Pension Spiking at North Carolina Colleges: An $8 Million Bill for the Public
In 2014, the North Carolina legislature passed a law to curb “pension spiking” among public employees. Pension spiking is when a worker dramatically increases their compensation at the end of…
GPA or SAT? Two Measures Are Better Than One
At a time when only 41 percent of college students graduate in four years—and only 56 percent in five years—colleges and universities across the country are phasing out the only…
Court Decision Erases a Huge Student Debt—Is that Good or Bad?
For years, a contentious and sometimes emotionally heated debate has raged over the issue of letting people discharge their student loan debts in bankruptcy. A recent decision opens the door…
Did You Know? The States Doing the Most to Protect Student Rights
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education was founded in 1999 by University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors and Boston civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate. One of the country’s…
The Intellectual and Moral Decline in Academic Research
For most of the past century, the United States was the pre-eminent nation in science and technology. The evidence for that is beyond dispute: Since 1901, American researchers have won…
The New American Academy: Break Out the Crayons and Play-Doh
The idea of a campus “safe space”—a university-sanctioned oasis where students can go to destress and feel at ease—has had its share of ridicule. And it’s not hard to see…
Did You Know? Confucius Institutes Disappearing from American Campuses
After years of expansion, Communist Party-funded Confucius Institutes have seen the tide turn against them at American colleges. The Institutes, controlled by the Chinese government, were created to teach Chinese…
Social Justice Revisionism Comes for Washington and Lee
In the fall of 2018, the trustees of Washington and Lee University voted to paper over parts of the university’s history. On the recommendations of Washington and Lee’s “Commission on…
Emerson’s Vision of the American Scholar
Editor’s Note: This is an abridged version of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s The American Scholar, a lecture he gave to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1837. This is the third…
A Path Forward for Reforming College Sports
As we move into 2020, it is important to assess where we are with the uniquely American phenomenon of elite, commercialized college sports. Often, what is claimed about college sports…