Articles by Malcolm A. Kline

With their gift for seeing crises the rest of us cannot visualize, colleges and universities continue to believe in global warming, even while naysayers multiply outside of academia swayed merely by the lack of evidence for it

A number of years ago, former congressman John LeBoutellier wrote a book about his alma mater which he titled Harvard Hates America. The thesis is worth revisiting.

The last Republican president and his Democratic successor both graduated from schools within Harvard University and that should probably be a literal red flag.

Campus Progress is bent out of shape over the mere prospect of federal and state budget cuts in higher education programs.

Here’s a new twist on that old cliché “Those who can’t do, teach.” “Last night, former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich returned to his alma mater, Northwestern University, and to a crowd as skeptical as it was curious to hear how he would defend his legacy in a panel discussion dedicated to ethics in politics,” David Vognar reported on The Huffington Post. “The result for both Blagojevich and the audience was more talk, talk, talk.”

A Utah Republican legislator has proposed scrapping senior year of high school to save state funds.

Ooops. “What was supposed to be a school wide assembly featuring a motivational pep talk turned into an impromptu and explicit discussion on sex acts at Crosby Middle School in Texas,” the National Abstinence Education Association reports.

One wonders what would happen, just once, if lawmakers, and for that matter, presidents, of both parties, completely ignored the academics who offer them free advice. For one thing, they might contemplate the employment prospects of the students who pay dearly to follow it.

With literacy on all levels (i.e., without adjectives or with—scientific, historical, civic, etc.) on the wane, public officials everywhere scratch their heads over what to do about it while concocting schemes such as the one devised by the school board in the city Tony Bennett sings about.

While academics lecture the rest of us about diversity, all is not well in their own temples of tolerance.

The Bush Administration’s education reforms doubled education spending but not test scores or graduation rates. The Obama Administration’s proposals might make No Child Left Behind look like school choice.

Every now and then we can get some much needed clarity from academia. “Nowadays, the unemployment rate equals the number of unemployed persons divided by the total civilian labor force, which itself adds the number of people who are employed to the number of unemployed,” William F. Shughart II writes in the Spring issue of The Independent.