Free Republic

I had a somewhat disturbing conversation yesterday with Steve Fussell, the senior VP of human resources at pharmaceutical maker Abbott. His basic message, which I may pursue in a column down the road, was that Abbott is going to be hiring tons of people for high-paying jobs over the next decade, but not many of them will be Americans because we study the wrong things in college and we're not willing to work overseas. The key quotes: 1) "I hate to say we don't have the world's best universities. We may have the best minds, the best liberal arts education....

As Nicole Marshall posed for photos on the eve of her commencement, someone joked, "Smile -- think of all the loans you took out for this!" She says she chose St. Michael's, a Catholic liberal arts college near Lake Champlain in Colchester, Vt., because it offered the biggest aid package, "but I'm still leaving with quite a bit of loans" -- about $20,000. Her debt is a little lighter than the national average for graduates of private, four-year schools who borrow: nearly $23,800 as of 2007, according to the College Board in New York. But if there's any time that...

Recently I have posted articles ranging from showing that American Muslims are not assimilating and forming their own communities, to Muslims openly calling for jihad just blocks away from Ground Zero. As long as they go unopposed they are going to continue to move forward with their agenda of an Islamic USA. Now two prominent American Muslims are close to finalizing their plan to open an Islamic College right here in America. The school will be lead by two Islamic scholars, the first being Sheik Hamza Yusuf, who in the past had made this statement.

Former faculty at Antioch College, which is temporarily closing amid financial problems, plan to teach in coffee shops, bookstores and parks to keep alive the spirit of the private school known for its pioneering academic programs. Scott Warren, former associate professor of philosophy and political theory at Antioch, said 22 ex-faculty members have formed the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute in the village of Yellow Springs... Warren said the institute will follow the Antioch formula of offering progressive liberal arts courses while encouraging learning for life, humanitarian acts and collective decision-making. Murdock said she applauds the group's passion, but the institute...

To meet its share of a $47 million budget cut, UF's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences will reduce its foreign language offerings, lay off more than 30 faculty and staff and eliminate three Ph.D. programs. The $5.97 million cut amounts to 6 percent of CLAS' budget. The faculty layoffs stem mostly from the closing of the Korean and Vietnamese language programs and the Ph.D. programs in philosophy, French and German. All of the Ph.D. students as of fall 2008 -- about 27 in philosophy and nearly 30 in French and German -- will be allowed to finish their degrees....

As a parent, I am reevaluating the merits of the 160K investment I am about to finish making in my daughter's education at the University of Texas. It's not that UT isn't a fantastic school and that my daughter has not done well in her double major of Psychology and Spanish ( 3.95 GPA) it's just that I'm trying to figure out what she does in a year or so to get that back or to even leverage on it in the world that she will find herself.. Perhaps she can be a sort of Dr. Phil for Telemundo going...

Put on probation, S.F. school at risk of losing accreditation - New College of California, a private liberal arts school in San Francisco, is at risk of losing its accreditation for academic and ethical violations. School administrators, under pressure from faculty, students and the Western Association of Schools & Colleges, announced that they will form a committee to search for a new president and will reconfigure the board of directors. New College, which emphasizes activism and social change, was put on probation July 5 by the association for violations found by the association's commission. The commission's investigators found that: --...

With so many adult students, opinions are flying everywhere on how they might be served best and what is needed most. Gary Berg, author of Lessons From the Edge, offers up these four main pressures: 1. Diminishing financial support 2. The call to serve adult learners and first-generation college students 3. A need to balance liberal-arts and applied curricula 4. A subsequent necessity of maintaing an evolving institutional mission. Fopros are in a position to address these pressures. Like them or love them, many experts credit the University of Phoenix with being the most innovative of the higher-education bunch. UoP...

Hi Roger! As you may know, I often post my responses to hate mail like yours on my website, http://www.DrAdams.org. You may also know that the responses are often curt and sarcastic. But, Roger, since your intellectual prowess was so obvious from the opening line of your missive, I feel obligated to give you a more thoughtful response. I trust you are telling the truth when you say you have never been as offended as you were after you saw my appearance on Fox News’ Heartland (with John Kasich) on Saturday night. Your statement that my “attack on moral relativism”...

At Hamilton College... you can take... "Resistance Memoirs: Writing, Identity and Change."... Its teacher is Susan Rosenberg, formerly of the Weather Underground. ...Its self-described revolutionaries, mostly middle-class, dedicated themselves to supporting radical black causes and tearing apart American society in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1970, they blew up a townhouse when a bomb detonated prematurely and killed a few of their troops. Kathy Boudin, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and other high-profile members of the group spent the next decade or so running from the police and, some of them, continuing to pursue careers in criminal violence.... So why...

"...nothing pertaining to Christmas, or any religion, should be allowed in a public, government funded or based building..."

Disappearing Act The Invisible Adjunct shuts down her popular Weblog and says goodbye to academe By SCOTT SMALLWOOD Through the blurry glass of the classroom door, a professor can be seen at the front of the room. It is a woman, but the thick window obscures any clues about how old she is or how tall or what color hair she might have. Maybe brown. She's the Invisible Adjunct. Or at least, she used to be. After five years of being an adjunct and a year after starting one of the most popular academic Weblogs, she is giving up and...

Academics Flee From Diversity Debate By Peter Wood March 11, 2003 In early February, the debate club at Colby College in Waterville, Maine invited me to debate the role of "diversity" in higher education with, they hoped, the president of the College, William Adams, who likes to be called "Bro." President Adams declined. So did his vice president, Arnie Yasinski, the “Associate Dean for Intercultural Affairs,” Jeri Roseboro, and the “Coordinator of Multicultural Student Programs and Support,” Bernadette Buchanan. In all the debate club invited 13 members of the administration and the faculty to debate me. They all declined. President...

Some students at Francis Howell's Barnwell Middle School in St. Charles County will have their hands and legs bound Monday to learn about slavery.

It is not so obvious that physical scientists need a liberal arts education, rooted in the study of language. They themselves assert that they have no time for it. They have insisted on the abolition of language requirements in almost every university graduate program in America. This development is directly related to the massive amount of fraud which now typifies scientific publication in this country. This scientific community has lost track of the historical and ethical roots of our civilization, the only civilization which has fostered the scientific ethic and considerable scientific research and discovery. Increasingly young men enter the...

Pluralism and the Catholic UniversityAlan Charles Kors Copyright (c) 2002 First Things 122 (April 2002): 11-13. The decline of Catholic higher education in our country should concern all Americans, regardless of their religious affiliation. (I am not myself a Catholic.) The Catholic tradition, preserved and revitalized by its own institutions, has made and will continue to make truly indispensable contributions to the intellectual and moral vitality of American life. At the most basic level, Catholic higher education is vital to the meaning of American pluralism, which does not entail homogeneity, but a variety of lived differences. From well before the...