Tag: higher education
What Students at Yale Don’t See About Their Own Success
The writer Rob Henderson recalls a classmate at Yale, where he was an undergraduate, telling him that “monogamy is kind of outdated.” But she was raised by monogamous parents and said that she planned to have a traditional marriage.
Henderson shares that anecdote in his new memoir, Troubled, an account of his upbringing in foster care and his escape into the Air Force and higher education. For him, “Monogamy is kind of outdated” is a “luxury belief,” a term
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 Moral Decline of Elite Universities
In the spring of 1994, the top executives of the seven largest tobacco companies testified under oath before Congress that nicotine is not addictive. Nearly 30 years later, Americans remember their laughable claims, their callous indifference, their lawyerly inability to speak plainly, and the general sense that they did not regard themselves as part of a shared American community. Those pampered executives, behaving with such Olympian detachment, put the pejorative big in Big Tobacco.
Last week, something similar happened. Thirty
What the DeSantis and Newsom Debate Revealed
The best way to understand last week’s unusual debate between Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Ron DeSantis of Florida is to think of them less as representatives of different political parties than as ambassadors from different countries.
Thursday night’s debate on Fox News probably won’t much change the arc of either man’s career. DeSantis is still losing altitude in the 2024 GOP presidential race, and Newsom still faces years of auditioning before Democratic leaders and voters for a possible
The Unraveling of American Universities
When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed six new members to the board of New College of Florida earlier this year, giving the oversight panel of the public liberal-arts college in Sarasota a decidedly right-wing bent, there was no ambiguity in the message he was sending. But in case anyone had doubts, one of his appointees, Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who led the push to redefine critical race theory, quickly eliminated them.
“We are recapturing higher education,” he wrote
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
Richard Hanania’s ‘The Origins of Woke’ Is a Gateway Drug for Extremism
This week, HarperCollins will publish a new work by the conservative intellectual Richard Hanania. Titled The Origins of Woke, it bills itself as the “definitive” account of the rise of identity politics. The book makes the case that contemporary “wokeness” is an ideology that has its origins in—and was in fact created by—changes to the legal system that began with the Civil Rights Act, in the 1960s. “Long before wokeness was a cultural phenomenon,” Hanania argues, “it was law.”
Here Comes the Second Year of AI College
When ChatGPT entered the world last fall, the faculty at SUNY Buffalo freaked out. Kelly Ahuna, the university’s director of academic integrity, was inundated by panicked emails. “It has me thinking about retiring,” one English professor confessed. He had typed a prompt into ChatGPT and watched in horror as an essay unfurled on-screen. There were errors, sure: incorrect citations, weird transitions. But he would have given it a B-minus. He anticipated an onslaught of undetectable AI plagiarism. Ahuna found
Israel’s Avalanche – The Atlantic
Israel’s democracy is still intact, but the country has already lost something essential.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Utter Collapse
As Israel nears the end of a week of turmoil, its democracy remains intact. On Monday, the country’s Benjamin Netanyahu–led ruling coalition—the most hard-right government in Israel’s history—passed one component of its planned judicial overhaul. The proposed legislation has inspired months of outcry from Israelis, many of whom believe, with good reason, that these changes
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