities — excellence and access — that have defined the University of California as the world’s leading public research university. At UC Santa Cruz, faculty, students, and staff worry about the impact the state’s financial meltdown is […]
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The indispensible FIRE—the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—bestows a regular mock honor on some offending college or university: the Speech Code of the Month. So far this year, the winners have included New York University (which bans, among other things, inappropriate jokes and teasing), the University of Idaho (no “insensitive” actions or communications), Northern […]
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A convicted terror bomber, Raymond Luc Levasseur, invited by a far left center to speak at the University of Massachusetts. Amherst, was disinvited after pressure from police groups and Governor Deval Partrick, then reinvited when the university president Jack Wilson intervened. Levasseur is a former leader of the United Freedom Front a radical group responsible […]
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Abby Thernstrom famously called our colleges and universities “islands of repression in a sea of freedom,” meaning, of course that for some twenty years, no other American institutions have worked harder to repress free speech. Consider these recent adventures in the long campus campaign against free expression: – After a peaceful protest over budget cuts […]
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At the tenth anniversary dinner last night for FIRE—the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education—I asked Robert Sibley of the group if they were still winning 97% of their cases filed for student freedom. Greg Lukianoff, head of fire, gave me that statistic two or three years ago. “It may have dropped down a notch […]
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Patrick Deneen, professor of government at Georgetown and founder of Georgetown’s Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy, spoke September 23rd at a luncheon in New York sponsored by the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University. The following is an excerpt. The full text will appear in the winter issue of The New […]
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Does it matter which college guide a high-school student consults? Yes indeed. They all differ in poundage, cost and frankness. To illustrate the various approaches, and the various levels of candor, here are five guides discussing one school, Wesleyan University of Middletown, Connecticut: Barron’s Guide to the Most Competitive Colleges is the driest of the […]
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Every now and then an American university sponsors a conference on Israel and Palestine that appears to be an open and fair-minded event, but turns out to be a one-sided anti-Israel rally. Wesleyan University, for example, sponsored one such conference in 2004, with much anti-Semitic commentary and some printed material covered in swastikas. The Toronto […]
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Yet another act of censorship by yet another college. St. Louis University is banning David Horowitz as a campus speaker. According to the College Republicans, who had invited the conservative activist to give a talk on October 13, Dean of Students Scott Smith said he could not allow the speech because Horowitz might “insinuate that […]
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The script is almost always the same: a campus conservative group invites a speaker who opposes illegal immigration; angry leftist students denounce him as a white supremacist and shout him down, knocking over tables or breaking a window; the president or chancellor of the university promises to investigate, but no penalty descends on the censors. […]
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In an effort to show which colleges are reaching out to low-income students, U.S. News & World Report has published “economic diversity” rankings of American colleges and universities. That sounds ambitious, but the rankings are based solely on the percentage of students at each institution who receive federal Pell grants, which mostly go to applicants […]
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A few notes on the preposterous decision by the Yale University Press to censor the Muhammad cartoons in a book it is publishing about the Muhammad cartoons, The Cartoons That Shook the World. – In a one-line comment on the Inside Higher Ed web site, Mark Bauerlein of Emory University asks to know that names […]
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John Rosenberg (Discriminations) and Mickey Kaus (Kausfiles) note that the slippery term “cultural competence” pops up often in the health care bill passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Once a harmless term in medical literature referring to the need to understand and communicate with patients of different races and ethnicities, “cultural competence” mutated […]
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As expected, President Obama’s plan to aid community colleges, to the tune of $12 billion, drew impressive praise. “Dean Dad,” who blogs at Inside Higher Ed called the president’s Macomb Community College speech in Michigan, which outlined the program, “by far the most intelligent presidential discussion of higher education I’ve ever seen.” But there were […]
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Liberty University made a mistake in revoking recognition of its student Democratic club. But the argument put forth by the conservative Christian institution had some substance to it. Mathew Staver, dean of the university, and John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute both argued that religious freedom trumps questions of political balance. That’s true. A religious […]
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Two years ago, I pointed out that UCLA seemed to be having trouble coping with its many identity-group graduations. Crowded into a single weekend, these ceremonies tend to overlap, though the good news was that multiple graduations were possible: a few students were eligible to graduate four or five times in three days. For instance, […]
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Last Friday, a 6-hour conference at the City University of New York (CUNY) graduate center examined “rightist efforts, from fiscally or socially conservative movements to hate groups.” It apparently raised no eyebrows, though if the meeting had set out to examine “leftist efforts, from fiscally and socially liberal movements to the Unabomber and animal rights […]
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