In 2005, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings convened a panel of 19 leading educators, educational bureaucrats, and corporate leaders to examine the state of postsecondary education. Members sought solutions to problems in four areas of concern: access, affordability, quality, and accountability. The commission completed a final report, with…

We are universally testing children to see if elementary schools are doing their job. So, too, in high school. Only in college is a person deemed educated merely for having collected enough hours. Open admissions, the absence of a required core, and ubiquitous indoctrination have so devalued those credit hours that today's degree reliably…

A professor of the old school invents the scenario of an avowed educational mediocrity that must defend its reputation for expecting the very least from its students and faculty. His fictional Damp State University cherishes its position on the lowest tier of "U.S. News & World Report's" rankings. Professor Reeves gives us a bitter chuckle when we…

Damp Valley U granted Jeff tenure after six years. Then, four years later, he found himself sweating through a post-tenure interrogation. The damning charges: uttering the word "foreman," involvement with a men's group, failure to note that 50 percent of cowgirls were black. Thomas Reeves enumerates the punishment meted out to his white male…

Throckmorton P. Wallow's guidance was, and still is, crucial to the success of presidents at so many of the very worst colleges. Now Thomas Reeves "discovers" the handbook, in which Wallow laid out his comprehensive strategy for instilling inferiority in faculty, reducing their drive for distinction, and keeping them at bay; for insuring straight…

It was important, in selecting a new chancellor for Damp Valley State, to find someone to preserve and cultivate the university's reputation as a fourth-rate backwater. Founder Throckmorton P. Wallow would have been pleased with the choice, by a painfully diverse and politically correct search committee, of Estralita Gonzalez, who had formerly…

The author lampoons twenty-first-century academic priorities. Using a fictional campus facing state-mandated budget reductions, the author parodies a system that retains high-salaried administrative and public relations positions, special-interest majors, athletic programs and junior/ad-hoc faculty, while relinquishing admissions staff, library…