Academia
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Grad School Is in Trouble February 28, 2025
Jennie Bromberg was somehow still exuberant last weekend about her future career in public health. In January, she interviewed for a competitive Ph.D. program in epidemiology at the University of Washington, one of several to which she has applied. “...
How to Free the Universities February 21, 2025
In more good news for British universities, “woke waste” is now gaining traction in the UK media, and firmly in the firing line are mad-sounding research projects at the taxpayers’ expense. According to a joint investigation by The Sun and the Taxpay...
How Did Law Schools Become Lawless? February 21, 2025
Legal academia has been long overdue for a book-length critique, and Ilya Shapiro’s Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites delivers—released just as Trump’s election victory appears to signal a turning of the tide on wokeness....
New Life for the Great American University? February 19, 2025
University education has long been both scorned and desired in America. L. Frank Baum’s classic The Wizard of Oz lampooned college students—both their failure to use their brains while thinking “great thoughts” and their laziness. Yet for most Americ...
The Ghettoization of Western Civilization in Universities February 05, 2025
In December, Inside Higher Education published a profile of the new School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL) at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The essay examines the research specialties and intellectual affiliations of several facu...
Spare A Thought For Your Broke Professor January 20, 2025
American universities have been shelled from all sides of late. Liberals want more equitable access and accountability for student outcomes. Conservatives see higher ed as Woke Central, a crucible of indoctrination and activism run amok. Many young p...
Can Cornell Steer Away from Campus Madness? January 20, 2025
For reputation-tattered Cornell University, 2024 was a bad year — the pain self-inflicted. As the school prepares for late-February elections of alumni members to the Board of Trustees, one wonders: Will 2025 deliver another (self-infliction encore!)...
Academia Must Come to Terms With the GOP January 09, 2025
To become a class enemy is a misfortune, but to cultivate such status is a blunder. Right-wing populists chose American academics and intellectuals generations ago as their class enemies. More than 50 years ago, Vice President Spiro Agnew labeled soc...
How to Storm and Save an Ivory Tower January 07, 2025
Not until quite recently did American colleges cease being free expression zones. After University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom sounded the alarm with his bestselling The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and...
Trump Must Break Up the College Cartel December 09, 2024
Perhaps no sector better exemplifies the economic recklessness, inflation, and elitism that Americans rejected last month than academia. What was once a beacon of Western enlightenment has devolved into a profiteering industry that survives on Washin...
How Professors Killed Literature November 18, 2024
In our quest for relevance, we teachers of literature have ended up becoming unnecessary. This thought comes to mind every time I read the latest news about the crisis in the humanities. English degrees have declined by almost half since their most r...
Is Academic ‘Wokeness’ in Remission? November 01, 2024
It’s undeniable that identity politics plays a different role in American life than it did four years ago. Far-fetched tales of omnipresent racism, once received with deference, are now out of vogue. For some, in light of this substantial cultural ch...
The Classroom Panopticon October 24, 2024
Is it ironic to give a prize for encouraging “open discussion and debate in the classroom” and “creating an environment where all perspectives can be heard” in the name of William F. Buckley Jr.?Although best known today as the founder of National Re...
Why I Am Not a PhD October 23, 2024
I used to get into quarrels with my high school math teacher. Every morning, he would stroll into class with a stack of notebooks, a pack of chalk, and a jab at our school’s English department. As a future English major, I felt it was my duty to spea...
The Unintended Brilliance of 'Dead Poets Society' October 08, 2024
As students return to school and our anticipation for fall colors grows, many of us are putting on classic movies that fit the autumn vibes. One of those perennial favorites is Dead Poets Society, a film that has been praised by a generation of stude...
Can Colleges Do Without Deadlines? September 05, 2024
Much of undergraduate life—much of life in general—is defined by what psychologists call motivational conflict, which is when a person has the incentive to do two things but can choose only one. It’s Saturday night, your friends are going out, and yo...
Abolish Grades August 30, 2024
Grade inflation at American universities is out of control. The statistics speak for themselves. In 1950, the average GPA at Harvard was estimated at 2.6 out of 4. By 2003, it had risen to 3.4. Today, it stands at 3.8.The more elite the college, the ...
Is College Still Worth It? August 30, 2024
Americans are losing faith in the value of a four-year college degree. A Wall Street Journal poll last year showed that just 42 percent of respondents believed that it was worth the cost, down from 53 percent a decade ago. Prospective students have t...
Demystify the Ivies August 28, 2024
Long before Hamas’s attack on Israel last fall, Americans had grown skeptical of their elite universities. The safe spaces, the academic-speak elevating inane ideas, and the cancellations of nonprogressive arguments all suggested institutions adrift....
Free Speech Is Not Enough August 27, 2024
The corrupted state of American higher education has become a primary item on the national agenda. The ever-ballooning expense of college, coupled with growing doubts about the value of what our colleges are fostering—and not fostering—in our young p...
How a Citizen Can Think Like a King August 23, 2024
In my mid-twenties, I found myself at a crossroads. Down one path, if I stayed the course as a graduate student in political science, I could pursue a life in academia. Down another path, I could go back to my hometown in Washington state to challeng...
Columbia Agonistes August 23, 2024
Words scarcely express what relief it was to finally escape Columbia University to turn whistleblower early last year. For the previous eleven years, across a range of prestigious schools, I was a reporter and PR flack charged with making people look...
John Barth’s Escape From Nihilism August 08, 2024
The majority of the legendary postmodernists in American fiction lived long enough to be disappointed by their legends. Don DeLillo (87), Thomas Pynchon (87), Joseph McElroy (93) and Robert Coover (92) can still, as yet, contrast life with lore. The ...
You Call That Compassion? August 07, 2024
I live close to Yale University and sometimes I take my morning walks around there. The campus is beautiful and walkable, and I badly miss academia; as uncool as it sounds, I’m afraid I’m a sucker for the pageantry and sense of self-importance. There...
Want Better Higher Ed? Get the Feds Out June 25, 2024
Two things seem like they should go without saying: People use their own money more efficiently than they use someone else’s, and the more you subsidize a thing the more of it you tend to get. Both profoundly apply to American higher education, a tee...
