College Administrators Simply Should Not Be Investigating Criminal Complaints: How They Are Doing It Is Not the Problem; That They Are Doing It Is the Problem

These are the opening paragraphs of an article written by Teresa Watanabe for the Los Angeles Times; the title of the article is “College Administrators Learning to Be Sexual Misconduct Detectives”: “Butte College administrator Al Renville was never trained as a police investigator, but that’s close to the job he found himself in when two…

Amherst's Attack on Fraternities Is an Attack on Student Rights

Amherst College, which banned fraternities and sororities in 1984, has now taken this an alarming step further: starting July 1, any students participating in an unofficial fraternity or sorority will be punished, and could be expelled. A college has the right to ban fraternities only in the sense of refusing to recognize gender-biased exclusive social…

Odd College Clubs

The Huffington Post recently ran an item listing the “ten weirdest college clubs.” I think that the word “odd” is more appropriate in this case, for “weird” has associations with perversity (though not just sexual perversity) and strange obsessions and these clubs seem, for the most part, to be much more whimsical. The clubs include:…

Learning and Test Prep: A Deathly Difference

Empire State College’s Ian Reifowitz has a post on Daily Kos called “Test prep kills learning. But standardized testing is big money. Guess how this one turns out.” He writes: Here’s what it comes down to: If preparing for and taking the tests means taking kids away from real learning for a significant chunk of the…