Editor’s note: Jon Sanders compiles an annual “Top Ten” list of what he calls the “nuttiest campus events” in North Carolina. This year’s list makes a notable exception, granting the top spot (see below) to something that didn’t happen. What didn’t happen, he says, was so strikingly necessary that its predictable non-occurrence warrants attention.
Onward to this year’s list:
From politically-indoctrinating professors to innovative educational programs, 2007 had it all.
In 1982, the Supreme Court decided that K-12 education could not be denied to illegal immigrants. Symbolically speaking, these children have now grown up and, twenty-five years later, the issue is whether illegal immigrants should be denied a college education at public community colleges and universities.
My view is that individuals who live in the United States, even though illegally, should be allowed to attend college if they pay the full cost of their education.
Illegal immigration is an emotionally wrenching issue because most Americans believe two things that currently contradict one another. They believe that our laws should be obeyed. Yet they recognize that today’s tight immigration laws fly in the face of a major reality: millions of people live in nearby countries whose governments have ruined their economies, making their citizens desperate to leave.
Assume that a popularly-elected government enacts a law. The law has the backing of an overwhelming majority of the people. Yet government officials decide they don’t like the law and choose to ignore it.
The above describes a clear violation of the single most important foundation of a free society: rule of law. It also describes the actions of many decision makers in our federal and state governments regarding illegal immigration. Federal law clearly states that foreign citizens of any age who enter our country outside of legal channels are to be deported. And yet the powers-that-be find endless logic-defying means to cloud the issue, against the law and the will of the people.
The issue rose to the forefront recently in North Carolina because the community college system decided that illegal aliens should be officially admitted as students, pending a legislative review.
Should the UNC system enroll illegal immigrants?
Editor’s note: The latest installment in the wizarding movies, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, will likely make an appearance under many Christmas trees this year. A more important question is whether the books should make an appearance in college courses. This article was originally published in the Charlotte Observer on August 9, 2007.
Universities across the country are adding Harry Potter to the curriculum in disciplines as diverse as English, philosophy, history, Latin, and science. Edmund M. Kern, an associate professor of history at Lawrence University and author of the reader’s guide The Wisdom of Harry Potter, is teaching an entire course on Harry Potter this fall.
The generation of students entering college this year has a mania for J. K. Rowling’s seven-book series about a young boy’s adventures in a fantastic magical world. Harry Potter’s ongoing battle against evil, with its themes of choice and consequences, life and death, and love and hate, reverberates among this generation as Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five captured the students of the 1960s.
But are Harry Potter books good enough for the college curriculum?
Mock constitutional convention at UNC-Chapel Hill produces a document inspired by radical politics.
“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.
You can send your son to college, but you can’t make him think.”
This little ditty ran through my mind as I was trying to understand the accountability movement of colleges and universities. Under pressure from the federal government, higher education institutions are scrambling to find ways to measure and report “learning outcomes” – that is, to show that students learn something after four years at their institution. This week, at a Washington, D.C., meeting of a Department of Education accreditation advisory group, that pressure will increase.
Fifty years ago, the student was accountable for learning, not the college.
Is it a college trustee’s duty to follow or lead?
On November 26, The Dartmouth published a column called In Violation of a Trustee’s Duty, by Bill Montgomery of the Dartmouth Class of 1952. The article called for Todd Zywicki’s punishment or forced resignation as a member of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees because of remarks made by Zywicki while speaking at the 2007 Pope Center Conference.
Since we at the Pope Center are not privy to all of the insider information at Dartmouth, we cannot comment about all of the charges against Zywicki by Mr. Montgomery. However, we expect that the charges we know nothing about are no more substantial than the charges for which we do have knowledge, and those are completely without merit.
