Bari Weiss and Coward Culture

BY JOHN K. WILSON Bari Weiss is a coward. That claim may seem incredible to those who have read the fulsome praise from conservatives about Weiss’ decision last week to quit her job as an op-ed editor and writer at the New York Times, and her open resignation letter. Newt Gingrich tweeted, “Bari Weiss’s Letter…

College Ratings and Rankings: The Debate Continues

BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Last month’s Huffington Post College article (also published on Academe), “Grading Higher Education: When Worlds Collide,” sparked a lively offline discussion and is worthy of additional exploration. In that post, we examined how various magazines, journals, and other outlets grade American higher education in their version of what some call the…

Who Counts As an "Educator"?

BY HANK REICHMAN Recently the New York Times published an article entitled “Hillary Clinton’s College Plan Appeals to the Left, but Educators Have Doubts.”  The thrust of the article was that while Clinton’s proposal to let students with families earning less than $125,000 a year attend public universities free has considerable appeal (and not just…

Why Does the New York Times Ignore the LIU Lockout?

BY HANK REICHMAN The Labor Day lockout of faculty at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus has placed that institution on the front lines of the battle for higher education’s future. It’s a big national story — the first time ever that a college or university administration in the U.S. has locked out its faculty —…

Quotation of the Day

POSTED BY MARTIN KICH “’I know why I get bad treatment in the New York Times. It’s because it’s owned by Mexico. I don’t know if you know, a rich guy in Mexico actually has power at the New York Times. I wonder why they don’t like us. You know, I just wonder.’” “Trump was…

Kill the Music: Students Must Read, Write, Do Math

This weekend’s Wall Street Journal featured a well-intentioned piece, “A Musical Fix For U.S. Schools,” which took up nearly 3/4 of a page with a huge accompanying photograph of a child playing the trumpet.  Unfortunately this visual only added to the Oliver Twist like desperation of can I have some more porridge please, as the…