Neo-Segregation in American Higher Education

Spurred by the decision in Brown v. Board of Education and a growing Civil Rights Movement, colleges and universities led a good-faith effort to achieve racial integration. Today, that ideal on campus is dead. Universities promote the benefits of diversity while actively constructing ethnic enclaves, promoting racial resentment, and founding organizational structures based on group grievance.

What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class?

Hundreds of American colleges and universities assign a summer reading to entering freshmen—usually one book, which is often un-academic and politically progressive. This year, Beach Books provides eleven years of data about common reading programs, from 2007 to 2017, and makes detailed suggestions for administrative reforms. Our study of common readings provides data on 732 colleges, 1,664 individual texts, and 4,754 assignments.

Causes, Consequences, and the Road to Reform

A reproducibility crisis afflicts a wide range of scientific and social-scientific disciplines, from epidemiology to social psychology. Many supposedly scientific results cannot be reproduced, because of improper use of statistics, arbitrary research techniques, lack of accountability, political groupthink, and a scientific culture biased toward producing positive results. The report includes a series of policy recommendations, scientific and political, for alleviating the reproducibility crisis

103 Years of Debate

A resource for anyone interested in the issue of academic freedom on college campuses in America. Charting compares fourteen published statements on academic freedom in twenty-five categories. We hope it will be helpful to scholars interested in how the debate has shifted in the 100+ years following the American Association of University Professors’ foundational 1915 Statement of Principles and legislators, jurists, all participants in the current debates, and members of the general public.

Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education

Since 2004, the Chinese government has planted Confucius Institutes that offer Chinese language and culture courses at colleges and universities around the world—including more than 100 in the United States. These Institutes avoid Chinese political history and human rights abuses, portray Taiwan and Tibet as undisputed territories of China, and educate a generation of American students to know nothing more of China than the regime’s official history. This is a study of the 12 Confucius Institutes in New York and New Jersey. It examines China’s soft power influence in American higher education and reveals new data on China’s funding, hiring, and academic freedom policies.

How American Universities Teach Civics

The “New Civics” redefines civics as progressive political activism. Rooted in the radical program of the 1960s’ New Left, the New Civics presents itself as an up-to-date version of volunteerism and good works. Though camouflaged with soft rhetoric, the New Civics, properly understood, is an effort to repurpose higher education.

A Critique of the Revised AP European History Examination

Much of the European past goes missing in the new AP European History Course and Exam Description. The College Board tells the story of European history as the triumph of secular progressivism, and shunts to the margins the continent’s centuries-long rise to political freedom and prosperity. The Disappearing Continent is the first extended examination of the College Board’s European history initiative.

In 2015, campuses across the country erupted in protests aimed at limiting the freedoms of professors and fellow students. Over time, the National Association of Scholars felt a commitment to restate the contexts of academic and intellectual freedom, including their application to a liberal arts education. The NAS published an updated edition in early 2018, to respond to the continuing infringement of liberty by university administrators.

The Illiberal Movement to Turn a Generation Against Fossil Fuels

The fossil fuel divestment movement, now on more than 1,000 American college campuses, aims at capturing a generation of college students as lifelong climate activists. This report is the first comprehensive account of how that is happening. 

Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism

To many, sustainability is just a new name for environmentalism. But the word has come to mean something much larger: an ideology that demands new limits on economic, political, and intellectual freedom as the price that must be paid to ensure the welfare of future generations. This report is the first in-depth critical examination of the sustainability movement in higher education.

How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students

Bowdoin College, the oldest in the country, has dedicated itself to the achievement of social justice and replicating the image of progressive politics in its students. This study surveys the history of Bowdoin College and tracks its progress from an institution of higher learning and truth-seeking to a bastion of leftist studies.

1964-2010

The Vanishing West traces the decline and near extinction of the Western Civilization history survey course in America’s top colleges and universities from 1964 to 2010.

The Fragmentation of the English Major since 1964

"Losing the Big Picture" uses data from 1964-1965, 1989-1990, and 1997-1998 academic catalogs of twenty-five selective liberal arts colleges to show that undergraduate English majors no longer even try to provide their students with a serious overview of the Anglo-American literary tradition, or a systematic exposure to its greatest writers and works.

1914-1993

For the greater part of the twentieth century, America's leading colleges and universities were strongly committed to providing undergraduates with a broad and rigorous exposure to major areas of knowledge. During the last thirty years this commitment largely vanished, according to a detailed study of fifty prestigious institutions.