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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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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Stephanie Grace, an editor at the Harvard Law Review, has been outed as the third-year student who emailed to two friends her opinion that “I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African-Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent.” That triggered yet another racial flap at Harvard Law, with the school’s […]
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The Obama Department of Justice is keen to support those who seek to expand racial preferences. The latest case is Fisher v. University of Texas, in which two young white women, Abigail Fisher and Rachel Michalewicz, argue that the University’s diversity policy-one of the more aggressive in the nation– violates their right to equal protection. […]
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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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I was struck by the title of an article that appears in the Chronicle of Higher Education this morning, “Education Dept. Data Show Rise in Enrollment and Student Aid but Flat Graduation Rates.” Unless the purpose of student aid is simply to boost enrollments, it sounds like some people — taxpayers come immediately to mind […]
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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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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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Regulars at FIRE’s must-read blog, The Torch, already know the ugly details of events at California-San Diego. A fraternity held an off-campus party that was at best tasteless and at worst racist. Appearing on a student-run TV station (which is funded by the student government through student fees), a student satirical organization defended the party […]
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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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Last December, I wrote in these pages about allegations of racial discrimination in tenure denial at Emerson College, which had prompted the school to set up a three-person commission charged with reviewing those allegations. The panel’s report has just been released, and the good news is that the panelists “noticed no overtly racist or prejudiced […]
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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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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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KC Johnson beat me to the punch in registering doubts and concerns about the letter University of Minnesota General Counsel Mark B. Rotenberg has written to Adam Kissel at FIRE regarding the education department’s review of the curriculum. Kissel and FIRE are to be praised for having wrought out of the university a letter assuring […]
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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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Does a black professor deserve tenure because his college hasn’t granted tenure to very many black professors in the past? To provide a role model for black students? To help the school achieve ethnic diversity faster than it otherwise might? To ensure that the proportion of black professors matches the proportion of black college students? […]
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A “Kinsley gaffe” comes when a politician inadvertently reveals a politically inconvenient truth. Perhaps in higher education, we can now speak of an “Alabama gaffe,” named for the University of Alabama, which recently decided to combine (“blend” was the university’s preferred verb) its women’s studies and African-American studies programs, creating a new entity called the […]
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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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Yet another statistical study reveals that the high school-age offspring of black immigrant families enroll in America’s elite colleges at a vastly higher rate proportionate to their numbers than the offspring of U.S.-born blacks, and even at a slightly higher rate than whites. This latest study, published in the journal Sociology of Education (abstract here), […]
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