BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL In a thought-provoking essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Derek Bok, president emeritus of Harvard University, wrote eloquently about the failure of American higher education to provide civic education to college students. Mr. Bok noted: “Political apathy is not evenly distributed throughout the population.Very conservative and very liberal voters are…
BY HANK REICHMAN When the New York Times first announced in April that it was adding former Wall Street Journal conservative writer Bret Stephens to its stable of op-ed columnists — which already included the unctuous moralism of Ross Douthat and the simplistic pseudo-sociology of David Brooks — alarm bells went off. David Roberts on…
BY HANK REICHMAN What is the appropriate response when racists and neo-Nazis like Richard Spencer appear on campus? One approach is, well, simply ignore them, or at the least don’t take them too seriously. Bob Moser in the New Republic praises one questioner at Spencer’s Florida appearance last week for using mockery quite effectively, demanding…
BY ANNIE ADAMS Annie Adams is a faculty member and AAUP chapter member at Morehead State University. Decreases in state appropriations, increases in tuition, public doubt about the “value” of higher education, and exploding student debt—these are the contexts within which we need to discuss high cost of intercollegiate athletics. In this “new normal” of…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH An ever-lengthening list of faculty have come under fire for tweets and other social-media posts that they have made. But anyone who actually looks regularly at Twitter feeds must know three things: first, the medium itself stokes extremes of expression; second, almost nothing that a faculty member has ever tweeted comes…
BY HANK REICHMAN Florida Governor Rick Scott declared a state of emergency; the University of Florida spent a half-million dollars on security; protesters were peaceful, if boisterous; and neo-Nazi nincompoop Richard Spencer managed to speak on the Gainesville campus for nearly two hours and even answered questions from the audience. (At one point CUNY Professor…
BY HANK REICHMAN I have occasionally on this blog posted items about the conflicted views of American conservatives about academic freedom, at times calling attention to the ideas of principled academic conservatives whose approach and arguments often run counter to the unfortunate hostility to higher education now rapidly gaining credibility on the right, and with…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In an article for University Business magazine, Jodi Helmer addresses the question “Is early college working?” She provides the following broad statistics: In 2002, 1.2 million students were earning college credits while still in high school. A decade later, the number of those participating in dual enrollment courses had almost doubled,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following excerpts are from Ben Tarnoff’s article, “Tech’s Push to Teach Coding Isn’t about Kid’s Success—It’s about Cutting Wages,” which has been published in The Guardian in September: Computer science courses for children have proliferated rapidly in the past few years. A 2016 Gallup report found that 40% of American…
BY FAWZIA AFZAL-KHAN I had been elected in early May 2017 to the position of director of the Program in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Montclair State University NJ. after the previous director stepped down without completing her three-year term, and after someone else who was elected to succeed her also stepped down, within…