Campuses are not adept at handling sexual assault issues because they lack experience, resources, and an unbiased agenda. Due process is immediately thrown out the window when we rely on the campus to punish the accused; injustice is built into the system. The customary standard, “innocent until proven guilty,” is reversed when we call on colleges to adjudicate rape.
Universities are great inventions, and they have a role everywhere, in areas rich and poor, Christian, Islamic, and even atheist. But the Law of Diminishing Returns applies: universities in small doses can disseminate and advance knowledge in welfare-inducing ways, but if expanded too fast, they produce dismal results at the margin. In the Middle East/North African region, this problem is aggravated by over-centralization.
American labor unions are in serious decline and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has become nothing more than a legal enforcer for panicked union bosses. A recent example is the December 2014 decision in Pacific Lutheran University that may force more private-sector higher education faculty to accept unionism if they want to work.
Since we are dealing here with a movement that traffics in extremism, it is not surprising that the BDS movement is having a nasty effect on some college campuses.
Recent developments at Trinity College with the Shelby Cullom Davis Endowment provide rare good news for supporters of donor intent. Here, after an over two-decade struggle, the endowment’s purposes have been restored to the donor’s wishes.
A sad fact about some of today’s college students—particularly those of the leftist variety—is that they place greater value on their emotions and ideology than they do on tolerance, sensibility, and free speech.
Over the past few decades, much of American higher education has become ideologically left wing. You might have thought, however, that business schools could resist the trend. You’d be mistaken.
It is heartwarming to see state officials do the jobs they were elected to do. Too often they have shied away from their obligations to ensure that the university system adheres to appropriate standards of scholarship.
Last week, a working group from the UNC system’s Board of Governors drew national attention and student and faculty protest after it announced plans to discontinue three of the system’s 237 centers and increase oversight of thirteen others. The centers slated for closure are East Carolina University’s Center for Biodiversity, NC Central’s Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change, and UNC-Chapel Hill’s Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, which was founded in 2005 by then-U.S. Senator John Edwards.
Parents of Marquette students can now rest assured that their children in college will be “safe” from homophobic and other politically incorrect indoctrination; professors of philosophy will no longer consider it their “mission” (pace Socrates) to subject widely accepted meanings and values to intensive reexamination; and professors of other subjects who manage their own private blogs now know that what they formerly considered to be “free speech,” even in their extracurricular activities, has now been redefined by their employers.
