The Wall Street Journal has an editorial today on student protests in the UC system, entitled "California's College Dreamers." The piece opens by chastising students for not investigating the tuition hikes enough to discover "that compensation packages won from the state by unions were a big reason for the hike."

The editorial notes that the UC system lost out on $800 million dollars alone this year after the state diverted $3 billion to cover rising government worker pension costs. The skyrocketing costs the editors attribute to a 1999 bill in which state legislators refigured pension benefits on the assumption that "investment returns would grow at a 8.25% rate in perpetuity." Among other things, the bill refigured benefits for public-safety employees that had a dangerous formula: you could retire at age 50 and receive 3% of your final year's pay times number of years on the job. "...

The other day my sister the epidemiologist overheard me talking about the writing problems of undergraduates and she jumped in with, "It's a real problem for us, too." She outlined one instance.  When senior researchers conceive their projects, one of the first things they do is ask assistants of various types (interns, etc.) to conduct a "literature review." That means reading up on the topic and summarizing every relevant study, report, essay, etc. Each item gets a one-page synopsis, a clear and short and simple but comprehensive description. No critical thinking required, and no other "21st-century skills" needed, either. 

According to her, more and more young people rising in the sciences have a hard time with it, and it's blocking the progress of research.

Her conclusion agrees with a survey conducted by Hart Research Associates on behalf of the Association of American Colleges...

In the current issue of PMLA is an exchange between Jacqueline Brady and Richard Ohmann on one side and Gerald Graff on the other. Brady and Ohmann object to Graff's contention in his MLA Presidential Address and in an article he wrote for Radical Teacher that leftists in the college classroom push students into leftwing viewpoints. (I wrote about Graff's pieces in an earlier Brainstorm post here.) Brady and Ohmann counter:

"We hold that the democratic teaching that most radicals do helps guard against pedagogical authoritarinism. If students have some control over curriculum and class discussion and in making sense of the ideas and texts they encounter, they are unlikely to be or feel bullied by the instructor."

Later on, they say:

"So, 'teaching for social justice' (which indeed should be a chief goal of a democratic system of education, right up there with the enrichment of life an...

As has been often remarked, the Millennials made a difference in the 2008 election. Not because of their increased turnout, which went up only two points despite all the grand predictions of six-, seven-, and eight-point bounces from 2004. Rather, it was because the 18-to-29-year-olds went for Obama 2-to-1.

Well, a recent report from Pew Research shows the favoritism for the left slipping fast. Here is the finding from the first paragraph:

"The Democratic advantage over the Republicans in party affiliation among young voters, including those who 'lean' to a party, reached a whopping 62 percent to 30 percent margin in 2008. But by the end of 2009 this 32-point margin had shrunk to just 14 points: 54 percent Democrat, 40 percent Republican."

Obama's job approval ratings among the young have plummeted as well.  In February 2009, 73 percent of Millennials gave the president a thumbs up.  ...

Here are two front-page headlines that hit me yesterday morning here in Georgia: "77% tuition increases needed to offset cuts" and "Campuses run low on courses, faculty."

I can't find links to the full stories on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution site, so I'll summarize. The first story opens, "It would take a 77-percent tuition increase at Georgia's colleges and universities to meet the demand for a $385-million cut in the state's higher education system budget." (That dwarfs tuition spikes at the University of California.)

The second story's second paragraph runs, "Classrooms are crammed with students. Some students are postponing graduation because they can't get all their required courses. Others have trouble meeting with professors because they're teaching more classes or aren't on campus during required furlough days."

Enough said. If faculty members care about their own job...

Recently, education reporter Jay Mathews of The Washington Post has been writing about reading in the public schools, two of those pieces appearing here and here.  One reason for doing so stems from a report issued by Renaissance Learning, a reading program that helps teachers and parents determine how well children understand the reading they do for homework and on their own.

Because of the popularity of the program, Renaissance Learning has a vast database on the books kids in public schools from kindergarten to 12th Grade actually read voluntarily and for class. The most recent findings, for the 2008-09 school year, are now released in a paper entitled "What Kids Are Reading: The Book-Reading Habits of Students in American Schools" (here's for the link).

The list of most popular titles for Grades 9 through 12 show just how powerful the social element of reading is at that age.  The ...

Kevin Carey's article from a few weeks back, "How I Aced College -- and Why I Now Regret It," laid out in blank terms how easy it was for him to maneuver his way through general education requirements with minimal effort and still pile up credits and a good record.

Unfortunately, it's not a singular story. A report has come out from UC-Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education entitled "ENGAGED LEARNING IN A PUBLIC UNIVERSITY: Trends in the Undergraduate Experience. Report on the Results of the 2008 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey" (link provided here).

It reports the results of a 2008 survey of students at the undergrad level throughout the entire UC system. One of the things it did was chart the way in which students spend their time in an average week. 

In spite of the general recommendation that full-time undergraduates need to devote around 25...

No, not the Tea Partyers or the Birthers.  It's another group, this one from the pro-Obama side. They are the people who forget a crucial fact about discourse in the United States. It is that there are few things more annoying or dismaying than to be charged with racism for saying or thinking something that, in fact, has no racial content to it at all.

A case in point appeared in the Chronicle Review recently. It was this article by Peniel Joseph, a historian at Tufts University. The opening sentence lays out the first premise of the argument:

"A year after Barack Obama was inaugurated as America's first black president, the nation has been gripped by a startling new reality: a cascading backlash of racially tinged anti-Obama sentiment. The breadth of antagonists has been wide: the 9/12 marchers against health-care reform brandishing signs labeling the president a traitor (and some...

The other day, Gerard Alexander opened an op-ed in the Washington Post with a broadside complaint:

"Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological, and unworthy of serious consideration."

An hour later, I read this sentence in an article in the Chronicle Review:

"It is because we liberal-arts professors have a personal stake in our relative economic status; we have carefully studied the actual dynamics of history and culture; and we have trained ourselves to think in complex, nuanced, and productive ways about the human condition that so many of us...

Why is there so much difficulty and controversy surrounding campus speakers? To be sure, only a small portion of the overall pool becomes a problem -- David Horowitz, Bill Ayers, the Minuteman founder, etc. -- but why should invited guests ever push administrators into cancellations, presentation conditions, added fees, and other odd stipulations? What are they afraid of?

The handling of David Horowitz by St. Louis University is a case in point. People might remember that, several months back, his talk was cancelled, and recently a new wrinkle has come up. Here is Horowitz' version:

"The administrator in charge, Dean Scott Smith, had told the student whose group had invited me that 'Horowitz would never be allowed to speak on a platform alone at Saint Louis University. He could be invited only if there was another speaker on the program to oppose his point of view.'"

Horowitz didn't...