college

Protecting Your Child from the Dangers of College Life

A church friend of mine has a daughter going off to college in the fall. When I ran into him recently, I asked how the summertime preparations were going. I expected him to tell me they’d spent an afternoon trying to help her register for classes or a day at Target looking at tiny fridges … Read more

The Times & Hookup Culture: Two Views

 RACHEL LU: When Adults Encourage Self-Destructive Behavior in the Young Sex has consequences. I realize that admitting this probably marks me as some sort of misogynist, but somehow I can’t help myself. For one thing, I have it on good authority that even in 2013, sex still has something to do with babies. Even before … Read more

Beating the Competition

Business leaders are blaming the education system for the loss of jobs offshore. But aren’t they forgetting that other institution that turns out good workers?

Marriage’s Vanishing Act

Is it possible that secular liberals, some of them anyway, are starting to realize  that knocking the supports out from under traditional marriage may not be such a great idea? If so, and if their next step is to think seriously about how to halt this destructive process, it will be the dawning of a … Read more

What Makes Norman Rockwell Possible?

I must confess to an intellectual sin. I delight in the paintings of Norman Rockwell. I know I’m not supposed to do this. As a college professor, I have a duty to pretend to others that I derive real satisfaction from poems whose sentences cannot be parsed, from sculptures that look like green blobs from … Read more

Santorum’s Demographic Edge

I do not pretend to know the intricate details of the Republican primary presidential race – reading about caucuses and the insane amounts of money spent on advertising leave me yearning for the simplicities of New Zealand’s intimate electoral system where every person gets two votes. (We see the slippery slope in action here – … Read more

Utopia State University

An Education for Our Time Josiah Bunting III, Regnery, 1998, 246 pages.   After religion and the family, education ranks at the top of almost any society’s priorities. If any of these elements is not healthy, a society is in serious peril of dissolution. Josiah Bunting III’s An Education for Our Time is a bold, … Read more

At Belmont Abbey, Catholics Fight Back

The first counterattack on behalf of religious liberty has, perhaps, begun. Earlier this month, Belmont Abbey College, a small, century-old Benedictine college in North Carolina that has deep devotion to its Catholic identity, sued the federal government for violating its rights to worship freely because of certain provisions of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, know … Read more

Obama Pursues Rich and Poor, Not White Working Class

  Has Barack Obama’s Democratic Party given up on winning the votes of the white working class? Thomas Edsall, the longtime Washington Post reporter now with The Huffington Post, thinks so. Surveying the plans of Democratic strategists, Edsall wrote in The New York Times on Nov. 28 that “all pretense of trying to win a … Read more

Why Bother Going to College?

In his famous introductory chapter to A Guide for the Perplexed, the economist E. F. Schumacher talked of his “perplexity” at going to Oxford, perhaps the most famous university in the world. The title of Schumacher’s book was the same as that of a book of the medieval Jewish philosopher, Moses Maimonides. The perplexity of … Read more

Are American Colleges Cheating Students?

American colleges and universities, widely admired throughout the world, have come under heavy fire in recent years. Critics complain that costs are too high, that too many professors shirk their classroom duties, that leftist indoctrination and political correctness are rampant, that breadth of knowledge requirements are minimal, that graduation rates are low, and that employment … Read more

An Amendment Isn’t the Answer

  When I graduated from college in 1976, I got a job in Washington with the National Taxpayers Union, which was working to get a constitutional amendment to require a balanced federal budget. Someone graduating today could sign up there and pursue the same goal. The balanced-budget amendment has never gone away and never come … Read more

Obama Team Split on How to Rally Unruly Coalition

President Barack Obama obviously is scrambling in his attempt to win re-election. He has proclaimed himself the underdog and has given up his pretense of being a pragmatic centrist compromiser in favor of harsh class warfare rhetoric. But it’s worth taking note of what he has squandered. In 2008, Obama won 53 percent of the … Read more

The Fight to Be Catholic

The fight to protect Catholic institutions from the Obama administration’s new health-insurance mandate is not only a dispute over contraception and abortion. For many colleges, schools, and charities, it is a fight for the right to be Catholic. If the outrageously narrow “religious employer exemption” put forward by the Department of Health and Human Services … Read more

Scandalous Education

Last December, I reported on Harvard University professor Stephan Thernstrom’s essay “Minorities in College — Good News, But…,” on Minding the Campus, a website sponsored by the New York-based Manhattan Institute. He was commenting on the results of the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, saying that the scores “mean that black students aged … Read more

Will Public Subsidies Burst the College Bubble?

When governments want to encourage what they believe is beneficial behavior, they subsidize it. Sounds like good public policy. But there can be problems. Behavior that is beneficial for most people may not be so for everybody. And government subsidies can go too far. Subsidies create incentives for what economists call rent-seeking behavior. Providers of … Read more

Moral Capital

Let us suppose we are looking at people who are not going to Yale or Harvard, or even to the local state university. First, they can’t afford it, and second, they lack the capacity to immerse themselves in absurdity for the sake of a few courses here and there that will deepen their understanding of … Read more

Our Wobbly World

In antiquity, everything depended on tradition because people recognized that their ancestors were the oneswho had survived in a hostile world that wanted to kill them. So smart people listened to what their ancestors said and, Darwin being right about some things, tended to be the survivors, while stupid people ignored seasoned wisdom and wound … Read more

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