How not to handle incivility in the Digital Age
A sad fact about some of today’s college students—particularly those of the leftist variety—is that they place greater value on their emotions and ideology than they do on tolerance, sensibility, and free speech.
Industrial relations: another academic field captured by ideology
Over the past few decades, much of American higher education has become ideologically left wing. You might have thought, however, that business schools could resist the trend. You’d be mistaken.
When university boards of governance actually govern
It is heartwarming to see state officials do the jobs they were elected to do. Too often they have shied away from their obligations to ensure that the university system adheres to appropriate standards of scholarship.
In North Carolina, university-backed political advocacy may be on the way out
Last week, a working group from the UNC system’s Board of Governors drew national attention and student and faculty protest after it announced plans to discontinue three of the system’s 237 centers and increase oversight of thirteen others. The centers slated for closure are East Carolina University’s Center for Biodiversity, NC Central’s Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change, and UNC-Chapel Hill’s Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, which was founded in 2005 by then-U.S. Senator John Edwards.
Firing Professor McAdams: When a Catholic university collides with political correctness
Parents of Marquette students can now rest assured that their children in college will be “safe” from homophobic and other politically incorrect indoctrination; professors of philosophy will no longer consider it their “mission” (pace Socrates) to subject widely accepted meanings and values to intensive reexamination; and professors of other subjects who manage their own private blogs now know that what they formerly considered to be “free speech,” even in their extracurricular activities, has now been redefined by their employers.
“Free” community college will make a bad situation worse
In his State of the Union address, President Obama pitched his plan for making two years of community college as “free and universal in America as high school is today.” He thinks it would be a great thing. But at the community college where I taught English from 2007 to 2010, Georgia Perimeter College, the joke was that it was already an extension of high school.
What I’ve learned at the Pope Center
Over the past eight years I have experienced a rich and sometimes tumultuous education about the economics, politics, and culture of today’s campuses.
Steven Salaita tells UNC-Chapel Hill audience that “civility” is a racist term
On February 5, more than 100 students, faculty, administrators, and political activists packed a lecture hall at UNC-Chapel Hill to hear controversial indigenous studies professor Steven Salaita speak about academic freedom and censorship.
Meet the mid-level bureaucrats who impose speech codes on America’s universities
Of all the many ideas that constitute our civilization, none is more central or important than the norms of free inquiry. The last place one should entrust these norms for safekeeping and propagation is to a bureaucracy that is dedicated to peace and quiet. Yet today, it is they, not the faculty, who are the true enemies of free speech on campus.
Americans used to save for college; moves toward making it free are not progress
I am strongly committed to higher education, especially in the sciences and math where we are lagging other countries. I also understand that there are students of limited means, and they need a hand up in life. But we seem to no longer draw rational lines between serious students who need assistance, and the many non-serious students who squander it.