Tag: faculty members
The Real Problem With American Universities
Updated at 7:33 p.m. ET on January 30, 2024
Just about everyone in America seems to be angry at higher education. Congress is angry. State governments are angry. Donors are angry. Parents are angry because schools are so expensive, and students are angry because they aren’t getting what they paid for. Just 36 percent of Americans now tell pollsters that they have significant confidence in higher education, down from 57 percent less than a decade ago.
Elite schools in particular
The Class War at West Virginia University
Three years ago, President E. Gordon Gee of West Virginia University had a terrific idea—a career capper. As he neared retirement, he would embrace the “academic transformation” of public higher education and streamline his university.
For too long, as Gee told anyone who would listen, public universities had tried to be everything to everyone and keep up with elite private colleges. When the coronavirus pandemic shut down American universities in 2020, Gee embraced its disruptions as a gift—a “black swan
The Israel-War Email That College Presidents Should’ve Sent
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
Two friends, Petra and Rodrigo, are having an argument.
Petra thinks the world is best if people stay in their lane and do their job as best they can, narrowly construed. CEOs should try to maximize profits within the law. Emergency-room doctors should
The Worst DEI Policy in Higher Education
Attacks on faculty rights are frequent in academia, where professors’ words are now policed by illiberal administrators, state legislators, and students. I’ve reported on related controversies in American higher education for more than 20 years. But I’ve never seen a policy that threatens academic freedom or First Amendment rights on a greater scale than what is now unfolding in this country’s largest system of higher education: California’s community colleges.
Roughly 1.9 million students are enrolled in that system. Its
The Hypocrisy of Mandatory Diversity Statements
Last month, John D. Haltigan sued the University of California at Santa Cruz. He wants to work there as a professor of psychology. But he alleges that its hiring practices violate the First Amendment by imposing an ideological litmus test on prospective hires: To be considered, an applicant must submit a statement detailing their contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
According to the lawsuit, Haltigan believes in “colorblind inclusivity,” “viewpoint diversity,” and “merit-based evaluation”—all ideas that could lead to
What Does DEI Even Mean?
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
This week, Donald Trump was arraigned on 34 felony counts and pleaded not guilty to all. His indictment has sparked debates about the legal soundness and wisdom of the criminal charges against him, his future in politics, and how the press is covering it
The Schools That Ban Smartphones
Last October, I accepted an invitation to speak (for—full disclosure—an honorarium) at St. Andrew’s, a small Episcopal boarding school in Middletown, Delaware. It was beautiful in the expected ways: the lake on which the school’s champion crew teams practice, the mid-autumn foliage, the redbrick buildings. But it was also beautiful in one unexpected way, which revealed itself slowly.
My first experience of St. Andrew’s was dinner, served family style, with all 317 students at tables presided over by faculty members.
Stop Donating to Your Elite University
During the peak of the pandemic, John Katzman and I had a standing phone date at 7:30 on Friday mornings. Katzman usually walked along the beach near his house in the Hamptons while we spoke. I’d sit in my office, try to visualize the beauty of Long Island’s southeastern shore, and listen.
Katzman is astonishingly knowledgeable about the American educational system. He founded Princeton Review, the test-prep behemoth, in the early 1980s, and has founded several other start-ups since.
How to Fix the Bias Against Free Speech on Campus
A recent investigation of eight abortion-rights supporters at American University, in Washington, D.C., offers yet more evidence that college administrators and diversity-and-inclusion bureaucrats—some of whom undermine free speech as if their job duties demanded it—need new checks on their power.
This matter began in May, shortly after the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked, prompting numerous law students at American to join an online chat about the impending diminution of abortion rights. One student
Professors Need the Power to Fire Diversity Bureaucrats
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter, Up for Debate, where he highlights timely conversations and solicits reader responses to thought-provoking questions.
One of the most closely watched free-speech battles in higher education reached its denouement recently at Georgetown University’s law school, where that foremost obsession of the American intelligentsia––a problematic tweet!––sparked a months-long investigation of a newly hired legal scholar who was supposed to run Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution. Ilya Shapiro’s inquisition revealed how diversity bureaucrats and other administrators, seizing