Higher Education

Update #2 (Sept. 20; 5:43 p.m. EDT): A former student of Prof. Guth's, who says he's a conservative and NRA member, emailed me to object to my characterization of his former instructor. See below the page break for his email, which he assented for me to publish, with his name redacted. Update #1 (Sept. 20; 12:55 p.m. EDT): Kansas University has put Guth on administrative leave. Read Kat Timpf…

President Obama made some proposals Thursday about how we can reduce college costs around the country. Speaking about this on MSNBC’s Martin Bashir show hours later, Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) actually said, and I quote, “There is no reason why a young person should have to pay for college.”

Whatever they're paying Teresa Ghilarducci, who is "the Bernard L. and Irene Schwartz chair of economic policy analysis at the New School for Social Research," it's too much. The bolded sentences seen after the jump which Ms. Ghilarducci included in a Friday New York Times op-ed (HT "Mungowitz" at the "Kids Prefer Cheese" blog via Megan McArdle) makes my contention an open and shut case (…

CNN's New Day continued its advocacy for Congress to "fix" student loan rates, on Tuesday and Wednesday, instead of asking why the House and Senate differ on the solutions and addressing the larger debate about rising tuition costs. Co-host Chris Cuomo lectured House Republicans in particular. "The Republicans say education matters also," he called out the GOP on Tuesday's New Day. When co-…

ABC News’s John Parkinson parroted liberal talking points on student loan rates Monday, claiming the GOP “seemed perfectly content to watch rates double” while Democrats prepped a Wednesday vote in the Senate to keep rates at 3.4 percent. In an online article, Parkinson pitted the “unrelenting” Democratic Party against a gleefully partisan GOP, apparently buying into Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev…

In a show of advocacy and not journalism, CNN skirted the policy details of the student loans debate and instead just paddled Congress for letting the loan rates double, on Monday's New Day. Co-hosts Kate Bolduan and Chris Cuomo begged Congress to "fix" the student loan rate increase that automatically went into effect on July 1. They dubbed it the "'Come on Congress' campaign." Cuomo…

Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift on Friday said something that might explain a lot to conservatives. After Pat Buchanan commented on PBS’s McLaughlin Group that "the United States is moving towards Third World [education] standards because most of the students coming in now, the principle feeder nation in the country now is Mexico which is at the bottom of the OECD,” Clift replied, “When my ancestors…

Full of hot air and partisan bluster, MSNBC's Ed Schultz cynically and ghoulishly exploited the disaster in Moore, Oklahoma last week to blast Republicans over unrelated education policies. Schultz recounted the inspiring stories of teachers who threw themselves on students while their schools were being ripped apart by the tornado. But his monologue took an ugly turn when he pivoted to the…

Today’s proof that National Public Radio is your taxpayer-funded rip-and-read press-release service for the Left: a Morning Edition story summarized as “College Divestment Campaigns Creating Passionate Environmentalists.” Reporter Elizabeth Shogren compared Brown University's anti-coal campaign to anti-apartheid campaigns of the 1980s: “Students at more than 300 colleges in the United States…

Two years ago today, I chronicled wire service reports which appeared shortly after John Hinckley's unsuccessful attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981 reporting that schoolchildren in many parts of the country cheered when they heard that he had been shot. At the time, I suggested that school teachers and administrators who were appalled at the reactions might have…

When the Associated Press reported on the upcoming “Sex Week” program at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, the reporter calmly noted that the “student-initiated” event will begin on Friday, April 5, and include several generic seminar topics. However, when Fox News Radio's Todd Starnes described the same program, he indicated that it will include such controversial aspects as…

The University of Oklahoma, like every higher education institution in the country, is opposed to plagiarism.  So why did the home of the Sooners invite admitted plagiarist Fareed Zakaria to deliver the class of 2013's commencement address after the CNN anchor and Time plagiarism scandal? In a statement announcing Zakaria's selection, University of Oklahoma President David Boren insisted…

Paul "The Population Bomb" Ehrlich, call your office. Oh, never mind. You've never cared about the truth anyway, or the fact that your predictions of worldwide calamity have been far off the mark, but you sure have received a lot of attention from the establishment press over the past several decades. According to Jeff Wise at Slate.com on Wednesday, "researchers at Austria’s International…

Angela McCaskill, Chief Diversity Officer at Gallaudet University, has been reinstated following three months of administrative leave which began after the university learned that she had signed a petition supporting the placement of an initiative to repeal recently passed legislation legalizing same-sex "marriage" on the Maryland ballot. The headline at the Associated Press story about Ms.…