Election 2016: Where the Republican Candidates Stand on Higher Education
Higher education is often an ignored issue in presidential campaigns. The 2016 campaign, however, may be different. The focus on higher education looks to be unusually strong, with issues such as student debt affecting many millions of potential voters and receiving multiple mentions in campaign speeches and interviews on both sides of the aisle.
The Faux Field of Dreams: If You Build A University Research Park, They May Not Come
Before committing taxpayer money and university resources to public-private research parks, higher education officials and elected leaders should reconsider a more proven way for regional universities to enhance economic outcomes. And that is to provide a quality educational experience that increases citizens’ human capital, thereby producing positive “spillover effects” in the local area.
Freshman Comp: Often More About Politics than Sentences
Colleges and universities should tell all writing faculty to focus their courses on improving students’ ability to write and to keep their political agendas out of it. At the very least, they should require full disclosure on course syllabi so that students can avoid professors who insist on instilling political activism rather than just teaching them how to write.
Peer Review: Definitive Truth or Suboptimal Standard? Four Views
The Pope Center asked four distinguished academics who have been involved with the peer review process as editors, participants, or critics for their opinions about peer review. Here are their responses.
Gene Nichol’s Poverty Fund: Two Views
Shortly after the Center for Work, Poverty, and Opportunity at UNC-Chapel Hill’s law school was closed, Gene Nichol, a controversial law professor who served as the center’s director, announced the creation of a “Poverty Fund” that may be a continuation of the Poverty Center by another name. The Pope Center’s director of policy analysis, Jay Schalin, penned an ardent critique of the new Poverty Fund. This led to a response by John K. Wilson, an editor for Academe Blog, an online publication of the American Association of University Professors, who regularly writes on academic freedom issues. At Wilson’s suggestion, Schalin prepared a second response. The Pope Center presents both responses in this special feature.
Supremely Naive: The Impact of Southworth on the “Marketplace of Ideas”
In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled in Board of Regents v. Southworth that using mandatory student fees to fund student organizations and speakers does not violate the First Amendment rights of those who disagree with the content. The Court’s decision, however, was premised on the idea that university officials would be “viewpoint neutral” in allocating funds—that they would not let the process be used to promote or silence any political perspectives. The Court was dreadfully naive about the state of affairs on campus. Its deferential attitude toward universities and the assumption of good faith speaks to a generation gap between what the justices experienced as students and what today’s students encounter.
Subsidizing Higher Ed Makes It More Costly; It Also Makes Incomes More Unequal
Federal student aid programs were expected to have nothing but good economic and social consequences for America. Instead, however, they are simultaneously making higher education more costly (that is, soaking up more of our limited resources) and, owing to “credentialitis,” making the distribution of income more unequal.
Remediation’s End?
For quite a few years, North Carolina’s colleges and universities have blurred the line between higher and basic education by admitting students who need remedial classes before they can handle college-level work. Fortunately, several provisions moving through the General Assembly may change the face of remediation by shifting it back to lower levels of education where it belongs.
The Hidden Costs of Tenure
In effect, tenure is a barrier to entry in the academic job market that makes it difficult to replace poorly performing faculty with better alternatives.
Gene Nichol’s “Poverty Fund” Is About the Politics, Not the Poverty
The reopening of UNC–Chapel Hill Law School’s Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity as the “North Carolina Poverty Research Fund” by law professor Gene Nichol shows great contempt for the UNC system Board of Governors, the state legislature, and the people of North Carolina. It also may be illegal.