Claremont McKenna College, a private liberal arts school nestled in the foothills on the eastern outskirts of Los Angeles County, dishonored itself and defrauded the public in a cheap effort to bolster its national rankings in U.S. News and World Report. But if that weren't bad enough, Claremont's deception calls into question the very worth of its students, faculty, and graduates.

Richard Vos, Claremont's dean of admissions for 25 years, resigned in disgrace this week after admitting to systematically manipulating the college's SAT scores since 2005. Vos evidently altered the mean, median, and range of SAT scores to boost the college's position on the influential list of college rankings.

The news is humbling and humiliating for Claremont students who until recently boasted on a now-defunct Facebook page, "It's okay you haven't heard of CMC, you wouldn't have gotten in anyway." How many potential students will bother to apply now that the college is mired in fraud?

What Effect on Job Prospects?

I graduated from Claremont McKenna last May with a B.A. in government and economics and about $14,000 in student loan debt after working odd jobs to put myself through school. And though I'm working, many of my classmates are still looking. How will this scandal affect their job prospects in industries like finance and government, which depend on honesty, now that the very legitimacy of their diplomas is in doubt? Will employers look askance at their college transcripts? Who could blame them if they did? I wouldn't trust another statistic from the college after this scandal.

Yet some within the Claremont community have decided to rationalize and excuse the disgrace, blaming the "culture" of U.S. News rankings, and not the college's administration, for promoting fraud. Like the student caught cheating who claims he should never have taken the class, this argument is as shameful as it is pathetic. The time to criticize the rankings is before, not after, you get caught trying to manipulate them. 

Other colleges, such as Reed, St. John's, and Skidmore, simply refuse to take part in the U.S. News ranking process. But Claremont's fundraising team is only too happy to stress the latest up tick in this category or that, as if it all meant something deep. But it is nothing more than an expensive popularity contest: as with all financial bubbles, we believe we're good because others tell us we're good--and we shell out more money. Nobody in the administration seriously questions the content or quality of a Claremont education because we're too busy measuring how diverse or how small a class is rather than what is taught in it.

Still others on campus claim that the fraud only increased the average scores per class by "10 to 20 points," as if a little cheating is okay. In fact, as the Claremont Port Side, a campus magazine, reported, some students who did not report SAT scores at all had scores simply manufactured on their behalf. While 76 students did not submit results in 2009, only 48 were listed by the college in its released scores; the remaining 28 were bumped up into the higher percentiles. The SAT scores were exactly the results you would need to qualify for elite status and for up-and-coming college. Vos's decision to keep test scores at 700, when they had, in fact, fallen to 680, was psychological as anything else.  Indeed, for top performing students, a minimum of a 700 math and 700 verbal score is what is needed to be competitive at elite colleges.

Vos reported to Claremont McKenna President Pam Gann directly. It's possible he acted without her knowledge, but it's hard to believe Vos acted alone. Vos was many things--avuncular, if a touch bureaucratic and insincere--but he was no statistician or econometrician, much less a Machiavellian spreadsheet manipulator. He would have needed help to make those targets year-after-year. 

Gann is at best complicit; and at worst, ignorant, and ignorance is no excuse, especially when you are entrusted with the reputation, the hopes, and the increasing fortunes of many families. Gann, who speaks often and laudatory of "leadership," but real leaders take responsibility and refuse to follow others rankings. They don't hide behind the school's lawyers.

If everyone cheats, only the honest are suckers. That's quite a descent from the standards the founders of Claremont Men's College set in 1946. Back then, the college's motto was "Civilization prospers with commerce." Today, the college's administration seems to think it can prosper through fraud, and that raising money raises the value of one's degree. 

Only in higher education is the victim of a fraud expected to pay back his loan promptly and without complaint, and of course, to "give back" to the alumni fund. But where do we go to get back our good name?

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Charles C. Johnson is a writer living in Los Angeles.

In an essay in the Wall Street Journal plugging his new book "Coming Apart" (which I haven't read yet), Charles Murray writes about a new American divide: "We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions."

Conservatives like Richard Vedder see this as the inevitable result, not of a system rigged to favor the elite, but of bad government policies, particularly in education: because of government-sponsored grants and students loans, too many people are in college who shouldn't be there; decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court and other legislative actions have virtually eliminated employment testing, which paved the way for certification inflation and the need for a college degree; laws protecting labor unions have virtually allowed them to put a choke-hold on the K-12 public school system.

These points have merit. But will less (or no) government support and more "vouchers and other pro-competitive measures" at all levels of education reverse the decline of real opportunities that Professor Vedder finds so disheartening? Should the free market determine who has access to higher education and can advance economically, culturally, even socially?

This can also be said of Murray's super elite--"the new upper class" that "runs the country" and is "even more detached from the lives of the great majority of Americans . . . not just socially but spatially." It's not nature that has "engendered a cultural separation;" it's their habits, their customs, and their education that have determined the kind of food they eat, "their drinking habits, the ages at which they marry and have children, the books they read (and their number), the television shows and movies they watch (and the hours spent on them), the humor they enjoy, the way they take care of their bodies, the way they decorate their homes, their leisure activities, their work environments and their child-raising practices."

Like Paul Fussell in "Class" and Lewis Lapham in "The American Ruling Class," his clever "mocumentary," Murray exposes that real opportunity isn't just about money; it's about one's social, cultural, and intellectual milieu--which is why a graduate of Yale Law School will always have a better chance of becoming Attorney General or a Supreme Court Justice than a graduate of Wyoming Law School.

Smith also understood that public--i.e. government--support of education could reduce such disparities. "The education of the common people requires, perhaps, in a civilized and commercial society, the attention of the publick more than that of people of some rank and fortune." Unless "government takes some pains to prevent it," the "great body of the people" will fall into a state into in which they "becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become" at the expense of their "intellectual, social, and marital virtues."

Granted, Smith was talking about "the most essential parts of education"--reading, writing, and arithmetic--which he argued were essential for making the common people both employable and good citizens. But one could similarly argue--and many have--that higher education is essential to be employable and a good citizen in the twenty-first century. As Stuart Butler recently put it in "The Coming Higher-Ed Revolution," the "high-school diploma has been supplanted by the college degree; making it through four years of college is now virtually a prerequisite for economic advancement."

One could also argue that the disrupters of the current educational system--e.g. Udacity (founded by former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun), Straighter Line (which offers college classes for $99 a month), and Apple (which is challenging the textbook racket)--do a better job than their traditional counterparts making higher education more accessible and affordable to traditionally under-served populations.

Some elite schools like the MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, Tufts University, and the University of Michigan are even making a total of 15,000 courses online available to the public through an open-courseware movement. MIT has gone one step further and will start offering a credential to those who take its courses through its MITx initiative.

But far from bridging the educational divide, this will only perpetuate it. In the first place, no one is suggesting that the elite schools give up their mission or relinquish their role as the purveyors of core cultural, social, and intellectual vales. In the second place, an MITx credential (or anything like it) will always be branded inferior quality. As Kevin Carey writes, "MIT undergraduates have to complete a rigorous academic curriculum to earn a degree. This means there should be little confusion between credentials issued by MIT and MITx. The latter won't dilute the value of the former." At least MITx is honest. It doesn't inflate a work certificate to the status of a college degree.

The way to bridge the educational divide is to provide all students with experiences and opportunities comparable to those which students at the elite schools get and have, especially traditional liberal education and exposure to America's core cultural heritage and institutions. That means imbuing them with the habits of thought and mind appropriate to the educated person, and teaching them the intellectual skills that will enable them to compete with elite students.

I'm no idealist who thinks that everyone should go to college or that higher education is a natural right. But I do believe, like Smith, that government can and should invest in education so that more, not fewer, students will have a genuine opportunity to advance in society, economically, culturally, even socially. As things now stand, we're drifting back to the days when access to that kind of opportunity was a privilege available to what Peter Sacks has called a "self-perpetuating aristocracy." If Murray's right, we may already there.

Cross-posted from Open Market.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a team of eight law firms have just "sued a dozen more law schools across the country, accusing them of luring students with inflated job-placement and salary statistics and leaving graduates 'burdened with debt and with limited job prospects.' The lawyers . . . said they planned to file 20 to 25 new lawsuits every few months . . . the lawsuits had been filed on behalf of a total of 51 graduates, and each suit was seeking class-action status. The targets of the latest round of lawsuits" include  "Brooklyn Law School (N.Y.)," "Chicago-Kent College of Law," DePaul University College of Law," "Golden Gate University School of Law," "Hofstra Law School," "University of San Francisco School of Law," "Widener University School of Law," and several others.

As the Chronicle notes, "Disgruntled law-school graduates who can't find jobs are increasingly taking their complaints to court, asserting that the schools duped them into enrolling with misleading statistics about their chances of landing well-paying jobs when they get out. Last year similar lawsuits were filed against New York Law School, Thomas M. Cooley Law School, and Thomas Jefferson School of Law."

As I noted earlier, much of what law schools teach their students is useless drivel, and law schools routinely exaggerate their students' job prospects. Accordingly, there is no reason to require people to attend law school before sitting for the bar exam. As law professor Paul Campos notes, legal education is often a rip-off, since the typical law professor has little real-world experience practicing law, and "knows nothing about being a lawyer." But since most states require people to attend law school before sitting for the bar exam, law schools have been able to increase tuition by nearly 1,000 percent since 1960 in real terms. For its part, the Obama Education Department has implemented policies that encourage colleges to jack up tuition and charge students even more, even as college students are learning less and less.

In an ideal world, Richard Perez-Pena and the New York Times would have been subjected to widespread condemnation, even shame, for the character-assassination frame the paper gave to the Patrick Witt story. Kathleen Parker, most prominently, has spoken with moral clarity on the issue, translating the Times argument as, "We don't know anything, but we're smearing this guy anyway." But far more common have been defenses of the Times--or even claims that the Times should have done more to portray Witt in a negative light.

In a sad commentary, however, not all of the Times' defenders, however, have come from the ranks of the ideologically sympathetic media. In Forbes.com, John McQuaid (who says he writes "about dysfunctional America") claimed that Times critics such as Parker have missed the point. "This is," stated McQuaid, "not a story about sexual assault. It is a story about misleading the public," regarding the reason for which Witt withdrew his Rhodes candidacy.

McQuaid did not explain why a story that's "about misleading the public" would have devoted considerable space to such items as Witt's "minor arrests" and his membership in a fraternity where other members have been  accused of sexual harassment. Nor did McQuaid offer a theory why Pérez-Peña would have structured his story in such a way to leave the (false) insinuation that Witt was no longer enrolled at Yale. A story portraying Witt as potential rapist, on the other hand, would have had good reason to have included such material.

And while McQuaid dismissed Witt's version of events--that he had already decided to play in The Game, and that he had informed Athletic Department officials of his decision--as relying "on a tortuous parsing of events," Witt's claim, which includes assertions that he had spoken to Athletic Department officials and has a paper trail of his decision-making process, is verifiable. (Perhaps Pérez-Peña could have asked one of his anonymous sources about the conversations, even if he couldn't have obtained from Witt the e-mails.) Witt's statement could be untruthful. But if, in fact, Witt's timeline is correct, there was no "story about misleading the public," since the decision to withdraw was made for the reasons that Yale and Witt suggested at the time. And given McQuaid's stated concern with ensuring that the public isn't misled, perhaps he'll call on the Rhodes Trust to reveal the name of the person who passed along information about the "informal" complaint, thus violating Yale procedures. While the Rhodes application process is confidential, surely there was no presumption of confidentiality to this matter, since the person or persons informed the Trust outside the parameters of the application process.

But the most surprising--and most disappointing--responses to the story have come from the ranks of self-styled journalistic watchdogs. The normally temperate Jim Romenesko posted a piece on his website by former Yale Daily News opinion editor Alex Klein accusing the student paper of having sat on the story, "for reasons personal, social, or political -- who can ever tell on a college campus?" Indeed, Klein wildly asserted, "The paper and its editor are also complicit in Yale's culture of secrecy surrounding sexual assault." For good measure, Klein also included an anecdote in which, he suggested, Witt had been too brusque to him in an e-mail.

Yet, in fact, the Yale paper did not know--as the Times story revealed--that the existence of the "informal complaint" had, in violation of Yale procedures, been leaked to the Rhodes Trust. The paper knew only of the existence of the "informal" complaint--a complaint that can be filed on the basis of an accuser's "worry," in which "limited or no investigation" occurs, and in which, the Yale website implies, the accuser retains all but complete control over whatever investigatory process takes place. Klein (and, it seems, Romenesko) believe that the paper nonetheless had a journalistic obligation to report the "informal" complaint.

Given the extraordinarily low threshold for filing an "informal complaint" of sexual assault at Yale, given the breach of the process by the person (presumably linked to the accuser) who leaked the complaint to the Daily News, and given the lasting reputational damage publication of a sexual assault complaint can cause, a strong case can be made for the approach to the story that the Yale Daily News adopted. Regardless, it's absurd to suggest that the Daily News is "complicit in Yale's culture of secrecy surrounding sexual assault."

The most outrageous take on the Times article came from Poynter's Kelly McBride. Fresh off a laughable "ombudsman" column that issued a blanket defense of how ESPN covered (or wildly over-covered) Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, McBride decided to fault Pérez-Peña for being too sympathetic to Witt. By not presenting the accuser's side of the story, she lamented, the Times article "feeds into a two commonly mistaken lines of thought about sexual assault: That rape is invisible, faceless and a possible pathway for scorned women seeking revenge."

Even more incredibly, McBride turned to adjunct law professor Wendy Murphy--who, she revealed, "has taught in  Poynter seminars" on the topic of sexual assault--for suggestions on how the Yale Daily News should have approached the story. That's the same Wendy Murphy who embarrassed herself and any journalist who spoke to her in the Duke lacrosse case, repeatedly making false statements of facts, culminating with an evidence-free suggestion that one of the accused Duke lacrosse players was molested as a child. (Salon's Alex Pareene has correctly branded Murphy as Exhibit A of the proposition that "there are, in the mass media, absolutely no consequences for blatant, constant lying.")  As for Murphy's more general approach to the presumption of innocence in sexual assault claims: she told CNN that "I never, ever met a false rape claim, by the way. My own statistics speak to the truth."

The idea that a journalistic watchdog group would turn to such a figure for guidance on a question of journalistic ethics is beyond belief. But it's Patrick Witt who has been held up to widespread scorn.

"Students entering the anthropology program have been required to take an intensive diversity course, 'Building Alliances.'  In teaching it, Mr. Shapiro assured them confidentiality and urged them to bring up deeply personal experiences to confront their biases and undergo a wrenching transformation that would turn them into better advocates for the downtrodden."

In his January 29 Forum piece, Peter Sacks says that I engaged in "nitpicking" in a blog post expressing disdain for President Obama's higher education agenda. He's free to call my skeptical view about federal initiatives to lower the costs of college whatever he wants. But in my opinion, it is naive to believe politicians (not just Obama) when they claim that they are going to make any good or service less costly. That's just glittering rhetoric.

Mr. Sacks does raise some important issues in his piece, however and I'd like to address them.

First, he reiterates the position he took in our Jan. 11 debate, contending that the fact that the U.S. has been "slipping" compared with other countries in college graduation percentages is worrisome. He avers that the nation is losing "billions of dollars in potential economic returns" because lots of young Americans don't graduate from college.

In our debate, I took aim at that notion by citing Professor Alison Wolf's excellent book Does Education Matter?. In my opening statement, I noted that her book has been ignored by the higher education establishment because her conclusions are uncongenial to the conventional wisdom that the more formal education people have, the better. Her strongly-supported argument is that government "investments" in higher education are neither necessary nor sufficient for a vibrant economy. I encourage Minding the Campus readers to digest Wolf's book (subtitled Myths about Education and Economic Growth) before they assent to the proposition that we are losing productivity because we don't have a higher college graduation rate.

If you don't have time for Professor Wolf's book, however, I'll explain briefly why our college graduation rate doesn't matter. The reason is that little of what people need to know for their work careers comes from classroom studies. We have a lot of very successful people in America who didn't graduate from college. We also have a much larger number of people who have college degrees (sometimes advanced degrees) who nevertheless struggle in low-paying jobs.

We know that many who go through college don't learn much and even if they do, they are apt to discover that the best employment they can find is work that high school students could do. There is no transmission mechanism that causes employers to create more high-paying jobs just because we "produce" more college graduates.

I agree with Sacks' that we need to "reframe the nation's strategic position," but disagree on how to go about that.

The best strategy for the United States is a great depoliticization. What I mean by that is to lessen or entirely remove politics from a wide range of endeavors - housing, medical care, the allocation of capital, energy, and last but not least, education.

Political decision-making tends to be short-sighted and swayed by special interest groups. Policies with concentrated but visible benefits often are enacted even though they create far greater (but often unseen) costs. Limited resources are squandered on projects that people wouldn't spend their own money on.

America's "competitive advantage" has never been that we put more people through college than other countries. It was that we had less government control over people's lives and property than other countries.

The denouement of the Times' coverage of Duke lacrosse came when then-sports editor Tom Jolly apologized for the paper's guilt-presuming, error-ridden articles on the case. Will the paper ever get around to giving former Yale quarterback Patrick Witt an apology? With a few days perspective, it's become clear that the Times' mishandling of the Witt story was, in two specific ways, even worse than originally believed.

First, Times reporter Richard Pérez-Peña strongly implied (though he carefully avoided ever coming out and saying so specifically) that Witt had withdrawn from Yale. In fact, according to a statement issued by a representative of the student, Witt has finished all academic requirements except for his senior thesis, and is off-campus this semester training for the NFL draft, as are many talented college football seniors.

Second, in what could only be deemed a deliberate attempt to smear Witt's character, Pérez-Peña devoted more than eight percent of his article (163 of 1956 words) to discussing what he termed "two minor arrests" in Witt's past. But the paper didn't even attempt to claim that these matters had any bearing on the article's ostensible topic--the suspension of Witt's Rhodes application. Negative insinuations, it seems, were all the news that was fit to print.

Beyond engaging in character assassination against a college student, the Times story did have a scoop: that the Rhodes Trust temporarily suspended Witt's candidacy because it learned that an accuser (whose identity the Times admitted its reporter didn't know) filed an "informal complaint" against Witt. Whether Witt withdrew his Rhodes candidacy because of this development is in dispute.

In any case, by doing everything he could to construct a guilt-presuming frame against Witt, Pérez-Peña buried the lede: that on today's college campuses, the filing of an informal complaint "intended to address an ongoing problem or worry," leading to "limited or no investigation" by the university, sufficed to persuade the Rhodes Trust to suspend an otherwise qualified finalist's application. In his article, Pérez-Peña did not quote these words from Yale's own Sexual Harassment and Assault Response and Education Center, nor did the Times online version provide a link to Yale's "informal complaint" policy.

Would anyone have come away from the Times article believing the Witt was subjected to a process characterized by "limited or no investigation," which could have been triggered by a ... "worry"? Pérez-Peña, alas, was too busy explaining about Witt's "minor arrests" to mention Yale's worrying language.

While Pérez-Peña didn't see fit to identify the almost comically loose definition of sexual assault in Yale's "informal complaint" policy, his article did discuss Yale's formal disciplinary process--but solely, it seems, to cast negative aspersions on Witt. The Times reporter explained that Witt belonged to a fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, "whose members and pledges had engaged in highly publicized episodes of sexual harassment." But no one, including the Times, suggested that Witt had any involvement in these "episodes," nor did the Times disclose that Yale's response to these "highly publicized episodes of sexual harassment" had, in fact, generated widespread condemnation from civil libertarians.

Rather than diving into Witt's "minor arrests," Pérez-Peña might have explored the formal complaint policy that Witt's accuser spurned. Under that policy, not only does a finding of guilt now (thanks to the Obama administration) come from a preponderance of evidence, but Yale promises that "the student bringing the complaint retains considerable control, although not total, as the process unfolds."

What sort of truth-seeking process promises to an accuser "considerable control . . . as the process unfolds"?

The Witt affair also raises a troubling question, which the Times unsurprisingly ignored, for Yale's administration. In a comment on the Witt case, the editors of the Yale Daily News noted that Yale's procedures require absolute confidentiality in the sexual harassment/assault informal complaint process. They added, "All parties involved observed that route of discretion. The complainant, the alleged perpetrator and all those who heard the case honored the discreet process."

With due respect to the student newspaper, which handled the story far more responsibly than did the Times, this description isn't true. Someone did not honor the "discreet process." Indeed, that breach of confidentiality had disastrous results for Witt, since it set the stage for the Times' character assassination. Will the university, therefore, conduct an investigation to determine if any Yale employee leaked information about the "informal complaint" to the Rhodes Trust? If not, why not?

21st Century Faculty

By Charles Tiffin

President Obama's State of the Union address urged businesses and higher education to work together to make sure students are taught the skills they need for immediate employment. Good point. One problem  is that most institutions, when hiring faculty,  still focus primarily on traditional academic and research credentials. That's not enough anymore. If you want to prepare students for workplace success in the 21st century, you need faculty who are not only academically trained, but who also bring a depth of real-world experience to the classroom.

At Capella University, where I am provost, we have hired scholar-practitioners as faculty since our founding in 1993. Dr. Joe Pascarella, for example, a core faculty for our Public Safety graduate programs, lives in New York, where he spent several decades with the New York Police Department. Karla Gable, another of our teachers, lives in Phoenix.  She has great experience working with children with severe emotional problems, and has master's degrees in counseling and in education.  She helped develop our special education administration course. Capella's Course Quality Committee, which includes Joe and Karla, leads the internal review of at least 80 Capella courses a year.  To make a difference for students, we hire faculty who can share real-world professional expertise along with deep academic knowledge.

Cross-posted from Open Market.

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

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

The University of California at San Diego, for example, is creating a new full-time "vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion." This position would augment UC San Diego's already massive diversity apparatus, which includes the Chancellor's Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women's Center.

Other colleges raised spending on administrators as much as 600 percent in recent years.

As a result of increasing federal financial aid, colleges have been able to increase tuition faster than inflation, year after year, secure in the knowledge that they can rake in ever-rising government subsidies and skyrocketing tuition.  College students are learning less and less even as higher education spending explodes.

Students have little choice but to pay inflated tuition bills into the education industrial-complex, as they vie with each other for scarce entry-level jobs by acquiring ever more degrees that show their ability to jump through hoops and master difficult (but largely useless) skills.  The net result is an educational arms race in which people compete to see who can acquire the most paper credentials.  There are now 8,000 waiters and 5,057 janitors with PhD's or other advanced degrees, and millions of Americans have useless college degrees.

Obama's State of the Union Address also contained false claims about outsourcing and corporate taxes, as well as a misguided proposal that could undermine discipline and order in inner-city schools that have high drop-out rates, and another proposal that could shrink Americans' 401(k)s and increase the cost of mortgage financing in the future.

The Education Department recently made college officials' lives more difficult by trying to alter the burden of proof long used by many colleges in sexual harassment cases (despite the lack of any legal basis for doing so), and by seeking to discourage procedures such as cross-examination that safeguard accuracy and due process in campus disciplinary proceedings.

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

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

In what sports media columnist Richard Deitsch accurately described as a "bombshell," the article, penned by Richard Pérez-Peña, revealed that earlier this fall, a fellow student accused Witt, a Rhodes Scholar finalist, of a sexual assault. The accuser did not file a complaint with the New Haven police. Nor at least on the basis of the material presented by the Times, did she go to the hospital for a rape exam. But she did turn to the new, post-"Dear Colleague" Yale judicial process. In that process, the accuser didn't even appear to have filed a formal complaint against Witt.

Somehow, however, the Rhodes Trust found out about his "informal" complaint, and demanded that Yale re-endorse Witt before moving forward with his candidacy. In response, Witt withdrew his Rhodes application, though he did so in a way that implied that the withdrawal was caused by a scheduling conflict between his Rhodes interview and the Harvard-Yale game. The article also leaves the impression that Witt has withdrawn from Yale.

In what could only be deemed a wildly misleading framing, here's how Pérez-Peña described the effects of the "Dear Colleague" letter: "The accusation against Witt, a history major who has expressed interest in a career in politics, came as Yale's handling of sexual harassment and assault is under intense scrutiny, including an investigation by the United States Department of Education. Last year, Yale overhauled its systems for handling such complaints and imposed a five-year ban on campus activities by a fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, whose members and pledges had engaged in highly publicized episodes of sexual harassment."

Yale "overhauled its systems for handling such complaints," because it was "under intense scrutiny." No mention of the lowered burden of proof in a system already tilted toward the accuser. No mention of the civil liberties impact of this new system. No mention, indeed, of anything that the "Dear Colleague" letter demanded. A typical Times reader would come away from the article with a false belief that the system changed from a structure that favored potential rapists to one that's fair and balanced.

But, of course, this is the New York Times. And if the Duke lacrosse case left no other legacy, it's that the paper frames its coverage of campus allegations of sexual assault in such a way that ignores issues of due process.

I don't know if Witt is innocent or guilty. But I do know that, at least at this stage, he's entitled to the something beyond a presumption of innocence, since his accuser did not file a report with police, receive a medical exam, or even file a formal campus complaint (in which he would have had some, albeit minor, due process protections). In the upside-down post-"Dear Colleague" era, however, Witt becomes the highest-profile case of a student who chose to withdraw from school rather than face a kangaroo system of "justice." That's not an angle the Times has deemed even worthy of a mention.

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

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

The most serious question, of course, involves the low and, in some instances, nonexistent graduation rate of athletes from Division I football and basketball programs. It is evident to anyone following big-time college sports that athletes are rarely students; they are rented semi-pros there to bring glory and revenue to alma mater. Whether they graduate is usually not an issue for the coach. His first and overarching responsibility is producing a winning team. And he is in many instances paid more than the university president; his tenure is based entirely on wins.

As I see it, Emmert wants to move the NCAA from its somnolent status to active enforcer. This isn't easy when in the recent past the NCAA had leaders incapable of making decisions and chose to evade their gaze when embarrassing moments became visible. The lure of television rights and revenue seemingly trump all other considerations.

The national championship game between LSU and Alabama had more than a billion dollars attached to it in seat sales, television revenue, hotel rooms, transportation, etc. This is not some small financial activity to be reviewed by the Better Business Bureau. It is big business that allows the turbines of higher education to keep turning. The game also raised interesting questions about the commitment of the players to their studies. Phil Mushnick of the New York Post asked "Among the 44 student athletes who started in Monday's LSU-Alabama title game, how many reported or will report for the first week of the new semester?"

However, Mr. Emmert is smart enough and impatient enough to know that in the present set of circumstances the words student-athlete are an oxymoron. Notwithstanding several noteworthy exceptions, most Divisions I football players are athletes who never saw a classroom or wrote a research paper on their own. Joe Nocera, who has adopted the position of defender of the college athlete, is more concerned with eligibility questions and arbitrary NCAA rulings than the academic side of the student athlete.

For many in the alumni, it may not make a difference. They simply want to see the home team win. But there is little doubt this travesty is having an effect on a public that realizes the amateur tradition is dead or on life support.

Mr. Emmert apparently realizes it as well which explains, in part, why he is calling for reforms, however modest they may be. It will be interesting to see what strides he may make with resistance from the major conferences. It is hard to be an idealist, even a guarded idealist, when you are putting billions of dollars at risk. College football and basketball are big businesses and, as a consequence, remain unlikely clients for a return to the pure love of sport.

It is appropriate to ask how the NCAA can define amateurism as allowing a $2000 stipend and then forbidding any additional funding. Or as Joe Nocera puts it, "How can the labor force that generates so much money for everyone else be kept in shackles by the NCAA?" This is the question Mr. Emmert is trying very hard to address.

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

This is ridiculous. When they say "rising standards," they don't mean stronger teaching or more service. They mean more publication, and in my field of literary studies the publication mandate has reached absurd degrees. As shown in this report, literary scholarship has piled book after book and essay after essay upon more or less stable topics such as the corpus of Melville for five decades at a feverish pace. In that time, some 5,500 items of scholarship have appeared on Melville. Do we really expect the 5,501st to say something significant and necessary, or at least something that justifies the labor and money that went into its production?

The survey finding indicates that the pressure to publish remains even though the field is largely exhausted of fresh material. Melville and others in the literary pantheon are, of course, fixed objects of undergraduate education, but we don't need much more research to teach them. What we need is to get more English and foreign language professors away from their computer screens and encourage more contact with students.

That question was the start of an item I posted yesterday on Facebook, referring to KC Johnson's excellent essay (above), The Ruinous Reign of Race-and-Gender Historians.  It was a question for a reason: the two super techies in our family, my wife Jackie, editor of the quite brilliant financial-business-political site, The Fiscal Times, and my youngest daughter Alex, a technical whiz at Reuters, have been telling me (a dedicated non-techie) that to attract comments on Facebook and other social media sites, it's always best to start with a question. Sure enough, my item drew a lot of comments. The  15th and best came from Alan Charles Kors, an outstanding professor of history at Penn, co-founder of FIRE and co-author of "The Shadow University." He wrote: " Not the most corrupted department on campuses---try English, Comp Lit, Ethnic Studies, Women's Studies, and on---but the most tragically corrupted department." I agree--his list is worse. But history matters and reform of our wayward history departments is urgent.

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

A claim to be "dry" is no assurance that there is actually no risk of alcohol abuse on campus. I learned very quickly that American University is no drier than most schools. A friend tells this story: he and his mother were leaving a campus tour, run by a guide who had extolled the benefits of a dry campus. Walking behind two students, they overheard one talking about calling a roommate to fill a bathtub with gin for a party that night. While this particular friend was not bothered much by this conversation, his mother seriously reconsidered AU as a choice.

I'm sure there are schools that are much more effective at actually enforcing a dry campus policy--my guess is this happens when students who don't drink self-select for "dry" schools, whereas most AU students are here for other reasons. However, when this isn't the case, the claim to be "dry" can be incredibly misleading. Not all parents get the sort of real insight my friend's mom did. By disguising and ignoring the very real problem of binge-drinking, we limit our ability to deal with the consequences. This is not only a problem for current students, but also those prospective students who may actually be seeking a community with low exposure to alcohol and may be misled by the proud claims of the school that "we're a dry campus." 

This could be seen as an enforcement problem on the part of AU, but I've heard of similar problems at other schools of questionable dryness. There is a general attitude of half-heartedness to the official policy. Everyone here knows that the campus is indeed quite wet, but it's just not talked about. Beyond the more nebulous issues associated with such a culture of denial, there is a lack of clarity about the actual consequences of the alcohol ban. The process that generally occurs is rather fair and forgiving. Consequences depend a good deal on consultation with a health counselor who focuses on treating students with real issues and encouraging safe practices. This seems appropriate. The issue here is not how individual students are treated, but rather the incentives being created. This process is long and often described as annoying and burdensome, but rarely actually painful. This is enough to encourage stealth and the issues that accompany this mindset that I mentioned earlier, but not quite enough to dissuade the student set on throwing the party of the year.

Whatever policy a university chooses, it should stick to it. The gray area created by wishful policies like the one at AU creates not only confusion, but also many problems that could be avoided with a little bit of honesty. When scouting colleges for safety, parents are warned to look out for vague or elusive answers. A policy that isn't well defined is considered a flag for lax enforcement. While this isn't always true, it might be worth considering for any school in regards to alcohol and drug policy. As much as the spectrum of opinions differs, so do the policies, but one characteristic that would surely help every policy is a clear definition and an understanding between all parties concerned. Students, administration and parents should be on the same page, and the scouting student (or parent) should be able to tell what their choice will mean.

But schools and anti-bullying activists have adopted incredibly overbroad definitions of bullying. The anti-bullying website NoBully.com, and schools like Fox Hill and Alvarado Elementary, define even "eye rolling" and other expressions of displeasure or hostility as bullying, even though doing so raises First Amendment problems.

The Obama administration claims bullying is an "epidemic" and a "pandemic." But in reality, bullying and violence have steadily gone down in the nation's schools, as studies funded by the Justice Department have shown. The Obama administration's StopBullying.gov website defines a vast array of speech and conduct as bullying: it classifies "teasing" as a form of "bullying," and "rude" or "hurtful" "text messages" as "cyberbullying." Since "creating web sites" that "make fun of others" also is deemed "cyberbullying," conservative websites that poke fun at the president are presumably guilty of cyberbullying under this strange definition. (Law professors such as UCLA's Eugene Volokh have criticized bills by liberal lawmakers like Congresswoman Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) that would ban some criticism of politicians as cyberbullying.)