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By David Wilezol

In the last few months, there's been a flurry of articles in the mainstream press acknowledging the same problem: a paucity of high-achieving, low-income students at elite colleges. "Better Colleges Failing to Lure Talented Poor," says the New York Times. ABC tells us "Colleges Struggle to Connect With High-Achieving Poor Students." Likewise, NPR is concerned that "Elite Colleges Struggle To Recruit Smart, Low-Income Kids."

Why does it matter that top-performing low-income students aren't making it into the best schools? After all, many other above-average schools would be happy to accept them and even give them adequate grant or scholarship money. And its likely that a worthy degree from a competitive institution would give these students at least a decent shot at moving up the income ladder.  Harvard grad Ross Douthat has an answer that Ivy-leaguers knew long ago: "...elite universities are about connecting more than learning... the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates." The absence of low-income students in elite higher education underscores its failure to facilitate social advancement. 

Continue reading "How Elite Colleges Drive Income Inequality " »

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By Richard Vedder

One of the things that strikes me about modern universities is the inordinate amount of lying that goes on -both by institutions and members of the university communities- and how little is done about it. As respect for moral absolutes is replaced with a mushy moral relativism, perhaps a decline in honesty is to be expected. But for people who regard universities as bastions of truth and integrity, this is rather disappointing.

Let's start with universities lying about themselves. A good example is the increasing number of incidents of universities inflating admission statistics to improve their ranking in magazines. A year or so, we were shocked to hear that already highly regarded Claremont McKenna College had inflated average SAT scores of its students; the most recent of several similar incidents involves York University in Pennsylvania. In a world where the "bottom line" is murky, magazine rankings serve a useful function by providing consumers information otherwise unavailable. Since SAT scores and similar metrics are important, there are temptations to lie in order to improve the published rank.

Continue reading "Why So Much Lying on Campus?" »

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By Peter Augustine Lawler

It's hard to find a "serious" commencement speech that isn't about remembering that there's more to life than power and money. And that the secrets of a successful life include following your passion and finding purpose, not to mention giving back to your community. The president's speech at Morehouse had a few of these insipid moments, to be sure.

Still, you expect political leaders and public intellectuals to also aim higher. This challenge was especially daunting for President Obama at Morehouse.  Morehouse, our leading historically black college, is about educating men. And the question is whether even our president can rise to a level that's impressive to such men, to classy gentlemen, to men who've been educated to know who they are and what they're supposed to do. Morehouse men are like Southern gentlemen, only better.  They're better because what they've achieved has been in spite of the injustices they suffered, and because they've been ennobled by both their American and their African heritages. There's little more formidable than seeing that combination displayed in the highly disciplined and beautifully manly performance of the Morehouse glee club.  

Continue reading "President Obama and the Proud Men of Morehouse" »

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By Peter Wood

"F*** Your Constructive Dialogue" reads the headline of an article by Kate Aronoff that's posted on a website that "seeks to facilitate the discussion of political, cultural, and social issues that are often left out of mainstream discourse."  (The asterisks, as Stanley Kurtz nicely put it, are not in the original.)

Ms. Aronoff is a student at Swarthmore College and a leader in the movement on her campus to persuade the college trustees to divest the college's holdings in companies that produce or sell fossil fuels.  Kurtz has taken the lead among outside observers in tracking the extraordinary departures from civil exchange and academic principle that have unfolded on the suburban Philadelphia campus as the movement has asserted itself.

Continue reading "Swarthmore Lets an Angry Mob Take Over" »

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By Cathy Young

A few months ago, a post with a shocking claim about misogyny in America began to circulate on Tumblr, the social media site popular with older teens and young adults.  It featured a scanned book page section stating that, according to "recent survey data," when junior high school students in the Midwest were asked what they would do if they woke up "transformed into the opposite sex," the girls showed mixed emotions but the boys' reaction was straightforward: "'Kill myself' was the most common answer when they contemplated the possibility of life as a girl."  The original poster--whose comment was, "Wow"--identified the source as her "Sex & Gender college textbook," The Gendered Society by Michael Kimmel.

The post quickly caught on with Tumblr's radical feminist contingent: in less than three months, it was reblogged or "liked" by over 33,000 users. Some appended their own comments, such as, "Yeah, tell me again how misogyny 'isn't real' and men and boys and actually 'like,' 'love' and 'respect the female sex'?  This is how deep misogynistic propaganda runs... As Germaine Greer said, 'Women have no idea how much men hate them.'"

Continue reading "A Classic Text on Gender--And It's All Wrong" »

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By James Piereson

                

According to a new report released by the American Association of University Professors, the gap between the salaries of faculty at private and public universities is widening.  The "Annual Report on the Status of the Profession" found that at the public institutions, full professors averaged $118,054 and assistant professors $69,777, while at the privates full professors' average salary was $157,282 and assistant professors' $86,189.

Even while the rest of the economy struggles, the last decade has been a flush time for private institutions, with endowments surging an average of 19.2 percent in 2011 and 11.9 percent in 2010, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Meanwhile things have gone steeply downhill for public colleges and universities as legislatures across the country have cut back on appropriations for higher education and, at the same time, have imposed ceilings on tuition increases.  The financial squeeze has taken a toll on the quality of instruction offered at some of our best public institutions.  Unfortunately, the situation is likely to get worse in the years ahead, given the condition of state and federal budgets.  

Continue reading "What Happened to the Great State Universities?" »

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By Harvey Silverglate and Juliana DeVries

In a breathtakingly bold move, the civil rights offices of both the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have mandated the effective abolition of free speech on college campuses, as well as the almost certain conviction of large numbers of students, many of whom will be innocent, of "harassment." Neither justice nor education will be well served.

The ED/DOJ's disturbing and unconstitutional May 9^th letter, mandating changes in sexual assault and harassment procedures and standards, arose out of a joint ED/DOJ investigation and evaluation at the University of Montana, Missoula. The ED and DOJ addressed their letter to the university president, but more broadly described it as "a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country to protect students from sexual harassment and assault." In other words, any college or university receiving federal funding (which includes nearly all of them) risks losing that funding, if it does not comply with the standards laid out in the letter. 

Continue reading "The Feds Mandate Abolition of Free Speech on Campus" »

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By KC Johnson

Students at Stanford are the latest to fall victim to the assault on due process mandated by the "Dear Colleague" letter. Last week, the university's faculty senate approved the "Alternative Review Process," an across-the-board diminution of due process rights for Stanford students accused of sexual assault.

The Office of Civil Rights' "Dear Colleague" letter, to review, mandates that colleges lower due process in two respects: weakening the burden of proof from the clear and convincing standard to the preponderance of evidence standard; and introducing a form of double jeopardy by allowing accusers to appeal when an accused student is found not guilty in a college disciplinary process. In addition, the letter strongly encourages a third change--prohibiting an accused student from cross-examining his accuser--that, when coupled with the usual requirement that accused students not be represented by counsel in disciplinary proceedings, effectively ensures that no cross-examination of the accuser will occur.

Continue reading "Stanford Abandons Due Process" »

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By Peter Sacks

The higher-education story of the week is about cost: colleges and universities are cutting prices. At least that's the impression one gets from media coverage of the annual report from the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). "Colleges Cut Prices by Providing More Financial Aid," states the Wall Street Journal. "Private U.S. colleges, worried they could be pricing themselves out of the market after years of relentless tuition increases, are offering record financial assistance to keep classrooms full."

Many colleges are "lowering" prices, but not because they're messing with their hefty sticker prices. In fact, American colleges and universities engage in a massive system of price discrimination, offering students varying discounts from the sticker price depending on family income and assets, number of children in college, and other family financial factors. While the amount of the discount largely depends on a family's ability to pay for college, many colleges also offer price breaks to students based on "merit," as measured by SAT scores and high school GPA. 

Continue reading "Average Tuition Discount for Freshman: 45%" »

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By KC Johnson

The End of Sex is a frustrating book. Author Donna Freitas, a self-described feminist, has written a thoughtful and richly-researched study of how the sexual culture on contemporary campuses shortchanges many college students. She draws from a rich data base, namely, a multi-year survey of students at different colleges supplemented by the author's own experience in residential or student life. Yet Freitas' recommendations--based around a call for faculty and administrators to guide students more in such matters--would almost certainly make things worse, given the professoriate's ideological alignment.

Freitas detects three basic characteristics to hookup culture: some form of sexual intimacy; which is brief, lasting no more than a few hours over a single night; and which is intended to be purely physical, not anything approaching emotional attachments. "If a person brackets all emotions and feelings of attachment," she argues, "a hookup becomes an efficient form of sexual interaction. Today's students tend to be overcommitted and extremely busy, and they don't have the time (or at least are socialized to believe they don't have the time) to get serious about any one person," leading to a practice that "creates a drastic divide between physical intimacy and emotional intimacy."

Continue reading "The Hookup Culture and Its Discontents" »

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By Richard Vedder

In the highly competitive free market economy that propelled the United States into our planet's richest nation, business enterprises making mistakes pay huge and sometimes fatal consequences. Indeed it is what Joseph Schumpeter aptly called "creative destruction" that forces firms to be productive, efficient, innovative, and willing to take risks. Contrast this to higher education.  Schools that make mistakes suffer minor but not grievous consequences. The top three schools in 1900 (Harvard, Yale, Princeton) are usually regarded as the top three today.

I looked at the Fortune 500 list for 1993. Of the top 20 companies, more than one third have undergone radical change. Three have gone bankrupt, although they still survive: General Motors, Chrysler, and Eastman Kodak. The Kodak stockholders have been almost completely wiped out and Chrysler has been sold. Three oil companies ceased to exist, being merged into larger companies (Mobil, Texaco, and Amoco). Philip Morris has undergone a fundamental transformation and has divided itself into several entities. Others have had their standing radically change for the better (Berkshire Hathaway went from 158 to 7, Apple from 67 to 17), or worse (Boeing went from 14 to 39, United Technologies from 18 to 48).

Continue reading "What Will Convulsive Change Do to Our Colleges?" »

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By Peter Sacks

In my 1996 book Generation X Goes to College, I predicted that virtually anyone with a computer and a modem would have access to the storehouse of human knowledge. As a result, higher education as we know would become an anachronism, if not obsolete. The university's status would diminish because it would lose its competitive advantage in disseminating information. 

The recent emergence of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), however, raises obvious questions.  Are these new teaching methods as effective, in terms of student performance, as real-life classrooms? Can these new technologies bring down higher education costs? Former Princeton president William G. Bowen takes on these questions and others in his new book Higher-Ed in the Digital Age. Once a skeptic, Bowen now concludes that online learning programs will reduce the cost of higher education without harming student learning outcomes.  

Continue reading "Is Online Learning for Steerage?" »

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By Robert Weissberg

Charles and David Koch are reportedly interested in buying the Tribune Company's eight newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun. According to The New York Times, this is less about making a profit than acquiring a platform to extol the brothers' laissez-faire ideas. Current estimates put the price tag at about $623 million (privately owned Koch Industries have annual revenues of about $115 billion).

 

Leaving aside the obvious arguments about buying dinosaurs and whether the brothers could ideologically re-shape these papers, let me suggest a better investment--establish an undergraduate college heavy on the humanities and social sciences (including economics) that recruits only top students. (David Koch took a step in this academic direction in 2007 when he gave $100 million to MIT for the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research). In a nutshell, it's better to create an elite alternative to today's left-leaning academy than to exercise the owner's droit de seigneur to write weekly op-eds on the evils of Washington's regulation. The Koch boys surely must appreciate how innovation can destroy the old economic order and higher education is no exception. Moreover, creating a college via a 501(c)(3) foundation would provide huge tax savings, perhaps even making the enterprise "free." 

Continue reading "How the Koch Boys Could Save American Higher Education" »

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PETER WOOD: Samuel Goldman seeks to distinguish the small and marginal subset "conservative defenders of liberal education" from other kinds of conservatives. He places these poor folks "in a blind alley." They are, he says, at odds both with "potential allies outside the conservative movement" and with the conservative movement itself, which finds its center of gravity in something other than the preservation of civilization. He then offers friendly advice as to how we conservative defenders of liberal education can find an exit from that alley. Make friends, he says, with people who are not political conservatives but who "take pride in their status as conservators of a cultural inheritance."

I take it by "conservative defenders of liberal education" he means folks like the members of the National Association of Scholars. Good advice, but as it happens, we are already there and have been for the last 25 years. A sizable portion of the NAS membership is made up of people who are registered Democrats. Some of our board members, some of our prominent donors, and some of the scholars who write for our journal Academic Questions emphatically identify themselves as "liberal," and by that they do not mean libertarian. And NAS tirelessly explains to those in the media who insist we are a "conservative" organization that, no, we are an organization that focuses squarely on improving American higher education by advocating for the continuing relevance of reasoned inquiry, the pursuit of truth, and the centrality of Western civilization. We never defined those as "conservative" principles. And in fact they are not. They appeal to some conservatives, which is great. But they also appeal to some liberals, which is also great.  

Continue reading "Are Conservative Academics Stuck in a Blind Alley?
Two Responses to Samuel Goldman (and Peter Lawler)" »

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By Samuel Goldman

What's conservative about liberal education? On any serious consideration, the answer is: a lot. Students do pick up marketable skills when they take classes in literature, history, or philosophy. But the real purpose of studying languages, books, and arguments is to initiate them as members of a community of free men and women, the present and future of which are heavily influenced by its dual origins in Athens and Jerusalem. In a recent essay for Minding the Campus, Peter Augustine Lawler described this task as "cultural transmission"--a term than could almost be derived from postmodern theory. It would be more conservative to use the still intelligible Latinate term tradition, which literally means "handing over."

Liberal education, then, has a distinctly conservative function. But that does not give it any necessary connection to conservative views on other matters, let alone approval for the Republican Party. Rather than confusing a cultural function with a partisan program, defenders of liberal education should pursue alliances with educational "conservatives" of the center and left. 

Continue reading "What Campus Conservatives Should Do Now" »

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By KC Johnson

At some point the demands for federal investigations into our colleges' supposed indifference to accusers in sexual assault cases will reach the point of parody. In fact, that point might already have been reached with two recent developments. First, celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred, an attorney who never met a TV camera she didn't like, has agreed to represent several Occidental College students in their complaints about the school's sexual assault policies. Second, a Title IX complaint has been filed against Swarthmore College, an institution widely considered a paragon of political correctness. To get a sense of the campus climate: Swarthmore was last in the news after student protesters successfully pressured Robert Zoellick, a former head of the World Bank and an early supporter of the Iraq War, into declining an offer to serve as commencement speaker.

Richard Perez-Pena--coordinator of the New York Times' anti-campus due process beat--brought news of both developments in a co-authored article. As is his customary pattern, Perez-Pena didn't actually describe the policies against which the students were complaining. (No mention, that is, of Occidental's bizarre standard under which a male student can be deemed culpable for sexual assault even if his partner says "yes" to intercourse.) Referencing the Orwellian criteria that campuses currently use would not, it seems, comport to the ideological framework through which the Times is viewing these stories.

Continue reading "Swarthmore, Occidental and Their Kangaroo Courts" »

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By Peter Augustine Lawler

A big divide is showing up between conservative and libertarian criticisms of higher education. Conservatives--and I am among them--argue that higher-ed has become too vocational and libertarians say it is not vocational enough.

Professor Michael Hepner of the University of Dubuque, part of an influential and cutting-edge effort to think through the causes of the withering away of "general education" programs, drew recent attention by arguing that conservatives are obviously right.  "It is no secret," he wrote, "that American higher education is becoming more and more technical."  Colleges are reducing the quantity and quality of general ed requirements so that students can get to their technical majors more quickly and easily.

I would add the observation that technical majors expand as general ed programs contract.  Complicated techno-lite vocational majors like music marketing and sports broadcasting often require huge numbers of courses.  The student, after all, has to master both music and marketing!  And then there are the alleged imperatives of the various specialized accrediting programs for education, business, chemistry, nursing, and so forth.  How could anyone possibly expect to get a job without a professionally accredited major?  English, literature, history, and philosophy and other "liberal arts" majors remain modest in size.  Those majors, of course, don't really claim to prepare technically competent students for some specialized job.  They don't have any vocational or professional reason to gloat.

Continue reading "Conservatives v. Libertarians on Higher Education" »

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By Greg Lukianoff and Robert Shibley                          

It's no longer a matter of much debate that America's college campuses are not the beacons of free and open discussion  they were intended to be. In its 14 years of existence, our organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has documented hundreds of cases of gross abuses of students' and faculty members' fundamental rights. More than sixty percent of America's largest and most prestigious colleges have speech codes that are either unconstitutional (at public universities) or directly contradict promises of free speech (at private universities).

The two authors of this piece come from different political and personal perspectives. One is a liberal and an atheist (Lukianoff), the other a conservative evangelical Christian (Shibley). Our combined decades of work as president and senior vice president  of FIRE have convinced us that the groupthink and the pressure to conform, be silent, or talk solely to those with whom you already agree  that is fostered by the culture and rules of the modern campus is destructive to students, our educational system, and our society as a whole.

Continue reading "6 Ways to Defeat the Campus Censors" »

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By Judah Bellin

Originally run as a Manhattan Institute Policy Brief.

The growth of student-loan debt has raised a vexing question: Is a college degree still a good investment? No segment of American higher education has faced greater scrutiny than for-profit colleges and universities.

 

For-profits differ from traditional institutions in important respects. They are accountable chiefly to shareholders, who expect a return on their investment; their stocks are usually traded publicly; and they face no restrictions in setting executive pay. In addition, their admissions standards generally are much lower than those of comparable nonprofit schools. While for-profits only accept students with a high school diploma or equivalent, they are otherwise nonselective. The average acceptance rate for for-profits in 2007-08 was slightly above 74 percent, the highest of any sector and roughly 5 percentage points higher than public universities. Most important, for-profits' academic goals are distinct: they explicitly seek to equip students with vocational skills. To that end, they emphasize technical training over the liberal arts. 

Continue reading "The Unacknowledged Value of For-Profit Education" »

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By Ron Lipsman

Easy question. Administrators do. Odd as it may sound today, faculties have long assumed the right and duty to set the campus agenda--to establish admission standards, control research and curriculum, run visiting speaker programs, and set the academic and professional criteria on which promotions, prizes and appointments are based.

Historically, the faculty actually did control these things, in part because it was viewed as the natural way to run a university, and partly because there were no countervailing forces to prevent it. The administrative layers that accompanied and facilitated faculty control of campuses were fairly thin. That is, the percentage of professional, full-time campus administrators was small compared to that of the faculty. Furthermore, many of them were drawn from the ranks of the faculty (to which they returned after relatively brief stints in campus administration) and so although these faculty functioned as administrators, they still thought of themselves as faculty and comported themselves accordingly.

Continue reading "Who Runs Our Colleges-- Administrators or Faculty?" »

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By Richard Vedder

Universities enjoy a privileged position in our society and lots of independence from political and economic forces, partly to provide an environment where diversity of views reigns -where conformist, stifling uniformity is suppressed in favor of a "free market in ideas." Coupled with that historically has been a sense of meritocracy -the academy is an oasis where the intellectual able, the motivated, the disciplined, can break bread, spar verbally and learn.

But that's not what our universities are like today. Campuses are filled with high-priced administrators collecting economic rents (unnecessary payments) promoting "diversity"--the favorite and most overused word of many administrators. But it's a good word that has been subverted to promote the evaluating of groups of people on the basis of some physical characteristic rather on individual merit. Thus universities in their admission policies favor blacks or Hispanics over Asians and whites. Sometimes they favor women over men.  Call it the New Racism.

Continue reading "Let's Reclaim the Word 'Diversity'" »

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Continue reading "Are Conservatives (or Libertarians) Ruining Liberal Education?" »

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By Frank A. Pasquale

Did you know you can get a degree in your pajamas?  It's true, the company EdConnect assures us--thousands of students are doing it every day.  Meanwhile, in California, the legislature and governor are cooking up a "faculty free" college experience: just take exams to get a degree.  Too lazy to take your own exam? Maybe an expert can phone it in for you.  

Welcome to the brave new world of Silicon Valley-style higher ed.  One visionary, Sebastian Thrun, fantasizes about teaching 1.5 million students at a time.  The less ambitious professors of "Coursera" settle for entering classes of tens of thousands.  Never mind how many actually complete their course--the media will fixate on the sign-up numbers. In the weird economy of prestige of today's networked public sphere, that's enough.

Continue reading "How MOOCs Really Work" »

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By Judah Bellin

To the careful observer of American higher education, the questions Neil Gross raises in Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? might seem self-explanatory. Indeed, such an observer could reason, everyone knows that American universities are run by left-wing academics who bar conservative students and faculty from moving up the ranks. In addition, he might say, conservatives obviously care about political skew because the professoriate tends to marginalize or ignore their views. However, Gross wishes to upend both narratives. 

Before he does so, Gross asks whether the professoriate is really as left-leaning as its critics allege. Unsurprisingly, his finds that it is. Gross draws this conclusion from older data, which shows not only that college professors have self-identified as liberals since the 1940s, but that professors have become more left-wing since 1969. In addition, he and a research partner conduct their own research. Their "Politics of the American Professoriate" study surveyed 1,416 professors from across the disciplines and types of higher education institutions, and interviewed select respondents. His findings add some nuance to the discussion. For instance, he finds that "strong conservatives" comprise 23 percent of the professoriate, "economic conservatives" comprise 4 percent, and "moderates" comprise 19 percent. This data hardly paint a picture of a conservative wilderness. 

Continue reading "Why Are Professors Liberal?" »

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By Andrew Gillen

Very few people who enroll in MOOCs (massive open online courses) tell us about the experience. I just took one and learned these lessons:

Lesson One: Professors need to start phasing out in-class lecturing now.

Based on my own experience as a student and as an adjunct professor, the vast majority of professors spend much of their time in class lecturing. I suspect this will not last in the age of MOOCs. Not that the lecture will become obsolete--indeed, the lecture as a pedagogical tool has had amazing resilience. Lecturing arose because books were once both rare and prohibitively expensive, and lecturing made it necessary for only one person to read while others took notes. Of course, the printing press, VHS tape, and YouTube have all shattered this justification for the lecture, yet the lecture survived. I'm betting it will survive MOOCs as well. 

Continue reading "The Four Lessons I Learned by Taking a MOOC" »

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By John Leo

Today the National Association of Scholars is releasing the results of its long, in-depth study of Bowdoin College, "What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students."

Among the findings: Bowdoin, in a retreat from its past, stresses global citizenship (with declining emphasis and on and concern for the United States). Multi-culturalism, diversity and emphasis on race and gender pervade the curriculum and campus life. Openness and critical thinking are officially preached, but many campus core tenets cannot be challenged in the face of the college's prevailing orthodoxy, and those who might challenge (conservatives) are virtually gone from the campus--only 4 or 5 of the 186 faculty could be listed as conservative, and 100 percent of faculty donations in the 2012 presidential  election went to Barack Obama.

The study of Bowdoin was triggered by happenstance--a golf game that included Wall Streeter Thomas Klingenstein and Bowdoin president Barry Mills. As a result of the disturbing conversation at that game, Klingenstein decided to fund the NAS study of the college.

Continue reading "What Happens Today at a Liberal Arts College?" »

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By KC Johnson

Wayward reporter Richard Perez-Pena, who covers campus sex codes and hearings for the New York Times, recently examined events at four campuses: Amherst, Yale, the University of North Carolina, and Occidental, offering readers positive portraits of "activists" who seek to decimate due process protections for students accused of sexual assault. A hallmark of the Times' coverage of college sexual assault questions has been an utter refusal to describe the campus procedures that help determine the fate of accused students.  I have covered events at Yale and UNC closely on this site and referred to Amherst, but what about the fourth case mentioned by Perez-Pena, at Occidental, a college with strange and unfair procedures?

In line with the OCR "Dear Colleague" letter mandate, Occidental uses the lowest possible threshold (preponderance of evidence) to determine guilt of a student accused of sexual assault. The accused student has the right to an "advocate" who can assist him in the process, but this "advocate" cannot be a lawyer and cannot speak in any way during the disciplinary hearing.

Continue reading "A College with Strange Sex Misconduct Hearings
('No' Means 'No,' and 'Yes' Can Mean 'No' Too)" »

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By Donald A. Downs

Remarks delivered upon acceptance of the Bradley Foundation's Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Award, March 15.                                                    

                                                                                        ***

Commitment to the principles of academic freedom was tested when new forces of politically correct censorship and thought control began to sweep higher education in the later 1980s, the latest historic example of a moralistic movement that considers academic freedom a hindrance to its ascendency. Before you knew it, speech codes, excessively broad harassment codes, and related policies cropped up across the land. To me, it was existential....The University of Wisconsin was a renowned pioneer in the rise of academic freedom in the United States, and our official University motto is dedicated to "that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found."

But in the late 1980s the University prided itself on being a pioneer of a different sort. We considered ourselves a leader of the national speech code movement under the chancellorship of Donna Shalala. Before long, there was less sifting and less winnowing, at least in some important areas. By the early 1990s we felt a pall being case over the campus when it came to free speech and thought regarding such controversial issues as race, gender, sex, religion, and related matters that were covered by the new codes.

Continue reading "Overcoming Shalala and the Speech-Code Movement" »

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By Harvey Silverglate, Juliana DeVries, and Zachary Bloom

There’s been a lot of head-scratching of late about how and why a clutch of Harvard administrators searched the email accounts of 16 “resident deans” in a Nixonian effort to find and then plug a leak of utterly inconsequential information about the so-called Harvard “cheating scandal.” But trendwatchers at Harvard and virtually every other college and university in the country should not be surprised. At Harvard, the Administration and General Counsel—rather than the faculty or students—run the show, with the campus police exerting a good deal of influence as well.

The governing board, despite being granted virtually absolute authority over the affairs of the college by an unusual provision of the Massachusetts Constitution, appears to be AWOL. And when the lawyers and bureaucrats take over as they have at Harvard, we can only expect that the campus culture will resemble a corporation at best and a police state at worst.

Continue reading "The Harvard Email Snooping Case:
Overreaching Administrators at Work" »

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By Richard Vedder

Accreditation is rapidly changing. Instead of remaining just a mildly annoying and inefficient barrier to innovation and change in higher education, it is evolving into a major impediment. Increasingly outrageous decisions by power hungry accreditation czars are becoming a serious problem. I have recently written about this issue here, but the problem is growing so rapidly that more needs to be said.

The most recent outrage comes from the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) of the North Central Association, the nation's largest regional accrediting organization. The HLC has issued a stern fatwa: education is a public, not a private good, and the mission of accredited institutions must reflect that.  The accreditation standards make it explicit that "educational responsibilities   take priority over other purposes, such as generating financial returns for investors...."  This statement, if interpreted narrowly, could mean that for-profit higher education is not permitted. Already politicians like Senators Dick Durbin and Tom Harkin have publicly called for the HLC to critically examine the University of Phoenix, which might largely explain why that institution--by some measures America's largest university-- is on probation. In short, the whole process is increasingly being politicized, with senators telling accrediting agencies what to do -and those agencies are listening.

Continue reading "Accreditors--Hip Deep in Politics" »

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By Mary Grabar 

My fellow mammal in residence, Sparky the Orange Cat, wanted out at a party at my home one cold and rainy night, but I knew what would happen--the ritual cat delay in the doorway: a long period of staring and hesitation while I shivered in the cold, followed by his running back into the warm house.

This made me recall a collection of hilarious poems, Henry Beard's Poetry for Cats: The Definitive Anthology of Feline Verse. Beard captures Sparky's indecision perfectly as he re-writes Hamlet's soliloquy from the cat's perspective:

Continue reading "Cats, Comedy and Common Culture" »

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Steven Hayward has accepted a one-year appointment as Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Hayward, who holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Claremont Graduate School, is the author of several books, including volumes on Reagan and Churchill, and has held positions at the American Enterprise Institute, Pacific Research Institute, and the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University. Funding for three years comes from outside donors.

Is this a good idea, a breakthrough for conservatives at a public university, or a short-sighted  exercise in tokenism--the temporary founding of a one-man conservative ghetto?

We have asked ten people in higher education to comment. Here are Daphne Patai, Cary Nelson, Steven Balch, Peter Lawler, Bruce Bawer, John K. Wilson, Jonathan B. Imber, Robert Paquette, Judah Bellin, Peter Skerry, and James Caeser:

Continue reading "A First: Conservative Studies Professor at a Public University" »

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By Fred Siegel

John Dewey said the job of education was to free students from the intellectual captivity imposed by "village truths," the groupthink version of reality they had grown up with. But the irony now is that liberalism, once created in opposition to small-town traditionalism, has generated its own all-encompassing "village truths" creating conformism on today's campus.

Students are now subject to a curriculum watered down by political correctness. So it comes as news to even well-read young people that there once was an anti-Communism and anti-Stalinism of the left in America. It was a tradition upheld by people like the literary critic and Yiddishist Irving Howe and the historian Eugene Genovese. But Howe's and Genovese's anti-Stalinism made them objects of enmity for the anti-anti-Communists of the New Left, who have dominated academia for the past three decades. The New Left aped the Communists by shutting down all campus debate, and in so doing, laid the groundwork for political correctness.

Continue reading "How Our Campuses Came to Reject Free Speech" »

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By Ronald Radosh

Can it be that "it is not left-wing academics, but ideologues of the radical right, who are pursuing political correctness in American universities?"  No, not really, but that's what the 1960's activist and historian, and more recently labor lawyer, Staughton Lynd, argues on The History News Network site. In a hagiographic obituary for historian Herbert Shapiro, Lynd charges that the right has purged faculties by selecting for teachers friendly to "the unrestricted pursuit of profit."  He says flatly, "conservatism rather than radicalism threatens the free exchange of ideas, intellectual tolerance, and the life of the mind in academia." 

Lynd's case is thin and rambling. Echoing Shapiro, he starts with a minor incident from the 1890s, citing a regent of the University of Wisconsin who said that the economist Richard Ely was writing "utopian, impractical and pernicious books," and in Lynd's words, was accused of "consorting with union organizers, and supporting strikes." Why cite this now? As Lynd undoubtedly knows, many universities today have labor history studies, as well as entire departments dedicated to training union personnel, with no one risking dismissal for "consorting with union organizers."

Continue reading "A New Left Historian Rewrites Some History" »

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Continue reading "The Anti-Bullying Panic Makes it to College" »

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Andrew P. Kelly and KC Deane

Despite our better instincts, we looked at Andrew Leonard's recent piece on the conservative plot to "wreck higher-ed." He begins with an oft-heard although accurate lament about public colleges: state funding is decreasing while costs and prices continue to climb. However, Leonard's argument quickly veers into conspiracy-land:

There's a political context to the transformation. Higher education is in crisis because costs are rising at the same time that public funding support is falling. That decline in public support is no accident. Conservatives don't like big government and they don't like taxes, and increasingly, they don't even like the entire way that the humanities are taught in the United States. 

It's absolutely no accident that in Texas, Florida and Wisconsin, three of the most conservative governors in the country are leading the push to incorporate MOOCs in university curricula.

Continue reading "Is There A Conservative Conspiracy to Destroy College? " »

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By Peter Wood

My sorry academic discipline, anthropology, has been in the news the last few weeks. Napoleon Chagnon broke his long silence by publishing a memoir, Noble Savages, about his work among the South American Yanomamo Indians and the long nightmare of politically correct recrimination that greeted his work.

Chagnon was infamously accused of infamy by a journalist, Patrick Tierney, who confabulated a story about Chagnon starting a measles epidemic among the South American Yanomamo Indians so that he could study the results. Chagnon was hauled up on charges by the American Anthropological Association; condemned in 2002; and then reprieved in 2005 when the AAA rescinded its condemnation after it became clear that Tierney's accusation had been fabricated.  

Continue reading "The Long PC Battle in Anthropology" »

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By James M. Patterson

In 1999, I was a sophomore at the University of Houston when Dr. Ross M. Lence invited me to participate in a small, graduate seminar entirely dedicated to John Locke's Second Treatise on Government.  It was an experience I will never forget. During the first few weeks, I found myself utterly unprepared for the rigor and patience required to read and discuss the material. By the end of the first month, I grew so frustrated that, during a seminar, I lashed out at a graduate student. The room went silent. Ross slowly turned to me, stared for what felt like an eternity and said, "Mr. Patterson, in this course, I will think hard about what Mr. Locke says. Will you be doing the same?" When the class ended, he told me to come to his office immediately.

Once there, he ordered me to spend more time studying the course material. He also made me talk to him about the material before and after each class. In time, I became one of the students who congregated in his office, and even met at large gatherings at his home. At first, we followed him out of fear of failing his course, but we eventually followed him to understand why he told such unusual stories in lectures and how they reflected long-standing political or even existential problems. Later, we did it because he was a great friend and mentor.

Continue reading "Remembering a Great Teacher:
'I Am the Messenger, Not the Message'" »

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Posted by KC Johnson

As some readers of Minding the Campus know, since last summer I've been embroiled in a legal controversy with Duke. The battle ended last week, when, facing a potential defeat before the US. District Court in Maine, Duke withdrew its subpoenas. The affair spoke volumes about the indifference to First Amendment values at one of the nation's leading research universities.

As part of the civil suits filed by former members of the Duke lacrosse team, I received four subpoenas from Duke, demanding among other things my confidential communications with anyone Duke-affiliated, including my e-mails with any Duke professor and all Duke alumni, relating to the "lacrosse incident" or discussing in any way President Richard Brodhead's "job performance." Duke did not subpoena Stuart Taylor, my co-author of Until Proven Innocent. As I'd come to learn, I was the only person who functioned in a journalistic capacity during the lacrosse case subpoenaed by Duke; the university even ignored its own campus newspaper, despite the fact that former Chronicle reporter John Taddei conducted the first on-the-record interviews with any of the plaintiffs in the civil suit--interviews that occurred before I launched my blog Durham-in-Wonderland.

Continue reading "Duke Drops the Case Against Me" »

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By Peter Sacks

Some critics have called for a near-total rollback of the government's involvement with higher education, including the end of subsidies to low-income students.  Last month, for instance, Jarrett Skorup of Michigan Capitol Confidential.com suggested that state and federal governments should  quit subsidizing higher education altogether because the aid fails to improve individual economic prospects or the nation's economic vitality. 

Similarly, Richard Vedder argued here that even liberals should support eliminating public financial aid for low-income students because "on balance (it) has increased income inequality in the United States."  And, of course, there is Ron Paul, who once told NBC News that federal financial aid for needy students should eventually be terminated "because there's no authority to do this...they're a trillion dollars in debt, we don't have any jobs for them, the quality of education has gone down. So, it's a failed program."

Continue reading "Stop Dumping on Student Loans" »

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By Jackson Toby

Indebted college graduates have recently begun to ask whether a four-year college education is worth what it costs.  According to an article in the Wall Street Journal on February 11, for example, 23-year-old Bryce Harrison, who graduated last May from Goucher College with a political-science degree and about $100,000 in student loans to repay, is now unemployed and is considering joining the National Guard.  He had spent the summer working for his father, power-washing houses. "Was college worth getting in the amount of debt I'm in?" he asked. "At this point, I can't answer that."

Continue reading "The Market for College Grads Keeps Changing " »

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By Peter Wood

Say you go down to local fishmonger and order a nice tuna steak.  You take it home, cook it up, serve it, and find it is succulent and delicious.  But before long you have cramps, nausea, and something worse.  Chances are what you thought was tuna was another fish, escolar. Tasty but not recommended. 

The New York Times is reporting the latest of many studies that show that the fish we buy are often mislabeled.  In the study 120 samples of red snapper collected at markets in 12 different parts of the country turned out to include all sorts of substitute species--28 different kinds of fish in that net.  The San Francisco Chronicle reporting on the same study noted that "a third of the seafood sold nationwide and almost 40 percent of the fish purchased by consumers in Northern California was not what it was touted to be."

Continue reading "Fishy Courses: The Fake Red Snappers of Academe" »

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By John S. Rosenberg

This may be a first: the president of a major research university has just been formally censured by his faculty -- a no confidence vote may be coming next month -- because of an opinion about a historical event (and a conventional, mainstream opinion at that) he expressed in a university publication.

Emory University President James Wagner's transgression was his opinion that the adoption of the Constitution provides a model of how it is both possible and desirable to compromise, even over bitterly divisive issues. Regarding the controversial compromise that provided counting three-fifths of the slaves for the purpose of state representation in the new Congress, he argued that "[p]ragmatic half-victories kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together." Both North and South, he concluded, "found a way to temper ideology and continue working toward the highest aspiration they both shared -- the aspiration to form a more perfect union."

Continue reading "Emory President Censured for Incorrect Opinion" »

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By Peter H. Schuck

A federal jury in Georgia has held Ronald Zaccari, the former president of Valdosta State University, liable for damages in a lawsuit by a former student, Hayden Barnes, whom Zaccari expelled in 2007 without according him a due process hearing.  Zaccari did so after Barnes had conducted a passionate, energetic, unrelenting campaign on campus against the administration's plan to construct a new parking deck at an estimated cost of $30 million, which Barnes argued would be better spent on almost 3000 full scholarships for needy university students.  The breaking point for Zaccari apparently occurred when Barnes referred to the project as a "memorial" garage, which Zaccari took to be a personal threat to his safety, justifying a summary expulsion.

Such outrageous violations by college administrators of their students' and teachers' peaceful exercise of First Amendment rights are all too common.  The legal challenges are usually based on 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, a civil rights law dating back to 1871 that provides a remedy (money damages, injunctions, or both) in federal (and state) courts against state and local officials who violate a right secured by the U.S. Constitution, federal statutes, or other sources of federal law.  (States themselves can be sued only under narrow circumstances because of the Eleventh Amendment).

Continue reading "Valdosta and the Future of the Authoritarian Campus" »

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By Daniel DiSalvo

A debate has raged for nearly a year over federal government's funding of political science research. On one side are those who argue that very little public benefit is derived from such funding and that it only furthers Ivory Tower navel-gazing. On the other side are, not surprisingly, the political scientists themselves and those who claim that scientists not politicians should dictate what research government sponsors. The issue was recently reignited by a major policy speech by House Majority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA). Things have gotten so interesting that even Paul Krugman has jumped in the fray. However, the whole debate is in many respects a tempest looking for a teapot to happen in.

Continue reading "Should Political Science Be Defunded?" »

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By Richard Vedder

If I were asked to name the ten organizations most adversely impacting Americans - I would undoubtedly think of a few terrorist groups like al-Qaeda or criminal elements like Russian or Italian Mafia crime families, but also on my list, right below the quasi-corrupt NCAA that exploits young athletes to profit and entertain adults, might be the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, hereafter SACS. Actually, SACS is one of a half dozen regional accrediting bodies whose decisions can determine whether a college exists or not, and most of what I say about SACS could be said about other regional accrediting groups, such as the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, or about subject accrediting groups like the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the American Bar Association, or the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education. 

Continue reading "The Damage That Accreditors Do" »

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By Peter Augustine Lawler

For many economists, the big point about the current higher education bubble is that it deserves to burst.  College education is overpriced because colleges have been getting away with charging students for amenities that have little or nothing to do with real education.  The list of amenities is long, with a lot of disagreement on which are most costly and pointless.  The two most obvious culprits are the burgeoning number of overpaid and self-indulgent administrators overseeing educationally irrelevant enterprises and concerns and the overpaid, self-indulgent, and underworked faculty.  The administrators, of course, blame the faculty, and the faculty the administrators.  The administrators create more bureaucratic bloat by insisting, through their organizations and accrediting associations, that educational outcomes be more rigorously assessed, and faculty respond that all the assessment baloney does little more than annoyingly take time away from their real jobs.

Continue reading "The Core Value of Higher Education Is Money?" »

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By Peter Wood

Near the beginning of Dickens' novel Little Dorrit (1857), a character named Monsieur Rigaud explains to a companion, "I am a cosmopolitan gentleman.  I own no particular country. My father was Swiss--Canton de Vaud.  My mother was French by blood, English by birth.  I myself was born in Belgium. I am a citizen of the world." 

It's an attractive idea.  Being a citizen of the world sounds like an escape from everything narrow and provincial, which gives it magnetic appeal to college students eager to shed their suburban and hometown identities.  Many American colleges and universities have tapped into this longing, and I've been tracking this conceit for a while.   

Continue reading "Teaching Collegians to Be World Citizens " »

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From the New Criterion

Last month we noted some of the trends affecting the future of higher education in this country. One trend is the explosion in tuition and fees over the last several decades, an explosion matched by the hypertrophy of college administrators, as more and more "deans of diversity" and programs in non-subjects like women's studies batten on the economic lifeblood of an institution. At many top-rated institutions today, the total yearly tab exceeds $60,000.

Where is that money coming from? And--the question of questions--what do you get for it? Those are questions that more and more parents and prospective students will be asking, and the colleges and universities that are pimping themselves for tuition dollars will not like the answer many of them will arrive at. Spiraling, indeed unsustainable, costs are not the only ominous reality facing the higher educational establishment. 

Continue reading "Moody's and the Crisis of the Universities" »

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By Daniel B. Klein

Clues to the structure of academia and its ideological leanings sometimes turn up in policy journals. Here's one: In the Georgetown Public Policy Review, Robert L. Oprisko, a visiting professor at Butler University, notes that "eleven schools contribute 50 percent of the political science academics to research-intensive universities in the United States. Over 100 political science PhD programs are graduating students that will contest the remaining 50 percent of openings. With fewer jobs in the field and a surplus of PhDs in a tightening market, Oprisko writes, "Many universities are losing the ability to place their own students within academia. The theoretical consequence of such hiring practices is that hiring committees often appear to favor people like themselves rather than candidates from schools like the ones in which they work."

The pattern of placing and hiring new young faculty has implications for the ideological profile within departments. Think of the academic discipline of political science as a tribe. The tribe's settlements are situated laterally, in universities across the country. There is an established hierarchy of prestige among the settlements. Culturally, however, the array has the structure of a pyramid. At the apex of the pyramid are the most prestigious departments. They produce the most new PhDs and they sweep them into positions up and down the pyramid.

Continue reading "The Tribes That Hire the PhDs" »