Free Republic

The high-profile bullying case of a black student has thrust San Jose State under an intense spotlight to improve the college experience for its minority students and diversify its predominately white faculty. But an analysis of demographic figures by this newspaper shows that a lack of racial diversity in academia runs wide and deep: The South Bay campus' faculty is more diverse than other major Bay Area universities and the state's two university systems. At San Jose State, 59 percent of the faculty are listed as white, although 10 percent of the professors didn't specify a race. The faculty at...

After refusing to honour a male student’s request to be separated from his female classmates for religious reasons, a York University professor has found himself at odds with administrators who assert he broke their “obligation to accommodate.” “It represents a great leap backwards,” said sociology professor J. Paul Grayson. “When I was a student, you couldn’t have gotten away with that — it wouldn’t even have been considered.” The issue arose last September in the opening days of SOCI 2030, an online course taught by Mr. Grayson. A student, who remains nameless due to privacy reasons, asked to be counted...

After years of cuts in state subsidies and growing resistance to rising tuition, U.S. colleges and universities are starting to unwind decades of administrative bloat and back-office waste that helped push up costs and tuition. The State University of New York system shaved $48 million in the past two years by cutting unused software licenses and consolidating senior administrators. The University of California, Berkeley, cut $70 million since 2011 by centralizing purchasing and laying off a layer of middle managers, among other things. And the University of Kansas revamped its back-office operations to save about $5 million in 2013. One...

WASHINGTON, November 30, 2013 — It occurs every fall, like clockwork. As a new round of anxious high school seniors apply to Virginia schools with exceptional GPA’s, abundant extracurricular activities and many honors to their name, and shockingly receive a letter of rejection, a new group of parents ask, “Who exactly is getting into Virginia public schools?” For many years now, Virginia lawmakers have debated the issue of public schools in the commonwealth accepting students with lower qualifications from students coming from other states who will pay up to three times the tuition as a Virginia resident. Some legislators have...

Our family is very proud and excited about our son's early decision acceptance to Hillsdale College to attend in the fall of next year. He's also earned a nice academic merit scholarship that we desperately need. We'll figure out how to pay for the rest of it. Couldn't be prouder or more hopeful about his future.

A 19-year-old Liberty University student was shot and killed early Tuesday at an off-campus women’s dormitory in a confrontation with a campus police officer. University officials said they had received reports that a male student attacked the officer with a sledgehammer in the dorm’s lobby. The incident occurred at about 4 a.m. at a hall known as Residential Annex II, on Albert Lankford Drive, a little more than three miles from the main campus. Lynchburg police said they responded to a call for help at 4:07 a.m. from the residence hall. “This appears to be an isolated incident and there...

The students at Bowie State University, a historically black college in Maryland, have Obamacare to thank for the cancellation of their student insurance plans. As Campus Reform reports, Bowie State cites a jaw-dropping increase in student premiums as necessitating the cancellations: The official website for Bowie State, a Maryland public school less than an hour's drive from Washington D.C., explains that Obamacare's new regulations would force the cost of the insurance to rise from $50 to $900 a semester. "Bowie State University has suspended offering health insurance for domestic students for the 2013-2014 academic year," states the school's official website....

A student from a Christian university in Oregon ditched the privacy of the confessional and went public about his faith, writing in the school newspaper: "I am an atheist. Yes, you read that correctly, I am an atheist." Eric Fromm, 21, a senior at Northwest Christian University in Eugene published his thoughts about not believing in God in the Beacon Bolt, the student-run online newspaper -- despite the fact that his university is a Christian school. Although Fromm didn't share the religious beliefs as the school, he said in his post he decided to enroll because Northwest Christian had a...

Is it a stretch to imagine activists might someday push for affirmative action programs for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students? For now, administrators are just weighing whether to include a question about sexual orientation on application forms to determine whether California's state colleges are presently adequately serving the LGBT community: California’s state colleges and universities are laying plans to ask students about their sexual orientation next year on application or enrollment forms, becoming the largest group of schools in the country to do so. The move has raised the hopes of gay activists for recognition but the concerns of...

Last month, after being sure to get his caffeine fix at Starbucks, Southern Baptist leader Richard Land went where few evangelicals had dared to go before: the Provo campus of Brigham Young University, the intellectual heart of Mormonism. After lecturing on "family, faith, freedom and America," Land attended a BYU football game with LDS leaders and joined them to hear James Taylor sing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Days later, George O. Wood, the general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, also visited BYU, followed by the Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptists’ flagship seminary. Is there...

President Obama’s Education Department recently announced that it is sending 39 lesser-known colleges a total of $20.1 million this year as part of the government’s “Strengthening Institutions Program.” The grant money may be used for planning, faculty development, building an endowment, or boosting academic programs. … President Obama said his college ratings system will help students and families select schools that provide the “best value. After the ratings system is well established, “Congress can tie federal student aid to college performance so that students maximize their federal aid at institutions providing the best value,” the White House website says. In...

No excerpt allowed from IHE, story here.

For 15 years, Heather Ann Clement was a faculty member at Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian school in Southern California. But that changed last month, with the start of Azusa’s new academic year, when Heather came out as a transgender. The professor of theology began referring to herself as Heath Adam Ackley. And she even started to develop a more masculine appearance. The professor of theology formerly known as Heather demanded that Azusa officially recognize “his” new name and gender change. So university administrators sat the prof down for several “thoughtful conversations.” After hearing out Heather/Heath, it was abundantly...

Some classes at West Point are being combined or canceled and military faculty members are being forced to fill in for civilian instructors furloughed because of the government shutdown, academy officials said Thursday. The academy furloughed 1,422 civilian employees this week, including 132 faculty members. …

As a regular reader of this column, you are acutely aware of the crisis in college education and particularly the soaring costs. As costs have climbed very little effort has been made to control them or limit the genesis of those costs. Our President has floated a plan which is destined for the scrap heap to have the federal government step in and rate colleges and then control federal funds to those colleges. A new way of funding college educations has emerged from the legislature in Oregon, and we took a look here. We first became aware of this new...

... 71 percent of the 2,500 black students in APS who took the Mathematics II exam in 2011, failed and only 1 percent, 25 students, passed with distinction (Pass Plus). By contrast, only 21 percent of white students failed with 79 percent passing and 23 percent of those passing with distinction. In Fulton County, where 62 percent of black students failed the Mathematics II exam, 90 percent of the white students passed, 32 percent with distinction. The failure rates and achievement gaps throughout most of the school districts in the metro-Atlanta area are astonishing. The consequence of this reality is...

[SUMMARY: All levels of education influence each other. College professors can greatly help higher education by joining the fight to improve secondary education.]-- No school is an island; each school, each sector of education, is connected to the others. Influences flow between them. It’s reasonable to think a nation’s educational institutions will rise and fall together. College professors may hope they can retreat to an ivory tower, untouched by the mediocrity in our public schools. Some professors may believe they are an intellectual aristocracy, and as such cannot be contaminated by the rabble below. However, the contamination relentlessly spreads and...

It has been nearly 50 years since Princeton University began admitting women and actively recruiting minority students, but the school is still too white and too male, according to a new report that calls for big changes on the Ivy League campus. Christopher Eisgruber, the university’s new president, and the school’s board of trustees signed off today on a series of recommendations by a campus committee convened to take a hard look at campus diversity. The 19-member group found that Princeton has made great strides in welcoming minorities, women and low-income students into its undergraduate classes in recent decades. But...

Southern Methodist University has fallen off the Princeton Review’s list of “LGBT-unfriendly” schools after holding a top-20 position for a number of years. Texas, however, continues to lead the nation with three schools on the most-homophobic list, while having none ranked most-LGBT-friendly. The three Texas schools ranked LGBT-unfriendly are Baylor, Texas A&M and the University of Dallas. A&M also ranks No. 1 for most conservative students. The Princeton Review surveys student attitudes at hundreds of schools on a number of campus-related issues to help students find “best-fit” colleges. SMU officials have questioned whether their school ever belonged on the list....

Could public colleges be free? Yes, says the head of the union for University of California’s 4,000 instructors and librarians. How? Trim non-essential functions, redirect a bunch of money and end tax breaks that mostly benefit wealthy college-goers’ families, argues University Council-American Federation of Teachers President Bob Samuels. . . . “The major stumbling block is people no longer believe in large government programs.” (Excerpt) Read More at InsideHigherEd.com...