What do Nasra Abukar Ali and Claudine Gay have in common? Or, for that matter, the Somali Ministry of Sports and the Harvard Corporation?
The answer is straightforward: both Ali and Gay came unprepared onto a major public stage, failed …
Harvard is a national disgrace
Three decades ago, a conversation in one of my classes at the University of Tulsa turned to the topic of Ronald Reagan. “Can you believe he called the Soviet Union an evil empire?” a student remarked with evident scorn. To …
Don’t blame SATs for American inequality
The SAT has been, for decades, a rite of passage for American high school students. The test, which pupils typically take a few times in their final two years of school, assesses their reasoning skills in maths and language, assigning …
American education’s new dark age
Some years ago, I taught a course in public writing at the Claremont colleges, the consortium of elite liberal arts institutions in Southern California. My students were juniors or seniors, mostly humanities or social science majors, almost all smart, a …