Did You Know? “Some College, No Credential” Students Are a Significant Cohort
Earlier this year, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC) identified 39 million adults who had some higher-education experience as of July 2020 but had not earned any credentials and…
The Pushback Against Classroom Indoctrination Begins
America is finally waking up to the fact that poisonous, divisive ideas are proliferating in public education, from pre-K to graduate school. The question is how to push back against…
How the Best of Intentions Created Today’s Academic Disasters
Today’s assault on intellectual excellence in the academy will eventually end. Hopefully, an investigation will then commence on its causes, and all the usual suspects will be rounded up. This…
A Defense of the “Ungrading” Movement
In his April piece for the Martin Center, Adam Ellwanger critiqued “contract grading” as a symptom of “the war against academic excellence” and the broader societal movement toward “some fetishized…
UNC’s Free-Expression Survey Elicits Both Fear and Hope
North Carolina’s public universities have a problem with free expression, and it mostly doesn’t come from censorious administrators or biased faculty members. Instead, it’s the students themselves who muzzle free…
A Popular Fiction Genre is Unreadable Garbage. Blame Colleges.
Over the last several years, a burgeoning new genre has put the book-watching world on notice. “New Adult,” a coinage first used by St. Martin’s Press in 2009, refers to…
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…
Did You Know? New College to Launch in Wake Forest This Fall
Thales College, a new undergraduate institution launching this fall in Wake Forest, N.C., is eagerly preparing to open its doors to its inaugural class. Thales College is a unique institution…
The Limits of Expertise
As a professor devoted to his college’s “pre-disciplinary” core curriculum, I was hooked by David Epstein’s title, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. The book is chock-full of…
Birds of Paradise: The Moral Poverty of Faculty Freedom Fighters
Carl Dobsky’s brilliant, fiery painting “Birds of Paradise” has been the focus of attention at his recent exhibitions, because it accurately and effectively captures the zeitgeist of contemporary American life.…