Wastefully-run colleges can now increase tuition even faster, at taxpayer expense, as a result of the Obama administration’s recent expansions of the Pay As You Earn program. For example, a recent executive order will allow an additional 5 million borrowers to enter the program, although many of those borrowers would not...
Four generations ago, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis noted that “the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.”
However well-meaning it may be, the Obama administration’s “guidance” this week for colleges on sexual assault and harassment contains insidious attacks on cross-examination...
Last Tuesday, the Supreme Court reversed a bizarre lower court ruling claiming that it violates the Constitution for voters to ban racial preferences in state college admissions and government contracts and employment. In its 6-to-2 decision Tuesday in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (BAMN), it overturned an 8-to-7 ruling...
New Jersey’s anti-bullying law, which covers both schools and colleges, is so overly broad that a fourth-grader was punished just for noting, in response to a question, that a classmate had suffered from head lice. A civil-liberties group called the Rutherford Institute is now helping that kid bring a First Amendment...
Do you think colleges should be able to conduct background checks to weed out shady applicants for sensitive jobs, like people who have criminal convictions or financial problems that might tempt them to steal your student-loan money to pay off their debts? If so, rejoice in a recent appeals court decision...
Crime rates are not the same for different racial groups, and student misconduct rates aren’t, either. The Supreme Court ruled many years ago that such racial disparities don’t prove racism or unconstitutional discrimination. But in guidance issued last week by the Education and Justice Departments, the Obama Administration signaled that it...
Earlier, I wrote about the Obama administration’s attempt to inject a race-conscious “disparate impact” provision into colorblind anti-discrimination laws like the Fair Housing Act, and how that could lead to risky, race-conscious lending, bad loans, and future bank failures and financial meltdowns. But the financial system isn’t the only thing harmed...
President Obama, a lawyer who once lectured at the University of Chicago, recently urged law schools to reduce the length of study from three years to two:
President Obama urged law schools on Friday to consider cutting a year of classroom instruction, wading into a hotly debated issue inside the beleaguered legal...
A recent Washington Post article describes “how Georgetown Law gets Uncle Sam to pay its students’ bills,” averaging $158,888 over three years, taking advantage of perverse incentives in a federal student-loan program. A federal income-based repayment plan forgives the student loan debt of law students who go to work for the...
In some states, occupational licensing rules give trade schools the power to force people to attend before they can get licensed. That enables them to charge high tuition for lousy training. Matt Yglesias discusses how “beauty schools are ripping off their students. Terrible licensing rules deserve some of the blame.” He...
The Washington Post reports on the ever-growing number of college staff losing wages or facing pay cuts due to the 2010 healthcare law:
For Kevin Pace, the president’s health-care law . . . produced a pay cut. Like many of his colleagues, the adjunct music professor at Northern Virginia Community College had...
The Justice Department and the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights have now effectively defined dating and sex education as “sexual harassment.”
The definition is found in a May 9 Title IX Letter of Findings and Resolution Agreement involving the University of Montana. In a radical departure from Title IX jurisprudence, the...
The U.S. Department of Education featured a quote from mass-murdering dictator Mao Zedong on its website.
Mao, the longtime Communist dictator of China, killed up to 60 million people through executions, torture, and the government-created famines of the abortive “Great Leap Forward.”
As George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley
We live in a culture where harsh but truthful criticism, or exposure of wrongdoing, is viewed by some as “bullying,” especially when it affects someone’s inflated “self-esteem.”
For example, “DePaul University has punished a student for publicizing the names of fellow students who admitted to vandalizing his organization’s pro-life display,” classifying his...
Schools such as Tarrant County College have banned “empty holster” protests in favor of gun rights, which school officials perceive as somehow threatening.
Never mind that such symbolic expression is protected by Supreme Court rulings like Tinker v. Des Moines School District (1969), as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education notes....
Self-control, not self-esteem, leads to academic success, researchers have found. Indeed, teaching self-esteem actually harms students’ achievement and work ethic.
“In one study, university students who’d earned C, D and F grades ‘received encouragement aimed at boosting their self-worth.’ They did worse than students with similar grades whose self-esteem had been left...
In a recent column, George Will discussed how college students have been disciplined for racial or discriminatory “harassment” for constitutionally protected expression, such as reading a history book about ugly past racial events, or discussing unpleasant truths about racial or religious matters:
In 2007, Keith John Sampson, a middle-aged student working his...
We earlier chronicled how perverse federal financial aid policies encourage colleges to jack up tuition.
Recently, the Obama Administration came up with something even worse. It announced a new financial aid policy that will effectively bail out low-quality, high-tuition colleges and especially law...
Suing schools and colleges has nothing to do with supporting our troops.
But that didn’t stop Senators from seeking to add an amendment, SA 3215, to the 2013 Defense Authorization bill on Thursday, containing provisions that would overturn two Supreme Court rulings in order to promote such lawsuits. The amendment, proposed by...
On November 15, a federal appeals court, dividing along ideological lines in an 8-to-7 ruling, struck down a provision of the Michigan state constitution prohibiting racial preferences in state college admissions, in Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action v. Regents of the University of Michigan.
Voters approved the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative in...
The Obama Administration has avidly attacked certain constitutional rights.
In one Supreme Court case, it argued that the government had the power to ban a non-profit corporation from publishing a book critical of a political candidate (the Supreme Court rejected this argument in a 5-to-4 vote, over a dissent by the liberal...
Under pressure from the Education Department, which investigated it over “racial disparities” and “disparate impact,” the Oakland, California, school system has agreed to impose “targeted reductions” in “suspensions for African American students, Latino students, and students receiving special education services; and African American students suspended for defiance.” See Agreement to Resolve...
