Higher Education

On Sunday’s "60 Minutes," anchor Morley Safer did a segment on Demark being ranked the happiest country in world consistently for the past three decades and wondered: "What makes a Dane so happy? And why isn't he wallowing in misery and self doubt like so many of the rest of us?" Later in the segment, Safer discovered that low expectations of the Danish people was the key to their happiness and…

Not that we need any more proof that our colleges and universities have degraded to near foolishness, but the Daily Collegian, a paper that bills itself as "New England's largest college daily," gives us one more reason to assume it is true. The paper, published at the University of Massachusetts, gives us an uninformed screed against Ronald Reagan that is a mere exercise in name calling as…

The New York Times wants you to know that legislators in Arizona are mean to illegal immigrants trying to go to the state's schools on the cheap. The Times wants you to imagine that Arizona's new anti-illegal laws are oppressing those poor, illegal immigrant students that come into Arizona expecting to get all sorts of loans and financial breaks just because... well, just because they happen to…

Is the maker of “Indoctrinate U“ being sued by “a major taxpayer-funded university?” A November 12 message at filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney's personal site Brain-Terminal.com states just that: Due to a threatened lawsuit from a major taxpayer-funded university, the Indoctrinate U homepage has been taken down temporarily. On The Fence Films LLC is deciding how best to proceed, and we will not be…

On Monday, NewsBusters reported the ironic occurrence of a Missouri newspaper firing a former journalism professor for plagiarism. At the time, I wrote, "I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry."Well, new information suggests the latter, as the piece which started the brouhaha, a November 3 column by professor emeritus John Merrill, was critical of a new department for women's and gender studies at…

Thanks to changes being implemented by the newspaper industry's Audit Board of Circulations (ABC), it may be, as I suspected in a previous post (NewsBusters; BizzyBlog) that the 30-month analysis of newspaper print circulation drops I did last week (NewsBusters; BizzyBlog) is the last "clean" one I'll be able to do. The ABC announcement is here. Editor and Publisher's Jennifer Saba describes the…

Americans have fallen behind in science in math and can't compete globally, right? Well, not according to Vivek Wadhwa's October 26 BusinessWeek article, which the media have conveniently ignored. For years, the media warned about US students' deficient science and math skills, but a report from the Urban Institute disputed those claims (all bold mine):...math, science, and reading test scores at…

Today I'm pleased to announce a new feature: The NewsBusters Interview. These will be a series of lengthy, candid conversations we'll be conducting with prominent individuals in the media and political worlds. Recently I had the privilege of attending the premier of the "Indoctrinate U," a documentary that exposes the widespread suppression of conservative and libertarian opinions on America's…

Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama is demanding that John Tanner, head of the Justice Department's voting rights division, be fired for racially insensitive remarks:John Tanner's remarks came during an Oct. 5 panel discussion on minority voters before the National Latino Congreso in Los Angeles. Tanner addressed state laws that require photo identification for voting, saying that…

Perhaps one of the most distorted stories in recent mainstream media history, the Valerie Plame CIA leak controversy, has become even more so with Plame’s upcoming "60 Minutes" interview with CBS Anchor, Katie Couric. On Friday’s CBS "Early Show," co-host Harry Smith talked with Couric about the interview and began by describing Plame as "...beautiful, smart, a covert agent." Smith then went on…

Conveniently, the American media is largely ignoring a significant statement from a UK High Court judge who said Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” promotes “partisan political views” and the schools should treat it as such. As a result the British government was forced to rewrite their website and their “guidance” and will need to issue a warning before showing the film.As NewsBusters reported,…