Let’s bring Western Governors University to North Carolina
For North Carolina, Western Governors University would be a welcome alternative to traditional credit-hour programs, particularly for adult learners who want job training and a degree—not a four-year “experience.”
Firing Professor McAdams: When a Catholic university collides with political correctness
Parents of Marquette students can now rest assured that their children in college will be “safe” from homophobic and other politically incorrect indoctrination; professors of philosophy will no longer consider it their “mission” (pace Socrates) to subject widely accepted meanings and values to intensive reexamination; and professors of other subjects who manage their own private blogs now know that what they formerly considered to be “free speech,” even in their extracurricular activities, has now been redefined by their employers.
“Free” community college will make a bad situation worse
In his State of the Union address, President Obama pitched his plan for making two years of community college as “free and universal in America as high school is today.” He thinks it would be a great thing. But at the community college where I taught English from 2007 to 2010, Georgia Perimeter College, the joke was that it was already an extension of high school.
What I’ve learned at the Pope Center
Over the past eight years I have experienced a rich and sometimes tumultuous education about the economics, politics, and culture of today’s campuses.
Steven Salaita tells UNC-Chapel Hill audience that “civility” is a racist term
On February 5, more than 100 students, faculty, administrators, and political activists packed a lecture hall at UNC-Chapel Hill to hear controversial indigenous studies professor Steven Salaita speak about academic freedom and censorship.
Scholars find that they can break with universities and make it on their own
The jailbreak of academics outside the walls of a university is an opportunity for students. Self-learners don’t have to spend $40,000/year for the privilege of expanding the life of the mind. Adults who want to dabble in Russian literature don’t even have to spend $3,000 for a night course at the community college.
Meet the mid-level bureaucrats who impose speech codes on America’s universities
Of all the many ideas that constitute our civilization, none is more central or important than the norms of free inquiry. The last place one should entrust these norms for safekeeping and propagation is to a bureaucracy that is dedicated to peace and quiet. Yet today, it is they, not the faculty, who are the true enemies of free speech on campus.
“Rubber stamping” is the norm at the State Board of Community Colleges
Attend a North Carolina State Board of Community Colleges meeting and you are likely to fall asleep as board members and community college system office staffers take turns dispassionately checking off the month’s agenda items to unanimous approval.
State officials seek to reform UNC’s teacher preparation programs
Teacher quality was the central theme of an education summit held by the UNC system’s Board of Governors at the SAS Campus in Cary, North Carolina, on January 27.
Saving academia from itself
Today’s new independent academic centers were conceived to solve a real and difficult modern problem—how to counter academia’s gradual purging of a vast array of ideas and knowledge that are still very much alive and central to the nation’s intellectual and political dialogues.