Forums: College Ball

Universities claim to be havens for diversity, but this political correctness does not guarantee freedom of thought. Tolerance is reserved for those who stick to the liberal line. Those who deviate from the approved set of views can expect to be set upon by angry student activists and reproving academic bureaucrats. Two recent examples of "thought crime" illustrate the academy's low level of tolerance for divergent views. The University of Illinois fired nontenured adjunct professor Ken Howell from teaching and also from a job at the on-campus Catholic center for correctly stating Catholic doctrine on homosexuality... Twenty-four-year-old Augusta State University...

The government's history of distorting the market place is long, storied, and usually ends badly. Federal interference in the market place began in earnest during FDR's New Deal policies in the thirties and continues to this day. Many economists believe that the great depression was extended due to the Federal Government's marketplace interference. A recent study out of UCLA comes to the same conclusion, showing that FDR's policies extended the depression by 7 years. More recent Federal Government efforts have yielded similar results. Progressive policies originally implemented decades ago, and extended since, turned the mortgage business upside down.  The...

The Obama administration on Thursday released its controversial proposed regulations to end federal student aid to for-profit colleges whose graduates do not earn enough to repay their loans. Since most for-profit programs get the vast majority of their revenues from federal student aid, the regulations could effectively shut down the programs whose students have the most debt and the least likelihood of finding good jobs. The for-profit colleges have lobbied strongly against the new “gainful employment” regulations. And in a statement Thursday evening, the Career College Association, which represents the colleges, called the proposed regulations “unwise, unnecessary, unproven” and said...

Speaking to the NAACP convention in Kansas City on Monday (July 12), Michelle Obama said that because of "stubborn inequalities" that "still persist --- in education and health, in income and wealth --- "the NAACP's founders "would urge us to increase our intensity." The White House, for some reason, appears to have heard her call, for on Tuesday, reported the Chronicle of Higher Education, "White House Official Says Civil-Rights Office Will Enforce Fair State Spending for Black Colleges." John S. Wilson Jr., executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, said on Tuesday that the...

Now listen up, white people! You CANNOT BE A VICTIM OF RACISM, because according to Paris Lewis, the head of the Black Panther racists, black people cannot be racist. I’m not making this up…see the video. His assertion is that blacks cannot be racist because their ancestors suffered as slaves. So, by his assertion, if you are victimized by the Black Panther racists, you are not a victim. This guy Paris is a college educated lawyer. Does he know how to look up something in a dictionary? Racism has nothing to do with past experience, but rather a view of...

... Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class. This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in...

They come with polished resumes and perfect SAT scores. Their grades are often impeccable. Some elite universities will deny thousands of high school seniors with 4.0 grade point averages in search of an elusive quality that one provost called “intellectual vitality.” The perception is that today’s over-achieving, college-driven kids have it — whatever it is. They’re not just groomed; they’re ready. There’s just one problem. Once on campus, the students aren’t studying. It is a fundamental part of college education: the idea that young people don’t just learn from lectures, but on their own, holed up in the library with...