A small federally funded industry now devotes itself to hectoring and badgering math, engineering and the hard sciences over supposed gender bias, but the evidence to back its contentions is thin [John Tierney, New York Times] Earlier here, here, here, etc.
Posts Tagged ‘colleges and universities’
“Academic Battle Delays Publication by 3 Years”
“The paper [published this week by the American Psychological Association] is a critique of a rating scale that is widely used in criminal courts to determine whether a person is a psychopath and likely to commit acts of violence. It was accepted for publication in a psychological journal in 2007, but the inventor of the rating scale saw a draft and threatened a lawsuit if it was published, setting in motion a stultifying series of reviews, revisions and legal correspondence.” [Benedict Carey, New York Times]
Parents fight college that won’t admit 13-year-old
Lake-Sumter Community College in Leesburg, Florida is refusing to admit a home-schooled teenager because of her age: 13. “Undeterred, her parents have filed an age-discrimination complaint against the college with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.” [Martin Comas, Orlando Sentinel]
Sons not awarded summa cum laude, dad sues
A Long Island doctor is suing the University of Rochester for $200,000 over the school’s failure to award his sons summa cum laude status despite their stellar GPAs. The school says it is correcting the oversight and claims it wasn’t aware of the problem until a reporter alerted it to the lawsuit. [New York Post]
Gender gaps and asymmetry
At the University of Florida female students in the entering class now outnumber male by 3 to 2, and a spokesman matter-of-factly explains: “Girls are being admitted because they are doing the things to be admitted and boys aren’t.” Coyote accepts the statement as rational, but tries to imagine how it would have been received if all the facts were the same but the genders were reversed.
P.S. From the Manhattan Institute’s Minding the Campus, two new articles on the controversy over lesser female representation in science, technology, engineering and math: Susan Pinker, “On Women, STEM and Hidden Bias“, and John Rosenberg, “The Misguided Push for STEM Diversity.”
Harassment and sex-bias charges on campus
Tony Judt reflects on many bemused years in a history department, and commenters have their say [NY Review of Books Blog via Amy Alkon]
Andrew Giuliani’s Duke golf lawsuit dismissed
The son of the former mayor had sued over being kicked off the university’s golf team. [“Campus Notes” News & Observer blog, WSJ Law Blog; earlier coverage]
Canada’s Coulter climate
“I was hoping for a fruit basket, not a threat to prosecute,” says controversialist Ann Coulter about the menacing letter she got from the provost of the University of Ottawa. [Big Government, Popehat, Legal Blog Watch, WSJ Law Blog] Part of Coulter’s Canadian tour was subsequently called off after security officials said they could not guarantee her safety from protesters. [Moynihan/Reason “Hit and Run”] More: Mark Steyn, Binks. The somewhat attenuated nature of Canada’s rights of free speech is a topic familiar to our readers.
UT hassling Longhorn users
IP lawyers for the University of Texas are busy creatures, according to Eric Johnson:
A couple years ago, they sued an outfit making t-shirts, sold to fans of rival Texas A&M, that depicted a broken Longhorns logo with the taunt, “Saw ’em off.” (Fellow UT alum Siva Vaidhyanathan’s take is here.)
And I remember when I was going to school at UT, in the early 1990s, the university was hassling local business with “Longhorn” in their names. Since then, UT has been very aggressive about trademark issues.
Yet all this activity has not really been as much of a profit center as you might think: the cost of running the IP program, Johnson calculates, may eat up something on the order of half the $800,000 in annual royalties brought in (via Ron Coleman).
A thought on Apple’s iPad
If, as Tyler Cowen suggests, the key market objective of the iPad is to obtain significant university adoption as a replacement for the paper textbook, one wonders how Apple’s lawyers are planning to handle the inevitable litigation from disabled-rights advocates.