Academics

Future leaders in business, government, and civil society need more than just job skills. The following articles defend the value of liberal education, with a focus on academic quality and rigor, fundamental knowledge, and the ideas that have shaped Western Civilization. They also scrutinize academic programs that have departed from these ideals in the name of progressive ideology.

Today’s students get to dictate what constitutes a general education

May 24, 2002 ·

Universities ostensibly provide students with rigorous training to prepare them for their chosen field. There’s more to it than that, however, because if it were only that, the students could skip the addlepated rigmarole that has become an accepted part of what’s blithely called “the college experience” (which amounts to hazing or coddling, depending upon one’s fealty to the campus’s hair-trigger socialist bent) and go directly to a private provider of vocational training.

Sign a form, get college credit

May 17, 2002 ·

Shortly after winning the glorified popularity contest to be next year’s student body president at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Jen Daum announced her plans to develop a course to teach students how to lobby the legislature. As reported by The Daily Tar Heel March 8, “Daum said students’ lack of knowledge about lobbying is a major reason why the university’s governing bodies have not been receptive to students’ concern in matters like the recent tuition proposals.”

N.C. State supports civil discourse, embattled professor

May 3, 2002 ·

Administrators and professors at North Carolina State University have come to the support of embattled Prof. Philip Muñoz. Muñoz’s Political Science 205 class on Law and Justice was the site of an alleged racial attack Feb. 19, when a white female student, angered by the heated comments made about America and its treatment of blacks by a black student, Najja Baptist, told Baptist “go back to Africa.”

Sept. 11 figures in campus discussions on health, discrimination, and racism

Apr 26, 2002 ·

The terrorist attacks on the United States and the subsequent U.S. war on terrorism were the subjects of a recent teach-in at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and were also referenced by North Carolina State University students during two recent campus events focusing on an entirely different subject, the racial climate.

Racial hypersensitivity poisons the campus climate

Apr 19, 2002 ·

N.C. State has gone to great lengths to gauge its “racial climate.” But how worthwhile is this activity, really? A voluntary demonstration ostensibly designed to list incidents of racial injustices at N.C. State produced only four, all of which were really examples of racial hypersensitivity, only two of which related to N.C. State, and one of which was from two decades prior.

Black student newspaper at N.C. State finds a real white devil

Apr 15, 2002 ·

On the back page of its Feb. 14-21 issue, the Nubian featured a large picture of “The infamous Darren O’Connor.” A diabolical reddish glow suffuses O’Connor’s face, almost crowding out his features, except for the dark hollows of his eyes, which are exaggerated by the hellish light.

Discrimination for diversity’s sake doesn’t help minorities succeed

Mar 22, 2002 ·

The controversy over minority enrollment in North Carolina colleges gets right to the heart of diversity, the cardinal virtue of academe. Although the issue has been vexing colleges for years, it doesn’t take an outside observer long to realize the absurdly simple crux of the matter. The problem with minorities is just that there are just so few of them.