We won't be operating on a regular schedule next week. We'll return with fresh content in the new year. Enjoy your holidays, and if you lack for anything to read, take a look at several stellar pieces from recent months you may have missed.

College Admissions, Let's Not Break The Law - Ward Connerly
An ever-timely reminder to the University of California - Proposition 209 isn't voluntary.

Another College Aid Boondoggle - Peter Wood

How congress continues to mangle financial aid.

Ward Churchill And The Diversity Agenda - KC Johnson

On the year's premiere academic charlatan, and his wider impact.

Immigration And Bowling Alone - John Leo

Robert Putnam's research revealed that diversity may not be good for communities. Then he decided not to tell anyone.

The Trouble With Tenure - Mark Bauerlein
Just how essential is tenure to the academic enterprise?

Diversity Gobbledygook - Heather MacDonald

A bewildering conversation with a diversity officer.

Yesterday I attended a fine conference at the American Enterprise Institute, "Reforming The Politically Correct University." AEI commissioned papers on various aspects of the PC university from Peter Wood, Steve Balch, Greg Lukianoff, John Agresto, John McWhorter, and many others. They're to appear in book form next summer, but many are available now at the event site. Do take a look. I've not had a chance to read all of the papers, but some stood out. Sandra Stotsky's account of the role of Ed Schools in the design of politicized textbooks was particularly interesting, as were Peter Wood's thoughts on permutations of "diversity" and John Agresto's call for a revitalized conception of the liberal arts.

Our own Jim Piereson offered a darker note in "The American University: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow" with a look ahead into the likely direction of higher education.

..As the diversity thrust loses steam, liberals and far-left groups on the campus will not be at a loss for new causes to absorb their attention and energy. The next iteration of liberal reform in the universities is likley to involve further steps to detach these institutions from the American polity in which they are embedded. We have already noted that the intellectual foundations of the modern research university are somewhat at odds with the philosophy of natural rights that shaped our national instiutions. The logic of liberalism points in the direction of the internationalization of the American university. We can already see fragments of this emerging trend in the banning of ROTC and military recruiters from college campuses in order to disassociate universities from American national policies. The enrollment of international students will receive greater emphasis in the coming decades which will further reinforce the trend. Academic programs in American government or in American studies will be increasingly de-emphasized on the grounds that they are parochial, in much the same way as programs in Western Civilization were de-emphasized in the past...

Wow. The "mind of evil" - he really did mean Ahmadinejad.

"Today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for," Mr. Bollinger told Mr. Ahmadinejad. "I only wish I could do better."

On June 4th of this year Paul Berman published an extraordinary 28,000 word New Republic essay on contemporary Islamic philosopher Tariq Ramadan of Oxford University and his liberal apologists, Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, who write for the New York Review of Books. Berman's essay was criticized by some for being too long, too meticulous, for being too concerned with ironing out any misunderstanding that might be wrung from his words. But the just published tepid reply by Scottish Malise Ruthven, a Scottish historian of Islam, for August 13th issue of the New York Review of Books suggests that, for now, Berman's tack has cornered his would be critics.

Ruthven finds the US denial of a visa for Ramadan to teach at Notre Dame in 2004 inexplicable. The only mark against Ramadan, says Ruthven, is that he once donated money to a Palestinian charity later put on a terrorist watch list. This is disingenuous. Here's Berman on some of Ramadan's history:

As early as 1993, at the age of thirty-two, he campaigned in Geneva to cancel an impending production of Voltaire's play Muhammad, or Fanaticism. The production was canceled, and a star was born - though Ramadan has argued that, on the contrary, he had nothing to do with canceling the play, and to say otherwise is a "pure lie." Not every battle has gone his way. He taught at the college of Saussure, where his colleagues were disturbed by his arguments in favor of Islamic biology over Darwin. This time, too, Ramadan shaped the debate to his own specifications by insisting that he never wanted to suppress the existing biology curriculum - merely to complement it with an additional point of view. A helpful creationist proposal. But the Darwinians, unlike the Voltaireans, were in no rush to yield.

Some universities are nervous about the Ralph Papitto controversy . Papitto, 80 years old and very wealthy, used the N-word in a discussion of diversity at a trustees meeting of the Roger Williams law school, which bears his name. After protests, Papitto requested that his name be removed. But that appears to be in response to heavy pressure from protesters and the university. Papitto said that the N-word "just kinda slipped out" and that the word, which he said has never been in his vocabulary, may have come to mind after he listened to rap music. Those unconvincing explanations made it seem that he very much wanted to be excused so that Ralph A. Papitto Law School could retain its name.

The removal of a donor's name from a university school or building in the wake of a racial slur is very unusual. But universities are on alert because naming battles are now fairly common, mostly over buildings named for felon-donors from Kenneth Lay to Alfred Taubman.

While debate over naming raged, Seton Hall University students went to classes at Dennis Kozlowski Hall, passed through the Dennis Kozlowski rotunda on their way to the Frank Walsh Library or perhaps to the (Robert) Brennan Recreation Center. Kozlowski, former chief executive officer of Tyco, was convicted of 22 counts of conspiracy, securities fraud, grand larceny and falsifying records. Tyco board member Frank Walsh pleaded guilty to concealing a $20 million bonus and First Jersey Securities founder Robert Brennan is serving time for bankruptcy, fraud, and money laundering. The Kozlowski name was removed from the hall and the rotunda at his request and the university regents changed the name of the Brennan Center. Seton Hall kept Walsh's name on the library on rounds that his offense was milder and that he pleaded guilty.

Why is the jailing of Haleh Esfandiari to be regretted? Well... because it will encourage Orientalists, of course.

Look to a novel account in this week's Chronicle, where Fatameh Keshvarz registers her distaste for Azar Nafisi, Khaled Hosseini, and Asne Seierstad. Their fault? Well, failing to depict the "complexities" of life in the worse-governed portions of the modern Middle East. This troika simply plays to Western Orientalism (and Imperialism), Keshvarz asserts, by failing to depict Tehran, Kabul, and the like in suitably complex terms, or to provide sufficient attention to local culture. Nafisi, for one, is assailed for oversimplification (her 18 years at the University of Tehran are evidently insufficient experience for Keshvarz) while a number of bright lights in the Iranian cultural scene are highlighted as offering a better composite picture.

She highlights Shahrnush Parsipur,

a powerful postrevolutionary author of many successful novels, including The Dog and the Long Winter (1976) and Tuba and the Meaning of the Night (1989). Parsipur is also the author of Women Without Men: A Novella. I purchased the latter two novels in Iran last summer, although they are supposedly "banned." In Women Without Men, she gives us Zarrinkolah, the charming prostitute. Shortly after the onset of the revolution, Parsipur's women are out to "see the world," and no one is going to stop them. When Zarrinkolah, a "little woman of 26 with a heart open like the sea," decides to leave the brothel, she needs no one's permission, no blessing from a holy man. She is her own source of holiness, the ray of light that brightens the brothel's miserable life. A holy prostitute in postrevolutionary Iran has to be a miracle, you say. But that is exactly the point. Postrevolutionary Iran has towering women writers who make miracles possible.

Well, that's great. So what's become of her? "Parsipur has since left for exile in the United States." Keshvarz's principal example of overlooked Iranian female expression is... in exile? Keshvarz can buy Parsipur's novels in Iran, but Parsipur can't live there? Is that the societal complexity that the "New Orientalists" are missing?

Once again, Orientalist theory displays an exquisite sensitivity to any and all depictions of the Middle East, yet posits a monolithic West (which seems to consist, in their minds, of Dick Cheney, Fouad Ajami, and Bernard Lewis). Spirited criticism of problems in the Middle East, from any quarter, is always met by enfevered shushing - don't encourage the neo-cons! Orientalism is a theory absurd enough when guiding readings of historical expression - it's positively malignant when labeling frank criticism some sort of Imperialist collaborationist sentiment. When the Esfandiari jailing is occasion first for worries about Western Imperialism and only second about the Iranian political climate, it's clear something's gone wrong.

By Edward B. Fiske

As author of a major college guide, I try to approach college admissions issues from the point of view of what's best for college-bound high school students and their parents. I speak with lots of such students and their parents every year, and the one topic that is guaranteed to come up is: What should we make of the annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings?

Here's what I tell them.

First, understand the real agenda of college rankings. The main reason that U.S. News compiles and publishes rankings is not to enrich the quality of U.S. higher education but to sell magazines. And there is nothing wrong with this. Americans love rankings, whatever the topic, and (for reasons discussed below) these rankings can be somewhat useful.

But keep in mind that static lists do not sell magazines. If the rankings were the same every year, no family would need to by the updated list for younger brother or sister. Since both the absolute and the relative quality of major colleges and universities evolve only over long periods of time, the best way to generate churn in the rankings is to change the formula. Which is what U.S. News does every year - for reasons both sound and dubious.

By Peter Sacks

Many conservatives are groaning over a major new report from a commission of higher education luminaries calling on colleges to de-emphasize the SAT for college admissions.

The catcalls from the right erupted after the National Association of College Admission Counseling suggested that colleges should rethink their reliance on the SAT for admissions. Wrongheaded, de-evolutionary, politically correct in the extreme, and void of common sense, the critics said the NACAC report is a frontal attack on academic standards and will lead to the ruin of American higher education.

We've heard the dire warnings before, countless times. And countless times the cries that the sky is falling have been wrong.

The defense of the SAT as the linchpin of the college admissions process contains at least two major propositions, both of questionable merit.

By Peter Salins

One of the hottest debates roiling American campuses today is whether the SAT and other standardized tests should continue to play a dominant role as a college admissions criterion. The main point of contention in this debate is whether the SAT or equivalent scores accurately gauge college preparedness, and whether they are valid predictors of college success, most particularly in comparison with high school grades. Behind this ostensible concern is the expressed fear that over-reliance on collegiate admissions tests will reduce "access" to college on the part of low-scoring applicants, many of them from poor or minority families and, thus, risk making American colleges and universities less demographically diverse.

First, let me address "access" and diversity: According to the most recent (2007) data, 45 percent of all colleges or universities, and 66 percent of public ones, have no admissions criteria at all. In the public sector - which accounts for three-quarters of all higher education slots - among the 34 percent of schools with some kind of admissions screen, 69 percent accept more than half of their applicants. Even among the remaining somewhat selective institutions, the majority either do not require admissions test scores or they accept most low-scoring applicants, with the result that the average verbal SAT for all college applicants is 532, and that for the math SAT is 537 (both out of a potential score of 800).

Second, regarding the sincerity of the most vociferous admissions test opponents: Virtually all of the schools calling for abandonment or down-grading of SATs and comparable admissions test have always been highly selective - and intend to remain so. There should be absolutely no confusion on this score. These places have no intention of becoming academically more diverse, meaning they are not planning to admit academically inferior poor or minority students. As predominantly rich institutions, they have an army of admissions officers able to pore over every applicant's high school transcript and other evidence of academic ability to keep recruiting the best and brightest students, even absent admissions tests. Actually, even with their "test-optional" policies, they will have access to most applicants' SAT scores anyway, because academically strong applicants will continue to take the tests to keep all their collegiate options open. If one were inclined to take a conspiratorial view of these institutions' motives, one might suspect that they were mounting this concerted campaign to assure that America's public colleges and universities remain unselective, derailing the rising admissions aspirations of those ambitious public institutions that threaten to cut into their current monopoly of gifted high school graduates.

By Charlotte Allen

"Parents asking, 'Where's the trash?' were promptly corrected by event staff and volunteers, who proudly provided composting crash courses to the thousands of students and family members."

The "event"---described in an online news release--was the Second Annual Zero-Waste Freshman Orientation Picnic at Duke University on Aug. 19, a campus event for entering Duke students and their families that featured "local and organic foods," biodegradable cornstarch drinking cups, and a taboo against anything plastic---all part of the latest college-administration fad, aggressive recycling in the name of "minimizing our campus footprint."

Some of the parents of the 1,600 or so Duke freshmen who attended the picnic might have wondered why they had to undergo being "corrected" by Duke employees and student volunteers for using the politically incorrect word "trash," or to receive "composting crash courses" from youngsters when they were already coughing up or going into hock for the nearly $50,000 a year it costs to send one of one's offspring to Duke. Duke allows students from households with annual incomes of less than $60,000 to attend the university for free, but everybody else---and that includes the modestly upper-middle-class---has to come up with cash, mortgage the family home, or take out loans in order to pay for a Duke education. Still, Duke's administrators seemed confident that they were teaching both parents and incoming students a welcome lesson. Boasting of the 95 percent waste-diversion rate the university had achieved at both freshman picnics by sending 5,000 pounds of organic food scraps and cornstarch cups to the compost heap instead of the dumpster, the Duke web page prophesied, "In two short years, styrofoam plates, plastic napkins and cups will be unfamiliar artifacts to all of Duke's students."

By Peter Wood

A group called Strong American Schools has just issued a report with the provocative title Diploma to Nowhere. The report is a lavishly produced cry of alarm: our high schools are failing. Millions of graduates are tricked into thinking their high school diplomas mean they are "ready for college academics." But they aren't. As a result, 1.3 million students end up in college remedial programs that cost between $2.31 to $2.89 billion per year.

That's alarming all right, but who is "Strong American Schools"? The organization's website declares that it is "a project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, [and] a nonpartisan campaign supported by The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation promoting sound education policies for all Americans." But the history of the organization and why it was founded are more elusive. The Gates Foundation issued a press release on April 2007 that throws a little more light on the genesis of Strong American Schools. The organization was apparently founded at that point with $60 million and the goal of injecting a particular version of school reform into the 2008 Presidential election. Strong American Schools' original project was "ED in '08" described as "a sweeping public awareness and action campaign that will mobilize the public and presidential candidates around solutions for the country's education crisis."

Of course a lot depends on what you think the crisis is. Is it our dependence on a teaching corps that in most states has been through the highly ideological training of schools of education and who bring their confused pedagogy to class? Is it our consumerist culture awash in short-term gratifications against which the schools can barely compete? Is it what Charles Murray calls "educational romanticism" that insists that every child can be "above average" and go to college if provided with the right kind of teaching? Is it perhaps an educational system that is dominated by teachers unions more concerned with their prerogatives than with educating students? Could it be the deterioration of academic standards which the No Child Left Behind initiative singled out as the key factor?

By Barrett Seaman

Some 128 college and university presidents have lent their names to a statement questioning the wisdom of the national 21-year-old minimum drinking age. This has re-ignited a long-simmering debate about our nation's approach to the vexing problems of drunk driving and alcohol abuse.

In 1984, Congress chose to attack these two related (but in many ways different) problems with a law that effectively trumped states' rights to decide their own alcohol policies. The law stipulated that any state that not abiding by a 21-year-old minimum drinking age (referred to here as Legal 21) would forfeit ten percent of its federal highway funds. In most cases, that is an enormous sum of money no state can afford to relinquish. By 1988, all 50 states had fallen into line.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and its many friends in Washington hailed the law as a great triumph, claiming in the years since that Legal 21 alone has since been saving between 900 and 1,000 lives a year on the nation's highways. Never mind that during those same years, seatbelts and airbags were made mandatory. Never mind that a worthy and widely absorbed series of public service ads were aired promoting designated drivers. Never mind that at last count, it was people 21 and older who caused nearly 90% of the drunk driving fatalities in the U.S.. As far as MADD and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statisticians are concerned, Legal 21---and Legal 21 alone---deserved all the credit for what was for the first five or six years anyway a significant drop in alcohol-related highway fatalities.

By Anne Neal

The Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) is at it again. In the latest set of rulings to come from this regional accreditor's Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, fifteen institutions find themselves in various states of probation or warning or show cause. No school is shut down; the federal dollars keep flowing. And the public is kept mostly in the dark about the accreditor's actions. But what is clear is WASC's unrelenting interference in the governance of these state-supported institutions.

Under current law, Congress has linked accreditation and federal student aid to prevent students from squandering money on diploma mills. Recognized accreditors are authorized, by law, to serve as a "reliable authority" on the "quality of education or training offered." But the reliance is misplaced. As it turns out, the interests of the accreditors and the federal government are not the same.

At Ohlone College, for example, academic quality is praised. Education is apparently fine. But no matter. The school is placed on warning because the accreditor doesnt like the way the board is functioning and planning.

By Anthony Paletta

(This article originally appeared at Inside Higher Ed)

Dartmouth College is now the latest institution to announce considerable changes to its tuition and financial aid structure, eliminating any charges for students from families making less than $75,000 a year. Dartmouth's arrangement is not nearly so generous as Harvard's or Yale's, yet it's markedly superior in one regard. Dartmouth proposes to offer a scholarship "to allow financial aid recipients to take advantage of research or internship opportunities in their junior year."

Dartmouth's is the most concrete step towards expanding access to internships, in a cycle of financial aid changes where colleges have begun to take explicit note of the fundamental inequities in their accessibility. Several colleges eliminated summer earning expectations for students on financial aid, asserting that the demand that students contribute money toward tuition in summers posed a stark obstacle to the pursuit of less-remunerative internships and volunteer work. All that is undoubtedly true, but the colleges' efforts go nowhere near establishing equality of access to internships.

Why worry? Increasingly, internships are perceived as essential steps to post-college employment, as definitive legs up for job applicants. "Internships are no longer optional, they're required," The New York Times quoted Peter Vogt, author of Career Wisdom for College Students and an adviser to MonsterTrak.com, as saying last month. A 2006 study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers indicated that 62.5 percent of new college hires performed undergraduate internships. Employers responding to association's 2007 Recruiting Benchmarks Survey reported that they offered full-time jobs to almost two-thirds of their interns. Over 30 percent of new hires came from such internal internship programs. Internships undoubtedly enhance employment prospects, but the question is - for whom? The answer, almost invariably, is for students already well-off.

By Roger Rosenblatt
(Harper Collins, $23.95)

"Don't bother to come home if you still have a job," Livi Porterfield called to her husband as he shoved their two groggy children into the 243,000-miles-and-still-rattling Accord, to drive them to school. He blew her a kiss.

The job she referred to was on the faculty of Beet College, forty miles north of Boston, where eighteen-hundred hand-picked, neurotically competitive undergraduates were joined with one-hundred-and-forty-one hand-picked, neurotically competitive professors to instruct them. Beet was a typical small New England college, fortified with brick and crawling with ivy and self-adoration - the sort of place people call charming when they mean sterile.

There Peace Porterfield, the youngest full professor in the school's history, taught English and American literature - which is ordinarily enough to mark a person for disaster. If that didn't do the trick, he also believed in what he did, being committed to an academic discipline said to have exhausted both its material and its usefulness, and patronized by institutions of higher learning like a doddering tenant no longer able to come up with the rent. And if those things didn't do him in, he believed in the value of a liberal arts education, and in colleges in general, from whose sacred waters, he further believed, civilization flowed. Need one glaze the duck? He believed in civilization...