Although she still considers herself a liberal, veteran journalist Claudia Dreifus found out just how intolerant the Left can be when she critiqued one of their totems in the book she co-authored, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do About It.
“The three negative reviews we got were in The Nation, The New York Review of Books and The New Republic,” Dreifus remembered at a conference here in Washington, D. C. that was sponsored by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. The Pope Center is based in North Carolina.
Additionally, “The provost of Columbia wrote a 5-page article attacking me and my co-author, Andrew Hacker, on the Huffington Post,” Dreifus said in the conference at the City Club. Dreifus is an adjunct professor at Columbia.
Hacker teaches political science at Queens College. The Huffington Post recently made a large donation to Columbia.
Despite her status as an employee of the gem of the Ivy League, Dreifus is unsparing in her assessment of that exclusive club. “Let’s face it, at the undergraduate level, the Ivies suck,” she told the crowd at the City Club.
As well, Dreifus leaves no portion of academia unscathed and helps to provide insights that will not likely be gleaned from university press releases either in their original form or as regurgitated by compliant local media. “Small is not beautiful in higher education,” Dreifus said. “There are more people graduating with Ph. D.’s than there are jobs for people with Ph. D.s.”
One group of job seekers that benefit from those graduate programs are the folks who actually are employed by them. “Kennesaw State has a grad school,” Dreifus noted. “It’s not the students who want it.”
“It’s the administrators.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia [1].
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org [2]