Here’s my reaction when I saw the title of “The Great Accreditation Farce,” Peter Conn’s recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Finally, someone’s telling the truth. Our system of accreditation of colleges is indeed a farce, a waste of “millions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours.” To please external examiners, faculty […]
Read More
Politicians and pundits who argue that college today is financially unsustainable and functionally obsolete are not just arguing for greater efficiency and more reliance on educational technology, they are pushing for a kind of higher education rationing. They may not have the courage to say it outright, but what they are really envisioning is a […]
Read More
A remarkable article on the University of Wisconsin (Madison) appeared yesterday on the John William Pope Center site. In it, UW economics professor W. Lee Hansen writes about a comprehensive diversity plan prepared for the already diversity-obsessed campus. The report, thousands of words long, is mostly eye-glazing diversity babble, filled with terms like “compositional diversity,” […]
Read More
The crusade to weaken due process rights of students accused of sexual assault traveled this week to Dartmouth, which is hosting a one-week conference entitled, “Summit on Sexual Assault.” As FIRE’s Peter Bonilla pointed out, the “matter of due process for accused didn’t make the agenda”; the presenters don’t include any civil libertarians or defense […]
Read More
Most of the sturm and drang about discrimination for the past week or two has involved bitter disputes over recent Supreme Court decisions (Hobby Lobby and Wheaton College) that spared a few Christians from being thrown into the lion’s den of Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate. Now comes a rude reminder that the “Diversity” Vampire is still […]
Read More
Since the 19th century, regionally-based accrediting bodies that use peer-based evaluation have determined which colleges and universities can stay open. Knowing the power that these agencies hold, schools usually march in lockstep to accommodate them. After all, the consequence of losing accreditation means a loss of federal funds (most commonly, student loan dollars). The mission […]
Read More
Here’s some good news for those of us concerned about the lack of due process on campus sexual assault cases. Three women whose sons were brought to campus tribunals on charges of sexual misconduct have just launched Families Advocating for Campus Equality (FACE), an organization committed to “ensuring fairness and due process for all parties […]
Read More
After the Titanic struck the iceberg, the ship’s captain and senior executives were said to be unworried. How could their mighty ship sink? The hubris and arrogance of the ship’s captain and senior officers was astonishing. They seemed to believe that because they were handsomely recompensed, resplendent in their uniforms and saluted by their toadies, […]
Read More
Moody’s Investors Service has a new report on the state of American public higher-education, and it isn’t pretty. Among the negative trends it discusses: The decline in enrollment. Moody’s reports that more than half of America’s public universities saw no growth or declines in fall 2013. The growing importance of tuition. Tuition now constitutes almost half of public […]
Read More
What does the state of on-campus housing tell us about the state of American higher-ed? A lot, as it turns out. Last week NBC News described the growth of a market in palatial student dormitories. Critics have long known that in promoting themselves, colleges tend to highlight their luxurious facilities—not their academic programs. Students, in […]
Read More
Sunday’s New York Times ran a lengthy story on what appears to be a mishandled allegation of sexual assault at Hobart and William Smith. (This was one of at least a dozen articles the Times has run on the topic, even as the “paper of record” has yet to run even one article on any […]
Read More
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) provider Coursera wants to change the way we think about the revolutionary learning platform. In response to arguments that MOOCs are too impersonal, in November it announced partnerships with nine institutions that would create thirty “learning hubs,” where students taking the same MOOC could physically meet to discuss the course […]
Read More
The news media took little notice when 14 organizations and religious leaders, including Rick Warren, Christianity Today and Catholic Charities, sent a letter to President Obama last week seeking religious exemptions from his forthcoming executive order barring federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. But the Boston Globe and gay activists noticed […]
Read More
Over the past several months, Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri) has emerged as the Senate’s most ferocious opponent of campus due process. One of the upper chamber’s unequivocal defenders of the Office for Civil Rights, McCaskill also attempted to browbeat the American Council of Education for representing its members, and convened several town hall sessions on campus […]
Read More
If you’re feeling hopeless about the apathy of today’s college students, check out FIRE’s latest video. Entitled “Don’t Shut Up–Stand Up For Speech!,” it highlights students who’ve asserted their First Amendment rights in defiance of hostile administrators and professors. The video also informs students of FIRE’s role in assisting such students. Check it out here:
Read More
Bill Powers, embattled for years as president of the University of Texas at Austin, appears at last to be facing his Alamo. On Thursday, the UT Board of Regents will meet and Powers, mired in controversy over costs and mission, is expected to either resign or be fired. A face-saving compromise would be to let […]
Read More
As everyone knows by now, the Supreme Court has just held in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (discussed here) that requiring the owners of a closely held family business to provide employees abortifacients that violated their sincerely held religious beliefs was barred by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (passed virtually unanimously by a Democrat-controlled Congress and […]
Read More
I’ve long believed that the main threat to liberal education—real higher education, in my view—is our tendency to judge the success of academics in technical terms. Too often, social critics attack tenured humanities professors for their inefficiency and poor productivity. Though they think they’re saving higher education, these pundits are harming higher-ed more than political […]
Read More
The Washington Post has helpfully compiled a table, using Clery Act statistics, of allegations of campus sexual assaults in 2012 (the last year for which figures are available, including all schools with 1000 or more students). To put it mildly, the data do not substantiate White House claims of a virtually unprecedented violent crime wave […]
Read More
The College Board recently released its new AP U.S. History (APUSH) Curriculum Framework. It is, in many respects, a dispiriting document. A great deal of important U.S. history is given cursory treatment and some ideological themes are sounded rather loudly.
Read More