More By James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal | Eastern NC Now
View More Entries By JamesGMartin...
 |
Last week, the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees considered a resolution to end discrimination and special preferences in all the university’s activities.
|
 |
In September, the chancellor of UNC-Wilmington, Jose Sartarelli, announced his plan to retire next year.
|
 |
Intercollegiate sports, particularly football and basketball, have ever so slowly, over the years, inserted themselves insidiously into the fabric of most universities with the support of alumni, the business community, and their college presidents.
|
 |
It has been two months since the start of the Fall semester at UNC-Chapel Hill. In those two months, four students have died by suicide on campus.
|
 |
The most striking fact about American colleges and universities over the last fifty years is how rapidly the cost of attending has risen.
|
 |
Incidents of academics being targeted for their views are on the rise, according to a new report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
|
 |
We have reached a critical juncture in our nation’s history. As once hallowed institutions decay before our eyes, parallel structures struggle to arise.
|
 |
The hiring of a critical race theorist to teach music is yet another offering from academics at the temple of the woke. Little good it will do students or individuals and communities interested in rejecting racial prejudice.
|
 |
In early August, archivists and other scholars erupted in protest when the American Historical Association (AHA) wrote a letter asking broad questions about how archives plan to reopen.
|
 |
In my nearly 15 years as a higher education journalist and analyst, I have, unfortunately, witnessed too few victories for the reform movement. In that time, and certainly for several decades before, academia has continued moving in bad directions.
|
 |
Universities have been going woke across the country. This involves administrators pushing “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” policies in hiring practices, student life, and curricula.
|
 |
In a recent article for the Martin Center, Duke professor Mike Munger asked an important question: should “a political board composed of nonacademics…be empowered to evaluate faculty proposals on hiring and curriculum in the first place?”
|
 |
Universities across North Carolina welcomed students back to campus last month for what may be the most “normal” semester since the pandemic began. And according to the chancellor of North Carolina State University, Randy Woodson, students are happy to be back in person, though uneasy.
|
 |
During the Obama administration, Catherine Lhamon worked in the Department of Education as Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights. She was known for her hyper-aggressive approach to Title IX. Now she has been nominated by President Biden for her old position.
|
 |
Currently, nine states prohibit colleges and universities from practicing race-conscious admissions. That number may soon become ten if a new bill in the North Carolina legislature is successfully adopted.
|
 |
On September 3, the UNC-Chapel Hill student government called for a press conference with the chancellor and provost to discuss COVID guidelines and transparency, but the university leaders did not make an appearance.
|
 |
"My most ‘illiberal’ claim is that all societies necessarily have standards. Even the freest of speech regimes has limits.” This is the claim of Michael Knowles in Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds.
|
 |
We are living in an era of unprecedented pressure for ideological conformity within institutions of higher education. Idaho’s Legislature has led the way toward reforming public universities through budgetary controls.
|
 |
Women outnumber men in higher education at record levels. According to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, women comprised 59.5 percent of college students at the end of the 2020-2021 academic year.
|
 |
While community colleges are known as a low-cost path to higher education, some might be shocked to learn that their enrollments took a steeper hit than the four-year sector in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.
|
 |
In recent years, American universities have come under fire for frequent mistreatment of speech on their campuses. Often, this mistreatment is a result of restrictive or ill-defined speech codes—policies that stifle any speech that would otherwise be protected in general society.
|
 |
Many colleges and universities are closing or merging throughout the United States. Since 2016, 70 institutions have closed, merged, or are planning to close or merge in the coming years.
|
 |
As Oscar Wilde tells us, “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.” This is especially true of bureaucracies on college campuses. Once their seeds are planted, their growth often continues without check.
|
 |
On July 29, 2021, I gave a presentation on “Fighting Smart Against Critical Race Theory In Education” to over 100 state legislators at the American Legislative Exchange Council annual meeting in Salt Lake City.
|
 |
Shelling out the time and cash necessary to earn a degree is a sacrifice. For many, the question of “is college worth it?” has a simple answer: “yes.” But for others, the answer may not be so clear.
|
 |
No one spoke of college students being trapped in debt until rather recently.
|
 |
Student loans in the U.S. total nearly $1.7 trillion, and at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, President Trump temporarily paused federal student loan payments and dropped interest rates to zero. The original suspension, which began on March 13, 2020, was only meant to last two months.
|
 |
A decade ago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was engulfed in a sports scandal that made national headlines, brought down a chancellor who seemed destined for a lustrous career, and caused the school huge expenses in litigation and for public relations experts.
|
 |
Some student-athletes at UNC schools get admitted despite not meeting the minimum admission requirements. The university system counts these students as “exceptions.”
|
 |
What is academic freedom, and who has it? The question is raised by the recent controversy sparked by a process that is usually boring and bureaucratic: an academic tenure case. Nikole Hannah-Jones, Hussman School of Journalism; she is an alumna, graduating with an M.A. in Journalism 20 years ago.
|
 |
Over the past several months, critical race theory (CRT) has become one of the most divisive topics in higher education and in America’s political dialogue. Mainstream liberals have framed the issue as simply a matter of teaching accurate history.
|
 |
Each generation returns the same complaints: college teachers drone, college teachers lack creativity and spark, nay, they often lack even rudimentary pedagogical awareness.
|
 |
Conservative thinkers are mostly united on the need for reforming the American college system, but they’re divided on how to do it. It can be hard to pin down, exactly, what is to be done, as the Martin Center has previously reported.
|
 |
Academics are growing wary of the peer review process amid mounting evidence that it is compromised by ideological biases and that it does not effectively or reliably ensure the quality of published research.
|
