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February 5, 2012
By John S. Rosenberg
On February 2 Daniel
Golden, former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of a highly
regarded book on college admissions, reported
in Bloomberg's Business Week that Harvard and Princeton are being
investigated by the Dept. of Education's Office for Civil Rights for
discrimination against Asians.
It's not the first time. In
fact, for the past decade or so there has been a rising tide of accusations
that the Ivies and other selective institutions treat Asians as the "new
Jews" (referring to quotas on Jews in the Ivies and elsewhere early in the
20th Century, and often beyond), holding them to much higher admission
standards than applicants from other groups in order to prevent their "over
representation" and thus make room for the "under-represented" blacks and
Hispanics admitted under much lower affirmative action standards.
Continue reading "Let's Be Frank about Anti-Asian Admission Policies" »
February 3, 2012
By KC Johnson Richard Perez-Pena's New York Times article on Patrick Witt consisted of
little more than dubious inferences and negative insinuations. But the
story did, unequivocally, feature one revelation: someone (presumably either in
the accuser's entourage or a Yale administrator) violated Yale's procedures by
leaking existence of the "informal" complaint against Witt--with the motive of
torpedoing his Rhodes candidacy. In
combination with the Times'
irresponsible reporting, this violation of procedures caused enormous damage to
Witt's reputation. Yet there's no sign that Yale has undertaken an investigation
as to whether a university employee violated Yale procedures and Witt's due
process rights, and an e-mail to Yale's P.R. office asking if such an inquiry
was planned went unanswered.
Continue reading "Patrick Witt and Yale's Disastrous Failure" »
February 2, 2012
By Nathan Harden
These days, the agenda of the academic elite can be boiled down to a few
liberal buzzwords. The most important buzzword is "diversity," which
is usually nothing more than a code word for reverse discrimination and
skin-deep identity politics. Recently, at Northwestern, they held a "race caucus" where
150 people gathered to discuss their experiences with discrimination on campus.
Students then gathered at the school's House of African-American Affairs to
form a new group called "The Collective." It was an ironic venue for
the first meeting since the purpose of the group is to encourage
"desegregation" on campus. In keeping with this ironic approach to
fighting racial injustice, Columbia University president Lee Bollinger recently
celebrated Martin Luther King's dream of racial equality by promoting
institutionalized racism in the form of racial preferences in college
admissions.
Continue reading "Four College Buzzwords and a Shameless Plug" »
January 30, 2012
By Jackson Toby Some Penn State alumni, outraged over the Board of
Trustees peremptory firing of Coach Joe Paterno, are organizing a campaign to
elect three new trustees. The objective
of Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship is, ultimately, to oust the current
Board. The Board fired Paterno, two
University officials and the University President for not responding forcefully
to accusations of child sexual abuse
in the football-team shower room. Many
alumni, including hundreds who met with the new President at hotels in the Pittsburgh,
New York City, and Philadelphia areas recently, were outraged that the Board
had not verified the accusations before acting. According to indignant alumni, the Penn State Board of
Trustees confused two separate, unequal cases.
One case was possible perjury before a grand jury by Tim Curley, the
Athletic Director, and Gary Schultz, the senior vice-president in charge of the Penn State
Police. The second case was the charge
against Jerry Sandusky that he possibly sexually molested a young boy in the
Penn State football-team shower room. Curley and Schultz were suspected of lying to conceal
discreditable behavior damaging to the reputation of the Penn
State football program. Guilty or
innocent, they face enormous legal costs to mount a defense against the perjury
charge. If convicted, they will probably
go to prison. But the evidence for the indictment
for perjury is weak. It rests entirely
on the grand jury testimony of assistant football coach Mike McQueary in the fall of 2011 about what he saw nine years earlier
when he was in his early twenties. McQueary remembered being shocked when he
accidentally observed in the shower room of the Penn State football team what
appeared to be a former coach sexually molesting a pre-adolescent boy. Here is how the Washington Post described McQueary's account of the 2002 incident when called
as a witness in a District Court hearing last December 16:
Continue reading "Second Thoughts About Joe Paterno" »
January 29, 2012
By Charlotte Allen
It's happening, almost overnight:
what could be the collapse of the near-monopoly that traditional
brick-and-mortar colleges and universities currently enjoy as respected
credentialing institutions whose degrees and grades mean something to
employers.
The most dramatic development,
just a few days ago, was the decision of robotics-expert Sebastian Thrun to
resign from his position as a tenured professor of computer science at Stanford
in order to start an online university he calls Udacity that he hopes will
reach hundreds of thousands of students who either can't afford Stanford's
$40,000-a-year tuition or who can't travel thousands of miles to one of the
bricks-and-mortar classes he used to teach.
This past fall Thrun and Peter
Norvig, research director at Google (where Thrun also works, designing cars that
drive themselves), teamed up to teach online and free of charge one of their
regular Stanford courses, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, not just to
Stanford students but to anyone who wanted to take them. Not only would the
online students sit through Thrun and Norvig's lectures, but the two
instructors would test them via quizzes and written assignments, grade their
work, and assign them a class ranking. Only Stanford students would be eligible
to receive Stanford credit for the course, but non-Stanfordians would receive a
"statement of achievement" that, together with their grades and class rankings,
could be used to demonstrate that they had mastered the Stanford-level material
in the course.
Continue reading "Has the Higher-Ed Revolution Begun?" »
January 27, 2012
By John S. Rosenberg
When Justice John Paul Stevens retired from the Supreme Court in
2010 ABC
News noted that over the course of his 34 years on the Court he "became
a hero to liberals[,] voting to ...
uphold affirmative action" and other liberal causes. Now he has written an
autobiography, Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court
Memoir, ruminating on that long, liberal career. Regarding affirmative
action, however, those ruminations are misleadingly selective.
U.S.
News World Report interviewed
Justice Stevens a few days ago about his memoir, claiming that he "gives candid
views of the five chief justices he has worked with, as well as his take on
some of the most significant cases in U.S. history." I don't know about the
other "most significant cases," but Justice Stevens' very brief references to
affirmative action in Five Chiefs and
his comments about it to U.S. News
are considerably less than candid.
Continue reading "Ex-Justice: Civil Rights Act 'Poorly Considered'" »
January 25, 2012
By Richard Vedder
Every decade or so, Charles Murray writes a blockbuster book captivating America. First came Losing Ground, focusing attention on our dysfunctional system of public assistance, and, along with Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve, a controversial but rigorous examination of the role played by cognitive endowments in American life. I suspect his new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, will be another mega hit. Based on a quick read, Murray demonstrates the growing gaps between affluent upper-middle-class Americans and their blue-collar, lower-income counterparts. He confines his analysis to whites to avoid all sorts of unrelated side issues, including the tendency to see the growing gap between Americans as primarily a problem of race, ethnicity or bias.
Murray's thesis is simple: a powerful new class has emerged in America, based on cognitive and educational homogamy--the interbreeding of individuals with like characteristics. Colleges and universities have played a key role--particularly the elite institutions, which attract almost no one outside the top ten percent of the nation's cognitive talent. (Fifty years ago, only three percent of Americans graduated from college, and the elite institutions tended to attract the well-connected and the economically successful, not necessarily the brightest.) These institutions now function as sorting mechanisms. The exceptionally bright now tend to meet and then marry similarly bright partners. In addition to building a culture vastly different from that of mainstream America, they perpetuate the advantages that high levels of cognitive skills offer. As a result, Murray concludes, "Highly disproportionate numbers of exceptionally able children in the next generation will come from parents in the upper-middle class, and more specifically from parents who are already part of the broad elite." As the new class pulls away from mainstream America, so does the discouraged underclass--now made up of all ethnicities--giving up on work, family and community.
Continue reading "How Universities Promote the "Coming Apart" of America" »
January 23, 2012
By KC Johnson
In a ruling
likely to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Montana Supreme Court last
month upheld the state constitution's
prohibition on corporations directly spending on state campaigns. For
those concerned with academic matters, the case is important for reasons quite
unrelated to political debates about Citizens United. In a
significant case involving history (the Montana
court relied heavily upon the scholarship and words of historians to reach its
conclusions), all the books cited were more than 35 years old. And that wasn't
a coincidence: the kind of U.S. history relevant
to influencing legal and public policy debates increasingly has been banished
from an academy obsessed with scholarship organized around the
race/class/gender trinity.
Continue reading "The Ruinous Reign of Race-and-Gender Historians" »
January 19, 2012
By Charlotte Allen
It may be inevitable: "gainful employment" rules
for law schools. "Gainful employment" is a term of art coined in the
wake of the U.S. Education Department's regulations last June governing
for-profit colleges and similar vocational institutions from which many
students emerge with student-loan debt and few prospects for working at jobs
they were trained for. It now turns out that America's law schools have a few
things in common with the proprietary sector: Both feature sky-high tuition
relative to students' ability to pay without taking on substantial debt, and
many former students of both kinds of institutions have trouble earning enough
money to pay back the loans made or guaranteed by the federal government that
taxpayers must eventually cover.
The Education Department now plans to limit or deny federal grants and loans to
students at for-profit schools that cannot demonstrate that relatively large
percentages of their former students are paying off their student debt in
timely fashion and in amounts that don't exceed certain set percentages of
their income. That's what "gainful employment" means. This past fall
two U.S. U.S. senators, Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), sent a letter
to Kathleen Tighe, the Education Department's inspector general, that appeared
to be a first step in subjecting law schools to similar controls. The senators
asked the department to provide "transparency" information (presumably
to be obtained from the law schools themselves) regarding tuition costs, bar
passage rates, job placement rates (including a breakdown as to whether the
jobs are full-time or part-time and whether they require a law degree), and the
amount of federal and private education-loan debt students carry on graduation.
The next step could well be a shutoff of the federal-aid spigot to law
schools--the same sanction that for-profit schools face--if substantial portions
of graduates aren't earning enough to pay back their law-school loans.
Continue reading "The Perils of Law Schools and Their Rankings" »
January 18, 2012
Cross-posted from NAS.
By Peter Wood
Several weeks ago, KC Johnson--a
scholar I much admire, not least for his fearless dedication to
principle--published an essay on Minding
the Campus under the title, "Keeton
Defense Contradicts NAS Principles."
We offered Professor Johnson the opportunity to re-post his article or
contribute a further statement on the NAS website. He accepted and posted both the article and an addendum of about the same length
as his original.
I would like to respond in defense
of the NAS's position. But, first, for
those who haven't followed the controversy, a summary. Keeton So Far
It concerns a court case in
Georgia. Jennifer Keeton was a graduate
student at Augusta State University (ASU) where she began studying for a degree
in Counselor Education in fall 2009. She
completed two regular semesters and two summer sessions but was then dismissed
from the program because she refused to participate in a "remediation plan"
that was designed either to change her views on homosexuality or convince her
to misrepresent those views. Miss
Keeton, citing her Christian beliefs, held that homosexuality is a form of
"identity confusion," and had stated this view in class. The faculty members involved rejected her
view and cited it as "a violation of the codes of ethics to which counselors
and counselors-in-training are required to adhere." The remediation plan to which she was
assigned singled out Miss Keeton's view that homosexuality is a "lifestyle,"
and posited that "sexual orientation is not a lifestyle or choice, but a state
of being." (The quotations are from
Keeton's complaint
in U.S. District Court, July 21, 2010.)
Continue reading "The Keeton Case--An Abuse of Academic Power" »
January 15, 2012
By Robert Weissberg
The campus diversity warriors are once again pounding at
the gates. This time the pounding comes from on high--the American Political
Science Association (APSA) itself. It is a serious clamor: a 76 page report
called Political Science in the 21st
Century authored by fourteen professors, many from elite research-oriented
schools such as Berkeley and UCLA. The report received National Science
Foundation money plus ample professional funding.
It is a curious document since nearly every university,
top to bottom, has for decades sought diversity, and has even been willing to
over-pay and compromise traditional academic standards. The Task Force includes
Diane Pinderhuges, past president of the APSA and my former colleague (and
friend) for 20-plus years. The two of us regularly sat in the same room
discussing how our department could be more inclusive and heard all the
administration entreatments to hire yet more blacks and Hispanics.
Continue reading "Look Who's Endorsing a Race-Based View of Knowledge" »
January 11, 2012
These are the opening
statements of a luncheon debate co-sponsored by the Manhattan Institute's Center for the American
University and the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. The
debate, held January 11 at the Harvard Club In New York City, pitted George
Leef, research director of the Pope Center, against Peter Sacks, economist and
author of Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American
Education. The moderator was Howard Husock, Manhattan Institute's vice president for policy research.
YES--George Leef
In my time this afternoon, I hope to persuade you that the
United States has greatly oversold higher education. We have done that through heavy government subsidies and
extravagant rhetoric from both politicians and higher education leaders that
created the impression that high-paying jobs were waiting for anyone who
completed a college degree.
Just as we caused a destructive, resource-wasting housing
bubble by pushing the idea that home ownership was good for almost everyone, so
have we caused a resource-wasting higher education bubble. Large numbers of people have gone to college
and obtained degrees costing a great deal of money and time, only to find that
there aren't nearly enough of those good jobs to go around. The analogy to the housing bubble isn't perfect, however. At
least the houses that were built were generally of good construction.
Continue reading "Are Too Many People Going to College?" »
January 6, 2012
By Charlotte Allen
There's something even worse than undergraduate debt. It's
graduate-school debt. According to the American Student Assistance website,
which uses figures from such sources as the National Center for Education
Statistics, the College Board, and the nonprofit Finaid.org, 60 percent of
recipients of bachelor's' degrees borrowed to fund their education during the
2000s, with the average debt load per borrower on graduation close to $23,000
by 2007. By 2010 that figure had jumped to more than $25,000 per
borrower, according to the Institute for College Access's Project on Student
Debt.
Those numbers sound bad, but what if you go on to obtain a
master's degree, adding another one or two years' worth of education to your
resume? According to American Student Assistance, nearly half of those who
obtained master-of-science degrees during the late 2000s borrowed to finance
their schooling, and their average cumulative debt load for those two years was
$29,975--on top of what they already owed for their bachelor's degrees. Of
recipients of master-of-arts degrees, degrees that typically qualify their
holders mostly for low-paying teaching jobs at community colleges and private
high schools, 61 percent borrowed to finance their two additional years of
education, with a per-borrower average debt of $29,975.
Continue reading "For Crippling Debt, Why Not Try Grad School?" »
January 4, 2012
By Harvey A.
Silverglate
Although
our beleaguered universities continue their seemingly inexorable march from
being institutions of higher education to resembling, more and more, political
and social re-education camps for the young, every now and then the students
demonstrate that they remain well ahead of campus administrations and faculties
when it comes to appreciating the true role of our colleges and universities: It appears that our universities' efforts at
attitudinal indoctrination have not been wholly successful.
We see the latest example at Harvard in an editorial in the
college newspaper The Harvard Crimson. Headlined "A University, Not A Think Tank: Harvard should not issue a
formal position on inequality" (The Harvard Crimson, December 14, 2011),
the undergraduate journalists take their professors to task for continuing on
the perilous journey of politicizing the institution by seeking to have the school,
in the editorial's words, "use its position to make a statement against social
inequalities."
Continue reading "Will Harvard Stop Trying to Impose Orthodoxies?" »
January 3, 2012
By Kate Hamilton
Cross-posted from National Association of Scholars.
Fall 2011 has seen some major milestones for the SAT/ACT
optional movement. DePaul University, for instance, initiated its first
admission cycle sans test requirement. Clark University announced
last month that it will offer test-optional admissions for the incoming class
of 2013.
In his new book released this fall titled SAT Wars, sociologist
Joseph A. Soares of Wake Forest University hails the success of test-optional
admission policies. Wake Forest was the first of the top 30 U.S. News schools
to go test-optional and is one of the most vocal cheerleaders of the movement
through its blog Rethinking
Admissions. According to Soares, adopting policies that allow
applicants to opt out of reporting their scores has successfully resulted in
diversifying these campuses by race, gender, ethnicity, and class (groups he
claims are excluded unfairly for underperforming on standardized tests) without
compromising overall academic quality. By all appearances, requirements for standardized testing in
higher ed admissions is on the long and ragged road out the door. To date
nearly 850 colleges and
universities (40% of all accredited, bachelor-degree granting schools in
the country) have already bidden farewell to the test requirement in some form
or another. 53 of these institutions are currently listed in the top tier on
the "Best Liberal Arts Colleges" list published by U.S. News and World Report including
Bowdoin, Smith, Bates, Holy Cross, and Mount Holyoke Colleges. Even some of U.S.
News' high ranking national universities, such as Wake Forest University,
Worcester Polytechnic Institute and American University, are categorized as
test-optional. It now seems likely that this trend will only gain in
popularity and momentum in the coming years.
Continue reading "It's Not the Test's Fault" »
January 2, 2012
By Hans Bader  Keeping quiet can seal your fate if you
are a professor facing a campus kangaroo court after being accused of
racial "harassment" over your classroom speech. Free-speech
advocates use
adverse publicity to save wrongly-accused professors from being
convicted and fired. They put to good use Justice Brandeis's
observation that publicity cures social
evils, just as sunlight is a disinfectant.
But as the plight of Lawrence Connell at Widener University illustrates, if an accused professor speaks up, resulting in possible adverse publicity for his accusers, he risks being punished for "retaliation" against them, even when harassment charge is baseless. Connell was convicted of "retaliation" because he and his lawyer denounced meritless racial harassment charges against him over his classroom teaching. Retaliation charges have become a growing threat to academic freedom, fueled by court rulings that provide murky and conflicting guidance as to what speech can constitute illegal "retaliation."
Continue reading "A Law Professor Takes on the Victimhood Industry" »
December 28, 2011
By Michael W. Massey
 At a time when higher education is essential for succeeding
in a global economy, America finds itself at a crossroad. We have a vast
university system that can't accommodate the demand because the cost is
prohibitive. The bricks and mortar
campus simply doesn't scale. The alternative is a disruptive game - changer
that requires low investment and self- directed learning. It's online learning,
and it's growing at warp speed.
With a growing amount of the world's knowledge openly available
on the Web and increasing daily, people can access much of it--free. Admissions
exams and inconvenient commutes are out-of-date.
Welcome to the golden age of self-directed learning (SDL) that promises
free access, rapidly increasing quality, and advanced educational content. SDL
is growing up and going to scale. Stanford University just concluded three
experimental, free-and-open-access computer science courses that are identical
to its on-campus versions except for online versus F2F delivery....
Continue reading "Can Online Learning Meet 21st Century Demands?" »
December 27, 2011
By John Leo What were the best books of the year on higher education? A
panel of ten prominent people in the field, invited to vote by Minding the
Campus, picked as their top two choices, "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning
on College Campuses" by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa; and "Crazy U: One Dad's
Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College" by Andrew Ferguson. Both books take a largely negative view of today's colleges
and universities. Arum and Roksa, both sociologists, take a straightforward
approach to surveys and analysis of the limited learning on our campuses, while
Ferguson, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a well-known conservative
writer, is darkly humorous about the results of his consistently impressive reportage. "Academically Adrift" was a top choice of 9 of the 10 voting
members of the panel, all asked to name from one to five books... "Crazy U." was
picked by six voters. Four books drew three votes: "In the Basement of the
Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic" by Professor X; "The Fall
of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It
Matters" by Benjamin Ginsberg; "The Faculty Lounges and Other Reasons Why You
Won't Get the College Education You Pay For" by Naomi Schaefer Riley; and "The
Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out"
by Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring.
Continue reading "Best Books of 2011" »
December 22, 2011
By Frank J. Macchiarola and Michael C.
Macchiarola
 As law schools have come under fire
on many fronts, the growing cost of tuition has drawn the most attention. This
is not surprising, given the shrinking job market for lawyers and tuition
increases that have far outpaced the general cost of living for more than two
decades. Put directly, one of us, a pre-law advisor (Frank), tells
students that if they can't afford the cost of a legal education, without
loans, they should think about other careers. This is generally a painful
conversation, but we strongly believe it is an honest one, particularly given
the lower-middle-class economic status of most of our students. Debt is
choking too many recent law graduates, bringing
anger and unhappiness into their lives. Further, the monopolistic
structure surrounding access to the legal profession, largely a result of the ABA's law school approval
process, denies many the chance to become lawyers. Within the last week, another law school was denied
provisional accreditation, for reasons unspecified publicly, but probably due
to the failure to meet standards that would have required greater financial
investment (and hence higher tuition) in the enterprise.
Continue reading "What's Wrong with the Law Schools" »
December 20, 2011
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