Free College for All Is Not the Best Way to Expand Access
“Free college” makes for a neat sound-bite in Democratic primaries. But turning higher education into another middle-class entitlement isn’t going to improve outcomes, isn’t going to promote economic mobility, and isn’t going to encourage the kind of structural reforms that are long overdue.
Actually, You Can Discharge Student Debts and the Feds Want to Make It Easier
It is common knowledge that students who have amassed large college debt burdens cannot discharge those debts through bankruptcy. That “knowledge,” however, is not really the case—the laws are written to permit discharge of student loan debts in some cases. And, with the federal government pushing for broader interpretations of those laws, they are now an incentive for students to amass debt and then dump it on the taxpayers.
Despite Its Big Spending, N.C.’s Higher Ed Budget Tackles Big Issues
The state’s higher education budget is usually a mixed bag of “the good, the bad, and the ugly,” and this year’s is no exception. However, the legislature should be commended for addressing a number of important issues that traditionally have been neglected or overlooked.
UNC-Chapel Hill’s Defense of Controversial 9/11 Course Doesn’t Hold Up
Given that the included content is overwhelmingly anti-American, that the course omits some of the most essential perspectives, and that the professor is a hard-left ideologue, the only proper conclusion can be that the course was crafted to present a biased picture. It is time for the Trustees of UNC-Chapel Hill to step up and end this politicized abuse of the curriculum. And in doing so, establish themselves as the voice of reason, since the administration seems incapable of proper judgment in many curricular matters.
Affirmative Action Actually Hurts Campus Race Relations
The Supreme Court held, in the 2003 case Grutter v. Bollinger, that it is permissible for universities to give some students preference in admission on the basis of their race. That decision was a serious mistake and it is time to correct it. Grutter’s essential premise is that a racially diverse student body leads to educational benefits for all students. The Court accepted that proposition—but it should not have. There is good reason to doubt that the claimed benefits of diversity in the classroom are even genuine, much less compelling.
The Dream Is Gone: Leonard Cassuto’s The Graduate School Mess
When an undergraduate student comes to me for advice about graduate school, I always say the same thing: Don’t do it. I tell them that because I was lucky to find a tenure track position after four years of searching for one. In my field, political theory, the job market was then bad and is today terrible. In The Graduate School Mess: What Caused it and How to Fix It, Leonard Cassuto, Professor of English at Fordham University and author of the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Graduate Adviser” column, focuses on the situation in the humanities, which sounds even worse than in my field.
The English Department’s Willful Self-Destruction
Are the humanities in trouble on American campuses? That is certainly the impression one gets from the media today; articles in publications of both left and right describe the increasing flight from the humanities into other disciplines. But is it all hype? After all, the blogosphere is always full of “next big things” or “imminent collapses” that never come to pass. And many academics scoff at the idea that the humanities are suffering from any sort of existential crisis. To find out the real situation, I explored what is going on in one of the main humanities disciplines, English. Concentrating on English departments and their faculties in the University of North Carolina system, I used a mix of empirical and qualitative methods to look behind all the rhetoric and wagon-circling.
I Fought Political Correctness and Correctness Won
If UNC-Chapel Hill officials can unceremoniously dump me for speaking out against the injustice done to my son and the lack of due process in campus sexual assault cases, they can and will do it to others who speak out on other issues. This is bigger than my job or myself; it is about the right to raise your voice on the UNC campus—a school that prides itself on a tradition of free speech—in protest of all and any injustice.
University Endowments: Whose Money Is It, Anyway?
If you think that universities are not making the best use of endowment funds, you should look to persuasion rather than government regulation. There are many ways of trying to convince presidents, trustees, and other college leaders that they should change their approaches to the use of their endowments; that would be vastly better than turning to a recently proposed federal mandate.
Federal Rules Run Afoul of First Amendment
In trying to avoid liability for “sexual harassment” under Title IX regulations, many schools have gone way too far. They have allowed hyper-sensitive or vindictive students to use the regulations as a weapon against anyone whose speech offends or annoys them.