Higher Education

Observers on the right and left have, for different reasons, long lamented that Comedy Central has become the main source of news for young people. But one group thinks the phenomenon is just fine. The academic left considers comedian Stephen Colbert an object of serious and perhaps even obsessive study.  The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi wrote an excellent piece on July 9, examining the…

Pity the poor Harvard Crimson. When reporting from that bastion of political correctness, Harvard, it is quite easy to inadvertently wander onto the dangerous shoals of thought crimes. Such was the case when the Crimson used a (GASP!) gendered pronoun to describe a new member of the Harvard faculty and was subsequently forced to issue a correction for their heinous misdeed: CORRECTION: July…

Wednesday's Today show on NBC ran a four and a half minute piece profiling Saratoga Springs, Utah, Mayor, and congressional candidate Mia Love, who has a very good chance of being the first black female Republican elected to Congress. MSNBC's Daily Rundown show on Tuesday ran a similar report on the Utah Republican. On the July 4 Today, guest co-anchor Willie Geist introduced the report:

From the headlines to the verbiage in many establishment press write-ups, it would be easy to believe that the just-resolved controversy over interest rates on student loans affects virtually everyone in college who has borrowed money and anyone who graduated (or didn't) who borrowed and is still owes Uncle Sam. That isn't so. To cite just one example, readers of Christine Armario's Saturday…

The Tweet watchers at Michelle Malkin's Twitchy.com caught an Associated Press reporter seeking out (perhaps the term should be "solicitweeting," with "solicitweetion" as the related noun) negative comments about Mitch Daniels on Twitter earlier today from Purdue alumni and students about the appointment announced today of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels to become that school's next president…

At the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, Jesse Washington's Friday evening coverage ("Who's an American Indian? Warren case stirs query") of the nuances involved in claiming Native American Indian heritage -- or ancestry, or biology, or allegiance, or identity, or identification, or membership (and I've probably missed a couple) -- occasioned by Democratic Senate candidate…

Some passages in Barack Obama's commencement address Monday at Barnard College on Broadway didn't make the media quote machine -- especially the ones whacking the media, and the comparative stupidity of men. Now that's a way to build a gender gap. The "founding mothers" were smarter than the Founding Fathers, he quipped. CNSNews.com reported the media slam -- which is an odd way to treat your…

On Tuesday's All Things Considered, NPR's Claudio Sanchez spotlighted the efforts of college students who, with the assistance of the "liberal Center for American Progress," are lobbying Congress for an extension of low interest rates on their Stafford loans. While Sanchez did find a critic of the politicization of the loan issue, he came from another left-leaning organization, the Brookings…

College professors are always assigning grades to their students but what would happen if the subjects they teach were graded in terms of income-earning potential? Thanks to the Chronicle of Higher Education, we can now see what the average lifetime earning potential is for different majors. It probably comes as no surprise that majors like "community organizing" or counseling psychology make…

For the umpteenth time, news unfavorable or embarrassing to the left comes from the UK instead of the USA. In this instance, it was an unbylined item in Saturday's Daily Mail. For years, Oregon University Sociology and environmental studies professor Kari Norgaard has been spewing forth bigoted characterizations of anyone who dares not surrender to the gospel of global warming. But her…

He may have phrased it inartfully but Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is on to something when he talks about how college isn't the panacea that the media is always touting it as. While college can be useful for getting a job in fields which require professional certification, in many cases, students are being sold a bill of goods by universities who care more about making money…

What does the New York Times have against Texas A&M, a rare public university whose student body leans right? Manny Fernandez reported Saturday from the campus in College Station, on an illegal immigrant who lost his bid for student body president: "Vying for Campus President, Illegal Immigrant Gets a Gamut of Responses." Who was to blame? A conservative student body who made him feel…

This probably won't surprise anyone, but it should be noted for the record: As of 3:45 p.m. today, almost 72 hours after the related story broke, the Associated Press has not reported on new revelations about the clear influence radical, racist professor Derrick Bell had on now-President Barack Obama 20 years ago -- so influential that Obama "routinely assigned works by Bell as required reading…

In an interview with Newt Gingrich on Tuesday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer hoped to get the former speaker to denounce recent comments by Rick Santorum about higher education: "Santorum said, 'President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college, what a snob.' As a former college professor, how did you feel about that exchange?" Despite Lauer's attempt to appeal to his…