Will the Surge of Support for Free Speech on Campus Do Any Good?
Last month, PEN America, the U.S. branch of an international organization, published a strong defense of free speech on college campuses. The nearly century-old group stands for the idea that “People...
View ArticleStudents Need Much Better Counseling Before Going Into Debt for College
American college students have taken to saying that they need “safe spaces” on campus. They really don’t, since all they’re after is “safety” from ideas they dislike. But if they were thinking ahead to...
View ArticleWill We, at Last, Do Something About Accreditation?
Accreditation is supposed to act as a quality guarantee for colleges and universities, but it works very poorly. Students can and regularly do graduate from accredited schools without having learned...
View ArticleWhen a University Regent Tries to Blow the Whistle: The Wallace Hall Case
Like all public universities, the University of Texas has a governing body that is supposed to oversee its management—the Board of Regents. Trouble can arise when a member of such a governing body...
View ArticleStudent Loan Forgiveness: Uncle Sam’s Generosity Will Cost Much More than...
When politicians and Education Department bureaucrats began designing policies to lessen college students’ federal loan burdens, they weren’t concerned much with the cost to the taxpayers. Their...
View ArticleThe Department of Education De-Accredits an Accreditor
The final year of the U.S. Department of Education in the Obama administration is noteworthy for all its carnage. In September, the large ITT Tech chain of schools, which had operated in 38 states, was...
View ArticleNo More Federal Student Aid Money for Charlotte School of Law
On December 19, the U.S. Department of Education announced that as of the end of the year, it would no longer allow students to use federal aid money at the Charlotte School of Law (CSL). The reason...
View ArticleShouldn’t an Entire Campus Be a Free Speech Zone—Not Just .02 Percent of It?
(Editor’s note: This article first appeared on Forbes.com.) Hostility to free speech has become a salient characteristic of American college campuses. Speech codes that make it dangerous for students...
View ArticleEither Support Our Politics or Find Another Field
The authoritarianism that increasingly characterizes the American professoriate is on full display in a case involving the master’s program in social work at Rhode Island College (RIC). A student who...
View ArticleHillary Clinton Lost, But Her “Free” College Idea Lives On
During last week’s hearings on President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, Senator Bernie Sanders asked her, “Will you work with me and others to make public colleges and...
View ArticleThe Spread of “New Civics” Is Cause for Alarm
One of the ways the college curriculum has changed for the worse in recent decades is the rise of what David Randall terms “the New Civics” in a hefty report published in January by the National...
View ArticleSweeping Change at the Office for Civil Rights Is Imperative
Nowhere is the adage “personnel is policy” truer than in the federal education bureaucracy. With nothing more than a few Dear Colleague letters meant to provide “guidance” to nearly all colleges and...
View ArticleThe Middlebury Mob Shows How Thin the Veneer of Our Civilization Is
On March 2, there was one of those oh-so-revealing events that makes people realize that very bad trends are at work in America, trends that are corroding the essence of civilization. Middlebury...
View ArticleBias Response Teams Chill Free Speech and Miseducate Students
In their Atlantic article, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukainoff identified a troubling development on American campuses. They wrote, “A movement is arising, undirected...
View ArticleLoyalty Oaths Return with Faculty “Diversity Statements”
One of the worst features of America in the 1940s and 50s was the persistent demand for national loyalty oaths. In those days, people were expected to declare their support for the U.S. and if they...
View ArticleAnother Professor Shouted Down—This Time Over Pronouns
Universities in the United States do not have a monopoly on intolerant and disruptive students. Canada has them too, as shown by a recent incident at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. The...
View ArticleElite College, Caught in Title IX Web, Goes to Trial Against Wronged Student
Amherst College is one of America’s most prestigious schools. It is run by people with lustrous liberal credentials, eager to show their fidelity to progressive causes, including the battle against the...
View ArticleColleges Try to Get Rid of Inconvenient Professors
College officials have cultivated a nice image for themselves—scholarly people who care deeply about providing the best possible education for their students. The reality, however, is often very...
View ArticleIf We Can’t Repeal the Higher Education Act, Let’s Improve It
The United States got along nicely for its first 176 years without any federal legislation on higher education. (A good reason why there was no such legislation is the absence of any authority for it...
View ArticleMicroaggressions Put Under the Scholarly Microscope
The term “microaggression” was coined in 1970 by Harvard professor Chester Pierce, who declared that “Every Black must recognize the offensive mechanisms used by the collective White society, usually...
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