In the last few months, there's been a flurry of articles in the mainstream press acknowledging the same problem: a paucity of high-achieving, low-income students at elite colleges. "Better Colleges Failing to Lure Talented Poor," says the New York Times. ABC tells us "Colleges Struggle to Connect With High-Achieving Poor Students." Likewise, NPR is concerned that "Elite Colleges Struggle To Recruit Smart, Low-Income Kids."

Why does it matter that top-performing low-income students aren't making it into the best schools? After all, many other above-average schools would be happy to accept them and even give them adequate grant or scholarship money. And its likely that a worthy degree from a competitive institution would give these students at least a decent shot at moving up the income ladder.  Harvard grad Ross Douthat has an answer that Ivy-leaguers knew long ago: "...elite universities are about connecting more than learning... the social world matters far more than the classroom to undergraduates." The absence of low-income students in elite higher education underscores its failure to facilitate social advancement. 

By Richard Vedder

One of the things that strikes me about modern universities is the inordinate amount of lying that goes on -both by institutions and members of the university communities- and how little is done about it. As respect for moral absolutes is replaced with a mushy moral relativism, perhaps a decline in honesty is to be expected. But for people who regard universities as bastions of truth and integrity, this is rather disappointing.

Let's start with universities lying about themselves. A good example is the increasing number of incidents of universities inflating admission statistics to improve their ranking in magazines. A year or so, we were shocked to hear that already highly regarded Claremont McKenna College had inflated average SAT scores of its students; the most recent of several similar incidents involves York University in Pennsylvania. In a world where the "bottom line" is murky, magazine rankings serve a useful function by providing consumers information otherwise unavailable. Since SAT scores and similar metrics are important, there are temptations to lie in order to improve the published rank.

By Peter Augustine Lawler

It's hard to find a "serious" commencement speech that isn't about remembering that there's more to life than power and money. And that the secrets of a successful life include following your passion and finding purpose, not to mention giving back to your community. The president's speech at Morehouse had a few of these insipid moments, to be sure.

Still, you expect political leaders and public intellectuals to also aim higher. This challenge was especially daunting for President Obama at Morehouse.  Morehouse, our leading historically black college, is about educating men. And the question is whether even our president can rise to a level that's impressive to such men, to classy gentlemen, to men who've been educated to know who they are and what they're supposed to do. Morehouse men are like Southern gentlemen, only better.  They're better because what they've achieved has been in spite of the injustices they suffered, and because they've been ennobled by both their American and their African heritages. There's little more formidable than seeing that combination displayed in the highly disciplined and beautifully manly performance of the Morehouse glee club.  

By Peter Wood

"F*** Your Constructive Dialogue" reads the headline of an article by Kate Aronoff that's posted on a website that "seeks to facilitate the discussion of political, cultural, and social issues that are often left out of mainstream discourse."  (The asterisks, as Stanley Kurtz nicely put it, are not in the original.)

Ms. Aronoff is a student at Swarthmore College and a leader in the movement on her campus to persuade the college trustees to divest the college's holdings in companies that produce or sell fossil fuels.  Kurtz has taken the lead among outside observers in tracking the extraordinary departures from civil exchange and academic principle that have unfolded on the suburban Philadelphia campus as the movement has asserted itself.

By Cathy Young

A few months ago, a post with a shocking claim about misogyny in America began to circulate on Tumblr, the social media site popular with older teens and young adults.  It featured a scanned book page section stating that, according to "recent survey data," when junior high school students in the Midwest were asked what they would do if they woke up "transformed into the opposite sex," the girls showed mixed emotions but the boys' reaction was straightforward: "'Kill myself' was the most common answer when they contemplated the possibility of life as a girl."  The original poster--whose comment was, "Wow"--identified the source as her "Sex & Gender college textbook," The Gendered Society by Michael Kimmel.

The post quickly caught on with Tumblr's radical feminist contingent: in less than three months, it was reblogged or "liked" by over 33,000 users. Some appended their own comments, such as, "Yeah, tell me again how misogyny 'isn't real' and men and boys and actually 'like,' 'love' and 'respect the female sex'?  This is how deep misogynistic propaganda runs... As Germaine Greer said, 'Women have no idea how much men hate them.'"

According to a new report released by the American Association of University Professors, the gap between the salaries of faculty at private and public universities is widening.  The "Annual Report on the Status of the Profession" found that at the public institutions, full professors averaged $118,054 and assistant professors $69,777, while at the privates full professors' average salary was $157,282 and assistant professors' $86,189.

Even while the rest of the economy struggles, the last decade has been a flush time for private institutions, with endowments surging an average of 19.2 percent in 2011 and 11.9 percent in 2010, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Meanwhile things have gone steeply downhill for public colleges and universities as legislatures across the country have cut back on appropriations for higher education and, at the same time, have imposed ceilings on tuition increases.  The financial squeeze has taken a toll on the quality of instruction offered at some of our best public institutions.  Unfortunately, the situation is likely to get worse in the years ahead, given the condition of state and federal budgets.  

By Harvey Silverglate and Juliana DeVries

In a breathtakingly bold move, the civil rights offices of both the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have mandated the effective abolition of free speech on college campuses, as well as the almost certain conviction of large numbers of students, many of whom will be innocent, of "harassment." Neither justice nor education will be well served.

The ED/DOJ's disturbing and unconstitutional May 9^th letter, mandating changes in sexual assault and harassment procedures and standards, arose out of a joint ED/DOJ investigation and evaluation at the University of Montana, Missoula. The ED and DOJ addressed their letter to the university president, but more broadly described it as "a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country to protect students from sexual harassment and assault." In other words, any college or university receiving federal funding (which includes nearly all of them) risks losing that funding, if it does not comply with the standards laid out in the letter. 

By KC Johnson

Students at Stanford are the latest to fall victim to the assault on due process mandated by the "Dear Colleague" letter. Last week, the university's faculty senate approved the "Alternative Review Process," an across-the-board diminution of due process rights for Stanford students accused of sexual assault.

The Office of Civil Rights' "Dear Colleague" letter, to review, mandates that colleges lower due process in two respects: weakening the burden of proof from the clear and convincing standard to the preponderance of evidence standard; and introducing a form of double jeopardy by allowing accusers to appeal when an accused student is found not guilty in a college disciplinary process. In addition, the letter strongly encourages a third change--prohibiting an accused student from cross-examining his accuser--that, when coupled with the usual requirement that accused students not be represented by counsel in disciplinary proceedings, effectively ensures that no cross-examination of the accuser will occur.

By Peter Sacks

The higher-education story of the week is about cost: colleges and universities are cutting prices. At least that's the impression one gets from media coverage of the annual report from the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). "Colleges Cut Prices by Providing More Financial Aid," states the Wall Street Journal. "Private U.S. colleges, worried they could be pricing themselves out of the market after years of relentless tuition increases, are offering record financial assistance to keep classrooms full."

Many colleges are "lowering" prices, but not because they're messing with their hefty sticker prices. In fact, American colleges and universities engage in a massive system of price discrimination, offering students varying discounts from the sticker price depending on family income and assets, number of children in college, and other family financial factors. While the amount of the discount largely depends on a family's ability to pay for college, many colleges also offer price breaks to students based on "merit," as measured by SAT scores and high school GPA. 

By KC Johnson

The End of Sex is a frustrating book. Author Donna Freitas, a self-described feminist, has written a thoughtful and richly-researched study of how the sexual culture on contemporary campuses shortchanges many college students. She draws from a rich data base, namely, a multi-year survey of students at different colleges supplemented by the author's own experience in residential or student life. Yet Freitas' recommendations--based around a call for faculty and administrators to guide students more in such matters--would almost certainly make things worse, given the professoriate's ideological alignment.

Freitas detects three basic characteristics to hookup culture: some form of sexual intimacy; which is brief, lasting no more than a few hours over a single night; and which is intended to be purely physical, not anything approaching emotional attachments. "If a person brackets all emotions and feelings of attachment," she argues, "a hookup becomes an efficient form of sexual interaction. Today's students tend to be overcommitted and extremely busy, and they don't have the time (or at least are socialized to believe they don't have the time) to get serious about any one person," leading to a practice that "creates a drastic divide between physical intimacy and emotional intimacy."

By Richard Vedder

In the highly competitive free market economy that propelled the United States into our planet's richest nation, business enterprises making mistakes pay huge and sometimes fatal consequences. Indeed it is what Joseph Schumpeter aptly called "creative destruction" that forces firms to be productive, efficient, innovative, and willing to take risks. Contrast this to higher education.  Schools that make mistakes suffer minor but not grievous consequences. The top three schools in 1900 (Harvard, Yale, Princeton) are usually regarded as the top three today.

I looked at the Fortune 500 list for 1993. Of the top 20 companies, more than one third have undergone radical change. Three have gone bankrupt, although they still survive: General Motors, Chrysler, and Eastman Kodak. The Kodak stockholders have been almost completely wiped out and Chrysler has been sold. Three oil companies ceased to exist, being merged into larger companies (Mobil, Texaco, and Amoco). Philip Morris has undergone a fundamental transformation and has divided itself into several entities. Others have had their standing radically change for the better (Berkshire Hathaway went from 158 to 7, Apple from 67 to 17), or worse (Boeing went from 14 to 39, United Technologies from 18 to 48).]]> http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/05/what_will_convulsive_change_do.html http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2013/05/what_will_convulsive_change_do.html Sun, 05 May 2013 15:05:10 -0500

By Peter Sacks

In my 1996 book Generation X Goes to College, I predicted that virtually anyone with a computer and a modem would have access to the storehouse of human knowledge. As a result, higher education as we know would become an anachronism, if not obsolete. The university's status would diminish because it would lose its competitive advantage in disseminating information. 

The recent emergence of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), however, raises obvious questions.  Are these new teaching methods as effective, in terms of student performance, as real-life classrooms? Can these new technologies bring down higher education costs? Former Princeton president William G. Bowen takes on these questions and others in his new book Higher-Ed in the Digital Age. Once a skeptic, Bowen now concludes that online learning programs will reduce the cost of higher education without harming student learning outcomes.  

By Robert Weissberg

Charles and David Koch are reportedly interested in buying the Tribune Company's eight newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun. According to The New York Times, this is less about making a profit than acquiring a platform to extol the brothers' laissez-faire ideas. Current estimates put the price tag at about $623 million (privately owned Koch Industries have annual revenues of about $115 billion).

Leaving aside the obvious arguments about buying dinosaurs and whether the brothers could ideologically re-shape these papers, let me suggest a better investment--establish an undergraduate college heavy on the humanities and social sciences (including economics) that recruits only top students. (David Koch took a step in this academic direction in 2007 when he gave $100 million to MIT for the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research). In a nutshell, it's better to create an elite alternative to today's left-leaning academy than to exercise the owner's droit de seigneur to write weekly op-eds on the evils of Washington's regulation. The Koch boys surely must appreciate how innovation can destroy the old economic order and higher education is no exception. Moreover, creating a college via a 501(c)(3) foundation would provide huge tax savings, perhaps even making the enterprise "free." 

PETER WOOD: Samuel Goldman seeks to distinguish the small and marginal subset "conservative defenders of liberal education" from other kinds of conservatives. He places these poor folks "in a blind alley." They are, he says, at odds both with "potential allies outside the conservative movement" and with the conservative movement itself, which finds its center of gravity in something other than the preservation of civilization. He then offers friendly advice as to how we conservative defenders of liberal education can find an exit from that alley. Make friends, he says, with people who are not political conservatives but who "take pride in their status as conservators of a cultural inheritance."

I take it by "conservative defenders of liberal education" he means folks like the members of the National Association of Scholars. Good advice, but as it happens, we are already there and have been for the last 25 years. A sizable portion of the NAS membership is made up of people who are registered Democrats. Some of our board members, some of our prominent donors, and some of the scholars who write for our journal Academic Questions emphatically identify themselves as "liberal," and by that they do not mean libertarian. And NAS tirelessly explains to those in the media who insist we are a "conservative" organization that, no, we are an organization that focuses squarely on improving American higher education by advocating for the continuing relevance of reasoned inquiry, the pursuit of truth, and the centrality of Western civilization. We never defined those as "conservative" principles. And in fact they are not. They appeal to some conservatives, which is great. But they also appeal to some liberals, which is also great.  

By Samuel Goldman

What's conservative about liberal education? On any serious consideration, the answer is: a lot. Students do pick up marketable skills when they take classes in literature, history, or philosophy. But the real purpose of studying languages, books, and arguments is to initiate them as members of a community of free men and women, the present and future of which are heavily influenced by its dual origins in Athens and Jerusalem. In a recent essay for Minding the Campus, Peter Augustine Lawler described this task as "cultural transmission"--a term than could almost be derived from postmodern theory. It would be more conservative to use the still intelligible Latinate term tradition, which literally means "handing over."

Liberal education, then, has a distinctly conservative function. But that does not give it any necessary connection to conservative views on other matters, let alone approval for the Republican Party. Rather than confusing a cultural function with a partisan program, defenders of liberal education should pursue alliances with educational "conservatives" of the center and left.