Links for 1/4/11

Joanne Jacobs

Money isn’t everything. Five years ago, donors offered to pay college tuition for all graduates of public schools in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Students can use the offer at any public college or university in the state. While 81 percent of graduates receive a scholarship, only 54 percent have earned a degree…

Most promise-style scholarships reward residency in a school district, city or state, rather than academic merit, though some set minimum grade-point averages or college-entrance exam scores. The effect is to encourage less-prepared students to try college…

Brian T. Sullivan

The academic library died alone, largely neglected and forgotten by a world that once revered it as the heart of the university. On its deathbed, it could be heard mumbling curses against Google…

As databases became more intuitive and simpler to use, library instruction in the use of archaic tools was no longer needed…

since it became so easy and inexpensive to find adequate resources, paying significantly more for the absolute best was no longer an option for perpetually cash-strapped colleges…

Bob Samuels

36 UC execs have called on President Yudof to “do the right thing” and allow their pensions to go beyond the IRS income limit shows in bright strokes how the university has taken on the logic of a Wall Street firm. Not only does the upper management seek to reduce labor costs by
lowering benefits, reducing salaries, busting unions, and eliminating positions, but there is an insatiable hunger to transfer wealth and power to the top…

ACT

only one third to one-half of the 11th-grade students are reaching a college and career readiness level of achievement.

Bryan Caplan

I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley during the heydey of political correctness. Everyone in the dorms was urged to attend DARE seminars - not "Drug Abuse Resistance Education" but "Diversity Awareness Through Resources and Education." The goal, quite plainly, was to create a one-sided educational culture so the next generation would accept the self-styled awareness raisers' agenda as gospel. Political correctness isn't justhypersensitivity; it's hypersensitivity designed to place a permanent stamp on impressionable young minds. From this perspective, political correctness isn't essentially leftist. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, leftist political correctness hasn't been all that effective. The full-blown triumph of political correctness, of hypersensitivity plus one-sided education, is patriotism.