Republicans Better Informed

A new Pew survey shows a rather steep "Partisan Knowledge Gap," with Republicans and Independents generally better informed than Democrats. Mary Katharine Ham finds this quite amusing and also notes that, "if the polling had gone the other way, the NYT would shout it from the rooftops."  She provides examples of the mainstream press doing just that on previous occasions. We'd need ...

College Students Better Than Professors Think?

Gary Lewandowski and David Strohmetz, psychology professors at Monmouth University, argue at Inside Higher Ed that college professors have unrealistic expectations of their students.  They begin poorly, with several paragraphs of the "both professors and students have shortcomings" variety.  But they eventually hit on an essential truth: We run the risk of using our own past experience as the default comparison ...

Prosecutors Investigate Innocence Project Students

A rather bizarre case in Illinois -- even by the standards of that state. For more than a decade, classes of students at Northwestern University’s journalism school have been scrutinizing the work of prosecutors and the police. The investigations into old crimes, as part of the Medill Innocence Project, have helped lead to the release of 11 inmates, the project’s director ...

College Sports Scandal Blame Games

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying.  But she makes a good point here about the fact that those who enable cheating never seem to get much attention: Everybody notices the crooked defiant coach, the hapless sputtering president, the anonymous guys on the academic support staff who sit next ...

Morehouse Bans Women’s Clothes

Morehouse, the top historically black college for men, has issued a new dress code of which Bill Cosby will approve but gays groups do not. Since he was named as president of Morehouse College in 2007, Robert M. Franklin has stressed the importance of defining education broadly, well beyond courses. He has been talking about the social and ethical obligations of ...

SNL Spoofs Internet Colleges

Amusing parody of the University of Phoenix ads by SNL: Bonus: Fred Armisen in whiteface. via Inside Higher Ed

Libraries: Paper or Digital?

Inside Higher Ed points me to a new study [PDF], “What to Withdraw: Print Collections Management in the Wake of Digitization,” on how academic libraries should cope with the increasing availability of scholarly journals in digital form. They go through great pains to argue the need to maintain print. From the executive summary: This analysis finds several rationales for ...

77% Oklahoma High School Students Can’t Name 1st President?

A recent survey of Oklahoma public high school students found that the overwhelming majority can't answer even simple questions about U.S. government and history. A thousand students were given 10 questions drawn from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services item bank. Candidates for U.S. citizenship must answer six questions correctly in order to become citizens. About 92 percent of the people ...

Qaddafi Son’s Dissertation

Saif Qaddafi, son of Libyan dictator Muammar, has completed a doctoral dissertation bemoaning the lack of democracy in the world. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi said the current system of global governance was "highly undemocratic". He hit out at undemocratic states whose governments were "authoritarian, abusive and unrepresentative". His father Muammar Gaddafi came to power in a coup in 1969 and has ruled ...

Southeastern University Loses Accreditation, Closing

DC's Southeastern University has lost its accreditation, canceled its fall term, and is seeking to merge with another school. The institution's accreditation from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education lapsed Aug. 31. A report from the commission found that the small private college lacked rigor and was losing faculty, enrollment and financial stability. Southeastern has operated since 1879 and has ...

Midnight College

Boston's Bunker Hill Community College is experimenting with midnight classes.  Wick Sloane, who teaches a full class from 11:45 pm to 2:45 am, explains: Two thirds of my class this morning enrolled at midnight because all the day, evening and weekend sections were full. The rest have night jobs, most of them at hospitals, and one is a taxi dispatcher. Almost ...

OTB Radio – Tonight at 5:30 Eastern

The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live from 5:30-6:30 Eastern. Dave Schuler and I will talk about President Obama's education speech and related topics. We'll also be taking calls at (646) 716-7030. Owing to a high trolls to legit callers ratio, however, we'll be using the BTR chat feature to screen for legit calls. You ...

Obama’s Education Speech

Matt Yglesias takes mock exception to President Obama's assertion to our nation's schoolchildren that "You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it." He notes that, "My father dropped out of tenth grade and has had a totally solid career as ...

Obama’s Schoolchildren Speech

President Obama is set to address the nation's schoolchildren next week, presumably to propagandize them into his evil agenda of turning the country into Communist Russia (pronounced "roo-shuh") and offing granny to save money on health care just as they do in his native Kenya. There are even instruction manuals to enlist the support of the teachers unions in brainwashing ...

College Rankings

Washington Monthly has put out its annual answer to the US News college rankings, even going so far as to launch a new blog devoted to the subject. Steve Benen highlights some of the findings: * Only one of the U.S. News top ten universities -- Stanford -- makes the Washington Monthly's top ten, while high profile institutions such as Princeton, Duke ...