Who Put the SAT and ACT in Charge?
In the early years of the Classic Learning Test’s existence, we believed that our fight for acceptance as a college entrance exam nationwide would happen in admissions offices. We were…
UNC Gets Its Own Story Wrong
It is jarring for a litigant to parrot the false claims of its courtroom opponent. But that’s what The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has done in defending…
The Next UNC? Bucknell’s Late Arrival to the Civil Discourse Trend.
Higher education is trying to remedy political polarization using campus democracy and dialogue initiatives. When Bucknell University announced its new Initiative for Dialogue & Democracy, administrators pitched the effort as…
Two Cheers for the Great Books
Recently, Luke Burgis, Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Catholic University of America, posed a provocative question: “What is the strongest argument from the political Right AGAINST Great Books programs?” In my view,…
A Via Media on AI
I was working in a public space when a nearby conversation caught my attention. One student told a colleague that she would be taking several difficult classes the next semester.…
Michigan Reconnect Is Pulling Community Colleges Off Mission
Community colleges play a specific role not only within our educational ecosystem, but also that of the communities that they serve. They are community colleges, after all. Before the community…
The SCiLL I Know
The School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL). At UNC, students hear this name in one of a few ways. One is “eww, that uber-conservative program that’s a waste of…
Universities Must Police Foreign Influence
On June 5, the Qatar Foundation International (QFI) announced that, after almost two decades of pursuing its stated mission of advancing Arabic language and cultural education, it would begin winding…
The New Feudalism
In 2009, an anonymous university support staff member wrote to C.K. Gunsalus—a prominent academic who specializes in the study of higher education administration—looking for advice and, frankly, a little bit…
Bans on “Divisive Concepts” Risk Stifling Speech
The growing (though not unanimous) acknowledgement that academia has lost public trust may be increasingly uncontroversial. But identifying remedies to repair that broken trust is proving to be much more…