Through their experience, business executives are well-equipped to respond to unanticipated market changes, competitive threats, and know how to capitalize on strategic opportunities. Therefore it’s somewhat surprising that most small colleges continue drawing their presidents almost exclusively from the academic ranks.
We’ve created a serious problem by allowing federal bureaucrats to dictate education policies nationwide, K-12 through college. Many rules that appeal to ideologically zealous regulators would never be adopted by school and college officials who are in the best position to weigh costs versus benefits.
A few years ago, I went back to school. I was in my 60s and nearing retirement as president of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. In that position I had been observing universities, faculty, administrators, and students for five or six years and I thought I knew a lot about academia. I was aware that many students are slackers, that a lot of faculty members have a leftist bias, that college costs too much, that there’s grade inflation and a lot of administrative waste and red tape. But I wanted to study again, and North Carolina State University was less than a mile away from where I lived. So far, I have taken five courses, three of them since I retired last February.
Just how bad colleges have become when it comes to free speech and toleration for anyone who disagrees with those who hold power cannot be underestimated. Many Americans who think back fondly on their college days decades ago are shocked to learn the truth. Toward that end, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has just released its Top Ten list—the worst colleges and universities in the country last year when it came to freedom of speech.
Next month will be the tenth anniversary of the spring break party that triggered the Duke lacrosse case. That incident probably remains the highest-profile false rape claim in recent U.S. history—rivaled only by the claim against University of Virginia fraternity members leveled, and then retracted, by Rolling Stone. An unwillingness to engage in any critical self-reflection is the foremost legacy of how the academy responded to the lacrosse case, at Duke and beyond.
It is very revealing that in 2010, the executive committee of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the discipline’s major professional organization, dropped the word “science” from its mission statement, and elsewhere. Since then the organization has focused on trendy issues such as the environment, violence, climate change, race, etc. The AAA now wants “to help solve problems” rather than to understand and explain reality.
The UNC System is flush with foundations that raise money for their associated universities, and researchers who have looked at these types of organizations on a national level have called them “slush funds” and “shadow corporations” that too often operate in secrecy, despite spending taxpayers’ money. The unusual practice in North Carolina in which foundations buy property, then lease space back to their universities, has raised eyebrows among some of those experts.
The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation has just launched the latest offensive in the war over admissions to the supposed elite of America’s colleges and universities. In its report entitled True Merit, the Foundation advocates economic preferences so that smart students from relatively poor families can have their fair share of the small number of spots at schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. But admission preferences, whether based on race or income, are clumsy tools for achieving social or educational ends. A much better approach is to identify academically sharp but lower-income students, then help them to find the best college and assist them through to their degrees.
University administrators and faculty have long been dedicated to increasing the numbers of blacks, Latinos, and women, among others, in their teaching ranks. But despite their intentions and efforts, the desired degree of diversity has not materialized. The reason is there is a pipeline problem. For example, in 2014, black students earned just 1.8 percent of doctoral degrees in the physical sciences. Even if every physics department in the nation were to recruit black Ph.D.s, there wouldn’t a big enough pool to effect much statistical change.
Julie Posselt, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Michigan, wishes to increase faculty diversity by expanding that pipeline and thinks that this pipeline problem has much to do with how Ph.D. students are selected. She makes her case in her new book Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping.
Nearly three months have passed since student protests upended the institution where I teach law, the University of Missouri (Mizzou). There have been several changes on the Columbia campus. We now have a highly regarded African-American interim president, Michael Middleton, who has a long history at the university. Our interim chancellor seems far more attuned to the campus climate and hosts weekly “chats with the chancellor” to foster a more open atmosphere. On the surface, things seem to have returned to normal or perhaps even improved. Recent trends, however, suggest that the protesters’ “success” may prove ephemeral.
