HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: Yale admits it was wrong to unplug student course evaluation website.
Archive for 2014
January 25, 2014
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: Chapel Hill Researcher’s Findings on Athletes’ Literacy Bring a Backlash.
Ms. Willingham, who is 52, has been talking about what she sees as the university’s poor track record in educating some UNC players since 2010, when the largest academic-fraud scandal in the university’s history broke open.
Now the whistle-blower, who filed a grievance against the university last year after it demoted her for those remarks, she says, is in the middle of a new firestorm. This time it is for data she released that show that about 10 percent of the university’s football and basketball players whom she studied can’t read.
University administrators have harshly criticized her research methods and disagreed with her findings. They have also suspended her work, saying she ran afoul of federal rules requiring that the identities of subjects remain anonymous to researchers. To continue her research, officials have said, she must receive approval from the university’s institutional review board. . . . Scholars at Chapel Hill say the way the university has responded to Ms. Willingham’s research has implications beyond her work. By halting it because of concerns over the anonymity of her subjects, and at the same time criticizing her findings, the university appears to be using the IRB as a tool to thwart her inquiry, say some faculty members.
“This looks vindictive,” says Frank R. Baumgartner, a distinguished professor of political science at Chapel Hill.
The university looks pretty self-serving, and of course there’s the problem that one of its department chairs is under indictment for fraud for offering classes that didn’t meet. I wrote a column about this case a couple of weeks ago.
January 24, 2014
HEH: Wendy Davis endorsed by ‘sugar daddy’ dating service. “SeekingArrangement.com’s Friday announcement followed a recent report in the Dallas Morning News which detailed a number of discrepancies in Davis’ personal narrative, including that she left a man 13 years her senior the day after he made the last payment for her Harvard Law School education.”
DAVID POST: Ukraine and the “Social War.”
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Love in the Time of Obama: Alex Wagner, Sam Kass, and the new aristocracy. “It is not every day that an article in Vogue magazine exposes the shaky foundations of democracy. But as I read ‘The Talk of the Town’ for the second time I could not help noticing how these attractive, talented, up-and-coming thirty-somethings relied, again and again, on personal connections to get where they are today. . . . They are members of a self-perpetuating milieu, a caste of right thinking yuppies whose position and wealth and patterns of consumption are the fruit of personal relationships spanning decades. There is income inequality, for sure, but there is also status inequality, and this latter form of inequality is a topic on which most bourgeois bohemians are silent.”
A LIBERTARIAN DRIFT: RNC slams ‘unconstitutional’ NSA spying.
SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “Maybe we should start emailing each other copies of the Constitution, so we can know that the government has read it.”
ON MARK LEVIN IN A MINUTE, talking about The New School. Listen live here.
JONAH GOLDBERG ON diversity and the decline of the civil society consensus. With nods to Robert Putnam, and Satan.
NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF REAL ESTATE: Real-Life Locations That Would Make Badass Supervillain Lairs.
HEALTH: Sunshine May Benefit High Blood Pressure. “Blood tests showed that UVA exposure caused a release of nitric oxide from the skin into the bloodstream. Nitric oxide causes arteries to dilate, and this, the scientists believe, accounts for the effect.”
Interestingly, old-timey bodybuilders believed that sunshine was good for muscle growth. Now modern bodybuilders take arginine supplements that boost nitric oxide levels. The old-time guys were ahead of the curve, which often turns out to be the case.
I’LL BE ON BRET BAIER’S SPECIAL REPORT, probably just after 6 pm ET, talking about Dinesh D’Souza’s indictment in the context of my Ham Sandwich Nation piece and the troubling trends in prosecutorial conduct under the Obama administration.
WORRIED ABOUT NET NEUTRALITY? Maybe It’s The FCC That Should Really Concern You.
REVIEW: 2015 BMW 2 Series: A Compact Sports Car Star is Born. I have to say, I don’t find it especially good-looking.
AT AMAZON, New Year’s Deals in Home & Kitchen.
Also, up to 60% off on Jewelry Gifts. Valentine’s Day is coming.
#GREENFAIL: Car and Driver: Fisker’s Remains May Be Scattered Across the Ocean, U.S. Jobs Not Guaranteed. Sorry it turned out to be a bust. It was a good looking car.
BRIDGET JOHNSON REPORTS FROM THE RNC WINTER CONFERENCE: RNC Condemns NSA Surveillance While Vowing to be the Real Party of Fairness.
POLL: ObamaCare Support Hits Record Low. “The new poll finds 59 percent of voters oppose the health care law, up from 55 percent who opposed it six months ago (June 2013). The increase in opposition comes from both independents and Democrats. Nearly a third of Democrats — 30 percent — oppose the law, up from 22 percent in June. Opposition among independents went from 53 percent to 64 percent today.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Coverage of Nonexistent Hookup Culture Makes Students Feel Left Out of Nonexistent Hookup Culture. Wait, we had hookup culture when I was in college. Where did it go?
READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Jeffrey Turner, Notes To My Kids.
CROWDSOURCING a 20-year-old mystery.
SPACE: Dream Chaser Space Plane Will Fly in 2016. “The Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) announced that Dream Chaser will blast into orbit in November 2016 atop an Atlas V rocket. Dream Chaser’s first orbital flight will be unmanned and will test the space plane’s autonomous landing system. SNC expects to launch its first manned orbital mission about one year later.” All is proceeding as I have foreseen.