The rise of intolerance on campus and beyond makes a new book by columnist and television commentator Kirsten Powers a must-read. If you do not yet believe that American higher education is smothered in intolerance of diverse ideas, read The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech.
Do we still need the humanities? Yes, now more than ever. But the current academicization, politicization, and jargon mean that college may be the worst place to look for them. That’s where you go for Queerness, libidinal data, and negotiated flesh. On the bright side, it may be that the liberal arts and humanities will flourish once they escape the airless vaults of academia.
I believe that colleges need to dramatically step up their game in terms of student course selection and coordination of electives across disciplines, and also to link more substantively to the employer community.
According to a new report by Jonathan Rothwell and Siddharth Kulkarni of the Brookings Institution, yes.
Pending bills represent progress toward reforming higher education in North Carolina. However, they are only scratching the surface of the work that needs to be done. The scandals at UNC-Chapel Hill show that the UNC system desperately needs to be made more transparent. And more attention should be directed to reducing the cost of a university education by making the system more efficient. Even so, some reform is better than none.
There is an argument to be made for giving students the commencement speaker they want. Many schools choose based on student input: it’s their graduation, and they or their parents paid hard-earned money to make that happen. But how many of those students would spend money on a commencement speaker if given the choice to save it?
Despite howls of denial, there can be no doubt that "diversity" hiring (i.e., hiring faculty who wouldn’t have been hired but for their race, ethnicity, gender expression, etc.) produces "diversity hires" with lower academic qualifications just as surely as lowering admission standards to enroll more underrepresented minorities admits students who have lower qualifications.
The methods that some universities have devised to combat grade inflation—capping high grades and adding more “contextual” information to transcripts—are problematic. While it may be good for universities to experiment with some of these reforms, they don’t appear to be final solutions to a complex problem that has been festering for decades.
Among the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill there are two quite different views of the university’s recent athletic/academic scandal.
I love working for Norwich University, but I wish my job did not exist. When I tell folks this, I always get a confused look or a laugh. I follow up by explaining that I’m part of the administrative bloat that universities have taken on to ensure we’re dotting all the “I’s” and crossing all the “T’s” of state and federal regulations.