Tag: higher education
The Failure of Affirmative Action
Most of my colleagues are college-educated. I am often the only product of felons, addicts, and foster care whom my peers have encountered outside of time spent volunteering in homeless shelters and group homes. Over the years, whenever affirmative action in higher education has come under threat, these folks have offered their sympathies. They believe that I—a child of a Black father and white mother who grew up in poverty and instability—feel the attacks more acutely. Most Americans seem to
The End of Affirmative Action. For Real This Time.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule next week on a pair of decisions about affirmative action in higher education. Both were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative group dedicated to eliminating “race and ethnicity from college admissions.” One case is against Harvard, likely because anything involving Harvard guarantees some attention. The other is against the University of North Carolina, one of the most prestigious public university systems that hasn’t banned affirmative action yet. Both cases involve Asian
Biden’s Blue-Collar Jobs Bet – The Atlantic
When President Joe Biden visited Kentucky yesterday to tout a new bridge project, most media attention focused on his embrace of bipartisanship. And indeed Biden, against the backdrop of the GOP chaos in the House of Representatives, signaled how aggressively he would claim that reach-across-the-aisle mantle. He appeared onstage with not only Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, but also GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, a perennial bête noire for Democrats.
But Biden also touched on another theme that will
How America Has Changed Since the First Affirmative-Action Case
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, 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
If you were in charge of the admissions office at a top-50 college or university, how would you decide which applicants got accepted as undergraduates and which got rejected? (How would you weight grades? Test scores?
Why Boys Should Start School a Year Later Than Girls
“It was a light-bulb moment for me,” Christopher Schroeder, an entrepreneur, an investor, and a father of two boys, told me. His son Jack had been accepted to Beauvoir, the National Cathedral Elementary School, in Washington, D.C. But “it was clear to the school that Jack should wait a year,” he said—not because of his academic ability, but to give him more time to become socially and emotionally prepared. “My view was that smart kids should be pushed forward
America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good
It may be time to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.
“When we
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
How to Fix American Higher Ed
American higher education is the envy of the world, and it’s also failing our students on a massive scale. How can both be true simultaneously? Our decentralized, competitive system of research institutions is a national treasure, unparalleled in human history. We have the best universities, best professors, and best systems of discovery, and we attract the best talent. But the American educational system leaves many high-school graduates woefully unprepared for work or for life, whether or not they go
Is Boris Johnson a Liar?
A few months ago, I saw Boris Johnson recount a story about his life that I’d never heard before—and he said something that was not, strictly speaking, true.
With most politicians, hearing a new tale can be unremarkable, but with Johnson—the subject of at least two biographies, countless newspaper and magazine articles, and someone who has been at the center of British political life for decades—almost everything that can be known about him is already known. Revelations that
The Rise of the Disneyfied Public University
Weeks into his freshman year at the Marion Military Institute, a public two-year college in Alabama, Thomas was bored. The campus, in the sleepy, hard-luck town of Marion, lacked the glitzy amenities of modern-day universities. To escape the institute’s starchy military uniforms and rigid schedule, Thomas would jump in his truck on weekends and head to Tuscaloosa, home of the University of Alabama.
The University of Alabama had a meticulously groomed campus and stately redbrick buildings whose white colonnades