Category: Education (higher ed)
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Centers of Learning… Or Indoctrination?
Three out of five (60%) college students belonging to fraternities and sororities across the country do not feel comfortable publicly disagreeing with a professor, according to a survey by RealClearEducation and Slingshot Strategies. Only two out of five (38%) said they felt comfortable doing so. Two-third of students said they are hesitant to speak up…
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More Free-Expression Suppression at Virginia Tech
by James A. Bacon In five years, the United States has gone from a country in which football quarterback Colin Kaepernick fought for the right to kneel during the national anthem into a country where Virginia Tech soccer player Kiersten Hening is fighting for the right to stand. During their opening match in 2020, women…
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Detached, Clueless, Pedantic and Non-Responsive
by James C. Sherlock A series of communications among Nickolaus Cabrera, a first year student at the University of Virginia, President James Ryan of the University and the University’s Rector, James Murray, has come into my possession. I have posted them here. I will offer here my assessment, but I urge each reader to access…
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Update: UVa Freezes Undergraduate Tuition One Year
by James A. Bacon The University of Virginia is freezing undergraduate tuition in the next school year, but increases in student fees, room, and board will total about $392, or about a 1.1% increase in the cost of attendance in the College of Arts & Sciences. The board had considered boosting tuition as much as…
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Wins Appointed as 15th VMI Superintendent
by James A. Bacon Maj. Gen. Cedric T. Wins will serve as the Virginia Military Institute’s 15th superintendent after a unanimous vote by the military academy’s Board of Visitors this morning. A 1985 VMI graduate and career military officer, Wins has served as interim superintendent since shortly after the November resignation of J.H. Binford Peay…
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What Does the VMI Board Have Planned?
by James A. Bacon The Virginia Military Institute Board of Visitors surprised the VMI community when it posted a notice Monday that it had scheduled a special meeting tomorrow, April 15, to notify the public of its intent “to vote on the selection of the next Superintendent of the Institute.” The widespread expectation was that…
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Keydets Too Busy to Be Racist
by Mark Reed My wife and I, Lexington residents since 2016, adopt” VMI “Rats” through a local church. We’ve had the pleasure of serving these fine young people in our home every Sunday during the school year, and we’ve been fortunate to continue our relationship with them and their families as they pursue their degrees…
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Woke Privilege at the University of Richmond
by James A. Bacon Faculty and students are up in arms at the University of Richmond, demanding the renaming of buildings that are named after a president and long-time rector the segregationist era. Faculty have voted to approve a statement of “no confidence” in Rector Paul Queally and have called for him to resign. Meanwhile,…
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Maybe VMI Needs to Close on Our Terms
A modest proposal by Shaun Kenney The Virginia Military Institute (VMI) is a hallowed institution to many. VMI men have a certain command presence that is rooted in realism yet rarely if ever accepts impossible as a status quo. The things that make VMI such an institution are the intangibles. VMI’s storied Honor Code, her…
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When “Words Are Violence,” Only One Side Gets to Speak
by James A. Bacon Victoria Spiotto was brought up in a conservative, religious family of Italian descent in Loudoun County. It was at the University of Virginia where she found her political identity as a conservative. One day in her third year, she was walking the grounds when she came across a Young Americans for…
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Et Tu, Tech?
by James A. Bacon I have long thought of Virginia Tech as the most tolerant of free speech and expression among Virginia’s larger universities. There have been minor eruptions of cancel culture, but nothing as debilitating as the examples we’ve documented elsewhere. Looks like I was wrong. Speech First, a nonprofit group working to combat…
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The Bureaucratic Banality of Academic Oppression
by James A. Bacon Two-and-a-half years ago, Kieran Ravi Bhattacharya, a medical school student at the University of Virginia, attended a session on “microaggressions” in which psychology professor Beverly Colwell Adams gave a presentation about her research. In what he thought to be a collegial manner, Bhattacharya challenged her analysis. The challenge was not well…
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Inside the Bubble the Slightest Breeze Is a Threat
This is the fourth column in a four-part series about COVID-19 at James Madison University. by Joe Fitzgerald The Breeze was always the “award-winning student newspaper” in JMU public relations — until the paper began filing Freedom of Information requests with the administration. The battle became public when the school decided to give the local…
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Incautious Messaging and Cautious Optimism
This is the third column in a four-part series about COVID-19 at James Madison University. by Joe Fitzgerald Except for the occasional late-night Facebook message, James Madison University has rarely responded to anything I’ve written. And those messages are like drunk dials from an ex; I appreciate the attention, but I wish they still loved…
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Board of Education Changes to Virginia Teacher Evaluation Guidelines Are an Embarrassment
by James C. Sherlock Education schools have a lot to be proud of, primarily their production of teachers. They also have a lot to answer for, including most of what passes for research and every bit of their practice of constantly changing the language of education to cover the lack of new and contributory ideas.…