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Unconventional college funds LGBTQ and DEI programs amid budget cuts, layoffs A private Massachusetts liberal arts college which openly touts its embrace of progressive concepts continues to grapple with big budget deficits. The budget woes have not stopped campus leaders from funding programs advancing LGBTQ and DEI concepts amid laying off employees and slashing departments. Hampshire College, which made headlines years ago when it took down the U.S. flag to promote multiculturalism and more recently offered Florida students wanting to flee from Gov. Ron DeSantis streamlined enrollment, is currently laying off 9 percent of its staff to close a budget...

One often hears liberal-arts professors, as well as college and K-12 administrators, advocating two ideas about academics in America: (a) the importance of a broad, well-rounded, liberal-arts education and (b) the equating of that education solely with the head, not the heart. In 1931, John Dewey chaired a national curriculum conference that declared the liberal arts important for “the organization, transmission, extension and application of knowledge” (emphasis added). That concept has given us the educational system we have today, and it is not what was promised. A “Well-Rounded” Education Don’t misunderstand my point; there is great value in a broad,...

To the outside world, he was an introverted loner, but online the Prague University gunman was not shy about sharing his sick fantasies to kill. David Kozak used online platform Telegram to muse on massacres and mass murder, while also boasting of his plans to carry out a school shooting, according to Czech media. He said his Telegram channel would be a “diary” of his life “before the shooting”. “I want to do school shooting and possibly suicide,” the 24-year-old wrote in one chilling post, before adding: “I always wanted to kill. I thought I would become a maniac in...

Is the humanities degree going the way of the dodo bird? An article in The New Yorker, “The End of the English Major,” posits as a eulogy for the bustling humanities programs of yesteryear, citing dwindling investment and a generational shift toward science and technology and degrees that can be monetized. Faculty members at the Graduate Center, however, say that while the article is a clarion call, the death of the humanities is exaggerated. The desire and need to study the human past remain strong. Scholars shared their views on the current state and future of the humanities: Tanya Agathocleous,...

You’ve heard the complaints: When am I ever gonna use this? How is this relevant to the real world? How is reading Shakespeare going to make me a better banker? I don’t run into this kind of thinking as frequently in the economics classroom, but I hear my students’ complaints about their other courses pretty regularly (and maybe professors in those courses hear students’ complaints about mine). Why, they wonder, are they expected to study art history? Or biology? Or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? Or Mesoamerican mythology? When are they ever gonna use this stuff? My answer?...

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the history field has seen a precipitous decline in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in American colleges. As Benjamin Schmidt, a historian at Northeastern University, reported in the American Historical Association’s Perspectives, the number of history degrees awarded fell by 30 percent—from 34,642 to 24,266 in just nine years from 2008 to 2017. History’s steep decline is not an anomaly, but part and parcel of a broader “crisis” in the humanities. STEM has steamrolled these disciplines on college campuses: Computer science has more than doubled its students between 2013 and 2017. Moreover, critics have...

Huxley Predicted the Future of Education A wonderful illustration of the dangers of moral education can be found in Aldous Huxley’s brilliant novel 'Brave New World.' https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/huxley-predicted-future-education

SANTA FE, N.M. — Have I got a college for you. For your first two years, your regimen includes ancient Greek. And I do mean Greek, the language, not Greece, the civilization, though you’ll also hang with Aristotle, Aeschylus, Thucydides and the rest of the gang. There’s no choice in the matter. There’s little choice, period. Let your collegiate peers elsewhere design their own majors and frolic with Kerouac. For you it’s Kant. You have no major, only “the program,” an exploration of the Western canon that was implemented in 1937 and has barely changed. It’s intense. Learning astronomy and...

It will come as no surprise that this year Hillsdale College has chosen to commemorate the bicentennial of the birth of Frederick Douglass. Born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland, Douglass fled north to freedom in 1838. Eventually, he became a celebrated orator, and a leading figure in the abolition movement. Douglass also became a friend of Hillsdale College. He was twice an honored guest of the college. His first visit took place in January 1863, a few weeks after the final issuance of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. On that occasion, Douglass delivered an address entitled “Popular Error and Unpopular Truth.”...

“I have had enough bullshit,” wrote Notre Dame sociology professor Christian Smith in a recent piece about the systemic problems of American Higher Education. “The manure has piled up so deep in the hallways, classrooms, and administration buildings of American higher education that I am not sure how much longer I can wade through it and retain my sanity and integrity.” This forward, in-your-face commentary on the state of today’s higher education caught the attention of many in the realm of the Ivory bell tower, but should also serve as a wake-up call to those who don’t follow higher ed...

Twelve years after finishing Harvard’s graduate theater program, Katierose Donohue still pays almost as much in student loans each month — about $650 — as for her share of the rent in Los Angeles. She recently stopped hosting her monthly sketch comedy show, “Ma’am,” because she didn’t always break even on her $200 budget. She’s now working side jobs as a dog walker and a social media copywriter, after past gigs serving at Starbucks and handing out free cigarettes for Camel. She’s never missed a loan payment, but there’s no end in sight: She borrowed nearly $75,000 to attend the...

John Agresto’s Aug. 7 essay “The Suicide of the Liberal Arts” is one of the more eloquent of the elegies for high culture that appear from time to time in the quality press. A former president of St. John’s College (Santa Fe), perhaps the best undergraduate Great Books program around, Agresto wrote in the Wall Street Journal: When properly conceived and taught, the liberal arts do not by themselves make us “better people” or (God knows) more “human.” They don’t exist to make us more “liberal,” at least in the contemporary political sense. But the liberal arts can do...

In recent months, Christopher Scalia in the Wall Street Journal and Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post have defended studying the liberal arts in college, primarily to confront advocates of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Zakaria’s article previewed his new book, “In Defense of a Liberal Education.” From my perspective as a former engineer, two caveats arise regarding their pleas: first, “liberal” education that involves “critical thinking” disappeared decades ago, to be replaced by hyper-sensitive grievance mongering; second, the quantitative reasoning STEM occupations develops also facilitates the understanding of trade-offs people need to make rational decisions among myriad conflicting...

Proving it's not only small, private, liberal-arts colleges that are susceptible to financial distress, Louisiana State University (LSU) announced that it's in the midst of drawing up a financial exigency plan. Bloomberg News, which reported the development, called the plan "equivalent to a college bankruptcy" and noted that it would let LSU fire tenured faculty and restructure its finances. The Baton Rouge-based university with over 30,000 students is drafting the plan, in part, because the most recently proposed budgetary cuts by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal threaten to severely impact the higher-education system in the state. The governor's plans would cut...

An op-ed piece titled "Conservatives, Please Stop Trashing the Liberal Arts" appeared last week in the Wall Street Journal. But it is not conservatives who trashed the liberal arts. Liberal professors have trashed the liberal arts, by converting so many liberal arts courses into indoctrination centers for left-wing causes and fads, instead of courses where students learn how to weigh conflicting views of the world for themselves. Now a professor of English, one of the most fad-ridden of the liberal arts today, blames conservative critics for the low esteem in which liberal arts are held. Surely a professor of English...

First Amendment enthusiasts are thrilled that Mike Adams, a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, won his lawsuit against administrators who denied him a promotion because of his conservative, Christian views. Adams joined the university in 1993. He was an atheist at the time. By the year 2000, he had converted to Christianity and become an outspoken political conservative. He eventually wrote columns for Townhall.com. In 2006, he was denied a promotion. Administrators were retaliating against him for his conservative views, he claimed. The jury agreed. Adams’s lawyers said the victory is an important one for free speech...

Economic anxiety defines the Detroit bankruptcy, and not just in Michigan and the Midwest. Detroit is the urban nightmare, symbolic of America's downward cultural spiral since the 1960s, when optimism about what Americans could accomplish was the national elixir. The automobile was the national icon: powerful, beautiful and reliable. Detroit's advertising slogans reflected America's immeasurable self-confidence. Cadillac boasted that it was "the standard of the world." Buick promised that "when better cars are built, Buick will build them." Packard, then Detroit's ultimate expression of luxury, smugly advised, "Ask the man who owns one." The car was the example of infinite...

Epic songs and battle hymns have for centuries lent fortitude to tribal warriors. But as international forces begin winding down their operations, the Islamist militants are redoubling efforts to take ownership of this treasured cultural tradition and use it for their own ends. They believe poetry converted to chants will help them recruit new fighters and inspire existing ones. Earlier this year the Taliban launched a new website called Tarani (meaning chants or ballads). It provides links to hundreds of chants by dozens of different singers. A book of Taliban poems has even been translated into English and published this...

Tampa, Florida - If you're a student trying to earn a degree in anthropology, or even journalism, Governor Rick Scott says don't bother. He says if the state is to compete for the best jobs, he wants students focusing on science, engineering, and math. Governor Scott says Florida needs more graduates in high tech fields so companies will consider relocating to the Sunshine State. But he's being criticized for his idea to shift tax dollars away from liberal arts majors like anthropology and journalism. Natalie Odom is majoring in mass communications at the University of South Florida. She says, "I...

The starting pay of certain liberal arts majors generally clocks in well below that of graduates in engineering fields, according to a Wall Street Journal study. Graduates with engineering degrees earned average starting pay of $56,000 in their first full-time jobs out of college, topping other majors. Communications and English majors only earned $34,000 in their first jobs. The survey, which was conducted by PayScale.com between April and June of this year, was answered by about 11,000 people who graduated between 1999 and 2010. The reported starting pay was adjusted for inflation to make the salaries of graduates from different...