The most important decision that the University of North Carolina system’s Board of Governors will make this year is the selection of the next system president. Board members have an excellent opportunity to find someone willing to initiate a badly needed departure from the university establishment’s status quo.
I am delighted to see that Asian-Americans are speaking out against racial preferences in admissions. That stands to reason, since their children are the big losers in the racial preferences game. But they should be joined by non-Asians who understand that the purpose of college is for students to maximize their learning, not for administrators to play at social engineering.
Writing a comprehensive history of American higher education from colonial times up to the Second World War is a monumental undertaking, but if anyone is up to the task it’s Penn State University professor Roger Geiger, perhaps the country’s leading scholar on the history of post-secondary education in America. Geiger’s new book The History of American Higher Education is the most fact-filled treatment of its subject to date, and will likely remain the standard work for years to come.
Strong cultural momentum—strengthened over several generations by parents, teachers, guidance counselors, and elected officials—has fostered an unwarranted faith in college’s benefits, raised attendance to irrational levels, and yielded an oversupply of graduates.
We ought to send more people to college. Our country is rich enough, our lives are long enough, and our economy is productive enough to justify the costs of providing more opportunity for our citizens to think and read and learn a little longer.
Few people know the challenges faced by community colleges as well as Scott Ralls. For the last seven years, he has been president of the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS), the nation’s third largest community college system. He will soon leave for a new challenge: he will become the president of North Virginia Community College—the nation’s 11th largest college. Jay Schalin of the Pope Center had a long talk with him about the role of community colleges, about how the NCCCS has dealt with a variety of issues, and where the NCCCS stands today.
On May 21, the Supreme Court held a conference to discuss whether or not to accept the Fisher<.i> case—again. At this time, I don’t know the decision, but I do know that a seemingly strange mixture of liberals and conservatives wants the Court to take the appeal.
My previous beliefs regarding higher education’s impending doom—shared by many others—were reinforced by pundits who sounded alarms whenever a new report predicted catastrophe or an insolvent college made headlines. I fell into a trap identified by Thomas Jefferson in a 1787 letter to Charles Thomson, then secretary of the Continental Congress: “The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.”
Pending bills represent progress toward reforming higher education in North Carolina. However, they are only scratching the surface of the work that needs to be done. The scandals at UNC-Chapel Hill show that the UNC system desperately needs to be made more transparent. And more attention should be directed to reducing the cost of a university education by making the system more efficient. Even so, some reform is better than none.
Despite howls of denial, there can be no doubt that "diversity" hiring (i.e., hiring faculty who wouldn’t have been hired but for their race, ethnicity, gender expression, etc.) produces "diversity hires" with lower academic qualifications just as surely as lowering admission standards to enroll more underrepresented minorities admits students who have lower qualifications.
