Texas’s Tip of the Spear
Higher-education reform has a new hero, and he hails not from the self-styled patrician environs of the Ivy League but from Texas. We all know how tough it is to…
Articles
Articles
Student Learning in the Higher Education Compact
Introduction The authors of the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education were right to label the section on grade inflation “Student Learning.” The section demands that grades…
How Shall Academic Freedom Be Defined?
Martin Center: You have noted that the current UNC System policy manual affirms that academic freedom is essential but does not offer a precise definition. And obviously this has been…
Putting the Progressive University in the Dock
Conservatives interested in higher-education reform often ask themselves where things went wrong. Answers usually range from the radicalism of the 1960s to the rise of social media or the triumph…
In Praise of the Commission for Public Higher Education
Complaints about the Commission for Public Higher Education’s (CPHE) proposed solutions to accreditation problems are unwarranted. This October, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article titled “Will the Commission…
Financial Responsibility in the Higher Education Compact
Introduction According to recent Pew Research Center polling, seven in 10 Americans believe the higher education system is headed in the wrong direction. Majorities of Americans also give colleges low…
Higher Ed’s Diseconomies of Scale
In Texas, we take pride in doing everything BIG. That seems to apply to our university systems, as well. While other states have one or two public university systems, we…
North Carolina Universities Are Finally Delivering for Veterans
This fall, the University of North Carolina System enrolled more than 23,000 military-affiliated students, the largest number in its history. This milestone signals real change in a state recognized for…
Peer Review Gone Wild
Faculty members at public universities are expected to educate students and advance knowledge through research in their fields of expertise. Academic research, however, has increasingly promoted ideological agendas over the…
American Higher Education Restoration Act
Rather than emphasize excellence in teaching, America’s public universities now produce a glut of academic “research” that almost no one reads and which does not meaningfully advance human knowledge. Unfortunately,…