By Charlotte Allen President Obama has made reforming federal assistance to college students---with the aim of making it financially easier for more of them to obtain their degrees----a centerpiece of his administration's goals. In his State of the Union address on Jan. 27 he called for expanding the Pell grant program that currently serves about 7 million low-income college students, both by raising the maximum annual amount of the grants, currently $5,500, to $6,900 by 2019, and by turning the Pell program into a Social Security-style entitlement that would require Congress to allocate funds automatically to cover every student who qualified. The rationale that Obama gave to Congress for the huge proposed boost in the size of Pell grants, outstripping inflation and accounting for a major portion of the president's proposed $77.8 billion in Education Department spending for fiscal 2011 (a 31 percent increase over fiscal 2010) is that "no one should go broke because they choose to go to college." That's a worthy sentiment, but it raises an important question: What exactly will a massive additional transfer of federal funds to college students accomplish?
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By Ruth R. Wisse 
On 2 December 2009 the curtain of Harvard's famed Agassiz Theater rose on a production of Avrom Goldfaden's Shulamis, one of the most famous plays in the Yiddish repertoire. An operetta set in the Land of Israel in late biblical times, it was last performed in Warsaw in 1939, and forcibly shut down by the German invasion of September 1. To stage the current production its co-directors, Debra Caplan, a Harvard graduate student of Yiddish and Cecilia Raker, an undergraduate concentrator in drama, assembled a cast willing to learn their parts in a language most of them had never heard.
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By Frank Macchiarola When talking with prospective students who are thinking about attending college, I often engage in a bit of "bait and switch." Many of them are interested in jobs that will come for them after college and so they look at what college is about in almost functional terms. "What job will I be able to get, and how much money will I be able to make?" More than 45 years of teaching at the college and graduate school levels have taught me that they are really asking questions that are less important to them than questions they should be asking. Getting them jobs is not going to be the principal function of their college education. They need to obtain more than "training." They need to secure an education. And the job they work at after graduation is less important than the things they will learn about life itself during their course of study. At one point in time the distinction between the question they asked and the response I gave was well understood by those of us in the academy. The good life that the students were seeking had to have room in it for reflection and understanding about themselves. The liberal arts provided that framework for their study. Now during this so called "jobless" recovery, with jobs being lost at an accelerating pace, the prospect of failure confronts these graduates who have believed that their worth has to be measured in terms of their capacity to work and to earn a livelihood. Jobs are not unimportant things, but they are not the complete picture. They do not tell the story of what the college graduates need to be successful. And if the capacity to obtain work is critical to their sense of self, then we are going to see many unhappy people in the country during what will be a protracted period of massive unemployment.
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By Charlotte Allen College investments dropped 23 percent in 2009, the most disastrous year since the National Association of College and University Business Officers began compiling investment statistics in 1971. Two observations can be made about NACUBO's report…
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By Peter D. Salins 
Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University is a short, provocative book that raises many more questions than it answers. Its greatest contribution is that it clearly delineates the development of the American university from its origins in the late 19th century to the many absurdities that characterize it today. Menand's exposition of the various key events and trends that have shaped the contemporary American university runs like a stream throughout the book's occasionally disjointed sections and chapters (the book is largely a compilation of lectures he gave at the University of Virginia). What we learn is that, for the most part, all of the key features of the American university as we know it today emerged full-blown in a burst of academic gestation over a single generation - approximately 1870 to 1900 - largely through the efforts of one man, Charles Eliot, Harvard University's president from 1869 to 1909. Although Menand reviews the important ways in which the American university has changed since then, describing some of the key twists and turns along the way, he stresses that much has remained the same - often for no particularly good reason. Menand divides the American university's historical evolution into three distinct phases: a formative period running from its launch in 1870 under the influence of Harvard's Eliot through its institutional maturation in the 20th century up to the onset World War II; a "golden age" of rapid expansion in enrollment, funding and prestige that lasted from 1945 to 1970, a product of post-war population and economic growth and the cold war, heavily influenced by another Harvard president, James Bryant Conant; and a post-golden age phase taking us from 1970 to the present, that Frederick Hess (but not Menand) has aptly dubbed the "politically correct" university.
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By Daniel B. Klein Two researchers offer a new twist on an old question---why do college professors overwhelmingly lean to the left? Bias against conservatives is not the main reason, nor are the allegedly higher IQs of liberals, say Neil Gross of the University of British Columbia and Ethan Fosse of Harvard. Instead they suggest a theory of "path dependence" --few conservatives are attracted to work in scholarly fields dominated by the left, just as few males want to be nurses in a traditionally female field. People tend to giggle when a man wants to become a nurse, they say, and conservatives tend to feel similar embarrassment in entering leftist academe. This giggle theory underrates what leftist domination does to faculties. In the recent book The Politically Correct University: Problems, Scope and Reforms, Charlotta Stern and I discuss groupthink mechanisms. The majoritarian procedure of each department means that once a majority leans left, the department will tend toward leftist uniformity. The pyramidal structure of each discipline means that publication, awards, grants, recommendations will follow the pyramid's apex, and if the apex goes left it tends to sweep leftists/neuters into job posts throughout the pyramid. If leftists have a lock on many fields, it means that non-left applicants will tend to be screened out. Awareness of that feeds back to the non-left student's thoughts about the future. Self-selection is a function of the screening.
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"Who are you kidding?" I wanted to get up and ask the English professor who was giving a talk at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association convention in November. He was analyzing a graphic novel, the spaces between panels, the line widths of the panels, the lettering inside the "speech bubbles." Maybe he was trying to keep his job in a field that by job postings indicates increasing irrelevance. Students are leaving English departments in droves. "This is a profession that is losing its will to live," proclaimed William Deresiewicz, former English professor himself, in 2008 in the pages of the Nation, no less. It's been a death by slow suicide. The reference to "spaces" coming from the podium was the same kind of self-abusive parsing, I had seen applied by deconstructionists in the 1990s when I was a graduate student. The depressed patient, failing to see any worth in his work, had leveled the greatest works to "texts." Reading between the lines of "text" has evolved into reading the gaps between panels: "Lots of stuff happens in that silent space," said the professor.
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Mid-length articles on the politics, the business, and the philosophy of higher education, and how a traditional liberal arts education is faring in contemporary academia.
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Mid-length articles on the politics, the business, and the philosophy of higher education, and how a traditional liberal arts education is faring in contemporary academia.
