Absolutely true, conservatives realized universal higher education was turning their children into independent thinkers and they *hated* it. Students were even protesting Democrats for not stopping the war!
They started by charging tuition for the UC’s under Reagan…
Right... with a standard curriculum that would mean that no language APs would get counted, and only 1 of 2 English APs; AP US and Euro/World would be done by 10th/11th. Potentially Bio and Chem, possibly Calc AB. Some electives (art hist, music theory) could be done early. Anyway. More data!
That's in a single year... What about over 4 years?
That's very interesting--thanks!
For instance at Penn State our honors college, often ranked in the top 1-3 in the US, has a percentage of engineering majors (last I heard, something like 50%, but that's third-hand) far higher than the rest of the institution. Why? What processes result in that configuration? Are they biased? How?
Whether this is true elsewhere I don't know. But it's an instance of a smart Dean looking into the actual processes governing the institution and finding structural bias at work. Every Dean in the US should be wondering if the same thing is happening at their institution.
In at least one case, Berkeley, the tendency of elite schools to offer, and elite students to take, more STEM APs, distorted the admissions formula in ways that turned out, once corrected, to make a huge change in enrollments and majors. That's the story behind this: ls.berkeley.edu/news/humanit...
But in any case you're right it's a small # of schools and students. But those students exert an outsized effect on the state and rhetoric of humanities enrollments, since they tend to fill the 50 or so universities where admissions rates are below 20%... it's an elite phenomenon, for good and ill.
I've looked at that data too. I had forgotten that there are now two English APs; I'm not sure what the difference is. But in terms of two APs a year, at our local public high school (in State College PA) you can do 7 STEM APs fairly easily: Bio, Calc AB, Calc BC, Stats, Physics, Chem, Comp Sci.
A real pro wears the first pair as a hat in cold weather, then rotates.
yes--that's why many of the truly "elite" high school in the US (the private big-city ones costing $50k a year or more) don't actually teach AP courses... they don't want the College Board deciding on their curriculum. Which means their students get a better education.
For people who went to HS a while ago, an A in an AP course in most public high schools now counts as a 5.0 GPA (as opposed to an A in the non-AP version, still a 4.0). Students who take more APs therefore have higher GPAs, which the formulas like. And since there are more STEM APs...
It's not just more vs. less. It's also that some of the humanities APs take 4 years of study (English, all the languages). Whereas a motivated science student can easily do 2 STEM APs per year in high school (Precal, Calc AB, Calc BC, Stats, Comp Sci, Bio, Chem, Env Science, and 4 Physics exams).
This is a crucial thread on what's going on with ADA/Canvas and higher ed by @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social . Read/share, please!
For those hereabouts scrambling to remediate course materials in order to meet the end of the month deadline for compliance with new federal ADA Title II standards, here is the endgame as I see it: 🧵
Arrgh, screwed up the pronouns, sorry, Colyer.
On the other hand I find the Colyer contributions genuinely weak-minded; he suffers from the malady of equating social language policing with actual legal policy; when he wonders if Candace Owens is the future (b/c she's pro-Palestine but anti-trans) I hear a wish speaking.
What I like about the O'N/S essay is that you can push it downward to the classroom, thinking about how teaching can model the development toward social freedom, how what we do together (in class) is not just a matter of pedagogy but an expression of ethos at small and large scales.
Also this: www.peterlang.com/document/128... ... free download and useful, partly b/c it's from philosophy/UK and so not exactly in our primary frame of discourse.
Dan, have you seen this? jacobin.com/2026/04/righ... ... it would be interesting if you could extend your thoughts into K-12 space...
Let's do this one time in good faith: Wealthy private universities in blue states should be bastions of humanistic education (including basic science), fully protected from the anti-education laws being passed in red states that afflict private and public schools alike. But instead .... /1
ICYMI earlier, I've written for the @financialtimes.com today about the boring, empty and unsuccessful 'strategies' being imposed on all our universities. If we go on like this, sooner or later we'll have 'reorganised' them all out of existence.
www.ft.com/content/5032...
This is a really important thread on the Canvas/Instructure terms of service, which were quoted in a piece @mattseybold.bsky.social and I wrote, and then were removed from the web three days after the piece was published.
So, @ehayo1on9.bsky.social & I have been receiving a wave of questions about a passage from Canvas's terms of use that we quoted in this essay from January. We did get a few questions about it then, but this surge coming months later makes me think somebody is doing some damage control.
1/
Yes, and at least part of the problem is that "method" is constructed as a series of binaries: close v. distant, surface v. symptomatic, historicist v. deconstructive, that obscure that (1) the two ends are often quite close, methodologically, or (2) that there are methods beyond the binary frame.
Right right--what might be a useful is a third word that would gather together the aspects of the "aesthetic" and of "art-making" (the latter might include "ritual" in the way the former would not, or wd only in another mode) under one umbrella and cd theorize the continuities and discontinuities.
Huh. That's very interesting. I wonder if that's a line too far for me--or if I'd be inclined to say that the aesthetic itself essentialyl gets modernized, or modernism-ized, over a century or two after 1700, and is itself an effect of modernity; it wd be connected to the pre-modern via "art".
Yeah, I don't know. But I guess the point is, if you're still buying Rao's based on the impression you had of it a few years ago, maybe do a blind taste test or two before dropping $8 on any of it...
p.s. learned this from @mattseybold.bsky.social