The fight for gun rights on campus is often contentious and generally does not favor the Second Amendment. But in August, pro-gun advocates won a major battle when a federal appeals court threw out a legal challenge by three University of Texas at Austin professors to Texas’s “campus carry” law. Campus carry, approved by the … Continue reading “The Success of Concealed Carry at Texas Public Colleges”
The internet is filled with stories of how conservative student groups are mistreated on campus. Conservative and libertarian students often sound the alarm about hostile administrators, violent protesters, and unpleasant experiences. They have their invited speakers shouted down, prevented from speaking by the imposition of exorbitant security fees, or simply canceled by administrators bending to … Continue reading “How Comfortable Do Conservatives Feel on Campus?”
On November 7, 2006, Michigan voters passed Proposition 2, a measure that banned the use of racial preferences throughout state government and state universities. The next day, University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman issued a defiant statement. In it she pledged to fight in the courts against the voters’ decision to have a color-blind … Continue reading “Exposing the Harms of the ‘Diversity Delusion’”
Free speech on campus has become a point of concern for many. News reports describe speakers being disinvited from campus or shouted down. Events such as students being arrested for giving away free copies of the U.S. Constitution on a college campus have become ordinary. North Carolina has not been immune to this worrisome trend. In … Continue reading “Have North Carolina Colleges Improved Their Free Speech Protections?”
Kentuckians were forced to consider potential problems with intercollegiate athletics when both the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky were implicated in the recent FBI probe into possibly corrupt and fraudulent recruiting practices in college basketball. Amid the outrage, politicians raised the possibility of serious reforms, such as expanding the oversight of Boards … Continue reading “Gaming the System: How Kentucky Spends Funding for Students on Athletics”
In recent years, the media has given us dire warnings about the “crisis of the humanities.” In article after article, one reads about falling enrollments in college English departments and funding cuts. Inside Higher Ed, a popular website that covers higher education, reports that English majors have declined 20 percent since 2012. History programs have … Continue reading “Why Humanities Programs Suffer as the Humanities Themselves Do Great”
Colleges are using a new tool with the frightening potential to shut down open dialogue. They go by the benign-sounding name of “bias response teams.” Bias response teams monitor what students and faculty say. They encourage students to report, often anonymously, comments or behavior that make them feel uncomfortable or threatened, even if the speech … Continue reading “A New Campus Invention for Policing Speech”
No one can accuse Education Secretary Betsy DeVos of inaction. Just within the past few weeks, her Department of Education announced the overhaul of two major Obama-era regulations. The next stage of DeVos’ agenda will review several of the rules governing which higher education institutions and programs are eligible for federal funding, with an eye … Continue reading “The Innovation Dilemma Facing Betsy DeVos”
The partnership between America and its colleges and universities is broken. Americans are disappointed with higher education. A majority of Americans (57 percent) now say higher education fails to provide students with good value for the money they and their families spend, according to the Pew Research Center. Universities are equally disappointed with the students … Continue reading “Fixing the Divide Between the Public and Higher Ed”
In 2015, Greg Lukianoff (president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and Jonathan Haidt (professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business) wrote an article for The Atlantic entitled “The Coddling of the American Mind.” In that article, the authors argued that students (college but also pre-college) increasingly react … Continue reading “Universities and the ‘Coddling’ of the American Mind”