For your holiday enjoyment, the Pope Center staff has rounded up the Top 10 Clarion Calls from 2007, wrapped them up in a single package and put a shiny red bow on them.
What makes these pieces our Top 10? All ranked high in readership and deal with particularly important higher education topics (which is not to say that we ever write about insignificant ones).
We’ll start with the Clarion Call that had the highest readership of all, one written by a UNC student.
1. My Introduction to Higher Education by Alyn Berry – A UNC-Chapel Hill student is surprised to find that expressing politically incorrect ideas on papers leads to low grades.
2. An Inconvenient Truth by Steven Hayward – Elon University is taken to task for requiring incoming students to read Al Gore’s alarmist book without any counterweight from responsible scientists.
3. Is Law School a Waste of Time? by George Leef – Graduating from a law school is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being a good lawyer. It just keeps the cost of getting into the legal profession needlessly high.
4. Duke’s Curtis Crisis by KC Johnson – Co-author of a best-selling book on the Duke lacrosse case writes about a Duke professor who vilified and downgraded students who had the temerity to disagree with her.
5. A Writing Program that Works by Steven Horwitz and Hillory Oakes – Two professors explain that their University’s approach to freshman composition works better than most.
6. Learn and Earn by Jane Shaw – State politicians have pushed through a program on the grounds that it would reduce high school dropouts, but it has morphed into just another educational subsidy for the middle class.
7. Marx, Mao, and Mischief at UNC by Jay Schalin – An investigation of a geography course at Chapel Hill where the professor admits to giving the students only one point of view, one based on Marxist/Maoist notions about poverty and economic development.
8. Commission Turns Thumbs Down on “UNC-Rocky Mount” Proposal by Shannon Blosser – One of the silliest ideas of the year was for the UNC system to take over a private college (North Carolina Wesleyan) and turn it into “UNC-Rocky Mount.” The article explains why the arguments for doing so were fallacious.
9. Is Leftist Bias on College Campuses a Myth? by Jenna Robinson – Our student outreach coordinator takes issue with a feeble attempt to prove that the widespread reports of leftist bias on campuses must be mistaken.
10. Keeping College Grads in the State by George Leef – Many states, including North Carolina, are trying to boost their economies by trying to keep “their” college graduates from going to work in other states. The piece explains why this is pure folly.