On July 4 at Mt. Rushmore, President Trump praised Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Louis Armstrong; it was a significant political and cultural speech, comparable to Trump’s speech extolling Western civilization at Warsaw in 2017. Trump also ordered a federal project called the Garden of National Heroes, mandating the artwork to be classical and “not … Continue reading “Higher Ed Is Stoking the Flames of the War on History”
On June 17, the Board of Trustees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill voted to end the moratorium on renaming campus buildings associated with white supremacy or slavery. An online petition sparked that change. Michael Rashaad Galloway, a recent alumnus, started the petition that gained over 9,500 signatures. Since the reversal, the … Continue reading “Did You Know? The Fight Over Renaming Buildings at North Carolina Colleges”
Academic freedom is under assault by people who want to control research and speech. One of their strategies exploits the gatekeeping functions of journal editors to censor unpopular ideas. The leading open-access journal in the field of intelligence research, the Journal of Intelligence, has a policy listed on its website since 2018 that states, “The … Continue reading “Misusing Editorial Power to Censor Unpopular Research”
Universities’ frantic struggles to create fall semester plans that bring students back to campus often hinge on social distancing. While students are excited about the promise of an on-campus fall, many detailed university plans have made it clear that freshman year will hardly resemble the bustling experience it was before. Instead, strict social distancing standards … Continue reading “Fall 2020: The Semester of Isolation”
Rumors of the humanities’ decline have been greatly exaggerated, a new report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences says. While the popularity of specific majors has changed, overall, the humanities as a whole are still attracting a strong number of students. Most importantly, the study didn’t find any evidence for a decline in … Continue reading “The Future of the Humanities Is Not an Adjunct-Fueled Decline”
Academia is a troubled institution plagued by financial problems, falling academic standards, and poor educational outcomes. Especially concerning is its politicization; it increasingly sows racial discord, advocates for anti-American and anti-Western perspectives, and promotes socialism. At times, it even rejects its most important value—the pursuit of truth—for a distorted vision of social justice. How has … Continue reading “Can Higher Education Be Saved? The Hope for Governance Reform”
Two UNC system schools, Western Carolina University and UNC-Greensboro, have announced that they will not offer students housing refunds if the university closes due to another COVID-19 outbreak. Both schools added an addendum to their housing contracts relieving them of liability should campus shut down again. The addendum states that “in the event of such … Continue reading “No Housing Refunds Put UNC System Students in Tough Spot”
If you had told me a couple of years ago that a book like Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism would be topping the bestseller lists and receiving accolades from all over, I wouldn’t have believed it. And I’m speaking as someone who, in my 2012 … Continue reading “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being”
As schools have moved online due to the coronavirus, they have partnered with proctoring services to monitor online exams and prevent cheating. Those services go by names such as Respondus LockDown, ProctorU, Proctorio, and Examity, among others. What gets overlooked as the contracts are signed, however, is student privacy. Forbes compared such proctoring measures to … Continue reading “Did You Know? With Remote Classes, Universities Breach Student Privacy “
America’s system of education has failed in one of its most important goals: forming future generations of American citizens. This is particularly true in higher education, where students are encouraged to become “global citizens” instead of Americans. At many of our institutions of higher learning, character education has been replaced by moral relativism at the … Continue reading “The Breakdown of American Education and the Hopes for Change”