Author Profile

George Leef

George Leef is director of external relations for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. He holds a bachelor of arts degree from Carroll College (Waukesha, WI) and a juris doctor from Duke University School of Law. He was a vice president of the John Locke Foundation until 2003.

Prior to joining the Locke Foundation, Leef was president of Patrick Henry Associates, a consulting firm in Michigan dedicated to assisting others in advocating free markets, minimal government, private property, and individual rights. Previously, Leef was on the faculty of Northwood University in Midland, Michigan, where he taught courses in economics, business law, and logic. He has also worked as a policy adviser in the Michigan Senate.

A regular columnist for Forbes.com, Leef was book review editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education, from 1996 to 2012. He has published numerous articles in The Freeman, Reason, The Free Market, Cato Journal, The Detroit News, Independent Review, and Regulation. He writes regularly for the National Review's The Corner blog and for SeethruEdu.com.

Articles by George Leef

Aug 10, 2007 ·

Harvard Dean, a Critic of Today’s Higher Education, to Speak at Pope Center Conference

Each fall the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy hosts a conference focusing on issues in higher education. This year’s conference, which will be held on Saturday, October 27, has the theme “Building Excellence in American Higher Education,” and the keynote speaker will be former Harvard dean Harry Lewis.

Harry Lewis is an ideal choice. He has many years of experience as a professor and administrator at Harvard. Last year he published a book entitled Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education. It spells out in detail the reasons why Harvard – and most other colleges and universities – are failing to live up to all their publicity hype.

The most glaring defect Lewis addresses (and which will be the topic of his speech at the conference) is in the curriculum. In years gone by, most colleges and universities required students to devote most of their credits to a core of courses that, by general assent, were crucial to a well-founded education. Some subjects, in other words, were more important than others.

Aug 1, 2007 ·

The Firing of Ward Churchill: A Good First Step

Last week, the University of Colorado terminated the employment of Professor Ward Churchill, the head of the “Ethnic Studies” department. It is an exceedingly rare thing for a university to fire a tenured professor and it took Colorado two years of investigation and hearings to finally determine that his employment would be ended.

Churchill’s firing was perfectly justified, but in my view is only the first step that the University of Colorado should take if it is to be truly accountable to the people of the state.

The case is well known, but let’s review the facts.

Jul 25, 2007 ·

Keeping College Grads in the State

Politicians will try just about anything that might boost their state’s economy. There aren’t many measures that will actually do that, so they resort to policies that they can plausibly say will produce economic benefits.

One idea that has been cropping up a lot in recent years is that a state can give its economy a lift by trying to keep students who graduate from colleges within its borders from taking jobs elsewhere. Several states have gone down that path, most recently Maine and West Virginia.

In Maine, Governor John Baldacci recently signed legislation that makes residents who graduate from a college or university in the state eligible for ten years of state tax credits of about $2,100 annually as long as the individual works in Maine. In West Virginia, Governor Joe Manchin recently said that in order to get “more of a return” on his state’s investment in higher education, he would like to see residents who have graduated from a college in the state be exempted from the West Virginia income tax until they turn 26. He also suggested giving students who remain in the state tax credits for money devoted to repaying student loans.

Jul 20, 2007 · and

College Summer Reading Can Be Useful – Or Not

Many colleges and universities these days have a “summer reading” program for incoming students, which requires them to read a book and be prepared to discuss it during the first few days of class. The programs are designed to create a common ground among new students, challenge them to think critically about new ideas and introduce them to university work and intellectual life at a university.

This is a splendid idea. Done well, such reading programs can help to get college students off to a good start by concentrating their minds on the nature of and reasons for academic study.

Unfortunately, if it is done poorly this becomes at least a missed opportunity. If a school chooses a book that has no timeless message, it will fail to make any lasting impression on the students. And if a school selects a book that is faddish or polemical, it is worse than a missed opportunity. It conveys to the students the idea that college is more about what to think than about how to think. Sadly, at some institutions that happens to be the case in many of the courses taught, but still it’s best to start freshmen off with a good impression.

Jul 11, 2007 ·

Do Sports Programs and Community Colleges Mix?

Community colleges are and supposed to be an educational stepping stone for people who didn’t make much of their K-12 years or find that they need to learn a new skill if they are to find a new job. The idea that those schools would become more effective in their role by adding organized sports programs seems strange. Quite a few of them are doing so, however.

Are community colleges and sports programs a sensible mix?

Jun 20, 2007 ·

Do’s and Don’ts on Helping Students to Succeed in College

Except for the rather small number of selective colleges and universities, most schools face the problem of ill-prepared and poorly motivated students. At many lower-tier institutions, such students are the norm. The problem they create for the faculty and administration is difficult and serious: they want a college degree, but lack the skills to actually earn one.

What, if anything, can schools do to increase the likelihood that weak and disengaged students will find the path to academic success?

In a recent article in The Chronicle Review, Indiana University professor George D. Kuh (co-author of the recent book Piecing Together the Student Success Puzzle) offers some thoughts on that subject. They’re worth considering.

May 23, 2007 ·

Buried Treasure

No, this column wasn’t prompted by the release of the latest pirate movie. Rather, it was prompted by a minute spent looking through my library.

Hunting for another book, my eye landed upon a book I hadn’t looked at in years – Education: Assumptions Versus History by Thomas Sowell. Sowell is a black economist who has had a distinguished career teaching at some of American’s top universities. His prolific writings have touched on just about every important public policy topic, including education.

May 2, 2007 ·

Should You Invest in Education?

A recent column by James Altucher that ran in The Financial Times touched off a debate between two of America’s most prominent intellectuals. Their argument on the benefits of a college education is worth investigating.

First, the column. Entitled “Why investing in education should pay off,” Altucher’s piece would seem to suggest that going to college is a smart move for young people. But that conclusion would show the folly of judging a column by its title, since the author begins by writing, “As far as I am concerned, college is a waste of time. Instead of going to college, I wish I had worked.” Years of taking classes don’t actually teach you much about life, Altucher suggests. Furthermore, he contends, “it is unclear whether costs of $200,000 – plus opportunity costs by the time all is said and done – are ever made back from your future cash flows.”

Apr 25, 2007 ·

What If the U.S. News College Rankings Went Bye-Bye?

Ask Americans how they know which colleges and good and which ones aren’t so good and they’ll probably say, “the U.S. News college rankings.”

For several decades, the annual issue of U.S. News & World Report that focuses on the rankings of colleges, universities, and graduate schools has been treated with exceeding respect by the public. It purports to identify the best university, best liberal arts college, best law and medical schools and so on according to a complicated formula. Rarely do people analyze that formula and ask if it’s a reliable means of identifying schools where students are most likely to receive an excellent education.

Apr 12, 2007 ·

The Higher Ed Completion Hobgoblin

There is a cottage industry in the U.S. (located mostly in Washington, DC, but with satellite plants scattered around the country) that produces hand-wringing policy reports saying that America faces a crisis unless it finds a way to put more students into and through college. (Here are two recent examples: “The Waning of America’s Higher Education Advantage” published last June by the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, and “American Higher Education: How Does it Measure Up for the 21st Century?”) H. L. Mencken once wrote that politics is a game of menacing the people with “an endless series of hobgoblins” to keep them clamoring for governmental officials to make them safe. This business of scaring people into thinking that we’ve got to get more students through college fits that description perfectly.

The most recent addition to this genre is a paper released March 7 entitled “Hitting Home: An Analysis of the Cost, Access and Quality Challenges Confronting Higher Education Today” published by the group Making Opportunity Affordable. The paper’s big point is that the U.S. suffers from a “degree gap” that threatens our economic future. In the words of the author, “In fact, the size of this gap – the difference between degrees produced in the United States and those produced by nations who are among our top competitors – could reach almost 16 million degrees by 2025….” To close this supposedly dangerous gap, the paper advocates government action to get far more young Americans into and through college – thus “producing” the degrees that will enable us to keep right up with those competitors.