More By James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal | Eastern NC Now
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A reporter who hasn’t dreamt of one day writing for the New York Times is a rare bird. “I’ll start with my local newspaper,” they tell themselves.
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As students and parents shop for colleges, trying to envision what they will receive in return for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, one of the central questions on their minds is, “How much personal attention and access to professors does this college offer?”
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University presidents make a difference. The best of them can steer a university to new heights of greatness, while the worst of them can bring costly mediocrity or even extinction.
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The United States is world-renowned for its higher-education system. As a result, it has become home to a massive population of international students.
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Just over one year ago, Cairn University, a small, private, Christian school in southeastern Pennsylvania, made a strategic institutional decision to eliminate its School of Social Work and all related degrees and programs, thus bringing to an end a 50-plus-year run.
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Earlier this year, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC) identified 39 million adults who had some higher-education experience as of July 2020 but had not earned any credentials and were no longer enrolled at a college or university.
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America is finally waking up to the fact that poisonous, divisive ideas are proliferating in public education, from pre-K to graduate school. The question is how to push back against such ideas.
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Recently, Title IX has been in the news because of the Biden administration’s promised (and, as of yesterday, delivered) rejection of much-needed Trump-era reforms.
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As previously mentioned in this series, college sports are a big business. Businesses need managers, and, as such, colleges and universities have athletic directors.
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Carl Dobsky’s brilliant, fiery painting “Birds of Paradise” has been the focus of attention at his recent exhibitions, because it accurately and effectively captures the zeitgeist of contemporary American life.
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Today’s assault on intellectual excellence in the academy will eventually end. Hopefully, an investigation will then commence on its causes, and all the usual suspects will be rounded up.
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One of the most important principles for preserving a spirit of inquiry, discovery, and discussion on university campuses is institutional neutrality.
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In his April piece for the Martin Center, Adam Ellwanger critiqued “contract grading” as a symptom of “the war against academic excellence” and the broader societal movement toward “some fetishized notion of social justice.”
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North Carolina’s public universities have a problem with free expression, and it mostly doesn’t come from censorious administrators or biased faculty members. Instead, it’s the students themselves who muzzle free speech.
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Over the last several years, a burgeoning new genre has put the book-watching world on notice. “New Adult,” a coinage first used by St. Martin’s Press in 2009, refers to novels with greater depth than standard YA fare but far less than traditional literary fiction.
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Citing the continuing impact of COVID-19, the Department of Education extended its Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) verification waiver on May 18, 2022.
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In the fall of 2021, it appeared that Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Terry McAuliffe, would rather easily defeat his Republican challenger, Glenn Youngkin.
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College sports are a lifestyle for many people and an indispensable business opportunity for colleges and universities. Many UNC System schools are perhaps better known for their sports teams than for their academic offerings.
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By now, only the most dishonest or intentionally ignorant observers deny the existential crisis facing higher education.
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At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers implemented sweeping relief programs to offset the economic shock of lockdowns, layoffs, and shifts in consumer behavior.
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Although tenure has been hotly debated over the years, it is still widely misunderstood as guaranteeing a professor a lifetime position.
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Presidents of prestigious universities often make outrageous decisions inconsistent with such bedrock values as freedom of expression and providing the accused with traditional American due process.
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Chancellor salaries at public universities across the country are far higher than those for other public executives, out of step with faculty compensation, and unrelated to student success and university performance.
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As a professor devoted to his college’s “pre-disciplinary” core curriculum, I was hooked by David Epstein’s title, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.
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58 percent of postsecondary educational institutions now employ a post-tenure review process. This is up from 46 percent in 2000.
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Thales College, a new undergraduate institution launching this fall in Wake Forest, N.C., is eagerly preparing to open its doors to its inaugural class.
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To what extent can a selective educational institution advantage certain racial groups in admissions decisions without discriminating against other groups simultaneously?
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When persons of means contemplate death, the question of where to leave their financial assets becomes acute.
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The institutions of the West have lost much of their power to conserve the past for future generations.
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Last month, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) released a report accusing the North Carolina General Assembly and the UNC Board of Governors of “political interference” at UNC-Chapel Hill and across the UNC System.
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The college application season has long been notorious for the anxiety it instills in high school seniors, many of whom are seeking admission to schools they believe will determine their futures.
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The educational bureaucracies from the state level down to local school boards, including community college boards of trustees, are rushing to implement administrative regulations and board policies
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While some nerdy people like me thought that college was fun, and so stayed in it for life, for most people it is a chore to be completed with the goal of higher income.
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Since the rise of social media, many students have gotten used to discussing difficult topics within the protection of their own echo chambers.
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