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Harvard University will launch an examination of the campus Police Department following long-running complaints that officers have unfairly treated black students and professors and, in an incident this month, a black high school student working at Harvard. President Drew Gilpin Faust announced yesterday that she has appointed an independent, six-member committee to review the diversity training, community outreach, and recruitment efforts of Harvard police, the first review of its kind in more than a decade. In recent weeks, black student and faculty leaders have been pressing the university to address what they view as racial profiling by the predominantly white...

Just weeks after former presidential candidate John Edwards admitted cheating on his wife, he's not shying away from public speaking engagements -- and his fee has gone up, his agent says. Edwards is due to speak at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Oct. 14. The agent for the former North Carolina senator has told the university student group organizing the event that Edwards is looking to add to his speaking calendar and that he's charging more, said university spokeswoman Robin Kaler. Edwards is to speak on "The American Dream," Kaler said. Tickets are free, but the student group...

Whitewater - Freshmen at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater have always spent their first few days on campus learning college survival - how to join the karate club, cheer like a Warhawk and find English 101. But this year’s orientation added a grim new lesson: how to take out a campus shooter with a book or a backpack. The school is one of about 500 around the country that have purchased “Shots Fired on Campus,” a new video training program with tactics for surviving a mass-casualty shooting. It’s the latest strategy for college officials who are preparing for the worst in...

As parents pack their youngsters off to college, they might ask themselves whether it's worth both the money they will spend and their children's time. Dr. Marty Nemko has researched that question in an article aptly titled "America's Most Over-rated Product: Higher Education (www.martynemko.com/articles/americas-most-overrated-product-higher-education_id1539)." The U.S. Department of Education statistics show that 76 out of 100 students who graduate in the bottom 40 percent of their high school class do not graduate from college, even if they spend eight and a half years in college. That's even with colleges having dumbed down classes to accommodate such students. Only 23 percent...

Harvard will launch an investigation into the campus police department after complaints that officers have unfairly stopped black students, professors, and other university community members because of their race. In an email to senior university administrators and faculty today, President Drew Gilpin Faust announced the creation of a six-member committee to review the police department's diversity training, community outreach, and recruitment efforts. It will be led by Ralph Martin, former Suffolk County district attorney and managing partner of the Boston office of Bingham McCutchen.

Hundreds of colleges across the nation have purchased a training program that teaches professors and students not to take campus threats lying down but to fight back with any "improvised weapon," from a backpack to a laptop computer.

Life is full of surprises, and some 100 college presidents think they have stumbled on one. They think there is too much problem drinking on campus -- no surprise there -- and suggest we might solve the problem by changing the drinking age. They don't propose to raise it to 25. They want to lower it to 18. The group behind the petition they signed, Choose Responsibility, says the current drinking age is a failure. It has "not resulted in significant constructive behavioral change among our students," the statement says, and in fact has spawned "a culture of dangerous, clandestine...

A university student who challenged his school's "speech code" and won a ruling in federal court that it was vague, overbroad and stifled student speech, including his Christian views, is continuing his battle with Temple University because the school has – three years after he completed it – declined to provide a grade on his master's thesis, thus effectively denying him his degree. The Alliance Defense Fund recently announced that the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had affirmed the district court victory by Christian DeJohn, who is a sergeant in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. The ADF handled DeJohn's...

“Hadith of Hate” Banned at USC   By Reut R. CohenFrontPageMagazine.com | Friday, August 22, 2008 As Muslim Student Association (MSA) chapters have become increasingly influential at universities and colleges around the country, critics have charged that it is a hate group that sympathizes with the international jihad and promulgates an anti-American and anti-Semitic ideology in its campus actions. In response, the MSA has claimed that it is merely another religious and cultural group similar to Hillel, a club for Jewish students, or the Newman Club for Catholics. That deception has been now unmasked at the University of Southern...

College presidents from about 100 of the nation's best-known universities, including Duke, Dartmouth and Ohio State, are calling on lawmakers to consider lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18, saying current laws actually encourage dangerous binge drinking on campus. The movement called the Amethyst Initiative began quietly recruiting presidents more than a year ago to provoke national debate about the drinking age. "This is a law that is routinely evaded," said John McCardell, former president of Middlebury College in Vermont who started the organization. "It is a law that the people at whom it is directed believe is unjust...

College is not all it's cracked up to be. Dumbed-down courses, flaky majors and grade inflation have conspired to make the letters B.A. close to meaningless. But another problem with today's colleges is more insidious: They are no longer a good place for young people to make the transition from childhood to adulthood. Today's colleges are structured to prolong adolescence, not to midwife maturity. Once upon a time college was a halfway house for practicing how to be a grown-up. Students couldn't count on the dean of students to make allowances for adolescent misbehavior. If they wanted to avoid getting...

Petition signers want University of San Diego to reverse course, re-invite “feminist theologian” to honorary professorship An online petition signed by thousands is asking the University of San Diego to again change its position and re-invite “feminist theologian” Rosemary Radford Ruether to take an honorary, yearlong professorship at the Catholic school. [[ATaylor081408.jpg]]Ruether, a supporter of abortion rights, contraception and the renaming of God, had been invited to hold the Monsignor John R. Portman Chair in Roman Catholic Theology at USD for the academic year 2009-2010, a decision that prompted a flood of complaints after California Catholic Daily first reported news...

FORT HAYS, Kan. -- A professor at a Kansas university who dropped his pants and mooned a room full of students and teachers is under investigation after video of the incident was posted on YouTube, school officials said. Bill Shanahan, a professor at Fort Hays State University, was at a debate with the Fort Hays State debate team last March when the incident occurred. School officials said they believe things got out of control when the team got low scores from two of the judges. Shanahan is seen on the video jumping up and down, ranting and then mooning the...

A federal judge has ruled the University of California can deny course credit to Christian high school graduates who have been taught with textbooks that reject evolution and declare the Bible infallible, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles ruled Friday that the school's review committees did not discriminate against Christians because of religious viewpoints when it denied credit to those taught with certain religious textbooks, but instead made a legitimate claim that the texts failed to teach critical thinking and omitted important science and history topics. Charles Robinson, the university's vice president for legal...

Chapel Hill, N.C. — Former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards likely won't be returning to the poverty center at the University of North Carolina that he helped launch three years ago. Following his defeat in the 2004 election, Edwards was named the founding director of the UNC Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity, giving him a platform to continue discussing poverty issues in America. Edwards left the center in late 2006 to make a second run at the White House, and Katie Bowler, assistant dean for communications at the UNC School of Law, said other people have assumed leadership responsibilities...

Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal: First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a...

A federal judge says the University of California can deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks declare the Bible infallible and reject evolution. Rejecting claims of religious discrimination and stifling of free expression, U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles said UC's review committees cited legitimate reasons for rejecting the texts - not because they contained religious viewpoints, but because they omitted important topics in science and history and failed to teach critical thinking.

SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal judge says the University of California can deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks declare the Bible infallible and reject evolution. Rejecting claims of religious discrimination and stifling of free expression, U.S. District Judge James Otero of Los Angeles said UC's review committees cited legitimate reasons for rejecting the texts - not because they contained religious viewpoints, but because they omitted important topics in science and history and failed to teach critical thinking. Otero's ruling Friday, which focused on specific courses and texts, followed his decision in March that found no...

Victory for Free Speech in DeJohn v. Temple by Kelly Sarabyn August 4, 2008 The Third Circuit Court of Appeals filed an opinion today in DeJohn v. Temple University, et al. The opinion provides an eloquent defense of free speech rights on university campuses and concludes with an unambiguous finding that Temple's speech code is facially unconstitutional. Today's ruling is a great victory for Sergeant Christian DeJohn, the Temple master's student and member of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard who brought the challenge to Temple's speech code. Christian's willingness to take a stand for his First Amendment right to free...

I have one simple goal for the 2008-2009 academic year: I want to organize more federal lawsuits against universities in one year than I have in the last four years working with organizations like the Alliance Defense Fund. In order to succeed, I need two things from ordinary Americans (including, but not limited to, typical white people). First of all, I need parents to start raising children who know something about basic constitutional principles. One way to ensure this is to provide kids with alternatives to public education. Even a short two-week stint at a place like Summit Christian Ministries...

Reactions from smokers ranged from stunned to furious -- and often unprintable. "Outside?" gasped Isaac Kim, who's about to start pre-pharmacy classes at the Silver Spring/Takoma Park campus. "Do they have the right to do that?" Welcome to the land of tolerance and freedom Mr. Kim. Your rights will be dictated to you in the Citizens Manual. Should you stray, they have a special police force to enforce your right not to smoke or chew tobacco. See if you can pick out the innocent-sounding, Stalinist name for the anti-smoking cops. And yes, employees could ultimately be fired or students kicked...

PRINCETON, NJ -- Barack Obama has by far his greatest strength among voters with postgraduate education, while John McCain has his highest level of support among voters who have a college degree but no postgraduate education. Obama wins overwhelmingly among blacks across all educational levels. An analysis of the vote by education among whites (with blacks and Hispanics taken out of the equation), shows McCain does much better against Obama among whites in general than he does among nonwhites. The presumptive Republican nominee in fact "wins" in each educational group of whites except those with postgraduate education

A federal court has ordered the state of Colorado to stop discriminating against students of a Christian college, a facility that state officials determined provided too much religion. The state for years has provided grants to students of secular institutions as well as students at a Methodist university and a Roman Catholic university, according to yesterday's opinion from the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. However, students at Colorado Christian University, a non-denominational evangelical Protestant university, were banned from the grant program after state officials decided the school was too pervasively sectarian. "We find the exclusion unconstitutional for two reasons:...

Raleigh, N.C. — Two months after recommending that North Carolina community colleges deny admission to illegal immigrants, the state Attorney General's Office has reversed that stance. The switch comes after U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials told state officials that federal laws don't prohibit illegal immigrants from attending college. Community College System officials decided in May to stop allowing illegal immigrants to enroll in degree programs after the Attorney General's Office issued an advisory opinion recommending the 58 community colleges tighten their admissions standards to be more in line with federal laws. J.B. Kelly, general counsel for the Attorney General's...

Something very good has just taken place on a college campus. After a two-year ordeal orchestrated by a group of mutinous faculty members, the Ave Maria School of Law has been given a clean bill of health by the American Bar Association and can continue with its work. I spoke on the campus last autumn and departed burdened by gloom. I feared the mutineers might win. They were the typical professorial grumblers, and such unhappy philistines so often have the upper hand on campuses. Truth be known, I spend very little time on college campuses. The life of the mind...

The process that began in the 1960s to transform America’s elementary, middle and high schools into places where students could literally graduate without being able to read their diploma, where the teaching of mathematics was reduced to mush without rules, and where it was more important for students to feel really good about themselves than having to measure up scholastically with millions in foreign nations, has now reached the campuses of America’s colleges and universities. In a nation where it now costs thousands of dollars to fire an incompetent teacher, we have the specter of university and college presidents eliminating...

The case of the San Jose/Evergreen Community College firing of June Sheldon is raising some eyebrows among academics, liberal and conservative. Here is the media version : The controversy centers on an incident in June 2007, when Sheldon was asked by a student in a human heredity class about heredity’s impact on “homosexual behavior in males and females.� Among other references, Sheldon noted a German study demonstrating some link between maternal stress and homosexual behavior in males, according to the lawsuit. After a student complained, college officials investigated and dismissed Sheldon, an adjunct professor at the school since January 2004....

After two decades of unconscionable increases in tuition and fees, colleges and universities increasingly are employing a new scam to swindle students and their parents out of whatever pennies they have left: the custom textbook. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, publishers make a few minor tweaks to a standard textbook, jack up the price and sell the special edition to the captive thousands who are required to buy it for required courses. For example, the University of Alabama requires all 4,000 of its freshmen to pay $59.35 for a spiral-bound special edition of "A Writer's Reference." The university's...

SAN JOSE, Calif., July 18, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A former San Jose City College biology professor is suing the college after she was fired for answering a student's question on the relationship between homosexuality and heredity.On June 21, 2007, June Sheldon, an adjunct professor teaching a human heredity course, answered a question about how heredity affects homosexual behavior by citing the class textbook and a well-known German scientist.  She noted that the scientist found a correlation between maternal stress and homosexual behavior in males but that the scientist's views are only one set of theories in the nature-versus-nurture debate...

Arguments were heard today in a federal district court case to determine whether a state university system can dictate that private Christian schools in the state teach their college prep courses from exclusively secular, Bible- and God-free textbooks. As WND reported earlier, the University of California system adopted a policy last year that basic science, history, and literature textbooks by major Christian book publishers wouldn't qualify for core admissions requirements because of the inclusion of Christian perspectives. Robert Tyler, who is representing Calvary Chapel Christian School and five students in the case against the University of California, told WND that...

Jack and Jill’ aren’t allowed to live together at the University of Kansas yet, but more and more school are allowing members of the opposite sex to live together . Most colleges didn’t allow students of different genders to live in the same dormitory 40 years ago. After gender-neutral buildings were opened, universities began to allow members of the opposite sex to live on the same floor. Now, there’s a new gender-based issue to debate in student housing. “We’re at the next phase in the evolution,” Jeffrey Chang, co-founder of the National Student Genderblind Campaign, said. “Why can’t men and...

Free Congress Foundation frequently is asked for a recommendation for good institutions of higher learning. Paul T. Yarbrough agreed to undertake a review of the best institutions in this country. He spent months acquiring catalogues, reviewing materials and asking questions. What follows is his exclusive report. We hope this will be an annual exercise. [SNIP] For our survival as a nation, to advance the cause of liberty and preserve what is left of our Judeo-Christian culture, faith and reason must infuse the life of an American college. There is no other way to achieve excellence. Do any institutions in our...

snip But no longer. In the economic expansion that began in 2001 and now appears to be ending, the inflation-adjusted wages of the majority of U.S. workers didn't grow, even among those who went to college. The government's statistical snapshots show the typical weekly salary of a worker with a bachelor's degree, adjusted for inflation, didn't rise last year from 2006 and was 1.7% below the 2001 level. College-educated workers are more plentiful, more commoditized and more subject to the downsizings that used to be the purview of blue-collar workers only. What employers want from workers nowadays is more narrow,...

A four-year college degree, seen for generations as a ticket to a better life, is no longer enough to guarantee a steadily rising paycheck.

Higher education could heal itself by teaching civics—not race, class, and gender.The university is worth fighting for. No other institution can carry the burden of educating our young people. That’s why we must redouble our efforts to restore integrity, civility, and rigorous standards in American higher education—particularly in the area of civic education.I’ll be the first to admit that the situation is dire. I sympathize when critics throw up their hands in despair. I sometimes feel that way myself. Darkness often prevails in places where the light of learning should shine. I often trade horror stories with my friend Hadley...

THUWAL, SAUDI ARABIA -- Up the corniche, along a coast where boats carrying pilgrims bound for Mecca sailed for centuries, a thicket of cranes rises over whitewashed mosques along the Red Sea. Steel flashes and blowtorches glow as 20,000 workers build a $10-billion university ordered up by a king who hopes Western ingenuity will revive the economy of this ultraconservative Muslim nation. When finished next year, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology will offer coed classes, Western professors, a curriculum in English and other touches loathed as dangerous liberalism by Islamic fundamentalists. The West may be dependent on Saudi...

READING, WRITING, WEAPONS Texas students join a nationwide movement for the right to bear arms while at college BLANCO — Cameron Schober, a 22-year-old Texas State University student, aimed his semi-automatic pistol at the outline of a man's torso just as a gust of wind blew down the target. "Everybody hold up!" hollered instructor Mike Cox. As six other shooters lowered their weapons, Schober scrambled to brace the cardboard target at a makeshift range on a deserted Hill Country ranch. Schober and fellow student Bill Downs were among 13 people who recently completed Cox's shooting proficiency and eight-hour classroom course,...

Former faculty at Antioch College, which is temporarily closing amid financial problems, plan to teach in coffee shops, bookstores and parks to keep alive the spirit of the private school known for its pioneering academic programs. Scott Warren, former associate professor of philosophy and political theory at Antioch, said 22 ex-faculty members have formed the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute in the village of Yellow Springs... Warren said the institute will follow the Antioch formula of offering progressive liberal arts courses while encouraging learning for life, humanitarian acts and collective decision-making. Murdock said she applauds the group's passion, but the institute...

The required reading for today’s class is, first, William Deresiewicz’s article about the transformation of our elite universities into high-priced trade schools: Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers. Next, you should read Mary Grabar’s bleak article about how the college curriculum itself is becoming less academic, and more like an Oprah Winfrey show: Oprah is us. Course offerings on Oprah appear in college catalogs, while those on Milton disappear. When you’re done with both, have swept up the broken glass and china, and repaired the bullet-holes in the walls, come...

Afew weeks ago, John McCain made a little joke at his wife's expense. Referring to her alma mater -- Cindy McCain is a graduate of the University of Southern California, where she was a cheerleader and sorority sister -- he called it "USC, the University of Spoiled Children." It's not an original joke, of course -- it's been around for ages, possibly even as long as John McCain himself -- but it said a lot about the man who wants to be president. ...Visit any college classroom -- at the University of Spoiled Children, Harvard, Yale, Puget Sound, doesn't matter...

Is Gov. Bobby Jindal at odds with LSU? Better put, does Jindal have a beef with LSU system president John V. Lombardi, or vice versa? Those are fair questions to ask in light of the governor's recent appointments to the LSU Board of Supervisors, a powerful board that's responsible for setting the direction of the state's flagship university. The new men on the block, or Jindal's appointments, are R. Blake Chatelain of Alexandria and James W. Moore of Monroe. If confirmed by the state Senate, Chatelain and Moore will represent the 5th District on the LSU board, or the two...

Last month, Wake Forest dropped the SAT and ACT as an entrance requirement, becoming the only top-30 national university with a test-optional policy. This step away from standardized tests will help us and other institutions of higher education move closer to the goals of greater educational quality and opportunity. Our decision to reevaluate our admissions policy grew out of a close look at the state of higher education and some long, hard thinking about the kind of university we want Wake Forest to be. For several years, a growing body of research has made clear that America's top colleges and...

Deval Patrick, already arguably the worst governor in the United States, has announced that he intends to give illegal immigrants free tuition to Massachusetts state colleges. "It's a simple matter of justice," he is quoted as telling reporters. As the station notes, out of state US citizens are required to pay a higher-than- instate rate to attend the same schools.

Leftist ideology may be gaining ground in Latin America. But it will never set foot on the manicured lawns of Francisco Marroquin University. For nearly 40 years, this private college has been a citadel of laissez-faire economics. Here, banners quoting "The Wealth of Nations" author Adam Smith -- he of the powdered wig and invisible hand -- flutter over the campus food court. Every undergraduate, regardless of major, must study market economics and the philosophy of individual rights embraced by the U.S. founding fathers, including "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." A sculpture commemorating Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" is...

There's a splendid controversy brewing at the University of Chicago--at least we'll consider it splendid so long as it has a happy ending, which now seems likely. The U of C may be best known these days as home to the law school where Barack Obama used to lecture on constitutional law (twice a week!), but in simpler times it was most famous as the academic perch of the great free-market economist Milton Friedman, who died in 2006. So when a prestigious university wants to name a research center after its most celebrated (Nobel prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom, etc.,...

The Columbia University professor who gained widespread attention last fall after a noose was found hanging on her office door was fired on Monday after months of wrangling over charges that she plagiarized the work of two former students and a former colleague. Madonna G. Constantine, a professor of psychology and education with a focus on racial issues at Columbia’s Teachers College, was sanctioned in February, after an 18-month investigation into the plagiarism charge, but allowed to stay in her job and to appeal the ruling that she had violated the university’s academic standards. But over the last five months,...

It's sweltering in Boston, and a dozen Tufts University coeds are out in shorts and tanks, attracting the usual stares. Only today the stares are for a different reason: the girls are huddled around a 750-pound machine that looks like a spaceship, long and wide with a bubble-shaped cockpit open to reveal a mass of pipes and wires. It's actually a solar car—one they've built from the ground up and hope to race next year. Suddenly sparks fly, and the girls jump back. They may be engineering whizzes, but they know a hazard when they see one. They call a...

This month 3,700 recent college grads will begin Teach for America's five-week boot camp, before heading off for two-year stints at the nation's worst public schools. Teach for America offers smart young people something even better than money – the chance to avoid the vast education bureaucracy. Participants need only pass academic muster and attend the summer training before entering a classroom. If they took the traditional route into teaching, they would have to endure years of "education" courses to be certified. On average, high school students taught by TFA corps members performed significantly better on state-required end-of-course exams, especially...

I was asked recently - by a child porn advocate, no less - why I write books with chapter titles that are so “offensive.” Citing two such chapter titles – “Fag Hags and Rainbow Flags” and “The Liar, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” – the child porn advocate asked what some of my fellow UNC professors had done to make me sound so “nasty.” I think the question is worth answering. Put simply, I use provocative language in chapters (more often in columns) criticizing a small minority of my fellow professors for two reasons: 1) because they are proponents of...

NU students, alumni call for Wright action Groups demand honorary degree be awarded after all June 8, 2008 BY MARY MITCHELL Sun-Times Columnist When Northwestern University officials announced it was rescinding its offer to bestow an honorary degree upon the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., the reason given was that the school didn't want the occasion to be overwhelmed by controversy. But apparently that may not be the whole truth. According to a spokesman for the university, the decision to rescind the degree was made in March, before a Wright sermon became a headache for the Barack Obama campaign. "That decision...