Editor’s Note: In celebration of the hundredth issue of Academic Questions, we present “One Hundred Great Ideas for Higher Education”—a wide range of ideas from a wide range of contributors with a wide range of interests in higher education. Some ideas are ready to be executed immediately, others to be contemplated for future action, some are brand new, others leavened with forgotten wisdom, but as a whole they offer incontrovertible proof of the enormous vitality among those who wish to see improvement and reform in higher education today. We thank all the contributors for their efforts, and many thanks also to Ashley Thorne, who helped the editors track and coordinate this ambitious project.



REPORT CLASS GRADES

Richard Arum, Professor of Sociology and Education, New York University

Colleges and universities could administratively address the problem of declining academic rigor by instituting a simple change: for every course a student takes, the student’s transcript would report the individual grade received as well as the average grade students received in the course. The transcript would also report the overall grade point average (GPA) of the student as well as the course grade point average (CGPA).



Without impinging in any way on either the ability of individual faculty to grade students as they choose or the freedom of students to select courses as they see fit, this administrative reporting change would make readily apparent whether a student excelled at coursework, or instead excelled at choosing a path through higher education that held students in relative terms to lower academic standards. Incentives for faculty to grade leniently and for students to choose easy coursework—which has led the academy in recent years to a “race to the bottom”—would be significantly reduced.



Examining post-college transitions of recent college graduates, Josipa Roksa and I have found that course transcripts are seldom considered by employers in the hiring process. Transcripts would be significantly more meaningful with this simple and relatively costless administrative reporting change. If colleges and universities did not have the political will to make such changes on their own, access to federal financial aid dollars could be made dependent on institutional compliance. More than one-third of college students today study alone for their classes less than an hour per day and yet are able to achieve a 3.2 GPA. Parents, employers, and students have a right to know how this type of college success is accomplished.

CREATE UNIVERSITY TASK FORCES ON INTELLECTUAL PLURALISM

Stephen H. Balch, Founding President, National Association of Scholars; Founding Director, Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, Texas Tech University

Back in 2005, under pressure from David Horowitz and his congressional allies, American higher education’s flagship organization, the American Council on Education (ACE) issued a Statement on Academic Rights and Responsibility, its first sentence boldly equating “intellectual pluralism” with “academic freedom” as “central principles of American higher education.” On paper this represented an extraordinary concession to critics. In practice it has largely remained a dead letter.



It’s time to give it life. The ACE statement contemplated discussions about intellectual pluralism across America’s campuses. It also suggested involving larger publics. Let these discussions now begin.



One way to get them rolling would be through the creation of university and college “task forces” on intellectual pluralism, charged with assessing how best to promote its growth and preservation. Nothing would be more in keeping with the spirit of the ACE statement. Consisting of faculty, administrators, trustees, and representatives of the alumni and public, considerations of philosophic diversity and intellectual acumen would guide their appointment. After holding intramural and external forums, canvassing promising academic practices nationwide, and consulting literatures and experience on the preservation of pluralism in analogous environments, they would issue recommendations for establishing intellectual pluralism as that centerpiece of academic policy envisioned by the ACE.

REQUIRE WESTERN CIVILIZATION

Jay Bergman, Professor of History, Central Connecticut State University

Every American should know Western civilization, of which American culture and political institutions are an integral part.

By Western civilization I mean the constellation of ideas, political arrangements, ethical precepts, and ways of organizing society and the economy that are traceable to (1) the ethical monotheism of the Ancient Hebrews, adopted by Christianity, which implied that man, as God’s creation, has inherent worth and dignity, and (2) the tradition of rational inquiry, indispensable to science and technological progress, that began in Ancient Greece.



Much of Western civilization is distinctive, and several of its essential features are unique: a belief in progress and even, at times, in humanity’s perfectibility; a Promethean faith in man’s ability to harness nature; a strong emphasis—greater than in other civilizations—on individual rights and the inviolability of individual conscience; and a belief in moral principles, grounded in nature and discoverable through reason, that are timeless, absolute, and universal.



To be fully educated, students should know what Western civilization has given to America and to humanity. In practical terms, this means mandatory courses in Western history, philosophy, and literature. Without having at least some knowledge of these, American students cannot function as informed citizens in a country arguably superior to the various dictatorships in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East—themselves reflections of civilizations very different from Western civilization.



This does not imply that America is perfect. But to effect change, students must understand the history of their own civilization and society.

BE A MENTOR

Jill Biden, Second Lady of the United States; Associate Professor of Developmental English, Northern Virginia Community College

As a teacher, a mom, and a grandmother, I have seen firsthand what a difference a great mentor can make in the lives of students. Having been an educator for more than thirty years, education for me is not an abstract policy debate—it’s about real people who lead real lives.



My students are men and women who return to school to get the training they need to reach the next level in their career. They are young people just out of high school trying to find their path in the world. And they are moms and dads squeezing in classes between full-time jobs, community activities, and raising kids.



They are all looking to make a better life for themselves and their families. In the middle of all that these students have going on, a mentor can provide a tremendous service just by being available—reaching out to show support, understanding, and a path to opportunity.



I have seen mentors help students set career goals and take steps to reach them. I have seen mentors let students know about resources or organizations that might be available to help them reach their goals. And I have seen mentors inspire confidence in students who need a little reassurance as they put their decisions into action.



From my perspective as a teacher, it’s easy to see how my students change over the course of their college careers. But one thing I’ve recognized is that the students don’t always see it themselves.

That’s where a great mentor can have a tremendous and inspiring effect. Mentors can help students chart and understand the dramatic growth they go through—and use all the tools available to build the career they want and pursue the life that they dream about.



I see every day that people across this country are making extraordinary efforts to improve their lives and the lives of their families. Mentors can help them turn those efforts into reality.

DECOUPLE LOANS FROM ACCREDITATION

Richard Bishirjian, President, Yorktown University, Denver, Colorado and Yorktown University of the Americas, Gainesville, Florida

The system of voluntary academic accreditation of colleges and universities has morphed into a quasi-governmental system by which institutions of higher learning become “accredited” to offer federal grants and loans to their students. The student federal loan program is the hook by which successive presidential administrations have “federalized” higher education.



Historically, American higher education has benefited from a mix of types of colleges, universities, and vocational schools—something for everyone with benefits for all. With the federalization of higher education has come heightened “accreditation” standards that reflect a desire by the accreditors to keep their federal charters, and in the Obama administration regulations that aim to pick and choose winners.



Agencies that grant regional accreditation qualify as “Title IV eligible” and are “chartered” by the U.S. Department of Education to accredit institutions that offer students access to federal student grants and loans under Title IV of the Higher Education Act. Remove those programs from oversight of the accreditation process and qualify institutions directly by the U.S. Department of Education and you reintroduce considerations of “quality” into the accreditation process.



A good start toward higher education reform can begin by (1) transferring Title IV loan programs to private commercial credit markets, (2) decoupling access to Title IV programs from “accreditation,” and (3) killing the U.S. Department of Education.



Reducing the number of federal agencies by at least one agency should be the goal of the next president of the United States.

DON’T GIVE CREDITS FOR SERVICE LEARNING

Jan H. Blits, Professor, University Honors Faculty, University of Delaware

Many popular proposals to improve higher education would actually weaken it. Faculty are letting academic standards slip—in the name of academic enrichment—and increasingly giving students academic credit for activities that are “academic” in only a lax sense. Not everything taught or learned is academic.



“Service learning” is a major example of such slippage.



Service learning claims to combine service and learning objectives: students participate in active education while addressing the concerns, needs, and hopes of their community. While communities are strengthened, proponents argue, students learn civic responsibility. However, service learning typically lacks academic rigor and faculty oversight, and is based on the student’s idiosyncratic, self-generated experience.



While I support performing community service (and performed service when I was in college), especially at a time when students are often highly self-absorbed, giving academic credit for volunteerism waters down standards and erodes the line between academic and nonacademic.



Also, under service learning students are not volunteers in any real sense. While not remunerated for their service, they are paid in easy grades and course credits. And the lesson they learn is not to be willing to help others freely, but to expect academic credit for everything and anything they do.

CHALLENGE STUDENTS

Douglas Campbell, Senior Lead Faculty, Business Administration, Walden University

As a university instructor, have you ever been told that you are not nurturing enough, or that your expectations are too high because you are making your students uncomfortable? Have you been advised to place your critical comments to students within a sandwich of positive comments? If you can answer yes to any of these questions, then you are likely doing something very right.



The best learning takes place when students are challenged to defend their conclusions and to think more deeply than they thought possible. Of course, along the way some (or all) may be frustrated, they may complain, they may not like you, but in the end most of your students will value your class and respect you for what you taught them.



All academic disciplines have practical applications to dealing with reality. Once you have given them a solid foundation in facts, theories, and concepts, expect your students to develop well thought-out conclusions, and to be able to explain and defend themselves under your critical questioning. Challenge their answers and demand their reasoning, and when for convenience they try to agree with you, challenge that position. Never let them defend their conclusions with emotions: insist on intellectual analysis, logic, and rational thinking. Teach students that the ability to explain their conclusions—supported by facts and a logical, rational argument—is the mark of an educated person.

REWARD RIGOR—NOT STUDENT EVALUATIONS

Robert Carle, Professor of Theology, The King’s College

Since student evaluations of faculty came into vogue in the 1960s, national GPAs have risen from around 2.5 to 3.4. In 1998, an “A” became the most common college grade in America. In 1970, college students spent forty hours a week attending class and studying—compared to less than thirty hours a week today. College professors so promiscuously award As that grades no longer spur student accomplishment or serve as an assessment tool for future employment.



In 2006, four Central Michigan University professors studied the student evaluations of 7,000 faculty members at 370 institutions in America and Canada, and they found physical attractiveness (“hotness”) to be the strongest predictor of positive student ratings. Other factors highly correlated with high ratings: easy grading standards, lax attendance policies, field trips, guest speakers, and popular (as opposed to classical) textbooks. No correlation exists between high ratings and teaching effectiveness, and there’s a negative correlation between high ratings and academic rigor. This study confirms what junior faculty members intuit. To boost your scores and keep your job, make class fun and implement relaxed grading, attendance, and deadline policies.



To remedy this epidemic of low standards, higher education administrators should reward professors for rigor and discipline in the classroom. Evaluating rigor is complicated, and it will require a thoughtful and honest peer review process. However, colleges and universities can make two simple changes immediately: (1) make realistic grading standards a factor in promotion and tenure decisions and (2) eliminate numerical scoring from student evaluation forms, thereby forcing administrators to review student comments, which are often more revealing than numerical scores.

CREATE A COLLEGE RANKING SUPERSYSTEM

William Casement, Independent Scholar; Author, Making College Right: Heretical Thoughts and Practical Proposals

College rankings are a fixture in the business of higher education. U.S. News & World Report is the market share leader, with rival publications by the likes of Forbes, Kiplinger’s, Washington Monthly, Newsweek, and Princeton Review. The public eagerly consults these rankings, while academics object to them as highly misleading. Using current technology, there is a way the public can get even more of what it wants while being led to recognize that what the rankings measure is more subjective than authoritative.



Let’s create an online supersystem that collects the metrics from the various ranking systems and places the categories and data of each side-by-side so viewers can select the information they need to evaluate colleges—from SAT scores, faculty salaries, student debt at graduation, alumni giving, quality of housing and dining, and many more factors. Other information can be added, such as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s curriculum survey “WhatWillTheyLearn.com.” The weight each factor receives is subject to choice; pressing a button gathers the selected data to reveal a customized list.



This approach is already available on many college-finder websites, but without the aura of magic formulas and many categories of data the “official” rankings employ. That data can be shared voluntarily by the various publications, but should they decline, it can be obtained from the same sources from which they draw (the Common Data Set, U.S. Department of Education, etc.).



High school guidance counselors will endorse the supersystem since it promotes their constant message to prospective college students to find a “fit” rather than a bumper sticker. And the public will enjoy playing expert online as it learns that whatever formula is used to rank colleges and universities is arbitrary.

ENROLL STUDENTS WHO ARE PREPARED FOR COLLEGE

Felicia Sanzari Chernesky, Managing and Poetry Editor, Academic Questions

Consider this the proposal of a frustrated parent who knows too much about what’s going on in colleges and universities for her own peace of mind: Only accept and enroll students in college who can read, write, do basic math, place the American Civil War on a timeline, and honor the Golden Rule. Required first-year courses titled “The College Experience” are code for “No Child Left Behind passed me along, but actually left me behind… Help! I’m not ready for this. I don’t even know how to take responsibility for completing and handing in my homework yet!”



How can we expect to solve the ills plaguing our colleges and universities if we’re not also working hard(er) to rebuild what’s broken down in the high schools—and often even earlier?

ELIMINATE RACE BOXES

REVEAL PREFERENTIAL TREATMENT

Roger Clegg, President and General Counsel, Center for Equal Opportunity

Sustainability Trumps Diversity



Save ink and paper by eliminating race boxes on application and employment forms.



This will get rid of that pesky temptation to discriminate against some groups (whites, Asians) and in favor of others (African Americans, Latinos) in college admissions. Admit and hire without regard to skin color or national origin, and cut down fewer trees while you’re at it.



Go green! (And forget about black, white, brown, etc.)



More Transparency for Diversity



Universities’ pursuit of “diversity” among the students they admit and the faculty they hire is controversial, but it’s hard to understand how anyone could argue that this pursuit should be shrouded in secrecy.

Schools should be required to divulge what they spend on efforts to promote diversity. In “Less Academics, More Narcissism,” Heather Mac Donald documented how even in California—which has limited these efforts by a state constitutional amendment and is facing a budget crisis of staggering proportions—the price tag has been substantial.



And the price goes beyond administrative and personnel costs, as I discussed in the Winter 2011 Academic Questions in “Affirmative Discrimination and the Bubble.” For example, not only are better qualified applicants for student and faculty slots rejected, but the evidence is mounting that the less qualified individuals accepted instead are often being set up to fail—it’s the “mismatch effect.” It makes sense for schools to reveal, in this case, the graduation and bar passage rate, etc., for students admitted with a particular GPA and SAT/LSAT/MCAT score. A student of any race or ethnicity about to take on a large student loan debt might be quite interested in his odds of obtaining a degree at a specific school.



Finally and most fundamentally, schools should be required to reveal when they are granting preferential treatment on the basis of skin color and national origin—and if they are, how much weight is being given and what steps they are taking to ensure that the preferential treatment falls within the legal constraints established by the Supreme Court. We can debate whether such discrimination is a good idea or not, but surely no one would argue that the discrimination should be done secretly and/or illegally—especially at public or publicly-funded schools. Legislation has been introduced to require this reporting as a matter of federal law, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has endorsed this approach.

LEARN BEAUTIFUL WORDS BY HEART

David Clemens, Founder and Coordinator, Monterey Peninsula College Great Books Program

James Burke’s original BBC series Connections (1978) ends with a plea for access to the information we need to make decisions that affect our future. Progress, he claimed, depends on “how easy [it is] for knowledge to spread.” Thirty-four years ago, access seemed a reasonable goal. Then, less than ten years ago, Web 2.0 exploded, and we got access all right, even on our phones: web pages by the trillion, Facebook, data mining, Wikipedia, MOOCs, archives, Google, data bases, Siri, and a distressing informational plasticity… We also got turned inside out with images and memory now located outside our bodies. What education must do is to return imagination and memory to our core, private selves where they create what George Steiner called the “inner echo chamber of our identifiable being.” Because of repeated hearing, in almost any situation, American adults can recall an applicable popular song lyric though rarely can they quote from a religious text, great book, or poem. Yet robust, patterned language strengthens the inner self against the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and what Steiner called the “scandalous fact” of mortality. Most colleges fail to convey a sense of history and continuity, of creation and beauty, located within the self rather than dispersed in the cloud. Having access is not the same as knowing, remembering, imagining, or feeling. Students enter college empty and leave empty. Fill them up is my prescription. Take a string of meaningful or beautiful or enigmatic words (Conrad, Yeats, Woolf, Lincoln) and have students speak those words until they memorize them. Repeat, again and again.

TEACH GRADUATE STUDENTS HOW TO TEACH

Andrew Delbanco, Columbia University Humanities Professor; Author, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be

Graduate students are seldom asked to articulate the “why” of what they do, to learn to convey its significance to a lay audience, even to express for themselves the fascination they feel for it. If we want to foster strong teaching in our colleges—the single most important factor in motivating and inspiring college students—this must change. The research culture of graduate school must take teaching more seriously.



This is starting to happen—mostly in the form of “teaching centers” where graduate teaching assistants work with master teachers on such matters as how to develop syllabi, lead discussion, or handle cases of suspected plagiarism. But we have a long way to go until good teaching becomes part of what academic departments expect from the future scholar-teachers to whom they award a Ph.D.



In my field of literary studies, for example, every doctoral oral examination should require the candidate to make a case for why a given author might interest a skeptical or indifferent college student. What makes the author alive today? Why should this novel or poem or play written years ago still matter? In other words, how would you teach this subject?



College teaching is a delicate and difficult art. It requires confidence and tact. It means putting students under pressure—without degenerating into badgering or bullying. It requires making clear explanations of complex ideas, but also waiting out the silence after posing a difficult question. We need to prepare future scholars for these challenges, all of which, if they are lucky enough to get a teaching job, they will face soon enough.

ABOLISH BIG-TIME SPORTS

George Dent, Professor of Law, Case Western Reserve University School of Law

Big-time sports are corrupting higher education. They should be abolished.



Some of the abuses are obvious. Star athletes who lack the academic ability to do college work are nonetheless recruited with offers of full scholarships and often with side-payments and sex. Once admitted, they get special tutors to help them pass gut courses and receive generous grades. Competing in sports may help build diligence, teamwork, and other positive qualities, but this can be achieved with club sports. Big-time sports focus vast amounts of resources on just a few students and reduce the rest to spectators rather than competitors.



In the end, however, even college athletes gain little from this “generosity.” The powers that be have worked to raise the embarrassingly low graduation rates for athletes at some universities, but very little attention is paid to what happens to athletes who manage to graduate. Most face dim employment prospects.



Less obvious but more pernicious are the indirect effects of major college sports. Too much student attention is focused on games and the ubiquitous partying that surrounds them. Whose fault is this? After all, if the administration gives so much money and publicity to sports, isn’t it urging students to be avid fans?



Huge sums are spent on athletic facilities that serve few students. A few sports programs can draw large revenues, but for the vast majority of schools big-time sports remain unprofitable. Administrators fear that downgrading sports would cause alumni giving and donations to fall, but they just need to adjust their marketing strategies. Many colleges that are highly successful in fund-raising do not have big-time sports.

Deprived of big-time college sports, the public might also pay more attention to academics at State U.

REEXAMINE FACULTY PRODUCTIVITY

Candace De Russy, Higher Education Reformer; Former Trustee, State University of New York

Faculty salaries comprise a large portion of campus budgets, and professors in general can reasonably be expected to carry a greater teaching load than they do at present. Many fully tenured professors today teach only a few hours a week, although they are paid considerably more than the median income in their local communities. The role, quality, and cost of teaching assistants in higher education classrooms also relate to this issue. Students deserve as much contact as possible with an experienced and expert professoriate.



In the nation’s public higher education systems, the governors’ staff engages in negotiations with the unions representing professors. Whether individual campuses are directly in charge of these negotiations or not, governing boards should make their priorities known to negotiators, receive briefings on the status of negotiations, and otherwise take a more active role. In addition to tracking more effectively time spent by professors in undergraduate classrooms and the use of graduate assistants for teaching and grading, there is a need to reconsider current sabbatical practices. Only slightly raising the student-to-faculty ratio and requiring each professor to teach one more hour per week can save considerable sums.

REQUIRE A FRESHMAN COURSE ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Donald Downs, Alexander Meiklejohn Professor of Political Science, Law, and Journalism, University of Wisconsin–Madison

The moral charter for higher education is to promote the advancement of knowledge and the pursuit of truth. This obligation requires intellectual freedom, diversity of thought, and intellectual honesty. As Academic Questions readers know all too well, we have not lived up to this obligation in recent decades. It is time to reaffirm our heritage.



I propose that institutions of higher education require freshman students to take a core course on intellectual and academic freedom. The course could be for one or two credits and would entail reading and engaging in class discussion on several classic works in free thought. Alternatively, the students could simply be required to read such works in advance of or during their first year on campus and subsequently attend a discussion session. Many schools presently assign readings to all freshmen in this manner, but my proposal would focus on freedom of thought each year because of its cardinal significance for higher education.



My proposal has two potential drawbacks. First, what should be read? Second, who would teach the readings? A politically correct institution or teacher could use the occasion to disparage free thought, much like the University of Pennsylvania administrator who claimed in the 1990s that the word “individual” is a code word for oppression.

Alas, all reform runs this risk, but this should not discourage us from trying.

BRING BACK LATIN

Thomas Drucker, Department of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin–Whitewater

Dum Spiro, Spero.



When World War I broke out, the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater expressed its sense of patriotism by eliminating German from the curriculum. At the same time, Latin was deleted, perhaps because it was associated with German scholarship. German was readmitted to the council of languages after the war, but Latin never reappeared. It is time for universities across the country to return to requiring Latin as part of the undergraduate curriculum.

We’ve no need to make the case for the value of Latin as training in mental discipline. Louis MacNeice’s observations about Greek in “Autumn Journal, XIII” apply a fortiori to Latin, supplying “a lesson in logic” and being “good for the brain.” Understanding the vocabulary of Romance languages becomes simpler on a Latin foundation, and the grammars of many languages are easier to appreciate by comparison with Latin.



Beyond simple linguistic advantages, however, a familiarity with Latin literature puts the student in touch with aspects of culture and civilization from which we have drifted too far. Questions about the best form of government were debated in Latin for millennia before they were taken up by speakers and writers of English. Our understanding of the natural world comes from works like Newton’s Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis. As we seek to understand our place in the world, Cicero and Lucretius remind us of considerations that have lost their force only for those who are too lazy to contemplate them.

Let us restore the connection to the world of wisdom (and folly) expressed in Latin.

INSTITUTE A FACULTY DRESS CODE AND REQUIRE USE OF STUDENT SURNAMES

Joseph Epstein, Author, most recently of Essays in Biography

The condition of undergraduate education strikes me as so sad, so wildly screwed up, and so heavily screened off from reality that no single sweeping reform is likely to help. A number of small reforms, though, might make for a beginning. Two I suggest are a dress code and a rigid protocol of address. I suggest these not for students, but for faculty.



If male teachers taught in jacket and necktie and female teachers in dresses or skirts an aura of seriousness would be lent to the proceedings. It would make plain that the classroom is not a democratic but a hierarchical setting, with the teacher above the student.



When I first began teaching in 1973 my contemporaries among the professoriate came to class in jeans and T-shirts. (One among them, whom I always thought of as an academic cowboy, wore jeans and a jean jacket; he eventually left the university to go on to a deservedly obscure career as a failed filmmaker.) As a man in his thirties, I didn’t own any jeans, but I did own suits and jackets and a vast quantity of neckties, bow and four-in-hand, and so decided to go with those. Being dressed as an adult gave me a small but genuine edge in authority over my students. I hope it also conveyed to them that I might—just might—be able to get a job downtown, selling shoes, say, and wasn’t one of those people who, in the crushing Shavian formulation, cannot.



The other question before me was whether to address my students by first or last names. I really hadn’t decided this until the first day of the first class I taught. Calling the roll, last name first, I came to the name “Pipal, Faustin,” to which a red-haired boy responded, “Would you mind calling me Frosty?” The question was settled. “I call all my students by their last names, Mr. Pipal,” I announced, a policy from which I never varied. I discovered that I was a minority of one among my colleagues in doing so. Since that time we have advanced to the point that students fairly regularly address their teachers by their first names. Perhaps by now there are teachers who themselves wish to be called Frosty.



Dressing respectably for the classroom, calling students by their last names—two small steps for the dignity of teaching, and maybe, who knows, one large step for undergraduate education.

DISCONNECT ACADEMIA FROM THE REAL WORLD

Bill Felkner, Director, The Hummel Report; President, Rhode Island Association of Scholars

Some would say academia is already disconnected from the real world, and in some ways I would agree. But today the academy has yielded to modern economic realities, maintaining vocational relevance by tailoring itself to the demands of various professional organizations and policies. This is nowhere more so on display than in higher education intended for public professions such as teaching, social work, planning, and administration.



West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943) explained it best: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”



There is no better example of academia prescribing orthodoxy than with the adoption of “social justice” as the paradigm through which to teach and judge the effectiveness of candidates for these professions. Enforcing allegiance to such terms has been the hallmark of professions at the vanguard of the Great Society for fifty years. But poverty still exists. Have we not gone far enough or are we going in the wrong direction? Are we free to ask?

When does life begin?

Is intelligence learned?

Does corporal punishment aid in learning?

Does sexual orientation impact parental efficacy?

Does just reading some of these questions make you uncomfortable?

Academia should be a safety zone where students are free to pursue the radical and be proven wrong, or occasionally find their way to unexpected truths. The alternative is an arrogance that we already know what there is to know and we shift from critical thinking into guided thinking.



Our goal isn’t to protect and promote a philosophy, or a profession, but to learn what isn’t known. Sometimes you have to go through what isn’t accepted to get there.

CUSTOM-TAILOR CAREER PREPARATION FOR STUDENTS

Jason Fertig, Assistant Professor of Management, University of Southern Indiana

Most high school students today do not ask, “Am I going to college?” They ask, “Where am I going to college?”



That needs to change.



The press throws around the statistic that individuals with college degrees earn more money over their lifetimes than those without those degrees. But, as college statistics teaches, correlation does not always equal causation. There is more to that wage premium than an upward sloping line.



Many students are simply spending five to six figures to obtain a workforce readiness certificate. This bubble of inflated tuition prices and degree value has to burst—so let’s fix things rather than mop up the mess.



Programs like MITx and iTunes U use modern technology to teach twenty-first-century knowledge and skills to anyone with a computer and Internet connection. And organizations like the Teaching Company establish that one can acquire a classical education without the ivory tower.



The one-size-fits-all college degree is obsolete. Let’s establish a new cycle of real education and learning.

BRING BACK LEARNING BY HEART

Janice Fiamengo, Professor of English, University of Ottawa, Canada

Every poetry course should include an oral and written memory assignment of at least fourteen lines.



Memorization of poetry all but disappeared from the classroom a half-century ago, dismissed with most other memory work as mechanical and perhaps damaging. Current pedagogical approaches tend to ask students to respond to readings imaginatively rather than merely (it is thought) to know them.



Memorization does not guarantee comprehension, and good teachers would still need to engage students in sense-making and analysis. But memorization would ensure that attention is paid to every word and mark on the page, to their form, order, and arrangement. Phrases normally glossed over would now be spelled out, sounded aloud, and practiced with varying emphases. The aural component of poetry, so often neglected, would become vividly manifest.



Memorizing would encourage parsing phrases and clauses, noticing rhyme and rhythm, marking punctuation points, breath breaks, line endings; attention would be drawn to word pairings, echoes and repetition, half-rhyme and parallelism. Led to recognize that understanding aids memory, students would be encouraged to look up word meanings and analyze subject-predicate links and patterns of modification and apposition.



Given institutional inertia and the decline of poetry instruction generally, my proposal might seem the ultimate in antiquated idealism or a radically counter-cultural strategy of resistance—but it is certainly a workable and useful exercise. Its effect: over the course of obtaining their degrees students would sharpen their language skills and also amass a repertoire of remembered poems that in future years might bring considerable pleasure and comfort.

ELIMINATE TEMPTATION

Chester Finn, President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

The greatest cause of today’s undergraduates not learning much is their preoccupation with tempting—one might even say seductive—alternatives. In a word, they’re having way too much fun. The most alluring of those alternatives could be kept within bounds via two simple additions to all food served to students in university dining rooms (and food courts, etc.): disulfiram and the modern equivalent of saltpeter.



The former medication “causes unpleasant effects when even small amounts of alcohol are consumed.”



The latter—well, you already know what it is supposed to do.



Less booze. Less sex. More studying. Problem eased if not solved.

REQUIRE PUBLIC SPEAKING

Will Fitzhugh, Founder, The Concord Review, www.tcr.org

It would be great and interesting for all concerned if every college student had to present a one-hour talk on some topic on which he had recently done research and written a substantial paper. Too few college students—if any other than the salutatorian and the valedictorian—ever stand and say something academic to an audience.



Those invited to such presentations should include the faculty in the department of the topic covered in the talk, the presenter’s fellow students and friends, as well as other interested persons, including members of the general population of the town or city where the college or university is planted.



Attending such a presentation would be time-consuming, of course, and the faculty audience might be limited to adjuncts and those with lighter research and consulting schedules. But having to read their words face-to-face to careful listeners would lead students to think longer and with greater care about what they write.

USE TECHNOLOGY TO TEACH THE CURRICULUM

Terrence F. Flower, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Physics, St. Catherine University

I have taught online in one form or another since 1981. During this time technology has dramatically advanced and with it, the ways technology can be used to help teach a particular unit of instruction. The key to success is to focus on teaching the curriculum and not the technology. It has been said that anything more than chalk and blackboard is razzle-dazzle, but at one point chalk and blackboard was an advancement in technology.



Rather than focus on the limitations of online classes (indeed, face-to-face classes on campus also have limitations), consider the advantages. If airlines can keep their pilots’ skills current via the use of computer-based simulators so too we ought to be able to use technology to teach students in almost every discipline. I have taught calculus-based physics and astronomy online—but again, I teach the subject matter, not the technology.



The biggest hindrance to using technology to enhance instruction is administrative reluctance to recognize that course development involves more than expecting faculty to adopt a new textbook. A university will have to invest time and money to develop the online curriculum along with the technology. The leadership for a successful program will have to come from the curricular experts, the practitioners, i.e., a bottom-up approach. We have seen that really successful online programs are those with a successful physical presence.

DISCUSS GRADING STANDARDS (OVER LUNCH)

David Fott, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director, Great Works Academic Certificate Program, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

It is difficult to fight grade inflation, but here is a step in the right direction: have all of the faculty in a department meet informally—preferably over lunch and nonalcoholic drinks— twice a year for the sole purpose of discussing grading standards. There should be no pressure to arrive at a consensus about what is A work, what is B work, and so on. Rather, ask faculty to explain—i.e., justify—their standards to one another.

OFFER ALTERNATIVES TO THE FOUR-YEAR DEGREE

Robin Fox, University Professor of Social Theory, Rutgers University

Most students attending four-year colleges really don’t need or even want to be there. Let’s give them alternatives.



Only 3 to 4 percent of students went on to university when I attended college in the fifties in the UK. Considered a fairly odd thing to do, college was for nerds and intellectuals unfit for anything else (except those who went to play cricket). Two-year teachers’ colleges (like the old Normal Schools) took care of those who wanted to teach. The rest got jobs, saved up to get married, and moved up through night classes at the technical colleges and the national trade and guild associations, which gave professional certificates (and letters to put after your name) in everything from plumbing, electrical, mechanics, accounting, dentistry, architecture, music, law, art, design, building, engineering, pharmacy, to nursing and even medicine.



Now the UK has fallen into the American trap and everyone has to “go to college.” This is purely a status thing.



State institutions in America have always fulfilled some of this role and they could continue to do so, but what we need is a reduction in residential four-year institutions and an expansion of the community college system, with primacy given to extension and online courses for those already working in the profession or skill of their choice. I recently read an article in USA Today praising the brilliant new idea of awarding “certificates” of professional competence rather than requiring four years of residential study. Welcome to the past.



Among college students, those doing science, engineering and math degrees should attend for free, while those who study arts, social studies, media studies, cultural studies (cultural anything), and particularly women’s and gender studies should have to pay double. Then let the market sort it out.

OFFER SIX WEEKS IN ATHENS, SIX WEEKS IN D.C.

Frederic Fransen, President, Donor Advising, Research & Educational Services, LLC

The most exciting opportunity in higher education today is creating incredible educational “environments” for students. Digital tools are eliminating the need to congregate where professors live. This opens new worlds to students, exciting environments or those better suited to contemplation. Urban or rural worlds. Worlds potentially safer than the environments many students live in today. I imagine a catalog of locations where the educational platform and format move seamlessly with student from place-to-place. How about six weeks in Athens, followed by six weeks in Washington, D.C.? Or for those who like the snow, a winter in the Rockies...



Current thinking on education and technology indicates that the best learning is hybrid. For this reason, digital-only degrees will never equate to those from residential colleges. The new environments I imagine solve this problem by combining online education with supplementary low-cost residential programs. For the price of room and board, a student can get a better education in a more interesting place.

THE SIMPLEST REFORM PLAN: ASSIGN MORE HOMEWORK

David French, Senior Counsel, American Center for Law and Justice

For all too many of our nation’s students, the college experience has become the equivalent of a high-priced, alcohol-soaked Disneyland. According to a recent study of 30,000 high school freshmen, these students spent an average of 8.4 hours per week studying and 10.2 hours per week drinking. Other studies have placed the average hourly study burden at fifteen hours per week, down from twenty-four hours four decades ago.



Relaxed study habits lead to, well, ignorance. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute has found that at some schools civic knowledge actually decreases after four years of college.



In response, I propose the simplest, least costly reform plan in the history of higher education: double the average student workload. Assign eight books instead of four. Six essays instead of three, and so forth.



Make the requirement universal (otherwise, students will flock from the harder to the easier classes), impose penalties for noncompliance, and watch the learning outcomes improve, the Wednesday and Thursday night parties die out, and marvel at fraternity houses full of students reading rather than retching.



There is precedent for broad-based teaching requirements. When I taught at Cornell Law School the administration controlled grade inflation by implementing a mandatory B+ class average—ending the practice of some professors of sprinkling As around the class like croutons on a salad. Simply put, a little hard work never hurt anybody.

DEFINE, TEACH, AND UPHOLD COMPOSITION STANDARDS

Bruce Gans, Professor of English and Founder and Director, Great Books Curriculum, Wilbur Wright College

It is falsely assumed that undergraduates have learned to write grammatically correct English. Faculty members who assign term papers are constantly made aware of this—as are the subsequent employers of such graduates. The solution is to issue an honest statement of what a passing grade in standard composition signifies and include it in the course catalog. But a college can begin by giving students a two-hour in-class assignment to write a two-page double-spaced expository essay on some aspect of their personal experience. This essay would be evaluated for grammar and syntax according to the college’s written guidelines on exactly how many major fundamental errors in grammar and syntax it may contain and the writing still be deemed proficient.



In reality, the number of permissible fundamental grammatical, syntactical errors expected of a college graduate is zero. However, as long as there are no official guidelines on proficiency in composition, an institution cannot confront or discipline a faculty member who is practicing social promotion—a long-common practice. If colleges discipline and fire faculty who pass incompetent composition students, writing standards are likely to rise.



If the college refuses to put an absolute limit on the acceptable number of fundamental grammatical errors it ought to be required to state in the catalog an honest description of what the passing grade signifies. It would read something like this: “The recipient of this passing grade in composition is not to be considered proficient in composition. This college in no way states or implies that students issued a passing grade can compose five hundred words without making a fundamental blunder on an average of once every hundred words, over and over again.”

TEACH ETYMOLOGY

Anu Garg, Founder, Wordsmith.org

We all know the origins of the names of our fields: that anthropology comes from anthropos, Greek for human, for example, or that engineering deals with engines or machines. We learn the history of our chosen area of study. But that’s about it. A course in etymology would help students dig a little deeper under the words. It would serve as the foundation upon which a student can erect any edifice of knowledge.



Language is the official gazette of humankind. Layers of history are buried within the etymology of words. Peel a layer and see where we have been. Even though “she” may command a space shuttle today, a “lady” once was, literally, a loaf kneader (lord: loaf guard). Humanity’s footprints are all over its language.



Etymology gives us a better appreciation of words and what’s lurking beneath them. It shows the connection among fields. It helps us see patterns. It reveals our common bonds. Engineering is ultimately about solving problems with “ingenuity”: that’s what the word meant originally.

CREATE SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE FOR ONLINE STUDENTS

James Garland, Author, Saving Alma Mater: A Rescue Plan for America’s Public Universities

A key problem with online education is a human and not a technological failing. Students sign up for online courses with high expectations, but relatively few have the self-discipline and habits of mind to stick it out. Without peers to study with and fend off distractions, the odds of completing a course drop precipitously.



Why not use technology to create a unique social networking site tailored to each student’s needs as an integral part of online coursework? Enrollees would complete a questionnaire that captures demographic information—the goal being to create a snapshot of the student’s life and interests, analogous to information admissions officers collect at traditional residential colleges.



With this information, the school (or, more precisely, the school’s computers) could create virtual classrooms of, say, twenty-five students with similar backgrounds, interests, and goals, which would become the students’ personal social group for the course. Thus, a virtual class might consist of single mothers, casual hobbyists, or Ph.D. physicists—in other words, traits that foster a community that makes sense for those students.



Students of a virtual classroom could interact via email, a Facebook-like page, Skype-arranged conference calls—all arranged automatically by computer, which could even schedule regular “class meetings.” To preserve privacy, each student would opt in at self-determined levels of involvement.

REQUIRE EPICTETUS AND RAUCH; FOSTER GOOD HABITS

Charles Geshekter, Professor Emeritus of History, California State University, Chico

One sweeping suggestion to faculty: Assign two important books students that must read before their sophomore year: Epictetus, The Art of Living: The Classic Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness, and Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. And a few specific recommendations to promote growth in character and maturity:



• Advise—even better, require—students to attend all classes, sit near the front of the room, pay attention at all times, bring no food to class, and turn off all cell phones and iPods.



• Encourage students to ask questions should you say something that seems unpersuasive to them. If they prefer to ask you questions during office hours, advise them to do some research and thinking before the appointment.



• Suggest they develop the habit of keeping track of new words and learning their definitions. Encourage them to record new words in a small notebook that fits into their pocket, to alphabetize the pages, and to buy a compact paperback Webster’s Dictionary. Persuade them to record a new word as they encounter it in the notebook, but to continue reading, then look up the word’s meaning afterwards and compose a four-to-five-word definition. Tell them: “If you learn to say that word properly five times a day, you will own it.”



• Encourage students to establish friendly contact with fellow students who share their seriousness of purpose and are taking the class to learn, not to waste time. Such classmates can become invaluable assignment and study allies.

PUBLISH EMPLOYMENT OUTCOMES

Andrew Gillen, Research Director, Education Sector

As college costs continually rise, students are increasingly concerned with the impact attending college will have on future jobs and earnings. Yet virtually no data exist to help inform this important decision. Students flock to law schools and English Ph.D. programs unaware that job prospects for graduates from these programs are terrible. Students should not have to make such important decisions essentially blindfolded.



The solution is deceptively simple: have the federal government provide earnings outcomes for every program that grants degrees. This is also deceptively easy to accomplish by requiring colleges to submit a list of graduates to the U.S. Department of Education, and matching that list to already existing IRS or Social Security earnings databases. This data could provide a wealth of information on employment outcomes to potential students while protecting their privacy.

PRESERVE LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION

David Gordon, Professor of History, City University of New York

Too many colleges and universities have abandoned traditional, broadly based liberal arts curricula for new, minimalist common core requirements.



It was no mere caprice that formerly obliged students to experience a wide variety of disciplines before pursuing one with special intensity. It is one of the hallmarks that makes our higher educational system superior to the European, or any other.



The creativity of American college graduates, so admired and envied by the rest of the world, is born out of a diversity of academic experience. Creativity cannot be taught, but the environment in which it is nurtured can be created. It can also be destroyed. You cannot think creatively through a multiple of disciplines unless you have had some experience of them.



It is sometimes suggested that limiting general requirements can free students to take more high-level courses, and to explore other fields and interests. But that’s what a broader core curriculum is already meant to do. With a reduced core, students will be able to avoid important and more challenging courses. In an age of globalization, many graduate without any foreign language instruction. Millions of America’s future voters enter the world knowing nothing of America’s, or the world’s, political history.



However worthy (and practical), the principle aim of higher education cannot be to produce better skilled operatives in a post-industrial economy. The preservation of a challenging liberal arts core curriculum will assure the nation a future generation that can not only function in the marketplace, but also understand and contribute creatively to the world.

STUDY IN THE LIBRARY, LUNCH IN THE CAFETERIA

Mary Grabar, Founder, Dissident Prof (www.dissidentprof.com); Instructor, Department of English, Emory University

Let’s restore books to their status as sacred objects and keep them free of coffee and taco stains. As Plato might say, there is no reason that the hungry Youth cannot go to the library café.



Routinely employing such self-restraint—refraining from eating and drinking while studying in the library—would instill in students a reverence for learning and respect for elders, both living and dead. As Plato’s student noted, habits form character.



Perhaps once these overgrown children experience such self-discipline, they might begin shedding flip-flops, baseball caps, and ear buds when they come to class. They might even rise when the professor enters, having completed their assigned readings, eager for intelligent discussion about the eternal verities and themes of justice, tragedy, comedy, and irony.

ACCEPT MASTER’S DEGREE IN LIEU OF TEACHING CERTIFICATES

Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History, Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Author, most recently of The End of Sparta

Acceptance of an academic master’s degree in lieu of the standard teaching credential would do wonders for higher education and the public schools. The power of the schools of education and their deleterious therapeutic curricula hinge on a captive audience of would-be teachers in need of “certification.” If a master’s degree could substitute for the credential, I think a majority of future history or English teachers would prefer a fifth year of more intensive academic study of Western civilization or Shakespeare than the usual race/class/gender indoctrination or “how to teach” classes that are now integral to the credentialing industry. It is a perverse thing that we turn loose MAs and Ph.D.s without official credentialing training on university and junior college students and they seem to do just fine without a stamp of approval from the school of education, but would not allow them to teach a freshman Spanish course or junior high U.S. history class. As it is, we have thousands of newly credentialed teachers who claim to know “how” to teach, but often lack the expertise and knowledge of “what” to teach.



Not only would resources in the university (staffing, curricula, funding) shift to academic programs away from the school of education, but the nation’s students would receive sounder education and less indoctrination from a high school teacher with a master’s thesis on the Renaissance than a BA/credential counterpart with courses in role-playing and diversity.

MAKE CAMPUS SAFE FOR MODESTY

Nathan Harden, Author, Sex & God at Yale: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad

Universities around the country have started hosting presentations by for-profit corporations in the sex industry. Sex toy companies present kinky workshops in university classrooms. Porn producers and performers show their films and lecture students about bedroom techniques.



Why all this interest in integrating XXX material into the classroom? It started a decade ago when Yale first hosted its infamous “Sex Week.” It was Yale administrators who first saw the pedagogical potential of porn. Every other year since 2002 they have hosted a series of lectures and workshops known as “Sex Week at Yale,” including sex toy giveaways, screenings of violent porn, student lingerie shows, how-to sadomasochism lessons, and at least one lecture by a topless porn star. (Had I not witnessed most of these things as a Yale undergrad, I wouldn’t have believed them possible.)



Many universities have followed Yale’s bawdy lead: Brown, Northeastern, the University of Kentucky, Indiana University, and Washington University in St. Louis have hosted Sex Weeks. Harvard and Cornell just jumped aboard. Numerous sex toy companies and porn producers and performers now make campus tours, speaking regularly in America’s classrooms.



As keen as most of our nation’s academic leaders are to profess their progressive concern for women’s rights, I wonder how they would have felt a few years ago during a classroom screening of a porn film featuring “rape fantasy” during Yale’s Sex Week. I’d like to hear their explanation for what playing host to the sex industry and obsessing over students’ sex lives has to do with the mission of a great university.

REQUIRE THE ABOLITION OF MAN

Carol Iannone, Editor-at-Large, Academic Questions

I suggest requiring all incoming freshmen to read C.S. Lewis’s brilliant short book, The Abolition of Man (1943), write a précis and response, and be prepared to discuss in breakout sessions during orientation. It is the shortest, straightest, purest, and most powerful refutation of relativism there has ever been, taking the reader step-by-logical-step through what it would really mean if we accept that there is no transcendent moral law or objective truth, and it were up to each individual—and by extension each generation—to decide what values should govern life.



What actually happens is that we find ourselves ruled by some people who take some piece of the moral law that they like and manage to impose on others. The end result in the future would be the technological manipulation of nature by those who happen to have power, to the point where what we recognize as definably human would virtually disappear.



This book, which began as a lecture, can be a life-changer for students who have the ability to take it in. It is unlikely that anyone who reads it with intelligence will easily be able to resort to simpleminded clichés such as “It’s all relative,” “Values vary from person to person,” and “No one can define right and wrong for anyone else.” Students may through stubbornness or reflex or force of habit continue to spout such ideas, but a mustard seed of healthy doubt will have been planted and will affect their responses to what they study.

ABOLISH STUDENT EVALUATIONS

Jonathan Imber, Jean Glasscock Professor of Sociology, Wellesley College; Editor-in-Chief, Society

Many colleges and universities today use student evaluation questionnaires to evaluate a teacher’s performance. The origin of this seemingly benign tool has much to do with its abuse as a weapon of conformity. The student protesters of the 1960s demanded greater “participation” in the life of the university. Administrators saw an opportunity at appeasement that also translated into a mechanism for oversight, which in the long growth of university administration means the production of ever more information about everyone and everything. Students could be part of the process of “democratically” supporting or opposing such decisions as tenure and promotion.



The result has been granting permission to students to offer anonymously any kind of opinion they want to express, however inane or cruel. Of course, teachers ought to be able to take it, but consider how profoundly the reversal of fortune now is: it was once expected that students ought to be able to “take it,” that is, to respond to tough standards, to hard lessons, to failure, to anything that might contribute to the building of character. Now, the students must be treated carefully, and the teacher has been put into the dock. To improve teaching, abolish student evaluations of teachers.

GIVE TRUTH A CHANCE

Robert L Jackson, Associate Provost, The King’s College

To reform American higher education, I would promote a national collegiate-level parliamentary debate under the following motion: “This House believes that Moral Truth should be considered the essential guiding principle of human reason, whereby every person seeks to discern right from wrong, good from evil.” Or, more simply, “This House presumes Moral Truth innocent until proven guilty.”

PREDICT STUDENTS’ SUCCESS PROBABILITIES

Joanne Jacobs, Blogger, joannejacobs.com and communitycollegespotlight.org

I’d like to see a program that would analyze a student’s grades, test scores, and self-reported motivation and study skills to predict future success. Let’s say Ned Ninth-grader learns he has a 1 percent chance of earning a medical degree (his stated ambition), a 10 percent chance at a bachelor’s degree, a 20 percent chance at an associate degree, a 50 percent shot at a vocational certificate, and a 65 percent chance of a high school diploma.

He gets information on what jobs he might do if he reaches various levels and what he can do now to increase his options. Maybe Ned will work harder, raise his grades, and have a real shot at an associate degree in radiology or a pharmacy tech certificate. Honest information would be great for students—and would reduce colleges’ remedial burden.

KEEP PARENTS INFORMED

Christina Jeffrey, Lecturer, Wofford College

American Higher Education has done a 180 in the last forty years. Colleges were once expected to act in loco parentis—in place of a parent—even at many coed schools. But just as colleges were abandoning responsibility for their young charges, Congress passed the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) of 1974. Soon, neither colleges nor parents were watching out for the kids.



The supervision gap resulting from ending in loco parentis and legally preventing parents from getting information about their kids gave the sexual revolution—as well as the lending industry—even more steam. Now students could easily borrow money without parental knowledge.



Unfortunately, among the pushers were their own colleges. Students were urged to support their school, the teams, the clubs, etc., by getting affinity credit cards. By 2008, over 80 percent of students had credit cards; 47 percent of them had four or more.



Parents need access to official student records. They pay the bills; they are responsible to clean up the mess if their children have problems.



More colleges are encouraging parents and students to discuss allowing parent access to student records by having students sign a waiver. A FERPA waiver, which can be revoked at any time, allows named parties to obtain any official records covered by the waiver (http://www.resccu.com/respaper7.html).



Colleges should not be offering credit cards to current students whose parents are paying their bills. It may be legal to do so, but it is not ethical.

REQUIRE STUDENTS TO PAY PERCENTAGE OF TUITION THROUGH WORK STUDY

April Kelly-Woessner, Chair, Department of Political Science, Elizabethtown College

Many young students have little appreciation for the cost and value of their education. For some, parents pay the bill. For others, their tuition is paid by taxpayers, private donors, or by their fellow students. Students take out loans, with little appreciation for the magnitude of their debt or the strain it will place on them later in life. As a result, college students are not cost-sensitive consumers and the price of higher education continues to grow. If students were required to work for a percentage of their college tuition, the demand for efficient education would drive down the price of higher education.



With pockets full of other people’s money, students select colleges that boast lavish dormitories, state-of-the-art athletic facilities, extravagant recreational amenities, and a slew of counselors at their beck and call. Indeed, colleges are wise to cater to these demands; those who do not often lose students to their more fashionable competitors.



Yet, more than two-thirds of undergraduates receive some form of financial aid. According to a 2011 American Enterprise Institute study conducted by Mark Schneider and Jorge Klor de Alva, taxpayers spend an average of $60,000 for a bachelor’s degree from a noncompetitive public university and up to $100,000 from the most prestigious public schools.



If students were required to “work off” 20 percent of their tuition bill every year, they would be far more inclined to select institutions that deliver a quality, no-frills education with a reasonable price tag.

REQUIRE AMERICAN HISTORY

Charles L. King, Professor Emeritus of Spanish, University of Colorado, Boulder; former Editor, The Modern Language Journal

Every American college and university should require all freshmen to complete a semester’s course in American history, an unrevised and unbiased history focusing primarily on the principles advocated by our nation’s Founding Fathers.



The goal of the required course is to provide all students with the objective truth of American history, especially of our Constitution, and the basic principles upon which America was founded and which have enabled it to become a truly great nation of free citizens. No student in an American institution of higher education should be allowed to continue college studies without having received a passing grade in this course in American history.

REQUIRE STUDENTS TO JUSTIFY COURSE SELECTIONS

Adam Kissel, Higher Education Philanthropy

Each term, each student shall explain why he has chosen the courses selected. The student shall write at least one paragraph about each course, articulating how he thinks the course will meet his academic and other objectives as well as the university’s goals for his education. After protected information is redacted, the justifications shall be made available to advisors, deans, professors, and department chairs. More than from student evaluations of teachers’ performance, these short papers will reveal students’ views about the college’s curriculum and its relevance to students’ academic and other goals.

ADD ASTERISK TO COLLEGE ACCREDITATION FOR EVERY THOUSAND COMPLAINTS

Malcolm Kline, Executive Director, Accuracy in Academia

Colleges and universities rarely discuss the employment rates of their graduates, but, conversely, are happy to talk about the number of graduates who pursue advanced degrees. I call for truth in advertising in academia.

Accrediting agencies could simply add an asterisk to their accreditation of a college or university if a prescribed number of students and parents complain that the institution is not living up to its advertising. One thousand seems a good ballpark number.



Doing this would merely require credentialing agencies to record student/parent complaints and when they hit four digits add a typographical symbol and footnote to their reports.



Please note that the proposal does not come with an enforcement mechanism. Nor am I calling for any action by any level of government—federal, state, or local. And we certainly do not want to get the U.S. Department of Education involved. Look at what a great job they did with No Child Left Behind.



The point of the asterisk is to let the consumers—students and their parents—know that a particular institution isn’t living up to its own press, so caveat emptor.

CHALLENGE THEM, BUT SAFEGUARD STUDENTS’ RIGHT TO EXPRESS RELIGIOUS BELIEFS

Peter Augustine Lawler, Dana Professor of Government, Berry College

There are surprisingly few American four-year colleges where genuine debate over such issues as abortion and same-sex marriage can occur in the classroom. Pervasive political correctness makes this impossible. It’s okay, the line is, to have your private religious view, but you can’t impose it on others; arguments against abortion or same-sex marriage are nothing but unscientific dogmas and religiously-inspired arbitrary animosity.



Believing students often end up having to remain “in the closet.”



On the other hand, at confessional or denominational schools the education will be apologetics in the service of defending what one knows through faith, with no time wasted admiring the power of counterarguments. Dissenting students tend to keep their reasons to themselves. Or such schools are in angry rebellion against the institutional church’s authority, and the student with orthodox beliefs is marginalized.



So where can a student’s cherished beliefs—whatever they may be—be challenged but not dismissed?



Here’s my recipe for such a privileged place: The school is located in the small-town South, where the comparatively conservative and religious character of the students balances the liberal biases of the faculty. The school has a religious background but is nondenominational— in fact, it doesn’t teach much religion at all.



The faculty is hired according to the standards of the various disciplines, but will—via the self-selection that comes by choosing the southern sticks—be slightly more conservative and religious than American professors generally. The faculty, however, will generally see themselves as more enlightened than their believing students.



This balance circumvents denominational enthusiasm and edginess, and keeps the content of religion from being an endless source of curricular dispute. Truth of religion is considered in the classroom—no law prohibits it—but professors approach discussion in a variety of contradictory ways without fear of dismissal.



Our model school, nonetheless, considers the religious lives of students a positive good and encourages diverse forms of religious expression through student-run organizations. Student religious life is vibrant and seriously observant, amidst plenty of open doubt and dissent.

REQUIRE COURSE IN LOGIC

George Leef, Director of Research, John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy

Read over the promotional materials from almost any American college or university these days and you’ll find an assurance that students who go there will learn “critical thinking skills.” Rarely is that elaborated upon. Students and parents are supposed to believe that simply because the school offers lots of courses where the professors are critical of Western civilization and capitalism “critical thinking” is being taught. This is rarely the case. If colleges were serious about critical thinking—and they ought to be—they would require students to take a course in logic. A logic course teaches students to distinguish between valid arguments and invalid arguments, a capability that will serve them well throughout their lives, as citizens, as consumers, as parents. Other people are constantly trying to persuade you to accept their beliefs, buy their products or services, vote for their candidates, and so on. Students who have learned logic are able to distinguish flawed arguments. Teaching students logic should be at the top of every school’s academic priorities.

HOLD SCHOOLS ACCOUNTABLE VIA THE COLLEGIATE LEARNING ASSESSMENT

Thomas Lindsay, Director, Center for Higher Education, Texas Public Policy Foundation

To date, roughly five hundred universities have administered the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) to their students. The CLA is a standardized test that measures how much students increase in general collegiate skills during their time in college. The growth in its use is a welcome development in light of the depressing results reported in the landmark national study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. Using the CLA, Adrift surveyed students across the country. It found that 45 percent failed to show “any significant improvement” in “critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills” after two years in college. After four years, 36 percent of students continued to show small or empirically nonexistent gains in learning.

CREATE A WESTERN CIVILIZATION INTERDISCIPLINARY PROGRAM

Herbert London, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute; Founder, Gallatin School, New York University

I recommend the creation of an interdisciplinary study program for the first two years of the college curriculum that starts with the epics in Jerusalem and Athens and ends with the contributions of the West. This might be described as the Western civilization program in which students are obliged to read such diverse books as the Bible, The Iliad, Shakespeare’s plays, Newton’s view of physics, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Federalist Papers, Aristotle’s Politics, Plato’s Republic, etc.



Instruction would be based on finding thematic linkages, i.e., the expression of passion, the government and the individual, explaining human behavior, the pros and cons of democracy. Rather than narrow disciplinary pursuits, such a program would give genuine texture to a curriculum most students observe as a hodgepodge of faculty preferences dereliction.

WALK THE STACKS

Christopher Long, President, Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Too many undergraduates today miss out on the serendipity that comes from pulling an unsought book from the library shelf. In an age of Google, JSTOR, and Wikipedia students quickly cut-and-paste their way to the finish line of an assignment without experiencing the joy and wonder of the intellectual journey—and they learn little along the way to boot! As Mark Bauerlein points out in The Dumbest Generation, there is a big difference between quickly pulling up Google’s digitally scanned Mark Twain obituary from the New York Times as opposed to going to the library and perusing the several pages of accompanying testimonies and related articles on microfiche.



The problem today is that students often lack context, self-discipline, and a guiding principle to help them navigate the vast sea of information into which they have been dropped. Thanks to the Internet, they have easy access to almost everything ever written. Their time is more often than not consumed not by great books but by mundane tweets. Professors should demand that students leave their smart phones in their dorm rooms and spend time wandering unplugged through the library’s stacks, open to the books’ sirenic call. Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book and James V. Schall’s A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning—available from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute—could be assigned to help rekindle a student’s intellectual curiosity and thirst for truth.

TEACH THE HABIT OF DEBATE

Greg Lukianoff, President, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

While researching the modern college campus for my book, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate (Encounter, 2012), even I was surprised by how deeply speech codes and the groupthink they help create—and the administrative bloat that promotes both—run in the modern academy. There is no easy solution to this problem, but teaching students to seek out those with differing views for rational debate on important topics would foster their intellectual development.



This simple practice is essential to overcoming “confirmation bias” and parochialism. The modern academy teaches students through word and, more powerfully, through example, the exact opposite of independent thought. Students and professors report that it is not “safe” to “hold unpopular views on campus,” and research indicates that a strong relationship exists between one’s level of education and the number of dissenting viewpoints encountered: Those with the least education talk to the greatest number of people with whom they disagree, while those with the highest level of education talk to the lowest.



An academy that takes its intellectual obligations seriously would strive to reverse this trend. Educated people should see it as a duty to poke their heads outside their echo chambers and cultivate the habits of a curious, skeptical mind. Instead, our campuses create consequences for having divergent or irreverent opinions, legitimize cheap tactics for getting out of meaningful debates, and create awkward and unproductive energy around issues that should be freely discussed.



If we could succeed in teaching students the value of actively pursuing intelligent debate with thinkers who do not share their current views, we might begin to reverse the calcification of ideas on campus, and even elevate the tedious national discourse to which we have all become accustomed.

TEACH VIVID WRITING

John Maguire, Author, Newsweek College Writing Guide

Colleges need to get real about writing courses and deal with the elephant under the carpet—gross student impoverishment in reading experience. In the state university where I teach, many first-year writing course students admit that they read exactly four books in high school: the one assigned each year. “Was I supposed to read more?” they ask. “They didn’t ask me to.”



How can you teach students to write when they have basically never read? They have terrible ears for good prose and that’s the source of the terrible writing that is so hard to correct. These students don’t even know what verbs and nouns are. As a friend recently observed: “These kids are being asked to create architecture when they don’t even know how to hold a hammer!”



Colleges must stop pretending that freshmen who cannot hold a hammer—that is, understand verbs and nouns—can design essays. We need to teach them a radical and simple appreciation of the sentence, the active verb, the named object, the capital, and the period. The first half of a freshman composition course can and should concentrate on just one thing: the style of vividness: fairly short sentences with concrete objects and active verbs.

Direct instruction on the necessity of writing short vivid sentences with active verbs will overcome the bad ears these kids have—because they didn’t read.

TAKE CHARGE OF STUDENT ORIENTATION

Robert Maranto, 21st Century Chair in Leadership, Department of Education Reform, University of Arkansas

Students are never as pliable as in the months before starting college and in their first year, making this a unique time to shape their mindsets. Yet with their usual inattention to undergraduates, faculty leave orientation to student affairs administrators, who emphasize recreation, vocation, and victimization—not learning.



Faculty must take over student orientation, using it to teach students that they are lucky to attend college and that their attendance is being subsidized by others, that integrity matters, that the life of the mind is vital, that with hard work they will grow smarter while with little work they will flunk out or emerge after four years none the better. Use orientation to ground students in their school’s history and traditions and to connect them to something larger than themselves.



Student orientation cannot work without follow-through, so our best rather than our worst faculty must teach first-year courses, which must have high standards and set demanding expectations for the years ahead. Since undergraduates constantly turn over, it would take only four years of this regimen to re-instill the culture of learning in our colleges and universities.

SEND ADMINISTRATION AND STAFF TO SPORTING AND CULTURAL EVENTS

Wight Martindale, Jr., Retired Visiting Professor, Lehigh University; Senior Vice President, Corporate Bonds, Lehman Brothers; Journalist, Business Week

Very good books have been written about the overstaffing of administrators by college presidents who want greater control over the faculty and the university at large. That’s why these overpriced administrators are there: to support the career and political agendas of the person who hired them.



To get at least some useful mileage out of this often well-meaning but clearly superfluous group: send the administration to student sporting and cultural events. I’m including departmental secretaries, media executives, librarians, everyone on staff.



At the college where I taught perhaps five or ten girls would watch a women’s track or dual tennis meet. About the same applied to less glamorous sports like softball or rowing. Golf, who knows? So let’s get the administrators and staff who are supposed to be supporting students anyway to show up at games and concerts.



I suggest requiring a weekly minimum of three to four hours attendance at sports and cultural events throughout the academic year. Cheer. Applaud. Show students you really do recognize their efforts. Who knows, it might set a good example for the teaching faculty—they should start showing up, too.

MEMORIZE KEY AMERICAN TEXTS

Wilfred McClay, SunTrust Chair of Excellence in Humanities, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

My idea is so retrograde that it is downright visionary. Require all undergraduates in American colleges and universities—irrespective of major—to memorize and publicly recite from memory certain classic American texts, in full or excerpted form, as a partial fulfillment of their general education requirement. Texts could be, for example, the Declaration of Independence, Washington’s “Farewell Address,” Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright,” Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” etc.



Why memorization? No activity has been more consistently and universally disparaged in educational circles for more than a century. Every account of American education’s development predictably praises the Progressive revolution of dynamic, child-centered, skill-oriented education as an advance over the cloddish and anti-intellectual formalism of “rote memorization.” But something important was lost in the process. True, memorization can be boring. But it also can powerfully sharpen the mind and improve retention and attentiveness. More than ever, memorization can serve as a counter to the increasingly short, distractible attention spans of today’s media-smothered youth and the institutionalized forgetfulness of a culture increasingly dominated by pixels and screens.



When students “commit to memory” a great text—and that figure of speech speaks volumes about what occurs—those students really have something. They have made the words and ideas their own. A memorized text becomes a permanent resource, a standard of reckoning, a rich fund of metaphor and allusion, and a pattern of eloquence, in the same way that Shakespeare and the King James Bible provided an intellectual and verbal treasury for the thought and diction of Lincoln.



INSTITUTE EXIT EXAM IN WRITING

Lawrence Mead, Professor of Politics and Public Policy, New York University

The great scandal of American education is that students can complete their schooling without learning to write correct prose. Even at the college level, and at good schools, most students cannot write even a page of text without committing some error of grammar, usage, or spelling. This is apart from content. The reason is that their teachers—from kindergarten all the way through—have little interest in correcting these errors. Either they themselves don’t know how to write, or it’s too much work.



Professors have no personal or professional interest in whether their students write well, so they ignore the problems and pass students along. College writing programs have little impact on the problem. But once on the job students quickly discover that the boss is their coauthor as their teacher was not, demanding that they be able to write letters or reports that he can sign without embarrassment—or be fired.



I recommend instituting a writing exam that undergraduates must pass to graduate from college, with rules for grammar and usage defined in advance. Ask students to respond to some essay question in, say, five pages, without outside help. Allow students some very small number of errors, or fail them. Have a nonprofit body—funded by all colleges and universities—that would operate separately from coursework correct and return the papers to students with errors indicated.



Allows students to take the test any number of times, but make the number of attempts to pass part of their academic record. Publicize these results by school, with the goal that they will eventually be factored into U.S. News & World Report rankings.

REQUIRE PHYSICAL LABOR

Charles Mitchell, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Commonwealth Foundation

Five words: mandatory physical labor, every student.



Two more: not joking.

LIMIT A AND B GRADES

Charles Murray, W.H. Brady Scholar, American Enterprise Institute

Pass a federal law that no teacher in a college or university that receives federal funds shall be allowed to award an A to more than 7 percent of the students in any course, and a B to more than an additional 18 percent.

EVALUATE BIAS

Alex Myrick, President, Washington Association of Scholars; Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker

College students have been complaining for years about ideologically biased professors. Frequently, examples of bias are so blatant that they make the news. Students wanting to make informed choices should not have to rely on word-of-mouth, and faculty accountability should not have to wait for egregious offenses.



The infrastructure for addressing this chronic and serious problem already exists in the form of student evaluations submitted for each course at the end of the quarter or semester. These evaluations typically contain a score or more of specific items and are completed anonymously and sent to an academic dean or department head through a student volunteer.



To student evaluations, I suggest including two questions that could easily be adapted to the Likert scale for frequency, likelihood, or agreement, e.g., very frequently to never, almost always true to almost never true, or strongly agree to strongly disagree:

1. The instructor assigned balanced reading and presented unbiased instruction.

2. The instructor provided authoritative sources/references for course content.



Classes taught by tenured professors would not be exempted. The results could be compiled and forwarded, not just to department heads, but to the trustees as well. NAS or another respected organization could publish the results by college and department for use by prospective students and parents in choosing a college.



Percentage of applicants accepted, SAT midrange scores, freshman retention rates, graduation rates, enrollment numbers, average class sizes, and student-faculty ratios for most colleges are widely available from a number of sources. Isn’t freedom from ideological bias at least as important?

ALLOW STUDENTS TO PURSUE OBSESSIONS

Cary Nelson, Jubilee Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; President, AAUP, 2006–2012

Learn to be obsessed. That, in a phrase, is my advice to students at all levels. It is how you learn to learn. It is how you learn. It is how you become driven to absorb vast amounts of information on a topic that fascinates you, including all relevant facts, and how you will be led, eventually, to say something of your own—perhaps something dramatically original—on the topic.



My whole career—beginning with high school—was about being obsessed. I wrote thirty-five- to fifty-page typed papers on William Faulkner and Franz Kaka in high school. Back then we were allowed three spelling errors. If we had a fourth, we flunked. That added a dash (at least) of discipline to the paper writing exercise.



During four undergraduate and three graduate years I took a total of two final exams. That’s all. I wrote papers. I became obsessed with topics fundamental and arcane. As an undergraduate at Antioch College they let me get a whole semester’s credit for studying one poet—Rainer Maria Rilke. Not exactly bad preparation for being a poetry specialist for the next fifty years. Another semester I followed an intense curiosity about Medieval and Renaissance alchemy. I read about nothing else for twelve weeks.



As a teacher, my job is to attend to my students’ interests and obsessions and help them to gain focus and practical form. If they follow their hearts—with some careful advice—they will become voracious readers, learners, and producers. Discipline and dedication will come from within. They will love what they do. They will become lifelong self-educators. Anything less leads to a curtailed education and diminished humanity. I haven’t given a final exam in decades, but many of my former students are now distinguished scholars with international reputations.



Of course I do not always succeed. Tragedy strikes some. Some are determined to settle for lesser ambitions. But I know what focused research can do for those minds willing to undertake it. That, for me, is what education is all about.

REQUIRE SCHOOLS TO POST COLLEGE REPORT CARDS

Marty Nemko, Member, Western Association of Schools and Colleges Commission to Improve Higher Education’s Transparency and Accountability, www.martynemko.com

No purchase is made with less informed consent than a college education.



If I were Education Potentate, I’d tell schools, We require every home, drug, packaged food, etc., to provide disclosures. If you want federal financial aid, your homepage must include a College Report Card listing the following information, for your institution and your three top overlap institutions:



• your true four-year graduation rate (no exclusion of athletes, legacies, minorities, etc.)

• the average freshman-to-senior growth on a specified standardized test of writing, critical thinking, oral communication, quantitative skills, and information literacy

• the full projected four-, five-, and six-year cost of attendance, subtracting cash financial aid

• the percentage of graduates who, twelve months after graduation, are in graduate school or employed in a job requiring a college degree, with results broken down by major

• the results of the most recent student or alumni satisfaction survey rating academic, nonacademic, and overall experience on a four-point scale from “poor” to “excellent”

• the most recent accreditation visiting team report and association action

Mandating a college report card would empower prospective students to choose a college more wisely, and even more important, reveal what’s behind the ivy. Deficient colleges might finally be embarrassed into reallocating resources from shrubs, sports, showcase buildings, sterile research, and porcine administrations to investments more likely to transform students into excellent thinkers, professionals, and citizens.

SAFEGUARD THE PURSUIT OF TRUTH

Kevin Nestor, Trustee, The Ohio State University at Mansfield, 2001–2010

The single most important thing—and the single most difficult—that university trustees, administrators, and faculty members must do to reform higher education is to create a university culture that values and protects the free pursuit and dissemination of knowledge in search of truth above all else. The principles and practices that create such a culture must be given priority over all others in all aspects of the operations of our public campuses. No ideology, no concern for personal or political sensitivity, and no political perspective should ever be allowed to trump them. It is this approach alone that fully accords with the animating principles behind our First Amendment, articulated so well by Thomas Jefferson when he said, “Error of opinion may be tolerated when reason is left free to combat it,” and “It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”

BASE ADMISSIONS ON MERIT

Russell Nieli, Lecturer, Princeton University

Having attended four high-end universities (Duke, Columbia, Princeton, Yale), and served on the part-time faculty at Princeton for over twenty years, I feel best qualified to comment on America’s elite educational institutions. In my judgment, the greatest scandal of these institutions lies in their eagerness to compromise academic standards for two large groups of yearly admits: recruited athletes and “underrepresented minority students” (mainly blacks and Latinos). One’s ability to slap around a hockey puck or contribute to racial “diversity” on campus are hardly valid reasons for severely compromising academic standards. (Legacy admits are a third problem, but in my experience administrators are usually unwilling to reach down nearly as far to accommodate the typical alumni child.) The only solution I can see, making no claim for its political feasibility, is to have at least half of those on the admissions committee consist of tenured faculty members, preferably those drawn from the hard sciences (the most meritocratic contingent of most university faculties). Neither athletes nor “underrepresented minorities” —nor the children of alumni, faculty members, politicians, famous people, or wealthy donors—should enjoy any substantial preferences over better qualified applicants.



Utopian? Yes. But we do have one working model. It’s called the California Institute of Technology, and, despite its diminutive size, in one respected international comparison it was rated number two among world-class universities (behind only Harvard). It must be doing something right. Caltech’s secret? Extensive faculty input in the admissions process and an admissions philosophy that implements a simple rule: ignore entirely athletic recruitment, racial balancing, legacy preferences, and the like and focus exclusively on opening your institution’s facilities only to the best, the brightest, and the most eager to learn.

ASK TRUSTEES TO REVIEW THE CURRICULUM

B. Nelson Ong, Associate Professor of Political Science, College of New Rochelle; Secretary, National Association of Scholars

Trustees should examine whether a liberal arts education is being provided in such a way that students can learn what is best in our Western cultural heritage as well as the tensions and competing values in that tradition.

They should not rely on administration reports but interview faculty and do due diligence by reading the reports from NAS and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni to see what the issues are regarding core curriculum and intellectual diversity in higher education so that they will know what to look for in their particular universities and colleges.

REEVALUATE WRITING INSTRUCTORS’ SKILLS

Robert Paquette, Professor of History, Hamilton College

In fall 2011, the Alexander Hamilton Institute kicked-off an entrepreneurship initiative aimed at undergraduates by inviting the CEO of a major family-owned business to speak on the meaning of entrepreneurship. During the question-and-answer period, a young man asked the CEO—Hamilton College, class of 1954—what courses he thought proved most important in making him a successful entrepreneur. Without hesitation he responded: “Composition and accounting.” A trenchant silence greeted the answer.



The CEO turned to me and asked, “They still teach composition, don’t they?”



“Well, no.”



“But doesn’t the home page of the Hamilton College website proclaim the college “A national leader in teaching students to write effectively, learn from each other and think for themselves”?



“Well, yes, but no quantitative data exists to support that pronouncement, which comes from the college’s public relations arm, not its writing center.”



“Doesn’t Hamilton’s English department require entry-level courses in composition?”



“Well no. It doesn’t even require a course in Shakespeare for English majors.”



“Well, doesn’t the college require writing-intensive courses?”



“Yes, but the existence of a writing-intensive course does not necessarily mean a course in which the student’s writing is graded intensively. Many if not most faculty regard grading papers as an obligation perhaps only preferable to having a colonoscopy. English departments especially at allegedly elite colleges and universities have punted composition courses to lowly adjuncts and graduate students, or something called ‘writing across the curriculum.’ Many of those who teach such courses, however, can hardly be called polished stylists.”



Here are my suggestions for improving our student’s writing skills: Reinstitute composition courses in elite colleges where necessary. Read an undergraduate’s graded paper in English 101 to see how thoroughly it has been evaluated. Research whether the writing instructors are English professors who hold intensive conferences, one-on-one with students.

PROMOTE FACULTY TIME AT THINK TANKS

Mitch Pearlstein, Founder and President, Center of the American Experiment

Here’s a sampling of very good books that have shaped some of my own writing over the years. Other than broad themes of povert