Writing for the Capital Research Center, Walter Olson details the efforts of the Ford Foundation to change the character of American law schools. Because of the foundation’s money, their curricula include much more activism and emphasis on “social justice” nostrums:

For over half a century, the Ford Foundation has quietly worked to turn the nation’s law schools into agents of Sixties-style “social change.”  Other donors like Carnegie, Soros, and MacArthur have followed Ford’s path, and the result can be seen in landmark Supreme Court decisions, the plethora of politicized “legal clinics” on campus, and the courts’ growing willingness to defer to “international law.”

According to an article by John Podhoretz, James Gandolfini found playing the evil don of the Soprano Mafia family in the television series The Sopranos corrosive of his own well-being. Citing a book about the actor, Podhoretz writes that “Gandolfini lived his years as Tony [Soprano] as a kind of torment. The only way he knew to play this man simmering with violent rage was to duplicate those feelings inside himself and then essentially vomit them out (or hold them in) on film. . . . Tony was first and last a monster, and Gandolfini had to be Tony, at least psychologically, to play him.” Podhoretz adds that loyal viewers could actually see that doing this “was eating Gandolfini alive.”

If this is true, it is quite alarming, and is taking American-style method acting entirely too far. We should find out how acting is being taught in our MFA programs and schools of drama. There is no need for actors to destroy themselves personifying evil. I defy anyone to find performances more terrifying than those of the actors who portrayed the hideous Mr. Hyde in the various Hollywood versions of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — John Barrymore, Fredric March, and Spencer Tracy. As far as is known, none of them had to rip out his guts to do it, and all of them continued in long careers afterwards in varied roles.

Of course, those films, and the work on which they are based, have a moral center, unlike The Sopranos and many other of the newer long-running television soap operas, which in the interest of ratings tend to lose moral focus and descend into sensationalism and nihilism. “As for the higher-quality prime-time soaps,” Martha Bayles writes, “they typically hold out the promise of a morally satisfying resolution but fail to deliver one, because they don’t want to foreclose the possibility of being renewed. This is why, after the first season or two, even the best dramatic television series — The Sopranos, The Wire — lose what moral clarity they originally possessed, as most of their characters never have to reckon with the consequences of their actions.”

I never understood the excitement aroused by The Sopranos. The several episodes I saw were dark, boring, and meaningless. The only thing I thought the series accomplished, unfortunately, was to make Italian Americans look like the Missing Link. Be that as it may, dramatic training in the English style does not require the actor to descend into the depths of depravity. Christopher Plummer once told an American director: Don’t bother about motivation and all that, just tell me how you want something said, and I’ll do it. As Lawrence Olivier advised Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man, after seeing the younger actor’s strenuous efforts to “get into the part” (this may not be an exact quotation but it’s close), “Why don’t you try acting, my dear boy?”

Winston-Salem State University is a historically black college in the University of North Carolina system. According to this Campus Reform piece, it has been inflating the grades of many black students, but never grades of the approximately 27 percent of the students who are not black. When a white administrator blew the whistle on this, she was terminated. Perhaps remarkably, the EEOC sided with her discrimination suit against WSSU. Two strikes against the integrity of the school.

Today is the day when interest rates on federal student loans go up to 6.8 percent. Despite much apocalyptic politcal rhetoric, the sky has not fallen. Cato’s Neal McCluskey offers his thoughts on the issue here.

Jeff Selingo’s College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students isn’t going to draw tepid responses from readers. An editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Selingo is something of a “bubble hawk” who sees great changes coming to academia due to technical innovations and the growing problem of student debt.

Ursinus College political-science professor Jonathan Marks isn’t sold on many of Selingo’s assertions, particularly the idea that students will be able to patch together a quality education from many sources, picking and choosing a variety of institutions and courses as if college were a cable-television package. At the Pope Center site, he presents a different perspective in his review of Selingo’s book.

Sam Klee, an Aquinas College sophomore, discusses a recent report that revealed a marked decrease in the complexity of works assigned to high-schoolers across the country. Among the findings: Hunger Games and the Twilight series make the Top 40 list of assigned texts. This has implications for students as they enter English classes in college:

[I]f formation is indeed the purpose of education, to stretch limits and stimulate intellectual growth, then students must be genuinely challenged. How can we fairly expect high school graduates to possess the sharpened reading and writing skills necessary for collegiate success if their literary experience has been characterized by books made popular through movie-adaptations? The Lightning Thief will not sufficiently prepare one to read (much less appreciate) Homer or Dante in a college-level humanities classes, nor should it.

Read the rest here.

Cato’s Simon Lester writes here about Italy, where good jobs go unfilled because many Italians now look down their noses at manual work. Italy’s education system, at all levels, provides poor preparation for working life. A great many young Italians are in universities studying things they aren’t really interested in simply because their parents want them there for prestige reasons.

Someone posting as Profman has this to say with regard to an essay on Minding the Campus:

There’s not much to disagree with here. I think my university in Illinois is a sign of things to come. Here’s what’s happening:
We’ve been bleeding students. FTE dropped from 9,800 students in SP2007 to 8,100 in SP2013.
There have been several months in the past few years where the university wasn’t sure if it could meet payroll. This had never happened before.
Many local businesses are really hurting because of this constantly decreasing customer base.
Retiring faculty are often not being replaced.
All departments have been ordered to cut 20% from their operating budgets next year. Yes, 20%!
All faculty travel budgets have been eliminated for next year.
The state has cut funding in recent years, so the university has had to dip into reserve funds to meet expenses. Those reserve funds are now gone. If enrollment continues its decline, we face HUGE deficits in the next few years.
Until this year, the university has been able to avoid outright lay-offs. It now says lay-offs are unavoidable.
We’ve raised tuition and fees every single year. As a result, it is much more frequent for me to know students only as juniors and seniors — because more of them are going to community college the first two years to save a LOT of money.
25% of our students come from families making less than $30,000 per year, but one year at our college now costs $21,000 (tuition, room, board, fees). Oh, that doesn’t include books. AND we just raised costs another 4.5% for next year.
We’ve closed three major dorms in two years (housed more than 2000 students).
Many summer classes have been converted to online, so very few students stay for the summer anymore. Add another hit to the local economy.
I know of several younger professors who are looking for jobs elsewhere because they want to jump ship before it sinks.
I don’t know of a single faculty or staff member who isn’t scared about their job right now. To say the mood is grim is an understatement.

Is Profman at one of the SIU campuses, perhaps? Anyone able to figure it out from the evidence? In any case, this is a university in deep trouble.

Prior to the Court’s decision to remand Fisher to the Fifth Circuit, which prolongs the battle over the legality of race-based admissions preferences, the social engineers in our midst were beating the drums for a shift toward a different kind of preference program — one that would boost students said to come from economically “disadvantaged” backgrounds.  

The same day that decision was announced, Peter Wood and Herbert London published a statement for NAS opposing such a scheme. In it, they provide strong reasons for concluding that class-based preferences are just as objectionable at race-based preferences.

I agree with their arguments and would add one more. The assumption behind both preference regimes is that it is a good thing, both for the individual students and the nation’s social health, for some students to be admitted to “better” colleges than they would attend in the absence of preferences. It is assumed to be more advantageous for a student who would have readily been accepted at, say, NC State to instead go to Duke, thanks to a preference. That assumption, I maintain, is usually mistaken. Rather than somehow making the country more socially just or at least helping the preferred student to better succeed, class preferences are apt to harm the students. Bigger, more prestigious schools do not necessarily give them a better education; often it’s the reverse. Also, “prestige” schools often have an inferior (and sometimes downright terrible) learning environment. That’s perhaps the main lesson of the recent book Paying for the Party.

“Progressives” take pleasure in thinking they can redesign society and improve upon laissez-faire. They’re almost always mistaken, and certainly so when it comes to shuffling students around to different colleges.

In the newest Prager University course, Daniel Gordis, President of the Shalem Center, analyzes the hostility towards Israel by exploring the complex relationship between Europe, Israel and the Arab World.

In a Pope Center piece, I take a look at the Supreme Court’s non-decision in Fisher v. Texas.

I agree with Justice Thomas that Grutter should have been overruled because, purported educational benefits or not, government institutions are not allowed to categorize people based on their ancestry and treat some groups differently than others. He sees through the fairy tale claims about those “benefits” but would have decided the case once and for all on solid equal-protection grounds.

Now the case goes back to be re-litigated. Texas will try to conjure up lots of silly research (just the the University of Michigan did) to prove that racial preferences make the country a nicer place. Maybe the judges will also pay attention to the solid arguments that preferences are damaging. In any event, the case is likely to wind up back at the Court in a few years. No doubt preference advocates are hoping that there will be five votes in favor of maintaining the fiction that “affirmative action” is good by that time. That’s a worrisome prospect.

There’s a new Manhattan Institute paper by Judah Bellin on our absurd and dysfunctional student-loan system. The status quo, Bellin contends, insulates colleges from the pressure of price competition and has an adverse effect on both student incentives and those of the schools that want them. While our ultimate goal, I think, should be to get the government entirely out of college financing, the changes proposed in the paper are worth considering.

These days, business is the most popular college major. Is that because students can get a good job by taking business courses? Or is it perhaps that these courses are easy? Whichever the reason, Jason Fertig, who teaches at a business school, suggests that most courses do little to help students either get a job or do well once they obtain one. He offers alternatives to the usual textbooks.

More than 10,000 federal employees benefit from a lovely little program whereby the taxpayers cover some of their student-loan costs, as we learn in this USA Today piece.

A spokesman for Harry Reid says that it’s necessary in order to get top-quality people into government “service.” I would much rather have those “top-quality” people working in productive jobs and paying their own way. This is just another aspect of the legal plunder (as Bastiat put it) that has spread all over the U.S.

According to a recent survey, a third of recent college graduates think they made a mistake by attending college. Read about it in this Forbes piece.

I wonder what response you’d get if you asked college dropouts if they think they made the right decision.

Last week, a federal judge on the Southern District of New York sided with the U.S. Department of Labor in allowing a class-action suit to proceed on the theory that unpaid internships can violate the Fair Labor Standards Act. (That judge, Bill Pauley, was a good friend and classmate of mine in law school, but nevertheless I think he blew it.) Cato’s Andrew Coulson has a sharp comment on the ruling here, observing that it’s now legal to pay much and learn nothing (as is the case with many college students) but not legal to learn much for free (as is often the case with internships).

The New York Times has an interesting interview with Laszlo Bock regarding management at Google. It casts further doubt on the idea that success in college is a predictor of success, at Google anyway.

Here is the key part of the interview in that respect:

Q. Other insights from the data you’ve gathered about Google employees?

A. One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.

What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.

Q. Can you elaborate a bit more on the lack of correlation?

A. After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.

Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

Hat tip: Russ Poter

We used to hear often from politicians (including Obama) that the U.S. needed to greatly increase the number of people graduating from college, lest we “fall behind” competitors such as China. The evidence, however, is that the Chinese with their educational central planning now have a large surplus of college graduates. Mike Shedlock writes about it here. This problem is inevitable when you depend on government officials to allocate resources rather than market competition.

Hat tip: Paul Nachman

College campuses are supposed to be places where ideas are rationally and unemotionally considered, but as we know, some ideas cause academics to go batty. John Rosenberg writes about such an instance at the University of Virginia in the Pope Center Clarion Call. The case is similar to that of Larry Summers some years ago at Harvard. Here, the offender is a trustee and the outraged, offended faculty can’t fire him, but that won’t stop the frenzy.

Last week, a federal judge on the Southern District of New York sided with the U.S. Department of Labor in allowing a class-action suit to proceed on the theory that unpaid internships can violate the Fair Labor Standards Act. (That judge, Bill Pauley, was a good friend and classmate of mine in law school, but nevertheless I think he blew it.) Cato’s Andrew Coulson has a sharp comment on the ruling here, observing that it’s now legal to pay much and learn nothing (as is the case with many college students) but not legal to learn much for free (as is often the case with internships).