Free Republic

Whether he wins the Iowa Caucuses or not, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has apparently hit a raw nerve in higher education. “Let’s look at colleges and universities,” he said in Mason City, Iowa. “They’ve become indoctrination centers for the left.” “Should we be subsidizing that?” Evidently, merely calling for shutting off the federal spondulix is tantamount to repression. “Santorum shows his great commitment to the First Amendment by declaring that the federal government should punish institutions for their ideology,” John Wilson writes on the academe blog. “If colleges aren’t supporting Republican ideas, Santorum tells us, the government should de-fund...

A man who Accuracy in Academia rarely sees eye-to-eye with nonetheless makes a good point in the October 8, 2010 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. “As for costs, universities typically spend only one-third of their budgets on faculty salaries,” Cary Nelson of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) writes. “Despite more than 10 years of education after high school, most people standing in front of a college classroom earn less than $60,000 a year, considering that contingent faculty members, who are not eligible for tenure, make up two-thirds of the faculty work force.” “Most earn less than...