Last week the American Council on Education released a “Statement on Academic Rights and Responsibilities,” endorsed by dozens of affiliated groups, including the American Association of University Professors, Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, and others.
Pelosi says Title IX clarification endangers college sports for women.
A statement from the American Council on Education may pave the way for a compromise between academic institutions and supporters of the Academic Bill of Rights.
The statement, dated June 23, was endorsed by 26 organizations, including the College Board and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. In it, the organizations outline their support for intellectual diversity on college campuses, which was the basis of the Academic Bill of Rights legislation proposed in several states and Congress by David Horowitz. Legislation in North Carolina, sponsored by Sen. Andrew Brock, did not make the June deadline for it to be considered for full passage in the General Assembly during the two-year session.
Last week, a federal court in Kansas ruled that the administration at Kansas State University did not violate the First Amendment rights of a journalism professor who was fired from his position as adviser to the school’s student newspaper. It’s an amazing case that shows the extent to which school administrators will go in order to appease the campus diversity crowd once it decides to feel aggrieved.
Professor Ron Johnson had for many years been the faculty adviser to the Kansas State Collegian, a student newspaper that had received an award in 2004 as the best daily college newspaper in a national competition. Alas, he and the students committed an unpardonable sin of omission. The paper failed to cover an event on campus. Of course, there are lots of events at a large university like K-State, so what’s the big deal about failing to write about one of them?
WASHINGTON – Congress is considering legislation that would provide grants to colleges to promote programs in Western Civilization and American history education as a way to improve educational quality in those subject areas.
The Higher Education for Freedom Act was introduced earlier this month by Rep. Thomas E. Petri, R-Wis., and Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., with the purpose to sustain postsecondary education programs that deal with traditional American history, the American founding, and Western civilization. The bills, H.R. 2858 and S.B. 1209, are currently in education committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
RALEIGH — Business owners in many areas of North Carolina are mobilizing to oppose a bill under consideration in the state Senate that they feel would make it easier for the University of North Carolina to compete unfairly with small businesses.
Mark Zimmerman, a Chapel Hill businessman and chairman of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce’s Board of Directors, says the bill, which would amend the Umstead Act, could hinder businesses in Chapel Hill and other university communities. He mentioned specifically businesses on Franklin Street that sell UNC-Chapel Hill-related merchandise. If UNC is allowed to sell merchandise to alumni it could damage those companies.
“We are very, very concerned,” Zimmerman said. “There are real businesses and real people that will be affected by this.”
For half a century, Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs have been a growth industry in the U.S. In 1955-56, only 3,200 MBA degrees were awarded. But in the 1960s, the numbers started to climb; in 1998, more than 102,000 MBA degrees were awarded. MBA programs have sprouted up in colleges and universities great and small as administrators sought to cash in on the increasingly prevalent idea that MBA studies were very useful if not essential for success in many business fields.
The trouble is that in trying to cater to a mass market, many programs offer an education that is of little practical value. In a September 2002 article in the Academy of Management Learning & Education, authors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Christina Fong observe that “possessing an MBA neither guarantees business success nor prevents business failure” and point out that the nation’s top business consulting firms often hire people who have degrees other than an MBA. They quote a Stanford MBA who regards the curriculum as “irrelevant” and believes that students get “a pedigree rather than learning.”
RALEIGH – A provision in the state House’s version of the state budget would eliminate the controversial tuition waiver program for graduates at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.
Created during the 2003 budget negotiations, the tuition waiver gives NCSSM graduates free tuition if they choose to attend any school in the University of North Carolina system. Sen. Kay Hagan, a Guilford County Democrat, pushed the tuition waiver policy through the General Assembly in 2003, saying at the time that the tuition waiver was one of the best provisions in the budget because it would keep more of North Carolina’s brightest students in the state.
Over the past four decades, grade inflation has become a hallmark (pun intended) of American higher education. A significant body of literature now exists which suggests that grade inflation is a serious social problem; part of which Callahan calls The Cheating Culture. Nearly everyone involved in higher education is now complicit in grade inflation one way or another, including professors, administrators, governing boards (of trustees, regents, etc.), students, their parents and their envetual employers, politicos and the public they serve. The immorality of this complicity speaks for itself and does not bode well for America.
RALEIGH – With House leaders approving its version of the $17 billion state budget early Thursday morning, members will now work towards ironing out the several differences that exist between the two documents.
Those differences also include funding for programs with the University of North Carolina system. House leaders approved a budget that cuts several proposed spending initiatives approved in the Senate budget, while also including new appropriations as well.