ISI Faculty Resource Center

By Jackson Toby

At the beginning of 2011 the portfolio of the federal government for education loans was nearly one trillion dollars.  The portfolio consisted of loans for students currently in college extended either directly by the Department of Education or loans from financial institutions like Sallie Mae and banks with repayment guaranteed by the United States Treasury as well the education loans of students who had graduated from college or had quit before graduating but had not been fully repaid.  Its size exceeded the credit card debt of the American population in early 2011 and it continues to grow; whatever part remains unpaid contributes to the national debt.

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Earlier this month, shortly after the announcement of a sexual harassment investigation targeting Yale University, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” to colleges on the handling of sexual violence cases.  On the same day, April 4, Vice President Joe Biden kicked off a nationwide “awareness campaign” on schools’ obligations toward victims in a speech at the University of New Hampshire.  But will this campaign truly help victims of sexual assault – or is it likely to trample on the civil rights of students accused of such offenses, and promote more panic and paranoia on campuses?

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Austen provides something for which young people-even the jaded ones-secretly long.

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Judged by the recent avalanche of autopsy-like books, American higher education appears troubled. Alleged evil-doers abound, but one culprit escapes unnoticed—the horrific sartorial habits of many of today’s professors.

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Higher education's not politicized because of a few radical professors, writes Naomi Schaefer Riley. It's politicized because vast portions of the professoriate can't conceive of their jobs except through a partisan lens.

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Calhoun, following Thomas Jefferson’s “Kentucky Resolutions” and James Madison’s “Virginia Resolutions” of 1798, pointed out that American federalism had an apparent flaw. The federal government could not be the final judge of its own powers.

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Enterprising students at the University of Chicago have managed to combine two of the central interests of the contemporary student: casual sex and facebook.

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The late American philosopher Richard Rorty (d. 2007) in describing his assessment of the role of university professor wrote: "When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization." The re-education imperative is one that he, "like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own."

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Frank Beckwith has an interesting little article over at “The Catholic Thing” on How Political Correctness Makes Us Dumb.

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As I predicted last October, the Supreme Court has made short work of the argument that the odious, bigoted, hateful, ridiculous Westboro Baptist Church ought to be subject to lawsuits for the emotional distress which their ugly protests cause.

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