Cross-posted from Open Market.

In his State of the Union Address, President Obama decried skyrocketing college tuition, attempting to take advantage of public anger over the steadily-worsening college tuition bubble.  This was ironic, since his own Administration has done much to foster rising college tuitions.

For example, it imposed the 90-10 rule, which forced low-cost educational institutions to raise their tuition to comply with a new federal regulation requiring them to charge enough over federal financial aid so that at least 10 percent of education costs don't come from financial aid.  For example, Corinthian College had diploma programs in health care and other fields that can be completed in a year or less.  Until 2011, many of those programs had a total cost of about $15,000, which meant that federal grants and loans could cover nearly 100 percent of their cost.  In response to the Education Department's rule, the college raised tuition to comply with the 90/10 rule.  The net result of the Obama Education Department's rule was to "create a perverse, no-win 'Catch-22' that could prevent low-income students from attending college," by encouraging such colleges to raise tuition to outstrip rising financial aid by more than ten percent.  Administration allies like Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) are now pushing a new rule, the 85-15 rule, that would require low-cost institutions to further raise tuition so that at least 15 percent of education costs aren't covered by financial aid.  (With this kind of mentality, it is no wonder that college graduation rates have actually "fallen somewhat since the 1970s" "among poor and working-class students").

Continue reading "Obama Fosters the Skyrocketing Tuition He Criticized" »

Over the past year, FIRE has led a campaign of civil liberties organizations against the Obama administration's infamous "Dear Colleague" letter, which ordered colleges and universities to lower the burden of proof in their on-campus judicial proceedings. The letter demanded that all universities receiving federal funds employ a "preponderance of the evidence" standard (in other words, a 50.1 percent degree of certainty) to determine guilt on allegations of sexual assault.

Given that campus judicial procedures already are tilted, often wildly so, in favor of sexual-complaint accusers, the letter has produced a guilty-unless-proven-innocent standard for accused students. In at least one case, that of Caleb Warner at the University of North Dakota, the standard (before FIRE's involvement) amounted to guilty even when proved innocent by the local police.

Continue reading "The Times Vilifies Another Athlete, Presenting No Evidence" »

Mark Emmert, the head of the NCAA, is a man with a mission. A series of unprecedented scandals has eroded confidence in big-time college sports. In fact, some critics contend the NCAA is an enabler that is compromised by the billions of dollars colleges earn through football and basketball programs. Mr. Emmert is intent on changing that perception.

Some contend that the so-called student-athlete should be paid and, at the very least, have called for "extra money" for athletes. Others argue that those who violate recruitment regulations and the maintenance of minimal academic standards should be prohibited from Bowl games and March Madness tournament participation. With 338 Division I members, whose budgets range from $5 million to $155 million consensus is not easily achieved. And some, Joe Nocera of the New York Times for example, contend that "Many NCAA infractions consist of actions that most people would consider perfectly appropriate - and entirely legal - but that the NCAA has chosen to criminalize."

Continue reading "What to Do About Big-Money College Sports?" »

What does a young academic need to do to qualify for tenure? For the answer, take a look at this recent survey of provosts. In a set of questions regarding tenure, the key question was, do you agree with this statement?: "Junior faculty today confront rising standards for tenure--standards that many of their senior colleagues could not have met when they were up for tenure."

An overwhelming majority of provosts agreed--71 percent from public doctorate universities, 72 percent from public masters universities, and 65 percent from private doctorate universities. This finding is important, not because it marks a major trend of recent times, but because of the opposite--at least that is the case in my area, the humanities. The rising standards have been in place since the mid-1970s, when the job market started to tighten up after massive hirings in the late-60s and early-70s. When I came out of grad school and hit the job market in the late-80s--a bad time to look for a tenure-track post--I and my peers grumbled about how little sympathy we got from 50-year-old professors who were able to snag a job before they even finished their dissertation, and were able to earn tenure by completing their dissertation and publishing an article or two.

Continue reading "After 5,500 Publications on Melville, What's Left for Number 5,501 to Say?" »

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 youngest daughter Alex, a technical whiz at Reuters, have been telling me (a dedicated non-techie) that to attract comments on Facebook and other social media sites, it's always best to start with a question. Sure enough, my item drew a lot of comments. The  15th and best came from Alan Charles Kors, an outstanding professor of history at Penn, co-founder of FIRE and co-author of "The Shadow University." He wrote: " Not the most corrupted department on campuses---try English, Comp Lit, Ethnic Studies, Women's Studies, and on---but the most tragically corrupted department." I agree--his list is worse. But history matters and reform of our wayward history departments is urgent.

A recent study by Harvard's School of Public Health concludes that a third of all American campuses are now officially "dry"--no beer or booze allowed for students. This policy has drawn a lot of support from those who believe it creates communities less focused on drinking. But opponents claim it forces binge-drinking underground, restricts student freedom, and probably will prove no more effective than the original Prohibition of 1919 to 1933.

Continue reading "Dry Campuses--A Solution to Binge-drinking or Not?" »

Cross-posted from Open Market.

A school superintendent has labeled a column in a school newspaper that criticized homosexuality as "bullying." (The Shawano High School newspaper decided to run dueling student opinion pieces on whether same-sex couples should be able to adopt children; the student article that was labeled as "bullying" answered the question "no." The school district also publicly apologized for the column, and said that it is "taking steps to prevent items of this nature from happening in the future.")

Continue reading "The Ever-Expanding Concept of "Bullying" Casts an Ominous Shadow Over Free Speech" »