Campus Unrest Exposes the Folly of Higher Education’s Social Justice Offensive
Common threads running throughout the latest campus upheavals include attacks on principles of free speech and a willingness on the part of school officials to mollify students and cede control to leftist protesters. Given higher education’s track record, however, both developments are unsurprising.
North Carolina Should End Its Protectionist Policies Limiting Online Courses
Because of protectionist regulations, North Carolina’s range of higher education choices is not as wide as it should be. But it’s not just the Tar Heel State that gums up the works with excessive red tape. North Carolina schools that want to offer their online courses to out-of-state students have had to navigate burdensome approval processes. In many cases, schools have decided it’s just not worth the considerable expense in terms of both time and money—thereby limiting options for students seeking online alternatives. But now there is a better way. The State Authorization Reciprocity Agreement (SARA) is an agreement among member states that establishes comparable national standards for interstate offering of online education.
What Entrepreneurship Education Can (and Can’t) Do
Entrepreneurship programs are spreading rapidly across America and are attracting a growing number of students. But one question keeps coming up: Is it really possible to teach entrepreneurship? The answer is both yes and no.
Feds Plan to Use Accreditation to Produce More Degree Holders
America’s national obsession with raising our “educational attainment” level leads politicians and bureaucrats to focus on the silliest of things. Lately, that has been college accreditation.
Ignorance Is Not Bliss for Journalism Majors
The recent decision by UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Media and Journalism to eliminate requirements that journalism majors take certain basic courses in economics, U.S. government, and American History since 1865 is troubling. If the people who are supposed to keep us aware are unaware themselves, how can we know how to stand up for ourselves?
Community Colleges: Much More Successful Than Statistics Seem to Show
The mainstream media’s mantra about community colleges is that their performance should be evaluated based on degree completion statistics, just as it is for traditional four-year colleges and universities. But what about the students who never intended to earn a degree? The cited statistics on completion are not very meaningful if they fail to consider the intentions of the institution’s students. Yes, many community colleges (and others) have low graduation rates, but it is a bad mistake to leap from that to the conclusion that they are “failing their students.” Rather, they are serving a widely diverse student population with a wide range of programs particularly well.
Academia Shrugs: The Destabilizing Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement
A new report by the National Association of Scholars, “Inside Divestment: The Illiberal Movement to Turn a Generation Against Fossil Fuels,” is welcome because it shines a light on the excesses and especially the anti-intellectual nature of this campus phenomenon. Students, parents, alums, professors, and administrators should pay close attention to the report, just as miners needed to pay attention when their canaries started going unconscious.
In Troubled Times, Some Important Advances to Protect Student Rights
In the last few years, the rights of students in North Carolina universities have received some significant new protections. It is important that state legislators and educators continue to do so, for such rights—pertaining to free speech and due process of punitive proceedings—have been under assault on college campuses nationwide in recent years.
What We’re Reading
Every once in a while, we all read something that really excites us or makes a deep impression on us. Sometimes it’s a timeless classic, sometimes it’s entirely new. We thought we’d share a few such influential works with our readers. Enjoy.
When University Governance Fails, Political Leadership Becomes Necessary
Senator David Curtis (R-Lincoln) has emerged as one of North Carolina’s leading voices for higher education reform. On July 28, he wrote a letter titled “UNC System Policy Change Suggestions” to the UNC system’s Board of Governors. His proposals, if implemented, would vastly improve key areas of UNC governance in great need of reform.