See Thru Edu is a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation
Thomas K. Lindsay, Ph.D., Editor in Chief and Director, Center for Higher Education, Texas Public Policy Foundation
Educational choice has been an especially hot topic this year in Texas and around the country, making the results of the latest poll on K-12 reform of interest to a wider audience than policy wonks.
The Koala is a student newspaper at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). In 2015, it became the center of a legal dispute that still rages.
Silence followed for another day or two until a note of an altogether different tenor arrived. I’d been disinvited. The note began, “I have been advised that we must focus more on a gender balance for the panel and that I should be adding another female speaker. So at this time I am sorry to say I have to withdrawal my invitation.”
Remarking on the relation between education and politics, Joseph Stalin observed that “the writer is the engineer of the human soul.” In Stalinist fashion, today’s campuses are endeavoring to rewrite the souls of engineers.
In the summer 2017 issue of the magazine Modern Age, the English philosopher Roger Scruton takes scalpel, forceps, and vascular clamps—sans anesthesia—to the campus free speech issue, leaving the reader to exclaim, in spite of his surgical care: Yuck!
The trouble with the obsession over group identity is that it prevents students from learning how to think and how to deal with controversy.
Title IX’s lack of due process was criticized by Harvard’s law school faculty: 21 men and 7 women declared “strong objections to Sexual Harassment Policy and Procedures.”
Whenever people don’t have good arguments on the merits, they turn to ad hominem attacks. That’s what we are seeing in the battle over racial preferences.
University of California, Berkley, once the home of the free speech movement, is now the home of censorship and suppression of diverse ideas. Its most recent tactic? Using “campus safety” as a smokescreen to hinder conservative thought from penetrating the university’s bubble.
Turmoil at the University of Missouri has caused a 35 percent drop in freshman enrollment since 2015, as the campus has been shunned by students and families put off by, depending on their viewpoint, a culture of racism or one where protesters run amok.
