We won’t be operating on a regular schedule next week. We’ll return with fresh content in the new year. Enjoy your holidays, and if you lack for anything to read, take a look at several stellar pieces from recent months you may have missed. College Admissions, Let’s Not Break The Law – Ward Connerly An […]
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Harvard’s announcement, on December 10, that it was eliminating student loans, and otherwise increasing grant support for lower and middle income students, has set off a torrent of welcome news in the last nine days. Two days following, Yale declared that revisions to its student aid program were forthcoming. Soon, Swarthmore announced the elimination of […]
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It is slowly dawning on the public that fake hate crimes, like the one just perpetrated by Princeton student Francisco Nava, are quite common on college campuses. Perhaps some aspiring academic, casting about for a PhD. thesis, will try to explain why these hoaxes – mostly imaginary rapes or fake attacks on black students – […]
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Against repeated accusations of leftwing bias on campus, professors have mounted many rejoinders disputing one or another item in the indictment. They claim that the disproportion isn’t as high as reports say. Or that reports focus on small pockets (women’s studies, etc.). Or that party registration is a crude indicator. Or that conservatives are too […]
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The Alice-in-Wonderland view of Duke University received yet another boost: a committee of the board of trustees has affirmed President Richard Brodhead’s “compelling vision” for Duke and found “general support, overwhelming support, for the leadership that the president is providing.” The obvious question here is “What leadership?” Brodhead’s performance during the Duke non-rape crisis was […]
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[a speech originally given at the University of Texas] What is an appropriate curriculum for our students? What happened to the consensus on which the college curriculum once rested? Together these comprise two of the most urgent questions in contemporary American higher education. It seems to me that the criticisms of Allan Bloom’s The Closing […]
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Consider the unbelievable obtuseness of Lawrence Bacow, president of Tufts University. Bacow talks endlessly about how he and Tufts revere the principle of free speech. Last spring someone at Tufts apparently induced New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in his commencement speech, to congratulate the university for its fierce protection of free expression. Yet that […]
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John Moores is a friend of mine. When I was a member of the Board of Regents of the University of California, John was my closest ally. Occasionally, we found ourselves on different sides of specific issues, like student fees. But, more likely than not – and especially on other fundamental issues – our perspectives […]
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Recently, former University of Colorado ethnic studies professor and documented academic fraud Ward Churchill spoke to a crowd of 500 at UC Davis. Preceded by protests, Churchill delivered a talk comparing nineteenth-century American westward expansion to the Holocaust. He then took questions from audience members who challenged his credentials and his version of history. The […]
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Last week, First Marblehead Corporation, a Boston-based company, saw its stock plummet after cutting its dividend. The problem? First Marblehead is in the business of “securitizing” student loans. A year ago, this would have required some explanation, but the sub-prime mortgage mess has taught Americans – and people all over the world – the meaning […]
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The University of Texas at Austin has just approved the formation of a field of study for the recently-established Program In Western Civilization and American Institutions. This enables the center to begin offering great books-based classes on Greek and Roman Philosophy, literature, and the American founding, among other topics. It’s a broad step forward for […]
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The National Association of Scholars has a question: “How many Delawares are there?” The reference is to the indoctrination scandal at the University of Delaware, which is very likely not an isolated case. NAS executive director Peter Wood has announced an investigation to see whether Delaware’s “education program” in student residence halls (in plain English […]
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The case of the Robertson Foundation versus Princeton University has not, after nearly five years of litigation, yet come to trial. But it’s already shaping up to be the most expensive donor intent case in history. Reports of spending by the Robertson family differ, but news reports indicate the family may have spent as much […]
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In my last essay for Minding the Campus, I discussed how faculty indifference may have contributed indirectly to the establishment of the University of Delaware’s now notorious residence hall re-education program. If so, we should consider this a crime of omission rather than a crime of commission. This perspective on the problem either differs from […]
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Yale’s college council has come up with a bright idea: it endorsed a call for each of the twelve residential colleges on campus to have two diversity coordinators. The relentless expansion of what Claremont McKenna professor Frederick Lynch calls “the diversity machine” is not exactly breaking news. Diversity is a restless quasi-religion whose missionaries are […]
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The New York Times yesterday featured a revealing piece on “branding” as a strategy for college admittance. There are few topics so noxious as the lengths to which desirous students will go (and amounts that parents will pay) to buff their applications to a fine polish with the aid of pricey consultation services. Their counsel […]
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Dartmouth trustee Todd Zywicki made several clumsy remarks in an otherwise good speech about campus orthodoxy. Speaking at a conference at the John William Pope Center, Zywicki compared faculty pressure to oust Harvard president Lawrence Summers to the Spanish Inquisition, called former Dartmouth president James Freedman a “truly evil man,” and said those who control […]
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Readers of this web site were challenged to translate into English an incomprehensible call by the Society for Cultural Anthropology for papers to be delivered at the society’s convention next May in California. The winner of our translation contest is Tom Kerrigan of Bethpage, New York. Here is his winning entry: Pseudo-intellectual gibberish pontificated by […]
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John noted here on Friday that Columbia’s effort to placate its hunger strikers was likely to bring them “more protests and larger demands.” That’s exactly what seems promised in a triumphant editorial by Andrew Lyubursky, one of the hunger strikers, in the Columbia Spectator today: The experience of the last two weeks has shown us, […]
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Nestled away in the heart of one of the most conservative Midwestern states is a publicly funded university radically at odds with its surroundings. Universities are in theory, marketplaces for ideas and ideologies; centers for free expression as well as vigorous and informed debate; refuges for free and independent thought. But if the taxpayers who […]
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Five students drinking Gatorade and water for a week are apparently all it takes to bring a major university to its knees. Columbia has had more than its share of lunatic events this year – the noose, the cancellation of the Minuteman speakers for the second time, inviting and then abusing the Iranian madman, and […]
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Here are links for the majority of papers from the American Enterprise Institute’s “Reforming The Politically Correct University” conference on November 14. Do take a look; there’s much of worth here: – “The American University: Yesterday, Today – and Tomorrow” James Piereson – “By the Numbers: The Ideological Profile of Professors” Daniel Klein & Charlotta […]
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Good friends of the Manhattan Institute were among the winners of the 2007 National Arts and Humanities Medals bestowed today at the White House by President Bush. Among them were Roger Hertog, chairman emeritus of the Institute’s board of trustees, Stephen H. Balch, founder and longtime president of the National Association of Scholars, and author […]
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A lot has been written about the details of the residential life program at the University of Delaware, and the ways in which it has bullied students and residential assistants to accept regnant orthodoxy. The nation’s collective hat should go off to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for exposing this program, and for […]
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The following is a call for papers to be delivered at the Society for Cultural Anthropology meeting next May aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. Frankly, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to us, so as we struggle to understand, we ask you readers for help. This passage, we can all […]
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Yesterday I attended a fine conference at the American Enterprise Institute, “Reforming The Politically Correct University.” AEI commissioned papers on various aspects of the PC university from Peter Wood, Steve Balch, Greg Lukianoff, John Agresto, John McWhorter, and many others. They’re to appear in book form next summer, but many are available now at the […]
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Stuart Taylor’s brilliant rant in this week’s National Journal (“Academia’s Pervasive PC Rot”) says “the cancerous spread of ideologically eccentric, intellectually shoddy, phony-diversity-obsessed fanaticism among university faculties and administrators is far, far worse and more inexorable than most alumni, parents, and trustees suspect.” There’s an obvious explanation of why so many university watchers don’t seem […]
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At a conference on November 14, the American Enterprise Institute released two important new studies by Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University. Their research, part of a forthcoming book titled Reforming the Politically Correct University, verifies even further that liberals and progressives outnumber conservatives and libertarians on campuses, overwhelmingly […]
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Alas, one of the intrepid Columbia hunger strikers has given in. How will they ever force Columbia to stop expanding, increase resources for minority centers, require more ethnic study courses, and make January sunnier with such lazy tactics. Especially now that a gourmand opposition group has mobilized – “Why We Act, Why We Eat,” whose […]
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KC Johnson’s remarkable blog, Durham-in-Wonderland, has generated 90,000 reader comments since it emerged as the most reliable source of information and analysis on the Duke/Nifong non-rape scandal. The following is an excerpt from a November 6 reader comment on Duke’s president Richard Brodhead and the book, “Until Proven Innocent” by Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr. […]
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