To Phi Beta Cons Readers:
We are sorry to inform you that Phi Beta Cons will be shutting down this week. This is the last PBC post.
National Review Online, our parent publication, is revamping its ...
Phi Beta Cons
How to Wreck a Good University
In Friday’s Pope Center article, Jason Fitzgerald of Penn Strategies, a Harrisburg firm that has dealt with many grads of Penn State’s Harrisburg campus, laments that the administration seems far ...
Saving America: J-School Must Go First
TV news readers and print jockeys are blatantly biased to the Left. How did this happen?
It began around 1965 in universities and colleges. The radical students and their mentors formed groups ...
A Do-It-Yourself Kit for Enlightenment
Socrates left us a DIY kit for enlightenment: Ask a question. Listen. Reflect on the answer. Repeat.
University of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson took Socrates to heart. Edmundson asked, “Why read?” ...
Is It Just a Joke?
I viewed FIRE’s documentary film, Can We Take a Joke?, on streaming. (FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, is the leading watchdog for freedom of speech on campuses.) ...
The Wrong Simile?
Ever since the crash of 2008, commentators have been warning of a coming crash in higher education. They – I among them – have seen out-of-control student debt, rising tuition, ...
Is College Worth It?
Tuition costs are out of control, graduates struggle to find employment, and colleges are more interested in building luxurious dorms than educating their students. So is there still a benefit to a ...
Federal-State Partnership? Or Extortion?
In a post in these pages last week, I mentioned president Robert Duffett of small Eastern University making a pitch that Hillary Clinton’s “free” college tuition proposals be expanded to include ...
College Isn’t a Public Good
So argues Tim Worstall, a Brit who writes often for Forbes. One of the arguments we hear all the time from the higher ed establishment is that college is a ...
One Thing I Like about the Start of School
I have always found the Beloit College “mindset list” amusing to read (although some years are better than others) and I think that professors should heed it. This is the ...