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.

                                       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.

                                         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.

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.

                                      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.

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.)

                                         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 21^st 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.

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.

                                         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.

                                     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."

                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.

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."