It’s no secret that our universities have become hotbeds of radical leftist thought. While professors and administrators pay lip-service to concepts like open-mindedness and robust debate, they try to squash any opinion that doesn’t match their radical left world view. World-renowned campus activist David Horowitz wants to bring diversity back to the college campus. Horowitz describes his decades-long campaign against intellectual bigotry, grade discrimination, and the denial of basic rights to any and all whose opinions diverge from the extreme liberal orthodoxy.

For far too long our colleges and universities have been allowed to ignore their chartered responsibilities to educate rather than indoctrinate. Instead of providing a forum for the free exchange of ideas, they intimidate students into ideological submission to leftist professors; rather than pursuing meaningful research, they proselytize for radical causes. Here, author David Horowitz tells the story of his ongoing campaign for an Academic Bill of Rights to protect students who refuse to conform to radical orthodoxies. Horowitz means to recall higher education to its better self, to become--as it once was--a place where students and teachers were not afraid to question opinions, create their own, and engage in Socratic dialogue.--From publisher description.

Political correctness if one of the primary enemies of freedom of thought in higher education today, undermining our ability to acquire, transmit, and process knowledge. Political correctness limits the variation of ideas by an ideologically driven concern for hue rather than view. This volume is not simply another rant; there are good data here, along with well-crafted, hard-to-ignore logical interpretations and arguments. It is the sort of work that those who adhere to idea-limiting notions of the university will try to trivialize. That alone should make it important reading. --Michael Schwartz, president emeritus, Kent State University and Cleveland State University

A provocative report on the state of American higher education discusses the consequences of decades of neglect and covers such recommendations as discontinuing tenure, refocusing on education over research, and tapping new technologies.

In the United States, 1,200 community colleges enroll over ten million students each year—nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates. Yet fewer than 40 percent of entrants complete an undergraduate degree within six years. This fact has put pressure on community colleges to improve academic outcomes for their students. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is a concise, evidence-based guide for educational leaders whose institutions typically receive short shrift in academic and policy discussions. It makes a compelling case that two-year colleges can substantially increase their rates of student success, if they are willing to rethink the ways in which they organize programs of study, support services, and instruction. Community colleges were originally designed to expand college enrollments at low cost, not to maximize completion of high-quality programs of study. The result was a cafeteria-style model in which students pick courses from a bewildering array of choices, with little guidance. The authors urge administrators and faculty to reject this traditional model in favor of “guided pathways”—clearer, more educationally coherent programs of study that simplify students’ choices without limiting their options and that enable them to complete credentials and advance to further education and the labor market more quickly and at less cost. Distilling a wealth of data amassed from the Community College Research Center (Teachers College, Columbia University), Redesigning America’s Community Colleges offers a fundamental redesign of the way two-year colleges operate, stressing the integration of services and instruction into more clearly structured programs of study that support every student’s goals.

From a nationally recognized expert, a fresh and original argument for bettering affirmative action Race-based affirmative action had been declining as a factor in university admissions even before the recent spate of related cases arrived at the Supreme Court. Since Ward Connerly kickstarted a state-by-state political mobilization against affirmative action in the mid-1990s, the percentage of four-year public colleges that consider racial or ethnic status in admissions has fallen from 60 percent to 35 percent. Only 45 percent of private colleges still explicitly consider race, with elite schools more likely to do so, although they too have retreated. For law professor and civil rights activist Sheryll Cashin, this isn’t entirely bad news, because as she argues, affirmative action as currently practiced does little to help disadvantaged people. The truly disadvantaged—black and brown children trapped in high-poverty environs—are not getting the quality schooling they need in part because backlash and wedge politics undermine any possibility for common-sense public policies. Using place instead of race in diversity programming, she writes, will better amend the structural disadvantages endured by many children of color, while enhancing the possibility that we might one day move past the racial resentment that affirmative action engenders. In Place, Not Race, Cashin reimagines affirmative action and champions place-based policies, arguing that college applicants who have thrived despite exposure to neighborhood or school poverty are deserving of special consideration. Those blessed to have come of age in poverty-free havens are not. Sixty years since the historic decision, we’re undoubtedly far from meeting the promise of Brown v. Board of Education, but Cashin offers a new framework for true inclusion for the millions of children who live separate and unequal lives. Her proposals include making standardized tests optional, replacing merit-based financial aid with need-based financial aid, and recruiting high-achieving students from overlooked places, among other steps that encourage cross-racial alliances and social mobility. A call for action toward the long overdue promise of equality, Place, Not Race persuasively shows how the social costs of racial preferences actually outweigh any of the marginal benefits when effective race-neutral alternatives are available.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram is assistant secretary general for economic development at the United Nations and research coordinator for the G24 Intergovernmental Group on International Monetary Affairs and Development. In 2007 he was awarded the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. --Book Jacket.