A brilliant comment by Jon Stewart on academia (begins 5:30 into the clip): http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:video:thedailyshow.com:400060 The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook Newt Gingrich: The tenured professors who can flunk you if you are too openly conservative. Jon Stewart: …where the F- did…
In this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Ted Gup calls for the idea of diversity to include political ideas, and he reports mumbling “sorry” to a parent who complains that his conservative son didn’t feel comfortable speaking his ideas in class. I’m annoyed at Gup for citing ACTA’s distorted surveys as proof that conservatives face…
[This post has been updated on 11/7/2011. The US Senate has said that for-profit colleges took in $626 million through the GI Bill, not $1 billion as they had initially reported] In the last few weeks, there’s been a lot of press about for-profit colleges and federal student aid. The big news is that the…
This weekend, I attended the 25th Anniversary celebration for the Campus Honors Program (CHP) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It led me to think about something I’ve contemplated ever since I entered the Campus Honors Program in 1987: what is the justification for an honors program? In an era of budget cuts, why…
Vanderbilt University has been under attack from FIRE and other conservatives for requiring all student groups to follow the campus non-discrimination policy in their constitutions. The Christian Legal Society, which imposes a Statement of Faith on all campus student leaders, has objected. I can never get anyone to answer my question about what I see…
Laura Clawson at DailyKos writes about part-time student graduation rates and notes, “don’t try to pretend that economic factors aren’t affecting college completion rates.” Roger Shuler writes about being threatened with a libel suit by Ted Rollins, the CEO of a student-housing development company. Updates on the Cincinnati State strike: “‘We love our teachers,’ says…
In an essay in the current issue of Academe, Elizabeth Cramer and Charles Ford discuss how, despite improvements in the climate for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students, staff, and faculty on college campuses over the last generation, discrimination persists. They cite the harassment and suicide of Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi last fall, harassment…
The National Association of Scholars has announced a project “examining the curriculum, student activities, and campus values of Bowdoin College.” I am sure that Peter Wood and the research fellow he has hired will attempt to do a thorough and fair job. But obviously they bring certain biases to their approach. And one concern I…
Earlier this summer, Josh Keller wrote a story for the Chronicle of Higher Education about the tricks that some for-profit schools use when advertising online. He looked at two websites in particular, collegesurfing.com and EducationStart.org, both of which promise to help prospective students “find the school that’s right for you.” In actuality, the only schools…
A jury in Orange County today found 10 UC-Irvine and UC-Riverside students guilty of conspiring to disrupt a speech at Irvine by the Israeli ambassador to the US. I wrote about this case last year, when I objected to the collective punishment of a student group for what these individuals did: “it appears that the…