This article reports on the decline in writing ability skills in secondary and higher education students. The author discusses changes that have affected student writing skills over the recent decades and offers recommendations for improving these skills, such as: implementing intensive freshman writing courses; adjusting existing course…

In this article, the author reflects on the flawed writing and composition teaching he received in his early Dartmouth University days. He reports that it took extraordinary classics professors like Don Rosenthal and Jack Zarker to turn around his work, and that these professors contributed to his eventual successful career as a college-level…

In this article, the author comments on an unsigned newspaper piece titled "Helping Talent Rise to the Top," printed in Canada's "Globe and Mail" about a new measure to enhance student well-being at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. The "Globe" piece lauds Queen's, a top-ranked Canadian…

This article is an exchange of ideas between Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), and Tom Klingerstein, Chairman of the Claremont Institute and NAS Board Director, on the study "What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students" (by Peter Wood and Michael Toscano). This…

On December 31, 2013, Hillsdale College--a small liberal arts college in rural south-central Michigan--will no longer be authorized to recommend students to the state of Michigan for teacher certification. Hillsdale's over a century-and-a-half tradition of preparing teachers for public schools will, sadly, come to an end. Hillsdale will lose the…

In this essay, the author discusses how affirmative action contributed to an unnatural rise in enrollments in college. In considering the higher education bubble, he makes the case that as the opposition to preferences continues to build, the momentum of this trend will only increase as funding shrinks. He offers some tentative answers to a series…

Frequently overlooked in the discussion of whether there is or is not a higher education bubble are community colleges--despite the fact that this sector within public higher education represents 43 percent of first-time freshman and 44 percent of all undergraduates. For the most part, the "bubble" discussion has focused on whether the cost of…

One of the major problems from which students suffer has to do with reading: reading with diligence, understanding, and, ideally, with the pleasure that attends discovery. Many students have long been hermeneutical-readers-of-a-sort. The problem has deep roots in a widely diffused media and technocyber environment that thins down and disperses the…

Student protests and occupations are not new phenomena. On February 10, 1355, what came to be known as the St. Scholastica Day riot occurred. Oxford students and townspeople clashed after a dispute in a local tavern and almost one hundred people were killed. But while student protests have occurred throughout history, the 1960s introduced a new…

Religious practice dramatically decreases in college and students' positions on hot-button religious/cultural questions move appreciably to the left. There's no doubt that college students are on a quest for meaning. In this article, the author reports on new data that reveals unequivocally the decline of religious practice among college students.…

Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science George Lakoff is among the handful of current faculty members in the United States to have successfully recast himself as a significant figure in national politics. Though his views place rather far on the progressive left, he has, unlike some other scholar-activists, focused most of his…

Diversity is said to bring about a host of educational benefits, yet on campus or off, things aren't working out the way diversity experts planned. In this article, the author reviews recent research challenging the "contact hypothesis," which asserts that putting individuals of disparate cultural backgrounds in the classroom and other social…

Military history faces a dire fate. Fewer and fewer colleges and universities today regard the historical study of military institutions and practices a worthy social, and therefore scholarly, charge. John Lynn enters this debate, examining the state of military history, which he defines in terms of three genres: popular, applied, and academic.…

"Service-learning" has been adopted by many colleges and universities as a way of instilling in students an ethic of community service. Its advocates typically distinguish it from simple volunteering, which lacks an academic component, and from internships, in which students acquire practical skills. The author argues that the rationales for…

Outside work can complement what goes on in the classroom in ways that benefit both the community and students. Of course, AQ readers may have heard of tendentious programs and faculty ideologues, who channel student enthusiasm into partisan activism. Still, statistical survey analysis presented here by Mary Prentice suggests that participation in…