More By James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal | Eastern NC Now
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The University of North Carolina at Asheville recently announced with great pride its plans to divest part of its endowment from investments based on “fossil fuels” (such as natural gas, oil, and coal).
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Americans celebrate their independence today, but liberty is still threatened in higher education.
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Student loan debt has become a major concern for young people. In response, some Democratic candidates for president are offering “free college” proposals.
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Many colleges assign “common readings” to incoming students as an intellectual experience outside the classroom to set the bar for the academic rigor that professors expect of students. This tradition is most students’ first taste of the university.
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Public universities in North Carolina can’t fund their athletic budgets from only ticket and merchandise sales; they must use subsidies to foot the rest of the bill.
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As more students have headed to college and a degree is seen as a way to shape students as workers and as citizens, higher education’s mission has become more important. Its leaders, and their personal beliefs, have become more contentious, too.
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The latest publication from The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, “University of North Carolina System 2019 Fact Sheet,” provides information on enrollment, tuition, graduation rates, student debt, and more for schools in the UNC system in an “at-a-glance”-style brochure.
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The time-honored American tradition of outlandish political promises continues apace.
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Tuition costs have been rising at a rate that’s almost eight times faster than wage growth, and yet survey after survey indicates graduates are still woefully unprepared when entering the workforce.
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Faculty pay can vary greatly across universities and even within the same university system.
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Campus protests started in the 1960s, but protests on today’s college campuses have a different vibe. While protests in the past pitted students against university leadership, protests in the present are supported and accommodated by presidents and administrators.
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Philip Hamburger recently published a piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that Congress should control administrative bloat by limiting student loan funds given to colleges with too many administrators.
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Davidson College has an impressive academic reputation. It has a student-faculty ratio of 10:1. Nearly 90 percent of its courses have fewer than 30 students each.
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On 30 April 2019, St. Edmunds College, University of Cambridge, rescinded a fellowship to the outstanding young researcher Noah Carl, who self-identifies as a conservative.
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America’s education establishment beams out a message to young people like a pulsar: Go to college! A high percentage of them do.
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A series of disasters face art colleges and the art departments of American universities. Their campuses are closing, their freshmen numbers are dwindling, and their graduates are struggling.
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Founded in 1873 in Greensboro, North Carolina, Bennett College is one only two of historically black colleges just for women.
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The focus used to be on developing the whole person: To lift students morally and ethically, to pique their curiosity in all things, and to instill, as cardinal John Henry Newman wrote, certain “habits of mind” that produce a deeply thoughtful individual.
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How far has the United States gone down the road of punishing people for uttering politically incorrect thoughts?
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In March, Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay penned “A Principled Defense of the University” for Areo.
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The promise of higher education has become a trap for tens of millions of Americans.
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Schools will receive adversity scores that boost the actual scores of students to the degree that the CB thinks they have faced adversity in their lives.
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In 2017, the North Carolina legislature passed House Bill 527 (now State Law 2017-196) to foster open inquiry in the state’s public colleges and universities.
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As recently as the 1980s, conservative political leaders often saw the need to allow immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, to be full-fledged participants in American institutions, including education.
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Academic postmodernism is no stranger to the idea that classical Enlightenment values such as reason, equal treatment, and individual agency should be cast aside for the sake of racial and sexual grievances.
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May 9 was the “crossover” deadline for bills in the North Carolina General Assembly.
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The public relies on journalists to learn about and share academic research. Public knowledge can be undermined, however, when academics try to influence what research journalists cover or limit the “acceptable debate” about an issue.
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On April 11, the administration of the University of Tulsa shocked faculty, students, and alumni by announcing the elimination of 40 percent of the school’s academic programs.
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Political science is the study of homo politicus, what Plato considered the most quintessential of human behaviors.
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Abigail Stewart and Virginia Valian are senior psychologists at the University of Michigan and Hunter College, respectively.
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Freshman composition occupies a unique position in a college curriculum.
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Good teaching is vital for college students to learn, but the work demands on professors and what type of work is actually rewarded means that teaching can be of secondary importance.
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When students graduate high school, they know about the benefits of a college degree but not career training.
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The end of the spring semester marks the 20th anniversary of my professorship at Duke, first as an assistant professor and then as an associate professor of the practice at the Sanford School of Public Policy.
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