Other requirements, such as general education programs, are considered to be of lesser importance. In many cases, they are designed solely to support the primary goal of training professionals, providing generalized skills that can be translated to many professions. Or they are treated dismissively and are so unfocused as to be little more than academic “taste-testing,” a leisurely stroll through a series of courses chosen to satisfy idle curiosities or because they require little study time.

Yet treating general education programs as secondary constitutes a great loss of opportunity, as well-designed programs have the potential to help students become better citizens, deeper thinkers, and more moral people. On the other hand, general education programs focused on providing students with general skills can even fail at their main goal by not considering how students actually learn and which types of knowledge are best to improve reasoning prowess.

In this report, Shannon Watkins goes where most academic administrators and policymakers in charge of general education programs are too timid, too biased, or too unaware to tread. She explores actual learning processes at a primary level and shows why a tightly crafted general education that deliberately connects various types of knowledge and learning is vastly superior to one that allows students wide latitude to choose among unconnected courses that may appear to be interesting at the time but offer little long-term insight. And is also preferable to one that attempts to teach skills without bothering with the content involved.

The post Making General Education Meaningful appeared first on The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

If students desire a deep and broad understanding of the Great Works, they must actively seek it out. Although Great Works-specific coursework is less available, the good news is they nevertheless still exist. Not only do they exist, but there is a variety of programs in terms of length and degree type, oftentimes allowing students who are majoring in other subjects to at least get a taste of the canon’s richness.

The Martin Center researched 48 academic programs that involve a close study of Great Books of Western thought. This is an updated and expanded version of the report that was originally published in November. Although some of the programs in this report aren’t advertised as Great Books programs, their curricula include an in-depth study of core texts. Uniting these programs is a desire for wisdom and understanding, and the belief that engaging with the Great Books can aid in this pursuit.

As a whole, one will find that many of the programs share common characteristics: no textbooks; an emphasis on discussion; courses that are seminar-based instead of lecture-based; “teachers” who don’t lecture but rather act as guides or “tutors.”

We encourage you to explore the information we’ve compiled. In this report, you will find a list of the top 100 common titles (50 fiction, 50 non-fiction) required (or examples of what may be required) or recommended at all of these institutions, as well as individual profiles with additional information on each program of study. This list isn’t exhaustive, other Great Books programs surely exist. These are the programs the Martin Center found and was able to attain a sample reading list from. You can find the full list of all assigned or recommended texts here.

Below is a list of the top ten fiction and non-fiction books taught in these programs:

(DOWNLOAD THE REPORT FOR THE TOP 50 LISTS)

We hope this information will act as a useful tool and inspire you and the students you know to crack open a Great Book.

The post Preserving the Canon: Great Books Programs at America’s Colleges and Universities appeared first on The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

Numerous degree programs throughout the UNC System equip students with the requisite knowledge and skills for meaningful careers that generate excellent returns for both alumni and the North Carolina economy. This talent pool attracts businesses and residents to the state, expanding job opportunities, further developing the labor force, and fostering economic growth.

Recent data from the Texas Public Policy Foundation on post-graduation debt and income, however, suggest that a substantial proportion of programs fail to generate satisfactory economic outcomes that reasonably enable alumni to pay back their student loan debt.

The TPPF data demonstrate the performance of more than 900 bachelor’s, master’s, professional, and doctoral degree programs across North Carolina. By categorizing these programs based on the debt and income of their graduates, we are able to identify those programs that are most in need of oversight, reform, or closure.

This report also allows prospective students and their families to make better-informed decisions regarding their college and later careers. Unlike resources that merely review the potential income for types of programs generally, this report provides detailed information on income and debt for specific programs at specific schools in North Carolina, providing a uniquely high-resolution picture of the financial risks and opportunities faced by UNC students today.

The post Student Loan Debt and Earnings at North Carolina Universities appeared first on The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects Americans from discrimination based on race, color, or national origin. It applies to any program or activity that receives Federal financial assistance, including most public and private universities. Title VI states:

No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

The Department of Education specifically lists both admissions and recruitment as covered activities.

But for almost as long as Title VI has been law, universities have discriminated on the basis of race in order to achieve diversity in their student bodies. This is a trade-off that many policymakers and university administrators have been willing to make.

In this report, we quantify this trade-off at flagship public universities. How large are the harms of racial preferences in admissions? How do they affect students’ chances of admission? We find that the size and effect of racial preferences vary across institutions. At some, however, race weighs very heavily in admissions decisions.

As the Supreme Court considers race in admissions, these data provide an important insight into admissions at public institutions. They show that, at some institutions, admissions are heavily influenced by a student’s race, in defiance of both the equal protection clause and past court decisions that narrowly proscribed the use of race in admissions.

It’s time to end the discriminatory practice of racial preferences.

The post Measuring Discrimination: Racial Preferences at Public Flagship Institutions appeared first on The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

Adding to the problem, most academics and policymakers insist that accepting federal funding—including grants and loans to students—is the only way a college or university can viably function in today’s economy.

Yet, despite such claims, it is still possible for academic institutions to remain free of government mandates by rejecting federal funding. The Martin Center located 19 such schools successfully operating in the United States, and we tried to find out what they are doing, how they are doing it, and why they are good for the intellectual life of the nation.

The post Breaking Away From Leviathan: Colleges Can Thrive Without Federal Funding appeared first on The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

A campus-climate survey published by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in 2021—the largest of its kind ever performed, including 37,104 students at 159 institutions—found that 5-in-6 college students have self-censored because of how they perceived other students, a professor, or the college administration would respond. Two-thirds of college students agreed that it was acceptable to shout down a campus speaker or to try to prevent them from speaking.

Unfortunately, colleges across West Virginia contribute to this restrictive culture by maintaining speech codes—policies that restrict guarantees of freedom of speech. Not only do the U.S. and West Virginia constitutions acknowledge the right to free speech, which must be protected at public colleges, but Senate Bill 657, which became law in 2021, requires that public colleges protect “any lawful verbal and nonverbal speech.”

Furthermore, many private colleges also promise free speech to their students. Speech codes violate these guarantees. FIRE reviewed the restrictions on free speech at 17 public or private colleges and universities in West Virginia and found 92 policies that restrict freedom of speech.  This report reviews FIRE’s ratings, gives examples of restrictive policies, and recommends ways to improve students’ free speech rights.

The post Free Speech in Peril at West Virginia Colleges appeared first on The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

For decades, observant Americans have looked upon our institutions of higher learning with dismay. The reasons for their anxiety varied; some were upset at the increasing politicization, others at rising costs, and so on. But it seemed as if there were no way to turn back the tide of higher education’s degradation.

That may be starting to change. Academia is moving into very extreme territory politically, promoting false, conjectural, and dogmatic theories such as critical race theory and indigenous science instead of long-accepted theories tested by proven methods. This extremism is heightening awareness among ordinary Americans about academia’s alarming direction, and some are starting to get involved in campaigns to push back against the radical agenda.

The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal has been on the forefront of the struggle to end the abuse of our colleges and universities for several decades. Today, with increasing potential to attract new allies to its cause, it is providing this manual, titled Rules for Academic Reformers, to encourage those who are concerned about higher education’s degraded state—particularly alumni, but also trustees, students, and other potential activists—to start a “long march through the institutions of higher education” of their own. And to offer suggestions about how to build a successful movement, how to deal with academic adversaries, and where to find allies.

The post Rules for Academic Reformers appeared first on The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

The post UVA and the New “McCarthyism”–An Insider’s Perspective appeared first on The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

Critical Social Justice (CSJ) poses a threat to higher education and to the American way of life. This school of thought goes by many names, including Critical Race Theory, Critical Theory, Multiculturalism, and Identity Politics. All these ideologies divide the world into aggrieved minorities and oppressive majorities, reducing people to a group identity grounded in immutable characteristics such as race and sex. They are based on a distorted view of what a human being is, compromising the pursuit of truth and diverting institutions that adopt it away from excellence and merit and toward factionalism. They cultivate resentment and anger among the supposedly aggrieved while undermining the stability, equal treatment, and mutual toleration that contributes to individual happiness and good citizenship. Universities promote CSJ policies under the seemingly innocuous rubric of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).

Most schools in the UNC System have adopted CSJ in their strategic plans, and things are accelerating across the system. A system-wide Racial Equity Task Force, which the Board of Governors seemingly empowered, released a report in December 2020 to accelerate the push to extend DEI programming into all facets of all the universities. It called for more administrative DEI hiring throughout the system and establishing more new programming aimed supposedly at aggrieved minorities, including curricular changes and more developed retention programs. The entire report was based on the idea that the UNC System represents systematically racist notions of achievement that could be deconstructed through careful administrative oversight.

Nearly every university is committed to building a DEI infrastructure. Here are the highlights from a survey of publicly available information across the system:

• Total DEI administrative salaries across the system exceed $12 million.
• Both UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State each have 11 DEI administrators making more than
  $100,000, with more than 30 DEI employees total at each school. Salaries at each university
  total more than $3.25 million.
• UNC System medical schools have extensive DEI administrative functions, including the
  UNC School of Medicine’s nine administrators dedicated to DEI and the Brody School of
  Medicine at East Carolina’s five DEI administrators (three of whom earn more than $100,000).
• All 16 schools have DEI aspirations laid out in their strategic plans.
• At least seven schools require implicit bias training for all job search committees.
• Curricula dedicated to DEI are expanding not only through increased general education
  requirements but also through “Living-Learning Communities” that promote social activism.
• The Racial Equity Task Force is pressuring schools to conform to these mandates.

The CSJ-DEI complex is expanding rapidly in the UNC System. Soon many more colleges will have deans and associate deans dedicated to promoting this pernicious ideology. Those deans will enact more policies such as requiring new candidates to submit DEI statements, creating higher pay scales for supposedly aggrieved minorities, or making optional training mandatory. Any influx of monies will be diverted in large part to further these DEI efforts. The Board of Governors and the legislature stand at an inflection point: either stop the DEI industrial complex or it will take over North Carolina’s universities.

The post Critical Social Justice in the UNC System appeared first on The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

Everywhere in higher education, there is a rhetorical affirmation of the values of free speech and the development of informed citizens. North Carolina’s state motto in Latin is Esse Quam Videri, which translates to “To Be Rather Than to Seem.” So it is reasonable to research what kind of speech actually exists on North Carolina campuses, particularly about public policy issues. Examination of official campus rules about free speech, as the Martin Center and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education have done, is a good starting point. Campus climate surveys where students are asked if they feel free to express themselves and whether they might forcefully oppose a speaker they might not like are helpful. Understanding the partisan identifications of faculty can provide some context.

If, however, the issue is what actually happens (the “Be” rather than the “Seem”) on campuses regarding the presentation of different public policy perspectives, research becomes more difficult. Public policy issues may be touched on by campus newspapers or addressed by occasional invited lecturers. Some courses deal directly with public policy, though students in many majors will not take them. Further, whether that instruction and course assignments are balanced is an impossible task to determine for the thousands of classes taught. Faculty committed to post-modern theory often reject the concept of objectivity and see advocacy of their preferred political positions as a personal and institutional duty.

The research reported here takes on a more modest scope, but an important subject nonetheless. Almost all American students are eligible to vote. So,

• What formal policy debates or forums with diverse viewpoints are sponsored for undergraduates on each of the North Carolina campuses studied? 
• What issues are included; which are excluded? 
• Without taking a whole policy-relevant course, will students have the opportunity to hear a civil discussion by well-informed persons with different perspectives on the great and complex policy issues affecting their lives, their nation, and the world? 

As Americans and North Carolinians are increasingly politically polarized, it would seem incumbent on higher education to model the kind of policy discussions on which our democracy depends.

Consequently, this research examines the 2018 and 2019 online calendars for 37 four-year North Carolina campuses to record all their multi-speaker policy events. These events were then classified as debates or forums in 24 different policy areas. Because some calendars were incomplete or difficult to interpret, follow-up emails were sent to campus reference librarians, archivists, and chief academic officers to try to assure accuracy. We believe our results are comprehensive, but no campus keeps information about public policy events with the meticulousness that its sports information is maintained. 

We hope readers will delve into the report to understand its detailed findings. The bottom line, however, is clear. 

Survey after survey shows that faculty are increasingly one-sided in their political identifications, that many students are fearful of expressing their policy opinions, and that an activist minority is willing to shut down speech it opposes. In this environment, public policy debates were almost entirely absent on North Carolina campuses and where policy-related forums were present, there seems to be no consistent effort to invite panelists with different viewpoints. 

There are some exceptions, but most North Carolina campuses seem inhospitable locations for policy discourse open to all undergraduates.

During fierce 2020 protests over the meaning and implementation of justice (among other issues), campuses—when they were open—were subject to demonstrations, but had not developed models for more reflective discourse. As concluded in this report, it does not seem likely on most campuses that the energy for creating frequent and responsible civil discourse about controversial public policy issues exists. That stimulus may have to come from legislators for public institutions and governing boards for both private and public campuses. As is often the case, that initiative may require some funding and regular reporting about campus policy events.

Hopefully, those initiatives will result in productive discourse between those who hold campuses accountable and campus administrators and faculty who will be ultimately responsible for scheduling and selecting policy topics and participants.

The post Political Reality on North Carolina Campuses: Examining Policy Debates and Forums with Diverse Viewpoints appeared first on The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.