Tag Archives: University

An American professor’s perspective as reported on Irwin Collier’s Economics in the Rear-View Mirror: On an October morning, some years since, a recent Vermont graduate and I entered together the Aula of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University at Berlin. Lectures were still two weeks away; but Germany is a country of leisurely beginnings and this was the morning of matriculation. The great hall was thronged with an interesting company. At a long table sat the Rector Magnificus, Harnack, the...

A paper by Peter Arcidiacono, Josh Kinsler, and Tyler Ransom offers some glimpses. The lawsuit Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard University provided an unprecedented look at how an elite school makes admissions decisions. Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs). Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC. Among admits who are African American,...

In the NZZ, Andrea Köhler qualifies the micro aggression debate on US college campuses as a “witch hunt.” Um keine Missverständnisse aufkommen zu lassen: Der allgemeine Konsens, Diskriminierung zu ahnden, ist hier nicht gemeint. Selbstverständlich gilt es, traumatisierte Menschen zu unterstützen und Minoritäten zu schützen; letzteres hat das Attentat von Orlando einmal mehr deutlich gemacht. Doch die Hypersensibilität an den Universitäten unterminiert jede Form des intellektuellen...