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Take a look at College Freedom, a blog from John K. Wilson, the author of Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and its Enemies and The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education.
A new survey of nearly four hundred private colleges and universities showed that more than two thirds were “greatly concerned” about enrollment figures for next fall, the New York Times reports.
Across the country, most private institutions are seeing declines in applications relative to last year, though final figures are not yet available. Experts attribute the drop-off to the current financial crisis, among other factors.
Elite privates seem to be immune to the application decline, though they are seeing more requests for financial aid. Administrators at large, mid-ranked schools say they can weather a dip by admitting a slightly higher percentage of applicants.
Even a small decline in enrollment can have a major effect on a college dependent on tuition for its funding, however. At Beloit College in Wisconsin, which has a student body of 1,300 and brings in three-quarters of its revenue from tuition, a decline in the entering class of just 36 students led administrators to announce that they would be reducing about forty staff positions.
The Recording Industry Association of America has announced that it is abandoning its legal strategy of bringing large-scale lawsuits against students and others who download music from the internet.
The RIAA has been bringing such suits for more than five years, often targeting students who used college networks for file-sharing. According to one expert quoted in the Chronicle article, such suits sometimes forced students to drop out of college.
Steven L. Worona, the director of policy and networking programs at the education-policy group Educause, said the move demonstrated that the RIAA understands that “their sue-the-customer, scorched-earth business model has not worked.”
Students at NYC’s New School have ended a 30-hour sit-in at a campus dining hall, after winning concessions from university president Bob Kerrey.
The students had initially demanded Mr. Kerrey’s resignation, but after internal discussions they replaced that demand with four others: student participation in the selection of a new provost, establishment of a new campus committee on socially responsible investment, changes in use of space in university buildings, and amnesty for all student protesters.
The protest ended at 3:30 this morning, an hour after the students got word that Kerrey had accepted their demands.
Saturday Update: I’ve posted a roundup of resources and information on the New School protests.
About a week ago, this story made the rounds.
A professor at the University of Michigan answered an ad on craigslist for sexual services placed by a woman who turned out to be a U of M law student. In the course of the encounter that followed, he hit her with a belt and slapped her face. She went to the cops, he claimed it was all consensual. The cops refused to charge him with assault, instead charging them both with misdemeanor offenses relating to the transaction itself, and one local (non-campus) cop made an extremely offensive public comment ridiculing the woman who had been beaten for going to the police.
I didn’t post about the story at the time because I didn’t have much of an angle on it, and because it’s often hard to know what to make of a crime story when it first breaks. It wasn’t clear what action the university was taking, or planning to take, for instance.
But now the law student has spoken out, and her statement is very much worth reading. Here it is.
studentactivism.net 
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