A Tale of Two State University Systems
One proposes central control and rapid expansion; the other, better education at lower costs.
Warning–Honest Grading Can be Hazardous to Your Job
Biology prof axed for not inflating grades.
Our Readers’ Recommendations
Some readers responded to our call for summer reading programs with ideas of their own.
Bucking the System, Diversity-Style
Accrediting agencies often push ideological goals, as George Mason University’s law school discovered the hard way.
A Dream Derailed
Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind society is threatened by government racial preferences.
Rejecting Victimhood for Individuality
Women’s History Month should feature more praise for individual achievement and less whining about men.
Shaking Up the System
Major changes such as expansion into underserved communities and centralization of command are coming to the UNC system.
Deconstructing America by Decree
Assume that a popularly-elected government enacts a law. The law has the backing of an overwhelming majority of the people. Yet government officials decide they don’t like the law and choose to ignore it.
The above describes a clear violation of the single most important foundation of a free society: rule of law. It also describes the actions of many decision makers in our federal and state governments regarding illegal immigration. Federal law clearly states that foreign citizens of any age who enter our country outside of legal channels are to be deported. And yet the powers-that-be find endless logic-defying means to cloud the issue, against the law and the will of the people.
The issue rose to the forefront recently in North Carolina because the community college system decided that illegal aliens should be officially admitted as students, pending a legislative review.
Accountability – What Is It?
“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.
You can send your son to college, but you can’t make him think.”
This little ditty ran through my mind as I was trying to understand the accountability movement of colleges and universities. Under pressure from the federal government, higher education institutions are scrambling to find ways to measure and report “learning outcomes” – that is, to show that students learn something after four years at their institution. This week, at a Washington, D.C., meeting of a Department of Education accreditation advisory group, that pressure will increase.
Fifty years ago, the student was accountable for learning, not the college.
Storming the Academic Fortress
Editor’s Note: Jay Schalin is a writer/researcher for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh.
The spirit of the Spanish Inquisition is alive and well in the American university, according to George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki, in remarks he made at the 2007 Pope Center Conference. Academia has a “new dogma” based on multiculturalism, environmentalism, and feminism, he said. “They will enforce it viciously.”
The higher education establishment can often seem to be a near-monolithic power that ruthlessly crushes any opposition, as Zywicki suggests. Yet it is coming under increasing attack by those who want to perpetuate America’s culture and traditions.
The reform movement was very much in evidence at the conference on October 27th, with both speakers and guests who are active participants in a wide variety of attempts to alter higher education’s current path.