When you talk to humanities professors, especially those at elite institutions, it doesn’t take long for the complaints to begin. They say that the administration doesn’t support them, choosing to invest in the sciences and business school, not language, literature, and culture. They witness the number of majors plummet—English used to collect nearly 8 percent of majors; now it’s close to 3 percent—and they feel unappreciated. (At my own institution, the number of majors has dropped by more than 50 percent since I arrived in 1989.) The overall drift toward the “corporate university” reflects values they abhor, and many of them would like to move, but the job market is terrible. Continue Reading »
Recently, an academic administrator informed me that passing judgment on others’ sexual orientation or religious beliefs was grounds for exclusion from partnership with the university office she represents. Continue Reading »
When I was an undergraduate at an evangelical college in the Pacific Northwest, I encountered a unique imperative, “Down with the Pinecone Curtain!” For my classmates who resonated with this battle cry, the towering evergreens on campus were a metaphor for the college’s cultural isolation. While the Pinecone Curtain wasn’t exactly the Berlin Wall, my classmates’ discontent was real nonetheless. They were dissatisfied with the school’s evangelical identity, if not with evangelicalism itself. Continue Reading »
The first-year reading program at Williams College, “turned out to be kind of like a bad blind date,” wrote Michaela Morton, a freshman at the time, in an article in the student newspaper. Continue Reading »
As students head back to college this month, many have yet to choose a major. When they do decide, they should keep a wide divergence in mind. It appeared awhile back in a headline in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Business and Academic Leaders Disagree on Quality of College Grads.” The disagreement emerged in two polls by Gallup, one for Lumina that asked Americans, including business leaders, about the cost and quality of higher education, the other for Inside Higher Ed that queried academic officers about the academic health of their campuses. Continue Reading »
To protect against discrimination, liberals increasingly seek to discriminate. News broke over the weekend that all twenty-three schools within the California State University system have taken steps to “derecognize” InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), a para-church Christian ministry organization that’s had a longstanding presence within university life religious settings. Continue Reading »
He has authored over a dozen books, written a syndicated newspaper column and countless essays and articles covering a broad range of subjects—sports, politics, mobsters, union thugs, cultural touchstones, booze, and blades of grass—all of it written in a smart, literate voice of the casual sophisticate who takes his subject, but not himself, seriously. Continue Reading »
In 1877 some concerned citizens of Wheaton, Illinois, decided that they needed to do something about the strange little college that stood in the midst of their town. It had been there since the early 1850s, first as a Wesleyan school called the Illinois Institute and then—reinvented by Jonathan . . . . Continue Reading »
