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
Those of us who entered the humanities as graduate students in the 1980s and strove to climb the institutional ladder in the 1990s know of a particular ritual that became a common feature of academic debate in those years. You might call it the “You-don’t-know-what-it’s-like” moment.
Do the number of degrees issued, the graduation rates achieved and the length of time completing degrees have anything to do with real learning?
We live in a moment when mass hysterias override and drive away the reasonableness our civilization once took as a cornerstone of the good life, the life of ordered liberty. Campus disorders merely reflect the mental and moral disorders of the time.
Spring is upon us and that can only mean one thing if you’re an observer of higher education—it’s commencement season. Normally, this would be a time of excitement, hope, and anticipation, but not anymore.
It seems fitting that the state which hosted perhaps the ugliest riots following Trump’s election, Oregon, now is pushing a retreat for faculty members at Oregon State where those who “identify as white” can examine their “internalized dominance.”
Even in so conservative a state as Kansas, the universities are largely in the grip of “progressives” who do not care for freedom.
“The domination of elite institutions of higher education by the upper middle class is a big problem for social mobility. . . . It looks like it might be bad news for free speech, too.”
William Murchison gives his take on Johnson and Taylor’s new book “The Campus Rape Panic: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities” in light of a survey showing 15 percent of undergraduate women at the University of Texas have been raped.
Colleges always pay lip service to educational excellence, but they don’t always mean it. That’s because educational excellence often collides with another priority of the administrators, namely student retention.
The irony here is rich. In trying to spread knowledge about our constitutional rights—including free speech—a student at a public college was informed that those rights were only exercisable in a 616-square-foot area.
