An amusing CronkNews spoof here.

In this Minding the Campus piece, history professor KC Johnson looks at the scandals at the University of North Carolina and Harvard. Both show the power of politically correct thinking. If it protects campus “diversity” to ignore a scandal, then it will be ignored as much as possible. As Johnson writes regarding UNC, where the scandal involved the African, African-American, and Diaspora Studies Department, “If the scandal had affected biology or computer science, rather than a center of campus political correctness, would an apparent attempt to cover up the extent of the wrongdoing have occurred?”

In this Pope Center piece, one of our interns, Lea Palmer, writes about her observations of the University of North Carolina after her first year. She offers quite a few good observations, among them that many of the students at this “flagship” seem to be chiefly interested in breaking into the grog and partying rather than climbing into the rigging to get a broader view of the world.

That’s the point of this RealClearPolicy piece by Thomas Lindsay. Misericordia College is the example of the necessary adaptation — focus on a few things and do them very well without needless costs.

To persuade the Supreme Court not to decide the Fisher case, that is. Here’s my posted response:

“It makes perfect sense for the Court to review this issue [of racial admissions preferences] again. For one thing, universities have shown that they cannot be trusted to weigh race only lightly; numerous studies have shown that, despite judicial warning, race continues to be given overwhelming weight. For another thing, the demographics of the country are changing so that, more and more, it is Asian students who are being discriminated against and Latino students who are being given preferential treatment. And there is more and more empirical data to suggest that the purported benefits of using racial preferences have been overstated, and that the costs are much higher (for example, “mismatching” students and schools has been shown to hurt the supposed beneficiaries of preferential treatment). And the issue of the case’s justiciability was exhaustively briefed at the cert stage in the case, with petitioner trouncing the University’s arguments.”

Eighty-three percent of Title IX coordinators are female, the National Association of Scholars found in a sample study.

We looked into the question of gender makeup among Title IX coordinators as a follow-up to an article about the sexual harassment letter to the University of Montana from the Office of Civil Rights, and in answer to a challenge by Professor Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit. Here were some of our findings:

We examined 52 institutions.  All have Title IX Coordinators as mandated by law for all institutions receiving federal funding.

At 43 of them (82.7 percent), the Title IX Coordinator is a woman. At 9 of the institutions (17.3 percent), the Title IX Coordinator is a man.

In short, the gender-equity enforcers seem to have gender-inequity problem when it comes to choosing staff members. Peter Wood explains why this could be a problem:

Considering that the overwhelming preponderance of sexual harassment allegations are directed by women at men, the disproportion of women to men in the positions charged with interpreting and enforcing the sexual harassment rules is a legitimate concern.  Are male students who are accused of sexual harassment likely to receive fair-minded treatment in these offices?  They already face a system of rules and definitions jerry-rigged by the Office of Civil Rights to deny them the presumption of innocence and to minimize due process guarantees. 

It was interesting to see how many of the Title IX coordinators belonged to a department specializing in some form of diversity:

We found that 32 of the 52 Title IX Coordinators (61.5 percent) were bureaucratically part of their institution’s Equal Opportunity/Diversity/Equity/Access operation. 

The campus commitment to diversity, however, has led to a ponderous lack of gender diversity when it comes to regulating sexual-harassment policies. 

A federal judge has ruled in favor of two student interns who worked on the set of the movie “Black Swan.” The judge said Fox Searchlight Pictures should have paid the interns for their work, since it had no apparent educational value. The internships consisted of “basic chores, usually undertaken by paid employees. The interns took lunch orders, answered phones, arranged other employees’ travel plans, tracked purchase orders, took out the trash and assembled office furniture.”

This ruling has wide-reaching ramifications for countless companies that take advantage of free student labor each summer by way of unpaid internships. Undergraduates work more than a million internships in the U.S. each year. About half are unpaid, and a great many in that latter category consist of rather menial work.

The student internship has become a rite of passage for most young professionals as they seek to transition from college to the workplace. Many consider it an unavoidable tradeoff — you agree to work for free in hopes that you will get valuable “experience” to add to your resume, leading ultimately to that ever-so-crucial first job. If this ruling stands, it could dramatically reshape the way companies utilize interns.

If you look at it from a practical perspective, it’s true that there is often little educational value in student internships. Often, it’s simply a case of a company taking advantage of available free labor. On the other hand, to take a more philosophical view, one could argue that unpaid internships have a historical precedent in the classic apprenticeship model common for many centuries among young boys seeking to learn a skilled trade.

Personally, I’d say that if students enter these unpaid positions voluntarily, what moral grounds do they then have to demand payment after the fact? No one forced them to take the job. But still, I’ll admit that I dislike the fact that so many companies treat students like an endless pool of free labor, taking advantage of students’ desperate resumé building in order to get them to do meaningless work.

This is an important ruling. Much is at stake. And the economic impact could be huge.

Above all, one single question haunts the minds of office managers everywhere, facing the prospect of a world without unpaid interns: Who is going to make the coffee?

In today’s Pope Center piece, Jay Schalin argues that the financial-aid status quo merely subsidizes a lot of wasteful spending by colleges and universities. He suggests a mixed system of need and merit aid as an improvement.

The humanities are in a state of decline across the nation. Once the main field of study, today only 7.6 percent of all bachelor’s degrees are awarded in the traditional liberal arts. Harvard, which has seen a decline in students with majors in the humanities from 21 percent in 2003 to 17 percent today, has taken an in-depth look at the problem (that is, in-depth for a mainstream organization) and produced a report entitled The Teaching of the Arts and Humanities at Harvard College: Mapping the Future.

Ursinus political-science professor Jonathan Marks reviewed Mapping the Future in Commentary and discovered that even Harvard College humanists recognize that undergraduate teaching has grown too attuned to professors’ narrow fields of research and must be “reinvigorated by revisiting the so-called canon.” Even more amazing is that the Harvardians perceived “a kernel of truth in conservative fears of the left-leaning academy” (their words, not Marks’s) and were willing to state it publicly. In such new awareness, Marks sees a hope for a revival of the liberal arts even as enrollment continues its decades-long decline.

While Mapping the Future is indeed a promising document, I’m still not entirely sold until I hear details. It may be that the “so-called canon” Harvard returns to is made up of the usual lefty academic suspects such as Marx, Foucalt, Derrida, and assorted Frankfurt School members.  

Republicans appear to be a scarce commodity among the attorneys who work at the Department of Education. So scarce, in fact, that there aren’t any.

That’s the argument I make in this Forbes piece. College might or might not enhance one’s future productivity; it is not like buying a financial instrument with a calculable yield.

I’ll add here that college can be worthwhile even when there is no monetary return on it. The value of a liberal-arts education does not depend on its “paying off” financially. Students who want such education may find it at some colleges. They can also get it at much lower cost without ever enrolling or taking a single course.

Why do conservatives attack academia’s liberal bias? It can only be because they have mental problems. At least, that seems to be the conclusion to the second question in the title of Neil Gross’s book, Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? That’s how George Leef describes it in the second installment of his scathing critique of Gross’s defense of the Ivory Tower in this week’s Clarion Call.

George details how Gross relies heavily on the sort of superficial 1970s-style pop psychology that made us all want to gag even back in its heyday, with conservatives’ criticism dismissed as personal shortcomings. Gross also treats conservative criticism as a political ploy with no basis in fact, and at times reminds George “of a trial lawyer who asks a question he knows won’t be allowed and then says, ‘Withdrawn’ before opposing counsel objects. The idea has been planted even if the jury is told to ignore it.”

Perhaps Gross should have shown his book to George before rushing to press. Then he might have been forced to come up with an argument that can stand on its own. On the other hand, the book wasn’t meant to withstand serious inspection, but to please the unquestioning choir of his leftist colleagues.

She made headlines earlier this year for parading around the campus of Carnegie Mellon Unviersity, dressed as the Pope form the waist up. From the waist down, there was naught but her skin. And she had shaved her pubic hair into the shape of a cross – just in case showing her privates off to the world wasn’t attention-grabbing enough by itself.

If I recall, it was all supposed to be some kind of art project. Or should I say “art” project?

Anyway, her lawyer announced that indecent-exposure charges against the student have been dropped. In exchange, she must perform 80 hours of community service.

Now that I have read Russell A. Berman’s discussion of the new Harvard study of the humanities, “Mapping the Future,” I am eager to read the paper. It sounds as though Harvard has not only re-confirmed the importance of classics but also admitted, at least in a tiny, restrained way, that bashing of the canon by humanities faculty may explain some of the decline in humanities enrollment. Another surprise is that the Chronicle of Higher Education printed Berman’s article. (He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and he agrees with the report.) As one commenter says, “How did this get itself on CHE? The censors are asleep, I guess.”

“Madam professor, your mustache is so dashing.” That’s the sort of conversation students at the University of Leipzig will soon be having with their professors.

After a vote of the German university’s governing board, all professors, including male professors, will be officially designated professorin – the feminine word for professor.

There you have it: Gender equality, deutsch style.

Read more here.

In a Minding the Campus essay, Mark Bauerlein calls upon all the white, male advocates of “affirmative action” to step down from their leadership positions so that we might enjoy the benefits of greater diversity in that group.

Long-time environmental advocate Bill McKibben is organizing college students to try to force their schools to divest their endowments of oil and gas companies. As the Pope Center’s Duke Cheston writes on Minding the Campus, they’re not likely to get very far. Even the much more morally persuasive campaign for divestment of South African holdings probably didn’t have much impact, as a recent study shows. This is a feel-good effort that most colleges and universities, concerned about their endowment incomes, are resisting. This time, satisfying their self-interest makes sense.

I have often heard Dennis Prager state on his radio show that Auschwitz was not liberated by peace activists. 

With that in mind, for the newest Prager University course, renowned British historian Andrew Roberts suggests that if you yearn for world peace, you should vigorously advocate for a strong American military. 

Have fun debating!

An atheist group called the Freedom from Religion Foundation has called for an investigation into the teaching of a professor at Ball State University. Apparently the group is arguing that it was unconstitutional for a physics professor to suggest there might be a God.

Peter Wood, of the National Association of Scholars, doesn’t see much of a case:

“I view this as either as a bit of bluffing on the part of Mr. Seidel, or if he believes in the accuracy of his own assertions, he is sadly mistaken,” Wood said.

The class in question is called “The Boundaries of Science,” and its syllabus details the course objective as examining topics that “provide examples of (human) existence that may lie outside the boundaries of human science.”

It concludes by stating the topics will “then be considered for their implications relating to the significance and value of human life, and as possible indications of the existence of God.”

More details at The College Fix.

**This post has been updated to reflect the following correction. FFRF is not suing Ball State, as this post originally indicated, but rather has submitted a letter calling for an official investigation and for the removal of the professor form the class.

In today’s Pope Center piece, Montana native Tom Burnett writes about the considerable number of federally subsidized tribal colleges in the western states. If the words “federally subsidized” suggest that famous trio Waste, Fraud, and Abuse to you, you’re right. This is another of the many ideas that sound nice, but couldn’t come close to passing the test of the market.