Look Beyond Elites for True Picture of Admissions

BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL For thousands of high school students, October marks the start of the college application season. Application deadlines approach, standardized tests and essays are finalized, and this year, an earlier deadline for the FAFSA financial aid application. In a series of reports last month, seasoned higher education journalist Scott Jaschik presented some…

Why Inside Higher Ed Faces a Dubious Future

On January 19, David Halperin published a piece with the Huffington Post on the purchase of a controlling interest in Inside Higher Ed by the private-equity firm Quad Partners, which has invested heavily in for-profit colleges and educational consulting firms. Here are the opening paragraphs of Halperin’s article: “Quad Partners, a New York private equity…

The Great, All-American, Academic Screw: Some Musings

It seems everywhere we turn these days, we have to listen to someone or read about someone getting screwed. And it’s never a good screw, or if it is a good screw, that means the person still got shafted. Perhaps the only really good screw will be about someone actually having great consensual sex in…

Tech Out, Chalk In, Well Almost

This is not so much in response to Mary Flanagan’s  essay, “The Classroom as Arcade,” recently published by Inside Higher Ed,  which features a vivid observation of a student in class who “check[ed] out from a class he likes” to play a role-playing game on an electronic device while others “openly engaged with their Facebook pages,”…

Old Mentors Never Die . . . or Do They?

This is the time of the year when gymnasiums and lawns all over the country fill with graduates barely able to sit still during ceremonies before they will be set free to go on to do what they want or must in the next phase of their life. This is also a time when faculty…

First God, Now the Vagina

Today’s Inside Higher Ed prominently features an article about faculty complaining about The Vagina Monologues being in part performed at a year’s end celebration ceremony coinciding with commencement at Mercer County Community College. Surely this news is a kick in the pants that we need to consider what really constitutes acceptable ceremonial material. Having alumni…

Of Presidents and Poodles

Seizing a Sculpture “At Canada’s Capilano University, the administration confiscates a professor’s work caricaturing the president on the grounds that it constitutes ‘harassment.’”  –INSIDE HIGHER ED I must say the Poodle is looking very presidential. The extended touch of gray shows someone who has had his share of worries, and the sharp, long tooth making…

The Art of Censorship

Daniel Grant writes at Inside Higher Ed about the question of controversial art: “There are no rules of the road to help art instructors and college administrators in this realm.” Actually, there are many rules of the road long established by the art world and the theorists of freedom of speech. It’s very easy: you…