“We Need to Make a Change”
Duke College Republicans (DCR), founded in 1965, was an active organization on the Durham campus for 55 years before its sudden dissolution during the 2020 election season. After four years…
Academic Program Reviews Are Normal
Earlier this year, the UNC System revised its Academic Program Review (APR) policy, requiring that all 16 constituent institutions complete portfolio reviews at least every seven years. Unlike UNC Greensboro’s…
Grading and Moral Hazard
As political pressures for equity—equality of outcome—have grown in recent years, traditional methods of evaluating college students have come under threat. As the proportion of the population going to college…
It’s Not All Gloom and Doom on Campus
Every year, we get a variety of survey snapshots of student opinion from organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the Heterodox Academy. I have also come…
Universities Are Doing Education Badly
One often hears liberal-arts professors, as well as college and K-12 administrators, advocating two ideas about academics in America: (a) the importance of a broad, well-rounded, liberal-arts education and (b)…
Do We Need to Abolish Grading?
Many generations of young Americans have learned in school under the grading system. We took tests in subjects and would find out how well we had done when the instructor…
The Great AP Score Recalibration
Average course grades tend to be lower in some college subjects than others. Engineering and the “hard” sciences, for example, retain reputations for being “harder” subjects than the humanities and…
It’s Time for a Liberty-Loving Sociology
In the sociological imagination, capitalism is now regarded as a sin standing next to sexism and racism. Routinely, sociologists call for their colleagues and students to oppose capitalism and use…
Did Hard Grading Spur UNC Greensboro’s Cuts?
Earlier this year, the Martin Center’s Ashlynn Warta wrote convincingly that faculty opposition to academic cuts at UNC Greensboro was best understood as an act of self-preservation. We stand by…
Restore the Science Section
For decades, aspiring college students have had to submit with their applications scores from standardized tests, such as the SAT or the ACT. Variation of test scores is inevitable—that’s the…