Governance

In a new book, The First Year Out, a sociology professor suggests colleges teach according to how students learn.

Community colleges must do a better job preparing students who transfer to 4-year schools.

Sometimes the most important questions are the ones never asked.

Putting the responsibility for training teachers into hands more practical than the hands of education theorists.

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:

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.

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?