In today’s Pope Center piece, Richard Bishirjian, president and founder of Yorktown University, writes about the assault that the Obama administration has launched against for-profit higher education.

The president wants Americans to think that he is not anti-business, but within the sphere of higher education at least, it’s hard to avoid that conclusion.

Inside Higher Ed has published an intriguing essay by Timothy Larsen, a professor at Wheaton College. He discusses the experience of a Christian student at a public university who encountered hostility (and poor grades) when he wrote about his faith. Larsen also shares his own experience with prejudice when he submitted a book manuscript to the Yale University Press. He quotes from the anonymous peer “reviews.” For example, a reviewer who agreed to accept the manuscript (based on T. S. Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society) explained his decision thus: “It is worth considering why ideas we find not just impossible to believe but even impossible to believe that others believe — such as the ideology of the Taliban or Saudis — have such appeal.”

Yesterday afternoon, the University of Illinois reinstated Prof. Kenneth Howell and made clear that he could teach the same class, Introduction to Catholicism, that he taught before he was fired. NRO readers will recall that the university fired Professor Howell after he taught his class about Catholic beliefs regarding sexual morality. An offended student (who was not even in the class) sent an e-mail complaint, and in very short order — without any due process — the University fired Professor Howell for allegedly violating university standards of “inclusivity.”  

This exclusion in the name of inclusion ignited a firestorm of protest. Within weeks, a “Save Dr. Ken” Facebook page and group had together accumulated more than 9,000 fans, FIRE weighed in, the AAUP expressed concern, and at the Alliance Defense Fund Center for Academic Freedom, we stepped in to represent him — and reminded the University of his fundamental First Amendment rights. Yesterday, these efforts paid off.

Professor Howell’s victory, while encouraging, is not complete. In its letter, the University notes that the Faculty Senate’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure will “continue its review of the situation.” As a result, ADF will continue to represent Dr. Howell to make sure that his academic freedom is protected now and in the future.

Finally, there has also been much discussion about the university’s relationship with the Saint John’s Catholic Newman Center (the Newman Center paid Dr. Howell’s salary). As I’ve said before, this case has always been about Professor Howell’s academic freedom. The relationship between the university and the Newman Center is a matter best left to those two parties (and I understand that this relationship is changing). As for Professor Howell, his academic freedom has been restored. It’s a shame, however, that it took a grassroots student uprising, legal representation, and an avalanche of media attention to make it happen.

Here is a New York Times piece on a program that allows students who haven’t taken the typical pre-med curriculum with lots of science and math, and haven’t taken the MCAT, to enter medical school.

I’m not automatically inclined to criticize this. I’ve heard the case made that good doctoring rarely involves knowledge of hard science and advanced math. Smart students who haven’t gone the pre-med track can no doubt learn what they need to in those areas as they proceed with medical studies. I suspect that somewhat more of the non-pre-med students will decide that med school isn’t for them, but if so, that’s the school’s problem.

It’s possible for someone to become a good lawyer without taking a single course in the typical pre-law curriculum. (It’s also possible to become a good lawyer without going to law school at all.) Maybe it’s equally possible to become a good doctor without pre-med undergraduate studies.

A grad student at Augusta State U. claims she was told to undergo gay sensitivity training or not receive her degree.

Yawn . . .

That’s the collective response of the 6,000 students taking summer classes there, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The thin piece of rope, crudely fashioned into a loop, was found July 21 in a stairwell in Mandeville Hall, an auditorium that hosts recitals and other performing arts.

So far, police have no leads on who might have created the noose and are seeking help identifying witnesses.

It is the latest incident with racial overtones to emerge on the campus in recent months. Another dangling noose was found in a campus library in February, drawing condemnation and sparking a protest rally attended by hundreds of students. A student later admitted to and apologized for hanging the rope and was suspended. . . .

The most recent incident has drawn little attention, said campus spokeswoman Judy Piercey.

The girl who confessed to the first noose-hanging, back in February, wrote an anonymous letter to the school paper explaining that she was herself a “minority” and had no racist intentions. Here’s how she explained herself:

I found a small piece of rope on the ground earlier in the day. While I was hanging out with my friends a bit later, we tried jump-roping with it and making it into a lasso. My friend then took the rope and tied it into a noose. I innocently marveled at his ability to tie a noose, without thinking of any of its connotations or the current racial climate at UCSD. I left soon after with one of my friends for Geisel to study, still carrying the rope. After a bit of studying I picked up the rope to play with, and ended up hanging it by my desk. It was a mindless act and stupid mistake. When I got up to leave, a couple hours later, I simply forgot about it. This was Tuesday night. Three days later, on Friday morning, I found out that the noose had been found and construed as another racist act on campus. I felt so ashamed and embarrassed, and the first thing I did was call the campus police and confess.

In response to this non-hate crime, the UCSD started doing multicultural back flips, launching a new campus group called “Join the Battle Against Hate.” Never mind that there wasn’t any hate to begin with.

Real racism is worth speaking out against. But all this hype and manufactured outrage simply deadens our sensitivity. Haven’t America’s race mongers heard of the boy who cried wolf?

Unfortunately, phony racial hysteria has become a mainstay of college life in America. All too often, “hate crimes” are intentionally staged by liberals who want to “bring attention” to America’s racial problems — a trend I detailed in a post back in March. It doesn’t matter to them if that racism is real or imagined.

No wonder the kids at UCSD have stopped paying attention.

Gregg Easterbrook makes a good case that the answer is “yes” over at ESPN.com.

So say some researchers, as reported in the New York Times.

Years ago, a study looked at kids who had been randomly assigned (within their schools) to kindergarten classes. Kids who attended good kindergarten classes (low class size, experienced teacher, etc.) did better in the next few years, but the effects eventually wore off as measured by test scores. More recently, researchers tracked down the participants in adulthood — and found that the effects of kindergarten seemed to have reasserted themselves, as measured by income, etc.

I’m skeptical. Specifically, in the PowerPoint report they provide (PDF), the scatterplots seem to support their conclusion, while the trend lines don’t. For example, look at pages 27 through 29, about class size, college attendance, and earnings. Or 32 and 33, about the effect of teacher experience and its effects on wages. Or 44 through 46, about “class quality” and earnings.

And not to mention the basic “sniff test” the results fail. Kindergarten is meant to teach academic skills, and the most direct measures of those skills reveal no difference after several years — and yet more indirect measures, decades later, somehow prove that kindergarten really, truly matters? I’m willing to follow the evidence where it leads, but I need more than this. I’m looking forward to a more thorough report, and some attempts to replicate these results with other data sets.

By Matthew Yglesias. Read the whole thing, but here are the highlights:

People who are plausible admission candidates at Harvard and don’t quite make the cut end up at Columbia or Penn. People who don’t get into Berkeley go to UCLA. And they all end up fine. There’s just absolutely no need to cry for someone who got into Bryn Mawr instead of Wellesley thanks to affirmative action or legacy preference or structural bias in the SAT or anything else. This is a made-up social problem. Every single American teenager who winds up at a selective college of any kind is in very good shape in a country where (a) most people don’t have college degrees and (b) most colleges aren’t selective.

If you were to start writing a list of the problems faced by poor people in the United States of America you’d run out of paper long before you got to elite university admissions policies. Poor kids start school already behind their higher-SES peers. They are then disproportionately concentrated in low-performing schools featuring ineffective teachers. And when they’re in school is the lucky time! Every summer, the schools shut down and poor kids fall further behind their middle class peers. If they depend on the school lunch program to feed them, well then they’re out of luck come summertime on the eating front as well as the schooling front. A very substantial proportion of kids from poor families drop of out of highschool and those who do manage to get into any kind of college at all have much [lower] odds of actually graduating.

Yglesias and I disagree on how much we can and should do about all that, of course, but as far as this post goes, he’s right on the money.

I should add, though, that the issue isn’t just about the effects of the policy, but also about the fact that in order for the policy to exist in the first place, our government has to carve out exceptions to anti-discrimination laws to allow discrimination against whites and Asians. In this way it’s like the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation controversy — a small issue that reveals a deeper problem with our enforcement of civil-rights laws.

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Emory University history professor Patrick Allitt discusses the research finding that college students are putting in less and less time on coursework, yet expect (and mostly receive) high grades.

I’m particularly glad to have Professor Allitt comment on this because his 2004 book I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student was such an eye-opener, detailing his difficulties in getting students — at a pretty strong university — to take the work seriously. You can read my review of his book here.

The administration has reprimanded history professor Robert Paquette over an article he wrote for the NAS website..

Paquette is up for the fight.

I take this as further evidence for my argument that many college graduates end up in jobs that don’t call for any real academic training at all. Thanks, Carol!

. . . transformed into “today’s persons of influence.”

Accuracy in Academia reports that one quarter of those who served on the national council of the radical Students for a Democratic Society — known for its disruptive demonstrations and violent spawn, the Weathermen — have either worked in academe, guest lectured there, or written textbooks.

AIA provides a Who’s Who of these radicals who have done so much to infect campuses with their ethos.

Perusing some Smith College alumni magazines, I came across an unusually frank and helpful article about Ivy League grads landing in low-level jobs. It sounds some of the themes of a recent piece at nas.org by Jason Fertig, that grads can use what jobs are on offer to go higher. The Smith article admits that the college stuffs its students with an exaggerated sense of their worth, which can leave them distraught when they are asked to fetch coffee on their first job.

It doesn’t actually say that, but that’s the implication: “At Smith, students are told they can conquer the world. Then once they graduate and get that first low-level job, reality hits. Where’s the corner office? Where are the perks? Why am I spending my days faxing and filing?” The article goes on to present three stories of Smith grads in just this kind of situation, and how they used the entry position toward getting more responsible and more satisfying work. Two of them land good jobs in the kind of PC work that NR readers deplore, feminism and sex education, but the ideas presented are still useful.

A sidebar gives some tips on making the best of entry-level positions: Ask for more responsibility. Learn everything you can. Interview co-workers. Train up (if there are workshops and educational opportunities supplied by the employer). Know when to move on (when you’ve learned all you can, when you can’t advance without further training, or when you simply dread going to work in the morning).  

Philosophy professor James Otteson weighs in with some thoughtful comments regarding the flap over BB&T’s grants to teach Rand’s laissez-faire economics here.

Last Friday, the New York Times ran one of those standard pieces on how American prosperity is “threatened” by the fact that some other nations now have a higher percentage of young people with college degrees than we do. I’m not surprised by the piece, but I am somewhat surprised that the writer didn’t even bother soliciting any dissenting views or casting doubt on the claim that we need more college graduates by pointing out that for years, large numbers of college-educated people have been taking low-skill, low-paying jobs.

Like its advocacy of Keynesian economic theory, it’s evidently an article of faith at the NYT that more formal education is always good.

This is what happens you combine a lazy Saturday afternoon, a new computer, and disgust for the mindset that spawns cases like Dr. Howell’s.

Behold, my movie-making debut.

On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal ran a good article by Henry Bienen (president emeritus of Northwestern and an affiliate of for-profit Rasmussen College). I sent in this letter to the editor:

Two cheers for Henry Bienen’s article “In Defense of For-Profit Colleges” (July 23). In its never-ending search for scapegoats when its meddling produces bad results, the political class has singled out for-profit higher education for attack, much as it blamed the financial industry for the housing bubble. For-profit colleges are under attack as the default rate on federal student loans rises, but as Mr. Bienen points out, there are for-profits with good records with regard to student education and job placement. Conversely, there are public universities that are scarcely better than the worst of the proprietary schools when it comes to luring in feeble students, promising them a great future, and giving them degrees whether or not they have learned anything useful. I’d have given Mr. Bienen three cheers if he had put his finger on the source of the problem — federal subsidies. Non-profit colleges have just as insatiable an appetite for money as do the for-profits. The availability of easy federal loans and grants that follow students who are spending little of their own money in the present gives them a strong incentive for enrolling many young people who are academically disengaged. Many of those who graduate wind up in low-skill, low-paying jobs that the typical high school student could do. The more we try to give everyone a “college education,” the more we water down our standards and cause employers to ratchet up their requirements for educational credentials. If our illustrious politicians manage to hamstring the for-profit colleges, the problem of defaults by poor and clueless students won’t go away, but there will be fewer options available for serious students. Instead, the politicians should rethink the policy of postsecondary education for all through federal “help.”

James Taranto takes a look at what may be the complete collection of messages from the now-defunct “JournoList,” a listserv for progressive journalists and others run by the Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein. Taranto rates the revelations contained in these messages as anywhere from “genuinely scandalous” to “pathetic.” He calls scandalous, for example, a conspiracy by participants during Obama’s presidential campaign to suppress news about Jeremiah Wright, including even a suggestion by one of them that a fellow journalist be smeared as a racist.

Taranto mentions that the only JournoList member who actually calls for the government to shut down the network is a law professor, UCLA’s Jonathan Zasloff: “I hate to open this can of worms,” he wrote, “but is there any reason why the FCC couldn’t simply pull their broadcasting permit once it expires?”

Taranto wryly notes “one reason: Cable networks don’t have broadcast licenses! If law professors needed licenses to practice law, this display of ignorance would be reason to pull Zasloff’s.”

Right, and there is also the little matter of Zasloff’s obvious disdain for the First Amendment.

Scandalous or pathetic? Whatever. But hardly the quality of intellect and judgment one would hope to encounter in a law professor.

Here is a column from the Guardian that makes wonderfully good sense about the costs and benefits of higher education.

Efforts by Cameron’s government to reduce costs in British universities have been met with the same sort of united front that we’re familiar with — a chorus proclaiming disaster if less money flows into the universities. The tactics used by special-interest groups intent on keeping every last farthing of their governmental largesse are pretty much the same everywhere.

The term “protecting the academic core” is getting to sound really tired. I keep hearing it here in North Carolina, as university-system officials explain how they are coping with cuts. By calling a program part of the “academic core,” these officials make it sacrosanct.

At a recent meeting of UNC-Chapel Hill trustees I learned that the school will have to cut its operations by 5 percent. (That figure doesn’t count some additional funding, such as a portion of $3.5 million in state matching funds for endowed professorships.)

I’m all for administrative cuts, but at some point, will someone look at what is actually being taught? I didn’t hear a peep about the possibility that perhaps there is something on the campus that should be cut. I didn’t hear a single trustee say that that maybe, just maybe, a course or program could be eliminated or replaced with something better. Perhaps UNC-Chapel Hill doesn’t need a “diversity advocate certificate.” Maybe the minor in social and economic justice — which doesn’t require a single course in economics — could be re-thought. Perhaps the social-justice pedagogy at the UNC’s School of Education could be replaced by courses that actually teach how to teach students in our K-12 system. No, we must preserve the (inviolable) “academic core.”

A longer version of Russ Nieli’s article on discrimination against white students in university admissions is going to appear in the Fall issue of Academic Questions. The AQ article is a review-essay on No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life, by Thomas J. Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, and Nieli takes the opportunity to revisit Nathan Glazer’s comments on group differences from way back in 1969, the common sense of which has been lost in the mists of  time.

In the Summer 1969 issue of the Journal of Negro Education, Glazer wrote: “History and social research convince me that there are deep and enduring differences between various ethnic groups in their educational achievement and in the broader cultural characteristics in which these differences are, I believe, rooted.” Such differences, he continued, “cannot be simply associated with the immediate conditions under which these groups live, whether we define these conditions as being those of levels of poverty and exploitation, or prejudice and discrimination.”

“If we are to have a decent society,” he concluded, “men must learn to live with some measure of group differences in educational achievement, to tolerate them, and to accept in some degree the disproportion in the distribution of rewards that may flow from differences in educational achievement. . . . We need to press not only our research on these differences, their origins, their extent, their causes, the measures that reduce them, but also develop and strengthen a political and social philosophy that permits a society to accept them, to live with them, and be stronger because of them.”

It is worthwhile asking why such obvious common sense about the diversity of human traits is so difficult for us in the contemporary social climate. Steven Pinker has commented that “the prospect of genetic tests of group differences in psychological traits is both more likely and more incendiary [than human cloning], and is one that the current intellectual community is ill-equipped to deal with.”  

Pinker rightly emphasizes that group differences say nothing about the individual members of any group, and that as long as we stay with the idea of individual rights and political equality, there should be no problem. But why then the nervousness when the subject of possible group differences arises, as in the e-mail-gate fracas at Harvard some weeks ago?   

Why this nervousness? Because political rights, human rights, individual rights, and the importance of the individual human person have to have some basis; they do not stand on their own. Many accept with equanimity that these rights are endowed by the Creator and are not troubled. As David French stated on our list when when the subject came up some weeks ago, “Aren’t the stakes of a scientific debate over, say, racial differences in IQ much lower if we understand the reality that ‘God created man in his own image’ and thus certain moral and ethical obligations to our fellow man flow inexorably from that truth — regardless of their IQ, or any other characteristic?”

But modern secular liberalism is without a transcendent source on which to base those rights, and thus substitutes all-purpose equality, which in the contemporary context has come to mean equality of group outcome. Darwinians struggle to claim that material evolution has somehow produced our finer attributes, such as consciousness, volition, reason, altruism, cooperativeness, moral sense, etc.; this “survival of the sweetest” scenario is speculative at best and is based on reasoning from present human behavior (which may well have developed from centuries of religious formation) back to our ancestors on the savannah.

Since the secular liberal paradigm contains no independent source on which to base an affirmation of human worth, equality of groups has become the only assurance of universal human dignity, and thus any sign of group difference would disturb the only premise on offer for affirming the unconditional value of human life.

In “John Galt to the Rescue,” Jay Schalin takes on the American Association of University Professors. In its latest issue of Academe, the AAUP aims its fire at John Allison, former chairman of the North Carolina bank BB&T, who has directed BB&T Foundation gifts to more than 40 colleges and universities. Nearly all the grants have a requirement that one or more classes on capitalism pay some attention to Ayn Rand, and that some funds be used to distribute Atlas Shrugged to students.

The AAUP considers this an attack on academic freedom. But Jay points out that liberals who give money to universities “have no such need to specify their intentions contractually. They know ahead of time that, from the left’s overwhelming dominance in the humanities, social sciences, and arts, that their aims will be carried out.”

He also says: “While [Ayn Rand’s] philosophy of Objectivism has not entered the mainstream, it is hard to imagine it being more erroneous than the ideas spawned by left-wing icon Karl Marx, who based much of his thinking on the thoroughly discredited Labor Theory of Value, and whose ideas have failed the test of time.” And, of course, Marx is everywhere on campus.

There’s more in that vein.

Late yesterday afternoon, the Alliance Defense Fund Center for Academic Freedom filed a lawsuit on behalf of Augusta State University counseling student Jennifer Keeton. Her tale has to be read to be believed. Essentially, the facts are as follows.

Jennifer is a devout Christian and holds biblically orthodox views regarding sexual morality. In the context of classroom discussions of homosexual behavior, she expressed her Christian views, and has also shared those views with her classmates outside of class. She has stated, for example, that she believes that sexual behavior is the result of personal choice rather than an inevitability arising from deterministic forces.  

These thoughts have displeased the counseling department, and it has expressed that displeasure in writing:

Another equally important question that has arisen over the last two semesters is Jen’s ability to be a multiculturally competent counselor, particularly with regard to working with gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (GLBTQ) populations.  Jen has voiced disagreement in several class discussions and in written assignments with the gay and lesbian “lifestyle.”  She stated in one paper that she believes GLBTQ “lifestyles” to be identity confusion.  This was during her enrollment in the Diversity Sensitivity course and after the presentation on GLBTQ populations.     

. . . 

Faculty have also received unsolicited reports from another student that [Miss Keeton] has relayed her interest in conversion therapy for GLBTQ populations, and she has tried to convince other students to support and believe her views.  (Emphasis in original).

To alter Jennifer’s views, the faculty imposed a “remediation plan,” that included “diversity sensitivity training,” required Jennifer to read at least ten articles in peer-reviewed journals that “pertain to improving counseling effectiveness with GLBTQ populations,” and (my personal favorite) required that she “increase exposure and interaction with gay populations,” including a suggestion that she attend the “Gay Pride Parade in Augusta.”

As she did all these things, Jennifer was required to submit a monthly two-page “reflection paper” to describe how “her study has influenced her beliefs.” Counseling faculty would then decide, based on these “reflections” and two in-person meetings, whether she should continue in the program.    

From Watchdog.org:

A new report by the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy shows that more than seventy five percent of Milwaukee’s K-12 students actually exercise some form of educational choice every year.

“Critics have characterized School Choice as a temporary experiment, one that should be feared by parents and the public,” said MacIver President Brett Healy. “Our research shows that in fact school choice in the broadest sense — parents rejecting the arbitrarily assigned neighborhood public school for a different school — is a fundamental part of Milwaukee’s educational landscape.”

The MacIver Educational Choice Census reveals that 87,191 of the 115,022 Milwaukee school children are educated in a place other than their traditional, geographically-assigned public school.