Puts me in mind of George Leef’s recent post about the value of an Ivy League degree, the American Dream, etc., etc..

As I said here recently, whatever else you might think about “social justice,” it really seems to have the money.

As we noted recently, NAS holds no brief for genuine bullying, and we certainly won’t stand in the way if those engaged in it are dealt with appropriately.

But on the majority of college campuses, long under the heel of sensitivity training, sexual harassment enforcers and “tolerance” educators, we shudder to think what “ant-bullying”policies are in the works right now. If you read FIRE’s analysis, you’ll see that we’re right to worry.

If anything is new, though, it’s the establishment of entire programs and research centers that the IHE article describes, all devoted to imparting “social justice” in one way or another. They seem to be getting some pretty hefty support: At Michigan’s Kalamazoo College, for example, the new Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership just received a cool $23M to underwrite its efforts to change the world, complete with endowed professorships. Whatever “social justice” is, it’s certainly not poor.

Imagine what kind of Great Books program you could get going with even a quarter of that sum. Oh, well.

Both of those, as we noted, are serious matters, and genuine cases need to be treated as such. Our problem, however, was the elastic and ever-adaptable definitions of what constituted “harassment.” As KC observes, OCR’s new “guidelines” now stack an already slanted deck even more heavily against the accused. For all intents and purposes, it’s up to you to prove your innocence. And even if you do, well, that may not be sufficient to get you out of hot water. Read his account of the experience of Yale quarterback Patrick Witt if you want exhibit A for this week.

Unfortunately, the New York Times, unchastened by its deplorable handling of the Duke lacrosse case, seems more than eager to run with the ball for the Sexual Harassment Industry, no questions asked. If someone’s accused – especially an athlete – he must be guilty. Doesn’t sound much like investigative reporting, does it?

Believe me, I’ve learned not to ask if things can get any worse where this stuff is concerned.

Apparently, a D of Ed statistical study was conducted to examine the impact of race as a factor in student loan default rate, and results were published accordingly. One small problem emerged inadvertantly last December however when, as part of the discovery process in litigation involving the department, it turned out that the study had omitted any data with regard to black students.

Now, let’s note slowly, carefully and specifically what happened here: 1) the US Department of Education conducted a survey in which it sought to demonstrate the impact of race on repayment rates of student loans and 2) it reached its conclusions without including any figures about black students in the analysis. I think I’ve got it right.

One of the commenters noted that a private business enterprise might well face criminal charges for work like this, while several others suggested that the missing data were deliberately excluded because the results would have been politically inconvenient.

At the very least, the episode doesn’t leave you brimming with confidence about the D of Ed’s capacity to produce reliable and accurate quantitative work, especially if it’s going to figure in their rating of individual programs’ eligibility for student loans.

Looks as if Secretary Duncan had better mandate some crash remediation in statistical analysis for his data crunchers, eh?

Well, get ready, because as CEI’s Hans Bader argues here, there’s a whole host of eager anti-bullying enforcers who haven’t yet found any limits to “bullying,” and they aim to protect us from a purported epidemic that’s sweeping the country.

Most of what Bader describes comes from the K-12 context, although even there, he indicates that some major concerns have arisen with respect to freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

But you just know that it can’t be very long before the anti-bullying bullies show up on college campuses already awash in sensitivity training, speech and harassment codes, kangaroo-court judicial procedures, anonymous accusations and knee-jerk administrations eager to jump in head first. You can easily imagine how the “anti-bullying” surge is likely to play out in this environment.

Although this decision is not directly concerned with academic matters, it’s obviously of interest to us in light of another Texas case, Fisher v. Texas, for which we’ve signed onto an amicus brief petitioning the SC to reverse a lower court’s upholding the use of race-based admissions in the University of Texas. To date, the SC has not granted certiorari, and you can’t assume that because the court issued this decision today, it will follow suit and accept the Fisher appeal tomorrow.

Still, we’re moderately hopeful that the court will do so, and reverse or at least trim back its unfortunate ruling in the 2003 Grutter case, which was not a good day for opponents of racial preferences.

In this piece, Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute describes how trendy ideologies, such as feminism, “critical legal studies” or globalization have displaced traditional legal subjects such as property or torts, leaving law school graduates unprepared for their bar exams and actual legal practice.

Over at Minding the Campus, Charlotte Allen examines the growing controversy over allegations that law schools, even some in the top-tier, have been fudging job-placement statistics with respect to their recent graduates, many of whom end up stuck with debts of 100K or more.

As Bader has argued previously, it may be past time to think about abandoning the current iron-clad requirement that all candidates for the bar exam must first obtain a law degree. All of that steep tuition, only to find out that your “legal education” hasn’t prepared you anyway? As he concludes, there’s got to be another way, and I have to think that a lot recent law graduates would agree.

It assesses The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters, a new book by Benjamin Ginsberg also reviewed last August by Peter Wood at this site.

What catches Lindsay’s eye is the role of administrative expansion in driving up the costs of higher education, as layer upon layer of managerial types continue to proliferate, even in times of budgetary shortfalls.