By Frank J. Macchiarola

Almost every morning, after taking a shower, I get on the scale to see if I have lost some of the extra weight that I do not want or need. I have tried many ways of shedding the pounds, with diet and exercise at the top of the list. The pounds refuse to disappear. After reading Catherine Rampell's piece, "In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That," in the New York Times, I realized that there is a simpler way. A slight adjustment to the scale, so that the measuring starts at minus 15 pounds rather than zero, could bring instant relief. I could truthfully -- if not honestly -- say that according to the scale, I was now less than 175 pounds.

This droll reverie faded to disappointment as I pondered the implications of adjusting law school grades in the fashion recounted in the Times. Grades entered on students' transcripts at law school were adjusted upward several semesters later. The article told of law schools abandoning traditional grading standards to give their students an edge in the tough job market. Thus, each school's scale was adjusted to give the appearance that students did better than they actually did. The schools named were Loyola, Georgetown, NYU, Tulane and Golden State Universty. When I thought further about these modifications, I was reminded of other instances where expected objectivity gave way to subjective judgments. The New York State Board of Regents, for instance, has begun the practice of determining acceptable grades by assigning a passing grade to a raw score. The raw score required for passage is only arrived at after the tests are rated. Such a system allows the Board of Regents to crow about an 80% passage rate, notwithstanding the fact that the classification was entirely contrived. It has the feel of issuing traffic citations on the basis of a quota and claiming there is an epidemic of bad drivers.

The fact that this practice of grade adjustment has developed in law schools is, I believe, a much more serious matter. The rule of law, when properly applied, embodies honesty, fairness and impartial justice. The behavior of adjusting grades to conceal the truth does damage to our expectation of the rule of law. That the law itself is made to yield to the dollar is particularly troublesome. As a professor quoted in the Times article put it, "if somebody's paying $150,000 for a law school degree, you don't want to call them a loser in the end. So you artificially call every student a success." The result is a perverse version of the golden rule: "he who has the gold rules."

In the wake of the National Association of Scholars' report on summer reading for college freshmen---the report found many of the assigned books trivial and politically one-sided---we asked Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, to explain his institution's unusually rigorous approach to summer reading.

By Leon Botstein

For the past two years, Bard College has asked first-year students to read works by Kafka and Darwin over the summer. These texts then become subjects of analysis when the students arrive on campus in August for an intensive three-week program of reading and writing before the fall semester begins. Let me explain the thinking behind this approach.

The idea of assigning summer readings to students entering college has three justifications. First, since American high school students usually take more of a vacation from serious thinking and study during the summer months than is warranted, readings remind them that college promises to be demanding and difficult and that it would therefore behoove them to stay in some sort of intellectual shape. This exercise is especially welcome because once high school seniors learn what college they will attend, they often cease to study seriously so that the final months of high school are wasted.

By Robert Paquette

On 19 April, the board of trustees of Shimer College in Chicago, by an 18 to 16 vote, ousted Dr. Thomas Lindsay from the presidency after little more than a year of service. For sixty years, tiny Shimer (about ten faculty and 100 students) has touted itself as a Great Books college on the Robert Maynard Hutchins plan. Students converse about the content of texts with one another, guided by a professorial facilitator employing the Socratic method. The experience, it was believed, would "sustain a life-long passion for learning." Accordingly, Shimer constructed and reconstructed its mission statement to reflect---and to extend--- Hutchins's ideals. Since 1996, the ambitious Shimer educational experience purported to prepare students for "active citizenship," not just in the United States, but "in the world." After four years of matriculation, Shimer's graduates would learn to shun "passivity" for "responsible action" by moving "beyond either unquestioning acceptance of authority or its automatic mistrust."

Dr. Lindsay came to Shimer from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) where he served as deputy director and oversaw We the People, a well-regarded program designed "to encourage and enhance the teaching, study, and understanding of American history, culture, and democratic principles." There he attracted national attention with impressive publications and lectures on how to teach the principles of the founding to the American people. Inaugurated as Shimer's thirteenth president In January 2009, he set to work trying to elevate an institution possessed of noble goals but gasping from slipping standards, radical egalitarian governance structures, a bare-cupboard endowment, and a long history of financial distress, including several bankruptcies. Re-accreditation itself was hanging in the balance. Dr. Lindsay expanded to thirty-four the number of sitting members on the board of trustees to include educators and philanthropists who could help Shimer out of its chronic fiscal woes. Raising money in good times requires persistence and long hours to persuade prospective donors. During a recession, the task can seem Sisyphean. Dr. Lindsay says he spent two out of every three days during his first year at Shimer on the road with tin cup in hand.

Many at Shimer made known their dislike of Dr. Lindsay from the outset. Despite his obvious relish for the Great Books, many saw him as an outsider with a suspicious agenda. They complained when they discerned that he might be moving to make the founding documents of the United States more central to a Shimer education. In The Federalist Papers, a work that Dr. Lindsay would have liked Shimer's undergraduates to read cover to cover, Publius devotes the majority of the eighty-five essays to the republican character of the Constitution. Of the two species of popular government, republicanism had refining, insulating features that democracy did not. In fact, in The Federalist Papers, the word democracy appears less than a dozen times and when discussed in its pure form draws a pejorative contrast. In a society composed of a small number of persons, Publius warns, the "citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction," and they "are continually exposed, by their incapacity for regular deliberation and concerted measures, to the ambitious intrigues" of others. One would be hard-pressed to find in the United States an institution of higher learning with a more radically egalitarian and democratic structure than Shimer's. Three faculty members and two students sit as voting members on the board of trustees. Shimer's representative assembly consists of all students, faculty, and staff, with one vote each. Dominated by activist students, the assembly has set itself up as the moral authority of the college, and members reference the Assembly's majority votes as if they were exquisite expressions of Rousseau's general will. When dissidents protested that Dr. Lindsay was not sufficiently steeped in Shimer's traditions read that he refused to kow-tow to the majoritarian voice of the predominant element in Shimer's Assembly.

By Patrick Deneen

For several decades, conservative critics of higher education have argued against trends toward the elimination of "core" curricula and with equal ferocity against their replacement by "distribution requirements" or even open curricula. They have, in particular, defended a curriculum in "Great Books," those widely-recognized texts in the Western tradition authored by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Mill, and Nietzsche, among others. This curriculum - preserved still in some of the nation's leading universities such as the University of Chicago and Columbia University - as well as at the heart of the longstanding Great Books approach of St. John's College - is seen as a bulwark against contemporary tendencies toward relativism, post-modernism, and political correctness.

More recently, even some faculty who would eschew the "conservative" label have sought to restore sustained study of the Great Books to some place of pride in the curriculum. Some twenty years after the height of the "culture wars" over the Western canon - during which the phrase "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go" was chanted on the Stanford campus - there seems to be a growing sense among some moderate faculty that the curriculum has become too fragmented, and that something valuable was lost in the politically-motivated elimination of a common core. Notably, at Harvard an ad hoc effort by some faculty to establish a Great Books track in the "Gen Ed" requirement was advanced before crashing on the shoals of Harvard's new fiscal reality (as well as the opposition of some faculty).

This reassessment has been most articulately argued by Anthony Kronman - a moderate liberal - in his recent book Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. Kronman, a professor and former Dean at the Yale Law School, laments the abandonment of a serious engagement with the Great Books. Their neglect has led to the decline of an examination of "the meaning of life," an activity that he argues should be at the heart of the university experience. He praises a period in the history of American universities which was dominated by what he calls a worldview of "secular humanism." This period of "secular humanism" followed the widespread disaffiliation of traditionally religious institutions and preceded the rise of the modern research university and the concomitant rise of political correctness in the humanities. He urges modern institutions of higher education to adopt something like the Yale program in "Directed Studies" - in which he teaches - which requires students to engage in a concentrated study of the Great books ranging from Homer to Luther, from Machiavelli to Kant, from Plato to Nietzsche - over a two year span.

By Robert Weissberg

In the contemporary battle within the social sciences between free market think tanks and liberal- dominated universities, the former labor under a huge disadvantage: they lack students. Think-tank based scholars may daily issue erudite policy analyses, write incisive op-ed columns galore, dominate talk radio, publish in widely admired magazines like City Journal but the half-life of these missives seldom exceeds a few days. By contrast, a professor typically has fifteen weeks, two to three times per week, for usually 50 minutes, to expound his or her views to a captive audience, two to four courses per semester, and over a thirty-five plus year career. Of the utmost importance, professors can compel students to read stuff and insist on minimal familiarity, a power unimaginable to even the most professional think tank PR department. That these students are of an impressionable age---the pedagogical equivalent of droit de seigneur-- and are hardly in a position to argue, only adds to this built in indoctrination advantage.

In graduate education the propagating-the-faith advantage multiplies, since most Ph.D. students will become tomorrow's teachers. Ideological domination can persist for decades, regardless of events. So, to use a depressing example, the Marxist analyses that first filtered into America's college classrooms in the 1960s are still going strong a half century later and can only continue on as the torch is passed from professor to Ph.D. advisees. Perhaps only centuries from now will Marxism go inert and like spent weapons-grade Plutonium, the last lead-brained but still radioactive Marxist professor will be entombed in a deep Nevada salt mine. And it may require additional centuries for him to be joined by ideologically exhausted feminists, deconstructionists, ethnic studies experts and all the rest.

This monopoly of early access cannot be overcome by think tanks churning out more reports, better public relations, or ensuring that every "important opinion leaders" receives a free copy of their sponsored research (which may not even be read). And keep in mind that professors get to students first (the droit de seigneur), so the glories of free markets, low taxes, and limited government etc. etc. must overcome years of prior exposure. It is no wonder that many free-market think tank scholars must feel like they are trying to push boulder up a mountain. They are---the professors got there first and designed the obstacle course terrain.

By Ruth R. Wisse

On 2 December 2009 the curtain of Harvard's famed Agassiz Theater rose on a production of Avrom Goldfaden's Shulamis, one of the most famous plays in the Yiddish repertoire. An operetta set in the Land of Israel in late biblical times, it was last performed in Warsaw in 1939, and forcibly shut down by the German invasion of September 1. To stage the current production its co-directors, Debra Caplan, a Harvard graduate student of Yiddish and Cecilia Raker, an undergraduate concentrator in drama, assembled a cast willing to learn their parts in a language most of them had never heard. The directors kept all the musical numbers in the original Yiddish and used a new English translation for the dialogue, adding dancers to the production to compensate for the verbal delights an English audience would miss.

Of the dozen plays I had studied with these students in a course on Yiddish drama, Shulamis was by no means the most obviously appealing to contemporary taste. Its theme is trustworthiness: a young man Absolom neglects the vow of marriage he made to the rustic Shulamis, who endures bitter years of waiting until he repents the alliance he made instead and returns to her. Beneath the intricacies of the love story throbs the Jewish national motif of keeping faith with covenant. What most intrigued the student-directors was the moral and psychological fallout of such faithfulness: How do we account for the suffering of the woman Absolom marries, and for the death of their two infant children in apparent retribution for his sin? When Absolom leaves his wife and fulfils his promise, can an audience forgive him as fully as Shulamis does, and is the reconciliation at the final curtain really meant to erase the effects of those intervening years? The excitement generated by such questions among cast, musicians, technical crew, and among scholars and graduate students invited to participate in an intercollegiate symposium on the play seemed to bear out the website's claim for "a resurgence of interest in Yiddish among young people."

Much of that interest is currently stimulated by institutions of higher learning, like Columbia, NYU, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Stanford, Emory, Brandeis, and universities of Indiana, Michigan, Albany, and Texas, all of which offer programs in Yiddish. Harvard's current cohort of eight PhD candidates in Yiddish is its largest and liveliest since the inception of the program in 1993. Yet the field of Yiddish is hardly stable. The University of Maryland has just announced that it may drop its Yiddish position as a cost-saving device, sacrificing an apparently marginal subject---one unlikely to figure prominently in the college ratings of US News and World Report. The news from Baltimore generated anxiety in what had until recently been the expanding sphere of Yiddish studies. Comings and goings of faculty sometimes determine the status of the language, since many university positions in Jewish Studies are open ended, and shift their priorities according to the specialty of the person hired.

By Matt Shaffer

As the senior class of Yale College prepares for its final semester and reflects on the Bright College Years so swiftly gliding by, I have heard one phrase repeated with surprising frequency: "I wish I had done Directed Studies." It's a statement that doesn't accord with the stereotype of Yale seniors as either careerists shaking hands toward Wall Street or activists uninterested in the intellectual foundations of their slogans.

Directed Studies is a full year, freshmen-only Great Books program. The very short, very intense introduction to the Western Canon consists of three courses per semester--one in Literature, Philosophy, and History & Political Thought each. All students together attend lectures by professors like Harold Bloom, Dave Kastan, Donald Kagan, Charles Hill, and others less famous but equally revered by their students. Afterward, students break out into smaller discussion seminars.

The program has a reputation for being demanding, and a quick look at the syllabus shows why. The spring semester in Literature alone includes Don Quijote, War and Peace, Swann in Love, Paradise Lost, Faust, and more. The fall semester in History and Political Thought covers Thucydides' and Herodotus' histories, The Republic, Aristotle's Politics, Livy, Tacitus and Augustine! And both are just one out of three for the semester.

By Peter D. Salins

The Obama administration - along with many in the opinion elite - is looking to the nation's two-year community colleges as the primary vehicle to ramp up future Americans' level of post-secondary educational attainment. A down payment in this direction are the billions of dollars of direct and indirect community college aid included in the administration's "stimulus bill." However, before we get carried away with enthusiasm for community colleges as the best place to extend the frontier of higher education, there's a question to consider: how well have these institutions actually succeeded in their mission to provide an inexpensive but effective college education to our millions of academically under-prepared high school graduates?

A cursory look at the data is not encouraging. Although 41 percent of America's college-bound students enter community colleges each year , only 28 percent of this cohort actually complete their studies and earn a degree , an even more dismal outcome than that displayed at the nation's baccalaureate colleges, where 56 percent manage to graduate . These depressing statistics haven't dampened the general consensus favoring support of community colleges because proponents appear to believe that college "access" trumps successful college completion and that "some college is better than none." Refuting the latter point, U.S. community college non-graduates have only marginally higher earnings and lower unemployment rates than high school graduates and do far less well than their counterparts that manage to complete their studies .

The disappointing outcomes at community colleges are to some extent hard-wired into four aspects of their design. These institutions are proudly and aggressively "open admissions" which means that there are no academic criteria to get in except, in most places, a high school diploma. They are indifferent to the extent to which their students are diverted from their studies by work or other outside obligations, convinced that such distractions are an unavoidable and immutable aspect of "nontraditional" student profiles. Their abundant array of courses (including ones for English and math remediation that a majority of their students test into and often fail) are taught primarily by low-paid part-time faculty who have little time for interaction with students beyond classroom hours. Finally, community colleges view their mission in strictly vocational terms. They offer majors geared to every occupation that their "environmental scanning" process identifies as having job openings, while slighting the kind of general education offered by baccalaureate institutions that may contribute more to post-collegiate success than narrow (and quickly obsolete) occupational skill sets. While educators and the media tend to be scornful of the academic pretensions of proprietary, often on-line, "universities" like Phoenix and DeVry, the public community colleges are not operationally very different or in their academic results any more successful.

By Sandra Stotsky and Ze'ev Wurman

Every year seems to produce a burst of attention to a particular crisis in education. In 2009, the most publicized crisis is likely the staggering number of post-secondary students with severe debilities in reading and math. Estimates of those needing remedial classes before taking credit courses range from 30% of entering students to 40% of traditional undergraduates. According to a 2008 report by the CUNY Council of Math Chairs, 90% of 200 City University of New York students tested couldn't solve a simple algebra problem in their first class at a four-year college.

A 2004 U.S. Department of Education study reports that 42% of freshmen in public two-year institutions need remediation. While there are many adult (non-traditional) students in remedial classes, those 21 or younger make up approximately 80% of remedial class enrollment, according to a 2009 policy brief from the Charles Houston Center for the Study of the Black Experience in Education.

More than half of all college students will not earn a degree or credential, according to a 2009 Gates Foundation report drawing on national education statistics. For community college and low-income students, it notes, the numbers are much worse. Only about one-quarter of the African-American students who enrolled in a community college in 2004 graduated within three years. Immediate enrollment in credit courses that accumulate rapidly towards completion of a degree program is not possible for under-qualified young adults who need to spend at least part-time on remedial courses.

By Barry Strauss

If there's anything uniting faculty on different sides of the aisle nowadays it's disapproval of large lecture courses. To the Left, lectures are authoritarian; to the Right, they are lowbrow. Better the egalitarian or members-only atmosphere of the seminar, they say. To anyone who is just "agin' the guv'ment," lecture courses suffer the stigma of administrative approval, because deans and provosts love lectures as cheap and efficient ways to deliver information.

That is, if the courses succeed: many alumni remember only the professor's yellowing notes or the students' back-row shenanigans and not any actual learning. Nor is the future of lecturing bright, according to some experts, who say that nothing so prehistoric as a lecturer's voice could possibly penetrate the digital habits of Generation Net.

But that's not been my experience. Course evaluations--and I've read more than a few--show that students love pointed, provocative well-delivered lectures. They appreciate and respect a master narrative (the Left's bugaboo), if only to give them something to rebel against. They can see through a professor's bias and they don't even mind it, as long as the professor acknowledges it. They appreciate common touches such as references to popular culture (the bane of the Right) as long as they are up-to-date. They want their electronic images, but not without a commanding voice behind them.

By Adam Kissel

The University of Chicago met widespread national opposition ten years ago after it instituted a new, less demanding core curriculum to make way for more electives. It was part of a plan to make the curriculum significantly less demanding (more "fun") to attract more students and improve the school's bottom line. Instead of 21 required courses (in the quarter system), there became 15: six in the sciences, three in the social sciences, and six divided among the humanities and civilization studies. The changes were bitterly opposed when they became public, but too late. Over the past ten years, the university's curriculum has slouched farther toward mediocrity.

After 1999, a student could forgo the modern era in the humanities as well as one third of the education in a civilization that used to be required for a bachelor's degree worthy of Chicago's name. While students need not avoid such courses, they may, and many do. In the first year of the new curriculum, only about 20 percent of students chose not to complete the third quarter of their humanities sequences, and it was argued that most Chicago students could be trusted to take their education into their own hands. The situation today is not so rosy.

In 2007-2008, for instance, nearly 47 percent of students chose to abandon their humanities core sequence to study something else. Maybe they were leaving room for more electives or were making hard choices as they tried to fit the core into study abroad and early graduation. But the fact is that half of Chicago's undergraduates now choose to forgo a year-long sequence, which at its best weaves multiple common themes through various changes across the centuries, in favor of a piecemeal education. Some of the humanities sequences have shrunk on the presumption that they can only maintain about 22 weeks' worth of undergraduate attention. Why keep up an integrated three-quarter sequence if students treat the third quarter as an elective?

By John McWhorter

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 mission of a truly modern African-American Studies department be?

The answer common in such departments is that the principal mission is to teach students about the eternal power of racism past and present. Certainly it should be part of a liberal arts education to learn that racism is more than face-to-face abuse, and that social inequality is endemic to American society. However, too often the curriculum of African-American Studies departments gives the impression that racism and disadvantage are the most important things to note and study about being black.

By Judith Miller

Fourteen Columbia professors are protesting the university's apparent decision to award tenure to Joseph A. Massad, a controversial anti-Israel professor of Arab studies.

The professors are from the schools of law, business and public health. They expressed their concern in a five-page letter to the incoming Provost, Claude M. Steele. The letter asserts that the university's decision to guarantee Massad a life-time teaching post "appears to have violated" Columbia's own rules, thus raising profound questions about the university's academic integrity. The university's administration, weirdly, still refuses to confirm or deny that Massad won tenure, but yesterday the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department let the cat out of the bag---it announced a beginning-of-term party next week congratulating Massad on gaining tenure.

This week Provost Steele belatedly issued a polite, noncommittal response. In a four-paragraph "Dear Colleagues" letter to the fourteen professors, Steele, a former Stanford psychologist, says he would "welcome" a meeting to discuss their concerns. After he learns more about Columbia's tenure process, Steele writes, he may "want to make some changes in our procedures." But nowhere does he state that Massad has, in fact, been awarded tenure. Nor does he acknowledge that the professors raise deeply troubling concerns, that if true, go to the heart of what many regard as the core of a university's integrity.

By Mark Bauerlein

In a recent interview with Mars Hill Audio Magazine (see http://www.marshillaudio.org/), Stanley Fish insists on a distinction bound to vex his colleagues. Professors must remember, he says, the difference between academic judgment and political judgment. In a classroom situation, academic judgment is the application of academic training to materials within the purview of a discipline, for instance, an English professor deciding whether Satan is or is not the hero of Paradise Lost (Fish's example). A political judgment is the application of a professor's political values to, well, anything, such that a "conclusion about action in the world could be immediately drawn."

I don't know of any distinction held in higher disregard back in the swirling culture wars days of the late-80s and early-90s. There was no such thing, the wisdom of the moment declared, as non-political academic judgment. I remember a graduate seminar at UCLA around 1987 when the teacher inched through a Derridean reading of a Wallace Stevens poem while a couple of students fidgeted uncomfortably. (At this time, deconstruction was considered an abstract endeavor that refused the ideological nature of language and the politics of academic labor.) They finally spoke up, stating that Steven's Romantic expressions about imagination and reality were, in fact, a case of suppression. Stevens merely engaged in "reification," converting social and political phenomena into interesting-sounding abstractions. That's the job of intellectuals, they noted, to cloak messy and inequitable human matters in the garments of beauty, truth, ideas, and theories.

"But what political facts does Stevens hide here?" the professor asked.

By Stephen Zelnick

Last semester, in an unguarded moment, I did what literature teachers should never do. I told a student her interpretation of a poem was wrong. From that moment I was regarded as an enemy to freedom.

I invited my students to engage with me in online debate on whether an interpretation could be wrong. What follows is their side of the argument. My arguments failed to dent their belief that a poem means whatever a reader thinks.

The debate erupted with Robert Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi," where Browning, impersonating a Renaissance painter and with much complexity, presents his artist's credo.

My students resolved that complexity by leaping to conclusions. One young woman found the poem disgusting because the wayward monk enjoys a night out with the ladies. For her, this poem was just another male pleasantry purchased at women's expense. That was her personal feeling, and therefore, the class argued, a perfectly acceptable account of Browning's poem.

Another student, who disliked religion, saw Browning's objective to expose the monk's hypocrisy. Religion - he was ecumenical in his contempt - was a lie, and Browning showed how true this was.

By John McWhorter

"If I couldn't study something that's about myself then I wouldn't want to be here," the black sophomore once told me, explaining how crucial to him it was to be able to major in African-American Studies.

It always stuck with me.

The African-American Studies department he was a major in was one of about 300 nationwide; this year is, in fact, the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the first one at San Fracisco State University in 1969. I have never had a problem with such departments in themselves. After all, despite that we hear this so often it has become a cliche, the story of black people is, to a considerable extent, the story of America.

Slavery helped drive the colonial economy and sparked the Civil War. The Civil Rights revolution was a moral advance unprecedented in the history of the species. Today American popular culture is deeply stamped brown and, in that form, has taken over the world, from hiphop through the worldwide superstar status of actors like Will Smith. The swelling numbers of African immigrants are giving the African diaspora to the New World a whole new meaning. The campaign and election of Barack Obama distilled all of this so profoundly that courses could be taught on it alone - and surely will be, nationwide, starting in the fall.

By Barbara Moeller

Last November, Rob Koons, director of the Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions at the University of Texas, was abruptly fired from that position. In swift succession, the name of the program and its leadership was changed to conform more closely to the ideological tastes of the faculty of the College of Liberal Arts. It was reminiscent of the fiasco at Hamilton College, recounted by Roger Kimball here. The common elements are a tenured, leftist faculty who are ferocious in their pursuit of intellectual homogeneity and the blithe betrayal of donors, alumni, and students.

The College of Liberal Arts (CoLA) at the University of Texas has all of the problems that plague higher education in America, only more, bigger, and with a better football team. It forms its own self-contained and self-referential world of all varieties of leftist thought, with only the occasional intrusion of voices from the right side of the intellectual dial. It's a place where it's assumed that if you are a middle-aged woman, you voted for Hillary Clinton, and would be forgiven, because you were motivated by a sense of solidarity. It's a place where a professor can say, in all seriousness that some of his best friends are liberals, but they are "politically unreliable" because they aren't far enough left. And where Dana Cloud, associate professor of communications, can, without a hint of irony, assert on national radio that there are many conservatives at UT- just look in Aerospace Engineering!

Needless to say, this kind of intellectual conformity, enforced by political correctness isn't good for education generally. It is buttressed by hyper-specialization, so that even at a university as big as UT, a top tier research institution, there are no survey courses in European history, to name but one gaping hole in the course offering. Likewise, the requirements for graduation from CoLA are a Luby's buffet of choices, where your course in "India's Non-Conformist Thinkers" counts toward your general culture requirement, but a survey course on the world's major religions does not, because there is no such course.

By Donald Downs

Forty years ago this week, an armed student insurrection erupted on the Cornell campus. I was a sophomore on campus at the time and later wrote a book on the events, Cornell '69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. To some the drama represented a triumph of social justice, paving the way for a new model of the university based on the ideals of identity politics, diversity, and the university as a transformer of society. To others, it fatefully propelled Cornell, and later much of American higher education, away from the traditional principles of academic freedom, reason, and individual excellence. "Cornell," wrote the famous constitutional scholar Walter Berns, who resigned from Cornell during the denouement of the conflict, "was the prototype of the university as we know it today, having jettisoned every vestige of academic integrity."

In the wee hours of Friday, April 19, 1969, twenty-some members of Cornell's Afro-American Society took over the student center, Willard Straight Hall, removing parents (sometimes forcefully) from their accommodations on the eve of Parents Weekend. The takeover was the culmination of a year-long series of confrontations, during which the AAS had deployed hardball tactics to pressure the administration of President James Perkins into making concessions to their demands. The Perkins administration and many faculty members had made claims of race-based identity politics and social justice leading priorities for the university, marginalizing the traditional missions of truth-seeking and academic freedom.

Two concerns precipitated the takeover: AAS agitation for the establishment of a radical black studies program; and demands of amnesty for some AAS students, who had just been found guilty by the university judicial board of violating university rules. These concerns were linked, for, according to the students, the university lacked the moral authority to judge minority students. They declared that Cornell was no longer a university, but rather an institution divided by racial identities.

By John Ellis

On February 25, 2009, an article by Patricia Cohen appeared in the New York Times: "In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth." Its thesis was a familiar one: an economic downturn will lead to a decline in the number of college majors in the humanities because in hard times enrollments shift toward majors with direct vocational utility. The article could have been written 25 or 50 years ago---the phenomenon it talks about is well known. For example, English majors made up 7.59% of those graduating with bachelor's degrees in 1968, but as the stock market bottomed in the early 1980's following the Carter economic debacle, that number had sunk to 3.7%. But Cohen's article is not just a tedious rehash of well-known ideas from the past: it has a more serious flaw. For while this argument could have been and in fact was made at many times in the past, it can not be made today. And that is because the humanities have undergone a profound change that makes Cohen's entire argument meaningless.

Let's look first at the statistics. As the economy improved dramatically during the 1980's, the figure for English majors rose with the economy, reaching 4.7% by the end of the decade. But now the familiar pattern broke down: as the economy continued to get stronger, the figures for English majors began to go in the opposite direction, the first time this had happened. By 1995, English majors had declined to 4.3% of all bachelor's degrees, and by 2005 they had gone down to 3.7%, the same figure that was seen at the economy's bottom in the early 80's---except that the economy had now been booming almost continuously for 20 years.

By Frank J. Macchiarola

Dr. Macchiarola, chancellor of St. Francis College in Brooklyn, delivered these remarks on February 5th at a one-day conference in New York on "The Future of the University." The conference was sponsored by the Manhattan Institute's Center for the American University.

If I were making this presentation a year ago, I would not have some of the deep concerns about the future of the university as I do today. Certainly the changes that are occurring within the university today are due, in large part, to some of the real difficulties the university faces in adapting to forces that are internal to it. The presence of the deep economic recession that we face today - and that will be with us for some time to come - significantly adds to the uncertainties that today's university has to confront. It puts solutions to a considerable extent beyond the scope of what some universities can actually manage.

The recession - or perhaps depression- has for private universities hurt their financial condition dramatically. Endowments drop and endowment income which is critical to the university's operations fall as well. In virtually all instances this combination means that universities been tremendously impaired. Endowment income which can provide 5% of market value for operating expenses is less available and this adds to the gap between tuition income and expenses that universities must face. Endowments are affected, especially for the tuition dependant schools which require tuition to fund operations in significant ways. Well endowed universities are the exception, not the rule. Costs also increase, usually by a multiple of the rise in the cost of living. This has been almost the universal rule largely because of factors that have driven universities to give students "more and more." The usual course of action -increasing tuition - is made more difficult by the hard economic times. Fewer students being able to afford college mean a shift to lesser charging private universities and the public ones. The factors that have operated to allow universities to grow are not present in anything like the same way. The decline in the number of high school students exacerbates the problem even further. While students may choose public institutions as an alternative, things are not going well there either. The depression has hit states hard, and while the stimulus plan may be helpful to them in the short term, they will not be able to absorb more students at the subsidized costs that they have traditionally borne. The taxpayer is being hit hard, and the state economies are as well. The public universities will have to charge more and give less. There is tuition relief by the way of increased Pell Grants and tax credits for college tuition, but there is no way that we will be back to conditions ante recession.

By Maurice Black & Erin O'Connor

The current upheavals in the financial markets have left everyone confused. But in the midst of all the confusion, one thing has become crystal clear: A free country simply must be an economically and financially literate country. Amid the waves of failing banks, roiling stock exchanges, massive government bailouts, and wildly fluctuating currency and energy markets, we have become newly aware of how much our nation's wellbeing, and, indeed, our freedom, depends on our financial security. Disturbingly, we have also become newly aware of how little most Americans understand about financial markets, or even about their personal finances. American colleges and universities should take note---and should act swiftly to ensure that their students are economically and financially literate.

State of Ignorance: What Young Americans Don't Know about Money

Younger Americans are deplorably uninformed about economic and financial matters. In 1999, researchers at the Securities and Exchange Commission concluded that 66 percent of high school seniors could not pass a basic economic literacy test. Things have not changed for the better since then. In 2008, the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy administered its biennial thirty-question financial literacy test to 6,856 high school seniors in 40 states. The respondents averaged an overall score of just 48 percent, down four percentage points from 2006. Students were most oblivious when it came to investment strategies: Overall, only 17 percent knew that investing in stocks would probably generate the greatest financial return over an eighteen-year period.

When Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke attended a Jump$tart news conference in 2006, he stated that financial literacy is "vital to the future of our economy" and called for improved financial education in our nation's schools. American parents agree---76 percent say that schools should be required to teach students about money management. But schools are not addressing the problem in any consistent or systematic way. The Young Americans Center for Financial Education recently reported that fewer than 30 percent of students receive even one week's worth of financial training during their entire high school careers. In 2004, only seven states made personal finance education a requirement for high school graduation.

Roger Kimball, editor of Encounter Books and co-editor of The New Criterion, delivered these remarks at a Manhattan Institute luncheon in New York City on November 19th. The occasion marked publication of the second revised edition of his influential 1990 book Tenured Radicals.

***

Joining so many old friends from the extended Manhattan Institute family inspires a feeling of what the philosopher Yogi Berra called "deja vu all over again." I know I have been here before, talking about something suspiciously similar to what I am going to be talking to you about today. I am counting on you to agree with me that novelty is a much over-rated commodity and to take consolation, as I do, in the observation of the Sage of Ecclesiastes that "there is nothing new under the sun."

When the first the edition of Tenured Radicals appeared lo, these many years ago, around the time movable type was coming into vogue, the American university, when it came to the humanities and social sciences, anyway, was essentially a left-wing monoculture gravely infected by the stultifying imperatives of political correctness, specious multiculturalism, and an addiction to a potpourri of intellectually dubious pseudo-radicalisms.

Well, that was then. In the meantime, some very talented people have weighed in on the problem. They have written articles and books about the university; they've organized conferences, symposia, and think-tank initiatives; they even managed to place scores of good people in various colleges and universities as a counterweight to the various intellectual and moral depredations I chronicle in Tenured Radicals. Today, two editions and nearly two decades later, we can look at the American university and what do we discover? That it is, essentially, a left-wing monoculture gravely infected by the stultifying imperatives of political correctness, specious multiculturalism, and an addiction to a potpourri of intellectually dubious pseudo-radicalisms.

By Mark Bauerlein

Of the many problems besetting higher education today, perhaps the most intractable is the incentives problem. On hundreds of campuses across the United States, thousands of college professors are being dragged away from their root educational mission. They serve as stewards of knowledge and trainers of citizens to come, but a binding demand makes them act otherwise. And the perverse thing about it is that the pressure comes from within.

Imagine yourself a newly-hired English professor at a university with a research dimension, however minor. You went into the field because you loved to read and a few books hit you hard enough to set a career path. As undergraduate days wound down, you aimed to share the inspiration, to expound and debate and teach the meaning of Dickens and Faulkner, and graduate school was the next step.

But graduate training shifted the focus. Instead of studying with an eye toward undergraduates in class, you came to recognize another audience: professors at conferences, on hiring committees, and in editorial offices. They, not freshmen, would decide your future, offer you a job, publish your work, and grant you tenure. Turning a wayward 19-year-old into a determined thinker might make you feel worthy, but it wouldn't show up on a resume or establish professional contacts. You needed to network and circulate, apply for grants and submit papers to journals, attend symposia. Every minute in office hours with students, you quickly realized, took away from securing a letter of recommendation from a name scholar or writing the final page of a conference talk.

By Roger Kimball

The following is an excerpt from Roger Kimball's introduction to the third edition of his classic book on the humanities, Tenured Radicals.

-------------------------------------

One of the great ironies that attends the triumph of political correctness is that in department after department of academic life, what began as a demand for emancipation recoiled, turned rancid, and developed into new forms of tyranny and control. As Alan Charles Kors noted in a recent essay,

under the heirs of the academic Sixties, we moved on campus after campus from their Free Speech Movement to their politically correct speech codes; from their abolition of mandatory chapel to their imposition of Orwellian mandatory sensitivity and multicultural training; from their freedom to smoke pot unmolested to their war today against the kegs and spirits---literal and metaphorical---of today's students; from their acquisition of young adult status to their infantilization of "kids" who lack their insight; from their self-proclaimed dreams of racial and sexual integration to their ever more balkanized campuses organized on principles of group characteristics and group responsibility; from their right to define themselves as individuals---a foundational right---to their official, imposed, and politically orthodox notions of identity. American college students became the victims of a generational swindle of truly epic proportions.

What, as Lenin memorably asked, is to be done?

By Robert L. Paquette

Imagine for a moment that you are a senior professor at an elite college with a proud 200-year tradition in liberal arts education. You attend a monthly faculty meeting in the fall 2007 and find yourself for the first time in a quarter century surrounded by seventy or so undergraduate activists who are staging a demonstration for social justice. Several incidents that in all likelihood have little or no connection to the behavior of members of the community precipitate the protest. Faculty sympathizers move to allow one of the student leaders to speak. She issues demands that the college "must make a stronger commitment to diversity in ... structure, institution, and most importantly curriculum." The small college of 200 faculty and 1700 undergraduates, claim the students, needs to do more to promote diversity, although the campus already boasts a Diversity and Social Justice Project, Social Justice Initiative, Associate Dean for Diversity Initiatives, and Associate Dean of Students for Diversity and Accessibility, along with a host of well-funded multicultural groups, with access, in aggregate, to hundreds of thousands of dollars of annual funding.

The lengthy student wish-list includes a place of their own, a "Cultural Education Center" that will educate the benighted in "systems of privilege and oppression" and provide a "safe space" in which to "privilege the experiences of non-dominant individuals." The faculty applauds the student initiative like trained seals. The discomfited president and dean of the faculty commend the protesting students for their "powerful and respectful demonstration." The dean, poor chap, who unwittingly doubles as a syndicated columnist for higher learning's lexicon of loonery, endorses diversity as the great "hedge against obsolescence," dismisses talk of political activism in the classroom, and speaks approvingly in the campus newspaper of the idea of "parallel safe spaces"---whatever the hell that means-- for the allegedly marginalized. The senior professor asks him point blank if he is concerned about the lack of intellectual diversity at the college, given that it hosted not one---that's right, not one---conservative speaker on campus during 2007-2008 academic year. In a word, he replies, "No." A few weeks after the faculty meeting, a breathless president, alluding to unnamed threats to inclusiveness, publishes a list of all the benefactions the college is providing and will provide in the name of diversity, a word that she, like her immediate predecessors, refuses to define with so much as a modicum of intellectual clarity. The activist students demand and receive a meeting with the board of trustees, a self-congratulatory, ostrich-like group, whose favored measures of judging the college's well-being revolve around the size of the endowment and the college's rankings in the annual educational issue of US News and World Report. One trustee comes to the rescue and antes up 4 million dollars to renovate an existing building for a new student center to serve as a kind of multicultural "hub" for "expanded collaboration among all student groups." Whether the renovated building will contain sacred spaces for the secret rituals of the diversity cartel remains to be seen, but don't bet against it. The building sits next to an impressive village of yellow buildings previously dedicated to student activities. Diversity, the president insists, "is not a problem to be solved, but "a fact and an ideal." Yes, a non-scholarly ideal, on which, it appears, you shower as much money as necessary to buy political peace and garner favorable headlines in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

By Charlotte Allen

Brown University is famous for having the loosest graduation requirements in the Ivy League. In fact, there are almost no graduation requirements at all, for although Brown undergrads do have to major in something in order to qualify for a degree, they are free to design their own majors. As for anything else in the way of mandatory courses, forget it. Don't like math and science? You'll never be asked to take a single class in either at Brown. Find learning a foreign language too difficult? No worry---you'll never have to utter a single word en francais or en espanol during your four years on the university's historic campus in Providence, R.I.. You can even bid au revoir and hasta la vista to freshman English while you're there, although you do have to demonstrate some level of competence in writing in order to don your cap and gown at the end of it all Grades? You can elect to take all of your courses pass/fail if you like. And if you do choose to have your professor give you a letter grade, the range consists of A, B, and C; F is not an option. Thus, there's almost no such thing as an introductory survey course designed for non-majors at Brown, whether in biology or history or anthropology or economics. Why should there be? Students at Brown don't have study anything outside their chosen (and often self-designed) fields.

Even given today's rampant grade inflation, especially at the Ivies and other elite schools, and today's lax definition of distribution requirements that allow students to select courses from a smorgasbord of offerings (a little Chinese history here, a little Caribbean poetry there) that usually ensures that they never learn the basics of any academic field outside their major, Brown's requirement-free curriculum is a standout. If it sounds like something left over from the 1960s, well, it is. In 1969 Brown's administrators jettisoned the university's traditional core curriculum, including distribution requirements, survey courses and required sequences that obliged students to learn the basics of an academic field before going on to advanced-level work, in order to focus on an free-form educational philosophy whose goals were variously described as to "put students at the center of their education" and to "teach students how to think rather than just teaching facts." One of the architects of Brown's "New Curriculum," as it is still known almost 40 years later, had been Ira Magaziner, now best remembered as the designer of President Bill Clinton's failed national health plan but then a student activist and antiwar protest leader at Brown. And so, to this day, while Brown says it encourages its undergraduates to "experience scientific inquiry," for example, there is no mandate that they actually do so.

By Anthony Esolen

Whenever anyone asks me what sealed my commitment to teaching the heritage of the West, I recall a minor uprising at my college long ago. In some ways it was tame enough. No sit-ins, no public obscenity. A group of students, led by a newly arrived sociologist, had been roused to indignation at having to study Dante and Homer and Thomas Aquinas. They called themselves Students Organized Against Racism. What they wanted to study instead they never specified. It wasn't math.

So the school organized a panel discussion, attended by a hundred students and a few dozen professors. The panelists were polite. There was a leftist ex-nun in blue jeans, who intoned, "Teaching is a political act," that great first tenet of the academic credo. A history professor tried to defend the old regime, then shrugged and admitted that a little change couldn't hurt. The students included a young lady driven by the cause, petulant and pretty, and a young black man who played the Guiding Star, intelligent, well-spoken, an obvious leader, but ignorant, as most people at that age are.

Back then I too was a left-leaning professor, but I had long fallen in love with Plato, Chaucer, Pascal, and the rest, and so I found myself at an impasse. I figured I'd try to persuade the attendees that if they really wanted to advance their causes a sinistra, studying the heritage of the West would be a fine strategy. So I asked the young lady a simple question: "Why do you study Virgil?"

I expected an ideological reply, with the requisite pepper of scorn: "To confirm the patriarchy" or something similar. What I got instead stunned me.

"I don't know why we study Virgil."

By Robert Weissberg

Observers of today's campuses have undoubtedly encountered a phenomenon that I will call "incidentism." Its principle characteristics are as follows:

First, a seemingly minor often obscure, innocuous event, e.g., a student newspaper cartoon, an off-hand remark by the school president, an invitation to a "controversial" outside speaker, among countless other possibilities, triggers boisterous outrage among groups claiming to be offended to the point of incapacitation. Rallies, marches, non-negotiable demands and all the rest predictably follow. Offended parties are almost always African American students, sometimes feminists, gays, even Muslims, but never conservatives. One might guess that sensitivity to "offense," like susceptibility to Tay-Sachs disease, follows ethnic/racial lines. Interestingly, that the triggering incident was a likely hoax, a silly misunderstood joke or even a misconstrued word like "niggardly" is irrelevant. Stating truth is, needless to say, also no protection. Anything suffices for those addicted to being offended.

Second, no matter how ridiculous or even false, the university's administration will treat matters "seriously." Typical are promises of yet more free benefits to help the injured party "heal the wounds" (e.g., mandatory campus-wide sensitivity training, additional faculty hires from "under-represented" groups, more role models and mentors, special "theme" centers where the vulnerable can feel safe, and on and on). At a minimum, the official Flak Catcher (to recall Tom Wolfe's Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers) will issue an official apology, promise an investigation, even suspend classes so student can attend workshops, and assure aggrieved victims that "this will never happen again."

Third, despite all the heartfelt official assurances an "incident" will soon occur, again. It is inevitable on today's campus. Rest assured, some professor will use improper terminology (e.g., colored instead of person of color); some campus restaurateur will slight a rowdy gay rights group or, to recall an outrage-provoking incident whose offensiveness still befuddles me, The Champaign, Il police department used the abbreviation "BM" for black male on their crime reports. These seem to average at least one per year per group, and nothing, absolutely nothing can make universities "incident free." These indignations are not like a frat party gone too wild, mere nuisances. They can entail hefty new expenditures ($50 million in the case of Larry Summers' off-hand remark about women and math) and sully a university reputation for "tolerance for diversity," an especially important cost if universities rely on state funds. There is also the ever-present threat of reputation-destroying violence if campus police over-react or rowdy outsiders join the fray. At a minimum and this is hardly trivial, a parade of incidents contributes to an unhealthy, freedom-killing paranoia---nobody, especially professors, risks triggering a confrontation, so better sanitize everything.

By Charlotte Allen

It's July, and there's one safe bet to be made about the 2.8 million or so new high school graduates who will be entering college as freshmen in just six or seven weeks: Few of them are likely to have even started reading the "one book" that the adminstrators at their chosen college have likely assigned them as summer reading. The freshman book programs, sometimes called "one book, one college" or "common reading," mostly date from the mid-1990s, and every year, it seems, more colleges and universities decide to require their incoming freshmen to read a novel or non-fiction work to be discussed in small groups during orientation week, which in many cases also features a campus visit by the book's author. The idea is to introduce 18-year-olds to college-level intellectual life before the fall semester officially begins and also to foster a sense of campus community based upon shared intellectual experiences.

As one might suspect on today's highly politicized campuses, days, the vast majority of freshman summer reading assignments have reflected not so much a commitment to fostering freshmen's intellectual growth---via, say, a literary classic or a seminal philosophical treatise such as Plato's Republic---as an effort to immerse them in the political cause du jour for liberal academics. Such recently published and distinctly left-leaning polemical works as Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001), Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (2001), and most recently, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change (2006), former New York Times reporter Elizabeth Kolbert's gloom-and-doom treatise on global warming, are current staples of freshman summer programs. Such book choices have sparked off-campus political controversy---as when the public University of North Carolina's Chapel Hill campus in 2003 required its freshmen to read Nickel and Dimed, criticized for its superficial reporting (Ehrenreich typically spent a few weeks at a low-wage job, then walked out in a huff) and its predictably snarky take on capitalism in general and on Wal-Mart and other employers of the working poor in particular. What is most interesting, though, is the on-campus reaction of many freshmen to their summer reading assignments. It turns out that many of them aren't so susceptible to politically correct brainwashing as their college professors and administrators might think, and their responses to the more overtly politicized assignments have ranged from indifference to outright hostility.

By John Leo

If I ran the campus
I'd start out anew
I'd make a few changes
That's just what I'd do

Here's a simple suggestion
(Avoiding all fads)
I'd have some professors
Who teach undergrads

I hear you all snicker
I hear you all scoff
But I've got to believe
That many a prof
Would thrill to be meeting
A freshman or soph

TAs are beloved
They're always the rage
Because they all work
For a minimum wage
(But do students want teachers
Who are just their own age?)

Remedial classes
I'm sure is a must
For teachers who give
Only A or A-plus

They really must practice
At home, if they please,
Traumatically giving
Some Bs and some Cs

There's another idea
I can bring to fruition
I know how to cut
The cost of tuition

I really don't care
Whose waters this muddies
But I'd cancel all courses
Whose names end in "studies."
This could irritate
The fuddies and duddies

That's just a start
I'll do better than that
My curriculum changes
Will cut out the fat

No courses on Buffy
The Vampire Slayer
Or Batman and Robin
Who cares which is gayer?

No bongo or bingo
(Remember I said it)
No study of Yoda
No sex acts for credit

No Star Trek theology
No Matrix psychology
No queer musicology
I give no apology

If I ran the campus
I'd start out anew
I'd make a few changes
That's just what I'd do

------------------------------------------
This originally appeared as part of the National Association of Scholars' "If I Ran The Zoo" series

By Donald Downs

An interesting news item caught my eye last week. The BB&T Charitable Foundation has made a million-dollar donation to Marshall University's Lewis College of Business. The donation comes with a string attached: Marshall must teach Ayn Rand's classic tribute to capitalism, Atlas Shrugged, as part of the curriculum. The BB&T Foundation has made numerous grants to other institutions dealing with capitalism and economics. John Allison, the foundation's chairman and CEO, expressed the logic behind these grants when he announced a $2 million grant to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University last summer. "We believe there needs to be a deeper understanding of the morality of capitalism and its causal relationship to economic well-being," he declared. "This contribution will encourage a thorough discussion of the moral foundations of capitalism with an organization that meets the highest academic standards and encourages students to hear all points of view."

BB&T's actions regarding Marshall and George Mason are part and parcel of a broader movement taking place across American higher education: redesigned efforts by major moderate and right-leaning foundations and sponsors to fund programs, journals, and chairs on campus that provide viewpoints that challenge the left-liberal orthodoxies that prevail in so many institutions. Among other examples, the University of Illinois recently established a major chair in free market economics, funded by a conservative donor. And the University of Colorado is looking for donors for a new chair in conservative studies. Meanwhile, several groups, including the Olin Foundation and other conservative entities, have decided to target limited term grants at specific individuals or groups whom they trust to carry out programs consistent with the foundations' missions.

One motive for such grants could be to influence academic thinking in the direction the foundations favor. Another motive is simply pedagogical: to counter the lack of intellectual diversity on campus, which several studies have shown tilts decidedly to the left at many institutions, especially in the social science and humanities. The pedagogical problem is not that conservative ideas are not being accepted or followed; the problem is the virtual absence of such ideas, which deprives students of a true liberal education that would expose them to all serious arguments and perspectives about social and political life. The right kind of education prepares students to seek the answer to the most fundamental of questions: How should I live?

By Edgar B. Anderson

Recently I sat down with a young woman who shared with me the experience of her first year at Thurgood Marshall College, one of the six colleges of the University of California at San Diego. She explained to me that regardless of her major field of study and in order to graduate she was required to take certain "general education" courses, the centerpiece of which is a three-quarter, 16-unit creation called "Dimensions of Culture." What she had to tell me is a warning to both parents and students.

The Dimensions of Culture program (DOC) is an introductory three-quarter social science sequence that is required of all first year students at Thurgood Marshall College, UCSD. Successful completion of the DOC sequence satisfies the University of California writing requirement. The course is a study in the social construction of individual identity and it surveys a range of social differences and stratifications that shape the nature of human attachment to self, work, community, and a sense of nation. Central to the course objective is the question of how scholars move from knowledge to action. - UCSD Course Description

Edgar B. Anderson: So let's talk about Dimensions of Culture. That's vague. What's that mean?
Student: I don't know. Each quarter, the first quarter is called Diversity, the second quarter is called Justice, and the third quarter is called Imagination. So Diversity is we studied everything about minorities - like women, homosexuals, and then Asians, blacks, Latinos.
Q. So what's left out - white males?
A. Yeah, pretty much if you're a white male you're bad, that's kind of the joke among all the students.
Q. Women are not even a minority, they're a majority.
A. But it's more about the workforce.
Q. Power.
A. Yeah, that's kind of how they presented it. We didn't really focus on women that much. It was mainly how Asians have been oppressed in history and how Latinos continue to be oppressed and how blacks continue to be oppressed, all of that.

By Stephen Balch

Trustees face a quandary in trying to figure out their role in academic governance. As a matter of law, institutional responsibility is squarely in their hands. On the other hand, while few challenge their oversight in matters managerial and financial, they are routinely warned that when it comes to intellectual content, the heart of university life, they should keep their distance.

Trustees should generally avoid getting involved in judgments about intellectual specifics such as individual personnel decisions, the content of courses, and the structure of particular programs, etc. Usually they will be out of their depth here. But they should be actively engaged in matters pertaining to overall intellectual climate, especially the degree to which such core principles of rational discourse as objectivity, disengagement, meritocracy, civility, and pluralism are honored and institutionalized. Here trustee fair-mindedness, ideological coolness, and intellectual distance, can help keep the ideological passions of academics from running discourse off reason's rails.

Like judges, trustees should see themselves as having a responsibility to ensure that the rules of sound intellectual discourse are recognized, that the academic cultures of the institutions they supervise are "lawful" in a manner that preserves the free and effective exercise of reason. This, of course, is a matter of faculty responsibility too, but since the nature of these rules, in many essentials, simply follow the operating principles of a liberal social order, citizens of that order should be able to understand them well enough to backstop compliance. Trustees need not be scholarly experts to participate meaningfully in the university's intellectual governance. They need only be intelligent and watchful products of a free society.

What types of rules are we speaking of and why should members of a liberal society be able to recognize and help enforce them?

By Patrick J. Deneen

Overwhelming evidence attests to the liberal tilt on our college campuses. Studies show that the faculty at most mainstream institutions are overwhelmingly registered with the Democratic party and give a disproportionate share of their political donations to left-leaning candidates. A recent study of donations by faculty at Princeton University during the current Presidential election season shows that every faculty donation went to a Democratic candidate. Were such unanimity to manifest itself for conservative candidates at an academic institution, one can be certain that our leading academics would decry the lack of diversity.

Anecdotal evidence everywhere further attests not only to the liberalism of most "mainstream" faculty, but the disproportionate share of radical professors in our humanities and social sciences. Innumerable stories have been circulated of aggressive efforts to "destabilize" gender, to question "normativity," to challenge backward institutions such as marriage and family, to encourage students to break out of pre-conceived social notions they may have inherited from parents and community. A recent article in my campus's newspaper, The Hoya, reflects this sort of radicalism. In the column, philosophy professor Mark Lance introduces himself thusly:

I'm an anarchist, a rationalist, a feminist, a man, a pragmatist, an evangelical agnostic, a friend, a philosopher, a parent, a teacher, a committed partner of one other person and a nonviolent revolutionary. These labels are all, to different degrees, important to me; they define my sense of self. You could call them my identities, but all are "works in progress," which is to say that the label stays roughly the same, but my sense of what it means changes and grows. (For example, I still have no idea what I mean by identifying as a man, though over the years I've figured out many things I don't mean. Some days, I wish that one would drop off the list.)

Aside from its unbearable self-indulgence, it's a predictable indication that Lance would seek to reject the one form of his "identity" that is actually given by nature. This is the one unbearable aspect of identity, because it is not chosen or willed.

Conservatives are often satisfied to register their righteous anger and indignation at this state of affairs, and have tactically adopted the language of victimhood and demands for diversity as a way of combating this left-wing hegemony. This may be politically effective and may in fact help raise awareness of the current campus culture to potential supporters outside the academy. However, these arguments are only tactical at best, and fundamentally obscure deeper investigation into why this state of affairs has come to pass and what would be required to begin a more fundamental reform of higher education.

By Donald Downs

For years now, college students have been busy committing themselves to extracurricular activities. On the whole, such commitment can be constructive. It contributes to civic engagement by the young and helps them to develop personal responsibility and character. Meanwhile, college officials claim that would-be employers are now demanding that colleges provide evidence that graduates are prepared to deal with real world issues and conflicts that will arise in the workplace. Many educators are starting to respond to this concern.

In recent days, the president of the University of Wisconsin system has risen to the occasion by proposing to the Board of Regents that students have two transcripts upon graduation. The first transcript would be the traditional one, which would list the classes the student took, and the grades that he or she received. The second transcript would depict what the Wisconsin State Journal described as "the student's personal development during college, such as whether the student interned for a company, directed a play, or edited the student newspaper." The University of Wisconsin system would be the national pioneer in this movement. This effort is supported by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, whose vice president recently said that companies seek graduates who can work "with diverse groups and have a sense of social responsibility and ethics," according to the State Journal story.

According to Reilly, the university needs to institute this policy because business leaders want "workers who can work with diverse groups and have a sense of social responsibility and ethics," according to the State Journal story. The second transcript would involve more than a typical resume. It would have to be approved by a faculty member, and show how the student's experiences outside the classroom represented a meaningful application of the student's classroom work. "We know when students get to the end of their time with us, employers and graduate school admissions officers want to know what you did besides get and A or B in philosophy," Reilly told the State Journal. "We think this will capture some of the educational experience."

By Robert Weissberg

Today's university seems obsessively compassionate about the downtrodden, far more than the usual academic Marxist celebration of exploited workers. Entire departments - African American Studies, Women's Studies, Queer Studies, Latino/a Studies - strive to uplift those suffering from white male heterosexual oppressors. In African and Latin American Studies indigenous people are always blameless "good guys" while under-graduates are relentlessly implored, usually with academic credit, to "make a difference" or "work for social change," i.e., rallying deadbeat tenants against predatory slum landlords. English Departments - even History Departments--increasingly celebrate heretofore repressed "voices" of the forcefully silenced. Schools of Social Work and Education now require taking vows to advance "social and economic justice" in order to graduate. Hard-head Business Schools are hardly immune - mandatory Business Ethics courses might teach that cowboy capitalism must be sympathetic to those unable to compete in cruel marketplaces.

Matters are not, however, as morally black and white as they seem. Fervent compassion for the repressed, suppressed, disadvantaged, disabled, stigmatized, marginalized, exploited and all the rest is selective, and this selectivity is hardly accidental or random. In a nutshell, liberal academics are wonderfully compassionate, caring and sympathetic but only for those who seem eternally mired in dependency to be ameliorated via expanding state power. If victims are disinclined to demand this expanded state power to rescue them from misery, then their consciousness must be raised so these newly "educated" souls can lobby for income re-distribution or some other handed-down benefit.

A class in black politics, for example, rarely dwells on Booker T. Washington's plea for self-reliance or recognizes that black Caribbean immigrants prosper via hard work, thrift and delayed gratification while shunning politics. This message is unspeakable heresy and, "inauthentic." A would-be professor expressing such views would never even be hired. The orthodox recipe for accomplishment is endlessly repeated semester after semester: mobilize, vote for candidates promising government handouts, demand new entitlements and otherwise crave measures to further deepen dependency on officialdom. One does not create wealth; one gets wealth by demanding it from on high. In this odd universe, a multiple choice question: "The best route to college admission is (a) study hard or (b) take political action against elites for stronger affirmative action" will be correctly answered with "b."

By Lionel Tiger

Those who have been operating the managerial levers of the financial system have failed embarassingly and massively to comprehend the processes for which they are responsible. They have loaned money avidly and recklessly to people who couldn't pay it back. They fudged data to get loans approved and recalculated . Then they sausaged fragile figments of moneyreality into new "products" which could be sold around the world to investors eager to enjoy the surprising returns which often accompany theft, managerial incompetence, and fraud.

One result is that our hard-nurtured national assets are being sold to foreign governments, our dollar which represents a share in our whole economy is at a portentous low while shrewd investors make bets on its continued decline. Houses and cars are being repossessed, pension funds shrink like bad shirts, people even hold off buying cheeseburgers it's that bad.

When it comes to responsibility for all this, there appears to be no one here but us spring chickens. Not only that but the overseers of the bitter debacle may lose their jobs for a month but nonetheless fill their wheelbarrows with company money and "severance" when they leave to tide them over until the next corner office becomes available. Surrealists appear to write the scripts for the drama. Stanley O'Neal was the lavishly - paid king of Merrill Lynch who - oops - mislaid about 22 billion dollars before he was shoved out the door. Sad. Shattered dreams. But he was speedily named to the Board of Directors of Alcoa! So you don't have to worry about yet another incompetent member of an increasingly overpaid and underskilled financial ruling class.

By Erin O'Connor

When asked about the theme for December's annual MLA convention- "The Humanities at Work in the World" - Yale comparative literature professor and MLA president Michael Holquist spoke of the need "to raise the consciousness of people outside the academy about the importance of the work that's done inside the academy." Acknowledging that the humanities do not enjoy wide public support, Holquist diagnoses the problem as a superficial one of public relations - if humanists simply advertise their worth more effectively, he suggests, the public will accept their self-assessment at face value.

But that's a glib analysis of a problem that goes far beyond appearances. The real problem the academic humanities face is a loss of purpose, imagination, and professionalism. No amount of PR can conceal that or make it palatable to a skeptical public - and efforts to do so risk revealing exactly how intellectually hollow the humanities currently are.

A case in point: Stanley Fish's recent attempt to use his New York Times blog to justify the humanities. A Milton specialist who has written numerous books on literary theory, Fish is a public intellectual who has long been at the forefront of the most influential movements in the humanities. That's why the New York Times gave him his very own online forum, "Think Again." It's also why his posts there routinely draw hundreds of comments from academics and lay readers.

A skilled rhetorician, Fish is exceptionally able to walk finer intellectual lines than most. So it was instructive to see him take up the perennially vexed question of the humanities in two posts at "Think Again."

By Herbert London

In order to fulfill the requirements for a major in history at Northwestern University, my daughter took a course called "The Cold War At Home." As one might imagine in the hothouse of the college system, left wing views predominate. The students read Ellen Shrecker, not Ronald Radosh. Joseph McCarthy has been transmogrified into Adolf Hitler. And victimology stands as the overarching theme of the course.

Communists in the United States are merely benign civil rights advocates and union supporters. The word espionage never once crossed the lips of the instructor.

An extraordinary amount of time and energy has been devoted to the "lavender persecution" - harm imposed on gay Americans. Presumably, this group was more adversely affected by McCarthy's allegations than others.

Despite the recent scholarship on the period such as Alan Weinstein's well researched book on Alger Hiss or Stanton Evanss biography of Senator McCarthy, views that do not fit the prevailing orthodoxy aren't entertained. Pounded into students is the view that America engaged in "totalitarian practices" not unlike the Soviet enemy we decried.

Although the course is entitled the Cold War at Home, you might think the instructor would be inclined to ask who the enemy is, why was the Soviet Union an enemy and what tactics did this nation employ against us. But these issues are not addressed.

By Herb London

[a speech originally given at the University of Texas]

What is an appropriate curriculum for our students? What happened to the consensus on which the college curriculum once rested? Together these comprise two of the most urgent questions in contemporary American higher education. It seems to me that the criticisms of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind of a decade ago are symptomatic of the problems we are facing. High standards are described as elitism, a pejorative of scathing proportions. A call for the assertion of Western traditions is characterized as racist and anti-democratic. And Bloom's critique of radical feminism as a virus let loose on the curriculum is greeted with cries of "phallocentrism."

The college curriculum as the source of youthful enlightenment free of the impediments of bias and prejudice has unraveled. While Stanley Katz, president of the American Council of Learned Societies, recently noted that "scholars are less politicized in the United States than in any country in the developed world," he neglected to point out that a profound and revolutionary change has occurred on American campuses since the 1960's, resulting in the institutionalization of a radical agenda.

For a generation students have been fed on the "studies" curriculum, whether it is women's studies, gay studies, environmental studies, peace studies, Chicano studies that are designed to indoctrinate students about pathologies in contemporary American culture - specifically race, class, gender, and environmental oppression.

An excerpt from the new book Education's End, Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life by Anthony T. Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law, Yale Law School (Yale University Press)

By the early 1970s, the humanities were floundering. Ideological rifts were widening. Traditional ways of teaching had lost much of their authority, and there was worried talk of a "crisis" in the humanities. To many it seemed less clear than it had a quarter century before, when Harvard published its famous report on the aims of liberal education, what the humanities are supposed to do and why their doing it is important. In this anxious and excited environment, a new set of ideas began to gain currency. The first idea was an outgrowth of the civil rights movement and is associated with the concept of diversity. The second generally goes under the name of multiculturalism, and reflected the deepening suspicion of Western values provoked, in part, by the Vietnam War. The third, which provided philosophical support for the other two, I shall call the idea of constructivism, though its supporters have given it a variety of other names ("postmodernism", "antiessentialism," and the like). Loosely inspired by the work of philosophers as different as Marx, Nietzsche, and Foucault, constructivism affirmed the artificiality of all human values and the absence of any natural standards by which to judge them. It insisted, in particular, that the values of the West have no inherent superiority over those of other civilizations and are merely instruments of power in disguise that must be unmasked and resisted as weapons of colonial oppression. Together, these three ideas are the source of the culture of political correctness that has dominated the humanities for the past forty years.

Each has something to recommend it. Each has a core of good sense with intellectual and moral appeal. And each draws its appeal from a feature it shares with secular humanism, which also acknowledged the diversity of human values and the need to construct one's life by making a choice among them. Together these ideas have helped to maintain the confidence of many in the humanities that they do in fact have something special to contribute to the work of higher education. They have helped define a new and distinctive role for the humanities, organized around attractive moral and political values - one that fills the void that opened up when teachers in these fields abandoned their role as guides to the question of life's purpose and value in favor of the research ideal. And they have done this in a way that appears consistent with the values of secular humanism itself.

By Anthony Paletta

Many college freshmen face their first academic task before they even set foot in a classroom - the freshman summer reading project. Many colleges now select a single volume for all incoming freshmen to read, and construct discussion groups and attendant orientation activities around the book. Temple University's explanation of its program is fairly representative: "the goals of the project are to provide a common intellectual experience for entering students" and to "bring students, faculty and members of the Temple community together for discussion and debate." At a time when core programs and required courses grow increasingly infrequent, it is surprising to find such strong language about "common intellectual experience" from universities. This all sounds encouraging, right? Perhaps, until you find out what they're reading.

An overwhelming favorite of these reading programs is Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed - it's a perennial from Baruch to Slippery Rock to UNC Chapel Hill. Nickel and Dimed appears a perfect class-conscious selection to expand students' minds. Poverty is a running theme in recent years' assignments, from Case Western Reserve's The Working Poor: Invisible In America to One Nation Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All at Washington University to a variety of Kozol readings across the nation's campuses. These assignments have not always been received happily - the 2003 Nickel and Dimed assignment at UNC Chapel Hill inspired a protest coalition, arguing that the book was an inappropriate assignment, as a radical and left-inclined critique of the American economy.

Here's another bit of wisdom from the Columbia Spectator, this time on the repulsive noose incidents. Here's the first sentence of the op-ed. See if anything strikes you as odd.

In the past weeks' furor about nooses and graffiti, which dramatize age-old concerns about our Eurocentric curriculum, paternalistic gentrification efforts, and feelings of marginalization from students and faculty, Columbia has had to defend and confront its legacy of diversity and inclusion more so now than ever before.

The furor dramatizes "age-old concerns about our Eurocentric curriculum"? Really? As there's so much lynching in there? Eurocentrists did hang Tess of the D'Urbervilles, didn't they? One comment at the Spectator site wonders:

What other ills does Eurocentric curriculum, now an 'age-old' concern, cause? Police beatings? Teen age pregnancies? Baldness? Yeast infections?

The author winds the piece up with a sustained call for a robust ethnic studies department, which "would do wonders to elevate and enhance dialogue, understanding, and scholarship when it comes to power and privilege." Ethnic studies departments as universal palliatives. It might prove tempting to dismiss this as mere student op-ed puerility, but her sentiments possess broad and considerable weight in the modern university. To determined critics, any and every instance of individual racial wrongdoing is proof of the core depravity of western society. Just ask the Group of 88.

Many universities try to indoctrinate students, but the all-time champion in this category is surely the University of Delaware. With no guile at all the university has laid out a brutally specific program for "treatment" of incorrect attitudes of the 7,000 students in its residence halls. The program is close enough to North Korean brainwashing that students and professors have been making "made in North Korea" jokes about the plan. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has called for the program to be dismantled.

Residential assistants charged with imposing the "treatments" have undergone intensive training from the university. The training makes clear that white people are to be considered racists - at least those who have not yet undergone training and confessed their racism. The RAs have been taught that a "racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture, or sexuality."

Courtesy of the Harvard Crimson, the worst justification for a class I've ever seen:

I understand that there are a number of students on this campus who think that FemSex is unnecessary, but what class or organization isn't? Extracurriculars aren't built out of necessity; they are created out of desires - to do what we love, to find common ground, to help others. If a student doesn't like it, she doesn't have to take it, but the need for it on this campus is no lesser because it's not for her.

FemSex is unnecessary in the same way as an African-American studies class is unnecessary; it's easy for us to look at this campus, at our seemingly liberal society and say there are no problems left to fix. It's easy to say that the solution lies in finding a better boyfriend or just shutting up and learning to live with it. But some people see study and exploration as a stronger way to approach the problem. The more we learn about ourselves and others, the more likely we are to feel happy and safe. And in a world of meaningless drunken hook-ups, perhaps it's time we started getting more of what we wanted out of sex.

Here Here! All that floundering about the purpose of the modern academy could be cleared up so easily if it simply honed its focus on sex. "FemSex" was a female sexuality class on offer last semester. A prior Crimson op-ed pointed out that eight of the ten class sessions focused on "sexual and/or anatomical exploration." They're not even bothering with theoretical trappings for hedonism anymore.

Finally, take a look at the close:

We are all consistently changing throughout college, and Harvard is not always the most warm and supportive place to do so. Now, as a senior (dear God), I would describe my overall experience at Harvard as a positive one. I love the friends I have made and the extracurriculars I have taken part in, but I have found no place where I have felt more welcome, respected, safe, and open than I have in FemSex. Why anyone would want to deny another student of that is beyond me.

From Veritas to "Warm and Supported."

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute released its second annual survey of civic awareness among American college students, and the results are just as depressing as last year's. "The average college senior know astoundingly little about America's history, government, international relations and market economy," according to the ISI report, "Failing Our Students, Failing America."

Harvard seniors scored a "D+" average on a 60-question multiple choice exam. That was the highest school score among seniors at 50 colleges surveyed - 25 elite universities and 25 other randomly selected schools. Some 14,000 freshmen and seniors took the test.

Among the questions were these:

The line "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.." is from

A. the Federalist
B. the preamble to the Constitution
C. the Communist Manifesto
D. the Declaration of Independence
E. an inscription on the Statue of Liberty

The dominant theme of the Lincoln-Douglas debates was:

A. treatment of Native Americans,
B. westward expansion
C. whether Illinois should become a state
D. Prohibition
E. slavery and its expansion

The Constitution of the United States established what form of government:

A. direct democracy
B. populism
C. indirect democracy
D. oligarchy
E. aristocracy

The survey, conducted by the University of Connecticut's department of public policy, generally found that the higher a college was listed in US. News & World Report rankings, the lower it ranked in civic learning. At the eight worst-performing colleges-including Cornell, Yale, Duke, Berkeley and Princeton, the average senior did worse than the average freshmen, an example of what the report calls "negative learning." The worst-performing college, Cornell, the report said, "works like a giant amnesia machine, where students forget what they once knew." Only 28 percent of Cornell seniors knew or guessed that the Monroe Doctrine discouraged new colonies in the Western Hemisphere.

The ten colleges where civic knowledge increased from freshman to senior year were mostly lesser-known institutions: Eastern Connecticut State, Marian College, Murray State, Concordia, St. Cloud State, Mississippi State, Pfeiffer, Illinois State, Iowa State and the University of Mississippi.

Surveyed colleges ranked by Barron's imparted only about one-third the civic learning of colleges overlooked by Barron's.

One reason why civic knowledge lags is the trend away from teaching dates and factors in general, in favor of analysis, trends and a student's personalized take on the past. And with the rise of postmodern theory and cultural relativism, many students have been taught to scorn the traditional values of the west - equality, freedom, democracy, human rights - as masks for the self-interest of the rich and powerful. If follows from this view that history, particularly American history, is mostly propaganda inflicted on the young.

ISI asks: "Is American higher education doing its duty to prepare the next generation to maintain our legacy of liberty?" The answer in the report is no. In 1896, at Princeton's 150th anniversary, Woodrow Wilson argued that a central purpose of higher education is to develop citizens capable of steering the nation into the future because they have a steady grip on the past. "The college should serve the state as its organ of recollection, its seat of vital memory," he said. But in the survey, Princeton ranked as the fifth-worst school for civic learning. And most of the other 49 schools weren't much better.

Harvard seems to be chugging in all the right directions as of late. Now that Harvard has escaped the nightmare-state of Summers apartheid the University is free to.. improve its standing in the field of hip-hop studies. The Crimson reports:

Marcyliena Morgan, a scholar of global hip-hop culture who was denied tenure under former University President Lawrence H. Summers, will be returning to Harvard in January with her husband, Lawrence D. Bobo, a prominent sociologist of race.

The couple left Harvard's African and African American Studies Department in 2005 for Stanford, where they have both held tenure-level positions. At Harvard, Bobo was a full professor, while Morgan held an untenured associate professorship.

"Since the day they left, it has been my dream to get them back," said Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr., the former chair of the African and African American Studies Department and the Fletcher University Professor.

Af-Am Chair Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham said that the change of leadership in the University was one factor that made Morgan and Bobo's return possible.

University President Drew G. Faust contacted the couple in person to urge them to return to Harvard, Gates said....

Good to see President Faust hard at work for a modern Harvard. While the President is wheedling hip-hop scholars, it's surreal to see that it remains to The Crimson , in an editorial today, to note that military studies are woefully slight at the university:

Peter Berkowitz appears today in the Wall Street Journal writing on "Our Compassless Colleges."

At universities and colleges throughout the land, undergraduates and their parents pay large sums of money for -- and federal and state governments contribute sizeable tax exemptions to support - "liberal" education. This despite administrators and faculty lacking, or failing to honor, a coherent concept of what constitutes an educated human being.

To be sure, American higher education, or rather a part of it, is today the envy of the world, producing and maintaining research scientists of the highest caliber. But liberal education is another matter. Indeed, many professors in the humanities and social sciences proudly promulgate doctrines that mock ...

And then the rest of the article vanishes, tragically, behind the subscription wall. Yet all is not lost - you can read the full piece from which the op-ed was adopted - in Policy Review - right here in our Must Reads.

Berkowitz, incidentally, is among the luminaries who will be appearing at our Center for the American University's Allan Bloom Conference "The American Mind: Opening Or Closing?" on October 3rd.

The Chronicle today reports on Harry Potter in the modern academy. It seems inevitable that Harry Potter would crop up in campus role-playing clubs, but now he's being taught in the classroom?

Universities across the country are adding Harry Potter to the curriculum in a variety of disciplines - English, philosophy, Latin, history, and science - and professors say courses fill up as quickly as Honeydukes on a Hogsmeade weekend. When Sara C. Boland-Taylor, 21, picked up next year's course schedule at Stephen F. Austin State University, she turned straight to philosophy. "I just saw 'H Potter,' and I completely flipped out," she says. "I called Dr. Anne [Collins Smith], and I left a message - I was like, I will be there and I will bring all my friends."

Philip W. Nel, an associate professor of English at Kansas State University, began teaching "Harry Potter's Library" in 2002, advertising the course with fliers, "which now seems sort of quaint," he says. Edmund M. Kern, an associate professor of history at Lawrence University and author of the reader's guide The Wisdom of Harry Potter, says he could probably enroll more than 100 students in this fall's course, but unless he falls under the sway of an "imperius curse," he would like to preserve the university's small class size.

Harry Potter's Library - why, that must be just like Prospero's books!