Oklahoma State University president Burns Hargis has pulled the plug on a scientific study involving baboons. He says the decision has nothing to do with the animal rights movement--but then other admins say it does.
...despite the university president's statement that animal rights groups didn't influence the decision,' [...]
You know you live in an upside-down world when teachers actively fight against the interests of kids.
From the Weekly Standard:
As Christmas grows closer, the hopes of thousands of D.C. schoolchildren and their families are appearing dimmer and dimmer, and no one is celebrating more than the teachers'' [...]
It was a delight to see Stanley Fish's review of Sarah Palin's Going Rogue. Why? First, he read it rather than fast forwarding to reviling it. Second, he brought with him a clear sense of what makes autobiography autobiographical, specifically its special relationship to truth-telling (you shouldn't lie about' [...]
Traveling last week for work, I burned through several books on innumerable airplanes: Clint Bolick's Voucher Wars (a strikingly human and accessible account of his landmark work on behalf of school choice), Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (read only if you want to wind up feeling spectacularly defeated and hopeless [...]
It's not just that the "proof" of anthropogenic global warming has been faked--but also that the peer review process ratifying the theory has been faked, too. And that's a problem that is not at all confined to climate science--rather, it's a sign of a new, unethical academic norm in which [...]
That's a phrase my father likes to use. And it's a very good fit for how the administration is treating the embattled but incredibly important and effective DC voucher program. From the Washington Times:
It is disgraceful the way Education Secretary Arne Duncan dodges and weaves while back-stabbing [...]
Happy thanksgiving.
[...]When defenders of the academic status quo hear criticisms about the lack of intellectual and political diversity among professors, they scoff. They argue that the reason there are so few libertarians or conservatives in academia is that they self-select for other professions (here there is often a snide comment about [...]
Teacher training is becoming sensitivity training in Minnesota:
Do you believe in the American dream -- the idea that in this country, hardworking people of every race, color and creed can get ahead on their own merits? If so, that belief may soon bar you from getting a [...]
Lincoln University, a historically black institution in Pennsylvania, doesn't have much in the way of a core curriculum. To graduate, you can take one year of foreign language or two courses in computer science ("Computers for Health Education" counts). They do make you take some intro survey sorts of' [...]
Yesterday, the American Enterprise Institute held a forum on increasing accountability in higher education. Participants delivered remarks and appeared on panels, as is usual for such things; panelists also submitted drafts of longer, chapter-length essays for circulation. ACTA president Anne Neal took part in the events, building on an [...]
From the New York Daily News:
More city kids are graduating from high school, but that doesn't mean they can do college math.
[...]
During their first math class at one of CUNY's four-year colleges, 90% of 200 students tested couldn't solve a simple algebra problem, the report by the [...]
In other news, this is what this year's academic job list looks like for English: In the entire country, there are' [...]
When times are tight and hiring is frozen, you have to set your priorities. You have to do less with more. You can only afford to retain absolutely essential staff--and when you hire, you must do so with an eye to bringing in people whose skills and experience are utterly [...]
Squib from Inside Higher Ed:
Many students at Northwestern University are upset over the blackface Halloween costumes of some white students, NBC Chicago reported. Morton O. Schapiro, Northwestern's president, sent an e-mail to students saying: “While I fully support the principles of free expression, at the same time [...]
--Rhoda Janzen's new memoir, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. Offered by publisher, accepted because I'm related to some lovely Mennonites in little black dresses.
--Michael Cox's The Meaning of Night. Never read any Cox. Part of my search for reincarnations of Wilkie Collins.
--Daphne Du Maurier's
Clear, strong thinking about what higher ed needs to do now, from Cal State chancellor Charles B. Reed and ASU president Michael M. Crow:
"Dumb public policies," like mandatory-sentencing laws that drive up states' costs for prisons and leave less for education, may be part of the reason' [...]
Eleven more videos of school kids performing songs and chants in praise of Barack Obama have surfaced.
Transcript of the one above:
Barack Obama there is none higher
Other politicians should call me sire
To burn my kingdom you must use fire
I create change till I retire!
[...]
Odds are--no disrespect--you can't. Most people in academia are in that boat. They know the term colloquially, as it floats around in casual conversation and in the occasional episode of righteous faculty outrage against the usual suspects--administrators, trustees, state legislators, watchdog groups. But being able to sling around a phrase' [...]
The higher ed accountability movement has been dismissed by many academic insiders as a right-wing Trojan horse--a way of eroding academic freedom, ending tenure, and putting power in the hands of politically driven nonacademics. But that's the defensive posture of an academy that is very resistant to change--and, ironically, very [...]
--The Nebuly Coat (1903), by the forgotten but fascinating John Meade Falkner. I ran across the name recently when reading around about Charles' Palliser's The Unburied, which is no Quincunx, but which was a pretty fun murder mystery set in a late Victorian cathedral town. One reviewer noted that' [...]
Faculty at Berkeley have done some detective work in the wake of massive system-wide budget cuts that include pay reductions for faculty and reduced academic services--and have discovered a surprising fact. The athletics program--felt there, as at many schools, to be a self-sustaining entity that encourages alumni donations and [...]
Tenure has been disappearing for decades--just about as fast as adjuncts can be hired. Much ink and many pixels have been devoted to analyzing, deploring, and even, at times, celebrating the fact that today, by some counts, upwards of 70 percent of college courses are taught by non-tenure track faculty. [...]
Recently re-read The Eustace Diamonds, Trollope's 1871 novel about the finer points of property law, inheritance, deception, and, most interesting of all, self-deception. My father always says that the real person to look out for is the person who believes their own lies. That's what this novel is about.
Every year [...]
Our ed schools are terrible. Even the folks who run them can and do admit that, when pressed. And to its credit, the Obama administration is calling them out. Arne Duncan is speaking at Columbia Teachers College today--and Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews says his talk "goes further" [...]
English teacher Patrick Welsh, writing in the Washington Post:
"Why don't you guys study like the kids from Africa?"
In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class of 12th-graders who had done horribly on a test I had just given. A' [...]
Accreditation is one of the murkier and less sensational zones of academic politics. But it's also one of the most important ones. To be eligible to receive federal student aid, a college or university must be accredited. No accreditation, no aid. For many schools, to lose accreditation is, thus, not [...]
Indoctrinate U director Evan Coyne Maloney has released a short film on the rise and fall of the Obama brand. Check it out.
[...]Barack Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Within minutes, the Chronicle of Higher Education posts the news on its site. Shortly thereafter, the comments begin to roll in. There are nine so far. Two are congratulatory. Excerpts from the remaining seven:
"Maybe this is a little premature? He" [...]
American University communications professor Gemma Puglisi devotes a Chronicle of Higher Ed column to how she turned her freshman comp class into an activist workshop:
I never thought that preparing a simple writing course would change my life and that of my students.
In the summer of 2007, as [...]
The Cartel exposes the corruption and incompetence in our public school system--and makes a compelling argument for school choice. It opens in theaters across New Jersey on October 9--and will hopefully be in theaters across the country shortly after that. Find out about show times, see clips, and sign [...]
I spend a lot of the work week just craving time to read. My vision of the ideal weekend always involved hours and hours spent doing nothing but reading and reading and reading. It rarely turns out that way, as life has a way of intruding, but it's still a [...]
Last winter, Maurice Black and I published an article about financial illiteracy among young Americans--and argued that colleges should be incorporating training in both economics and money management into their curricula. Good news: things now seem to be changing a bit on campus
[...]"Can you any longer read Henry James or George Eliot? Do you have the patience?" asks Tufts professor Maryanne Wolf, who is also the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. The context is a New York Times story on how publishers [...]
The year I spent teaching in a small boarding school in the Berkshires just happened to be the year Kerry challenged Bush for the presidency. A short while before the election, classes were cancelled so that the students could all go register Democratic voters--not something they initiated, but that the [...]
Administrators at Saint Louis University apparently live under a rock. They tried to get away with preventing a controversial speaker from coming to campus -- and are getting the spanking they deserve from across the political spectrum:
David Horowitz is getting backing from his usual critics after Saint [...]
From Steven Backus, director of the College of St. Scholastica's Rose Warner Writing/Critical Thinking Center:
Devon's face flushed. His lips began to quiver. A tear formed in the corner of his right eye, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand before hastily shoving his [...]
Our tax dollars at work on New Jersey school kids.
[...]FIRE reports on one of those cases that you just could not make up:
ATLANTA, September 15, 2009--The abuse of campus sexual harassment policies to punish dissenting professors has hit a new low at East Georgia College (EGC) in Swainsboro. Professor Thomas Thibeault made the mistake of pointing [...]
Embedded video from CNN Video
One of the biggest stories right now is that the MSM habitually fails to report on really big stories. That's why James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles' ACORN videos are so striking--they reveal a pattern of systemic bias, incompetence, and reportorial failure on the part of [...]
From the Chronicle of Higher Ed:
Criticism continues to rain down on Yale University and Yale University Press for their decision to remove all images of the Prophet Muhammad from a forthcoming scholarly book, The Cartoons That Shook the World, by Jytte Klausen.
Now the National Coalition Against Censorship [...]
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Mark Bauerlein wonders where the academics are when the media distorts the historical record as a means of dismissing dissent:
Anybody who believes that last month's town-hall meetings marked an unprecedented eruption of anti-democratic thuggery hasn't read much U.S. history. A glance at a gubernatorial debate in Columbus,' [...]
Coming in the mail: Rafe Esquith's new book, Lighting their Fires: Raising Extraordinary Children in a Mixed-Up, Muddled-Up, Shook-Up World. (Extra points for conjuring the inimitable E.L. Konigsberg with the title.)
If Esquith's name is new to you, then this is your lucky day. He is a revelation. Check out the [...]
Camille Paglia, writing at Salon last week:
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason [...]
Loved: Julie & Julia. Funny, smart, inspiring, edible. I've dusted off Mastering the Art of French Cooking and am contemplating where to begin (not with the recipes for brains). Normally I steer away from overly creamy and buttery recipes--I do a lot of Italian and Asian-style cooking with minimal fat' [...]
Sometimes, it's the Week from Hell. And when that happens, it's necessary to spend much time with my flute. This is one of the pieces I'm learning now. The coolness never gets old.
' [...]At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mount Holyoke professor Gail Hornstein reflects on the off-putting--and self-defeating--conventions of academic style:
Do you ever read your prose aloud, either quietly to yourself or at a public reading of your work? Too many academics would answer no to that question. We [...]
