Social scientist Charles Murray aims to provoke. This time, it’s with four broad-brush, simplistic claims about higher education.
David Kirp
David Kirp, professor emeritus at the Goldman School of Public Policy, is the author of The Education Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know.
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
Audacity in Harlem
Geoffrey Canada founded the Harlem Children’s Zone as a “conveyor belt” to transport poor kids from birth to college, by dealing with every need. Can its successes be replicated?
Posted inSpecial Report
Nature, Nurture, and Destiny
The Bell Curve revisited: What science teaches us about heredity and environment.
Posted inSpecial Report
You’re Doing Fine, Oklahoma!
Thirty years ago, the national movement for universal preschool came heart-breakingly close to success. But Richard Nixon’s 1971 veto of such a measure — it “would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach” — proved to be Washington’s last […]
Posted inFeatures
Scandalous Schools
“The Condition of California School Facilities and Policies Related to Those Conditions,” a 2002 report by nationally recognized facilities expert Robert Corley, is written in stilted bureaucratese, but the conditions it describes are the stuff of exposés. Corley describes peeling lead paint on classroom walls; leaky roofs; deathly hot classrooms, their windows blacked out against […]
Posted inFeatures
Berserkeley Works
“Berserkeley,” that famous play on Berkeley, Calif.’s name, calls to mind the city’s widely held image. The media feast on tales about kooky characters such as the “Naked Guy” who organized a mass “nude-in” to protest social repression, or the homeless man who converted a city councilman’s office into his nocturnal abode. A measure on […]
Posted inFeatures
This Little Student Went to Market
“No matter what it is called, who does it or where in the institution it is being done, universities are engaging in marketing activity.” That message shocked academics when a marketing professor named Richard Krachenberg first delivered it in a 1972 Journal of Higher Education article. What schools referred to as recruiting was really advertising, […]
Posted inFeatures
Interring a Dream
The U.S. Supreme Court’s April 15 decision in a school desegregation case called Belk v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education was just a single line long and entirely devoid of explanation. A federal trial judge had recently ended more than a third of a century of judicial supervision over the North Carolina public schools, which dated […]
Posted inFeatures
Martyrs and Movies
On New Year’s Eve 1993, in the dead-end town of Falls City, Nebraska, two men shot and stabbed Teena Brandon, a 21-year-old who, in defiance of the laws of biology, wanted desperately to live her life as a man. On October 6, 1998, two men smashed the head of Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man, […]
Posted inFeatures
End of the World, Amen
Tales of the cataclysm have long been a cinematic staple, and since the movie industry is perpetually on the lookout for ways to turn a profit from the zeitgeist, this seems an especially apt moment for such films. Two have been brought out this season: End of Days, the latest Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, and the […]