Tenure’s False Promise
Although tenure has been hotly debated over the years, it is still widely misunderstood as guaranteeing a professor a lifetime position. What happened in May to Joshua Katz, a classics…
Articles by Walt Gardner
The College Rankings Game: How Students and Parents Are Being Played
The college application season has long been notorious for the anxiety it instills in high school seniors, many of whom are seeking admission to schools they believe will determine their…
End Legacy Admissions
There was a time when the number of “legacy admits” at colleges was low enough overall that the practice was tolerated. But with elite schools now under immense pressure to…
Vocational Education Goes to College
When the University of Georgia announced that “student success” would be heavily weighted in future tenure decisions, it opened the door to the possibility of a long-overdue change in college…
Making a College Degree More Valuable the Wrong Way
It’s old news by now that the wage premium attached to a college degree largely depends on the field of study. Engineering and health care, for example, are far more…
Regional Colleges Can Compete by Emphasizing Choosing the Right Major
The wage premium attached to a bachelor’s degree largely explains why high school graduates who would have previously looked for a job now apply to college. But they need to…
The Last Refuge of Pure Meritocracy
Racial consideration for college admissions hearkens back to Grutter v. Bollinger, the landmark decision by the Supreme Court in 2003. It held that affirmative action programs can pass muster as…
UCLA’s Discrimination Office Targeting Professor Threatens Academic Freedom
When a political science lecturer at UCLA read to his class Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and showed clips from a documentary on racism, he found…