“The universities have done this to themselves. They created the whole phenomenon of modern identity politics and Politically Correct rules to limit speech. They have fostered a totalitarian microculture in which conformity to those rules is considered natural and expected. Now that system is starting to eat them alive, from elite universities like Yale, all […]
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Last week, a real-life South Park episode somehow took place within the very prestigious confines of Yale University. In the lead-up to Halloween, Yale Dean Burgwell Howard sent out an email requesting that students not engage in “cultural appropriation” when it comes to costume choice. That message prompted a very mild rebuke from the Associate […]
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Black student protesters and their allies got the scalp they were looking for at the University of Missouri—the university president, Tim Wolfe, resigned today after criticism for not responding strongly enough to reports of racial incidents on or near campus. Wolf had issued a few benign “let us listen to one another” comments, while the […]
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Most readers of the higher education press likely believe that women are underrepresented in STEM field because of sexist stereotypes, “unwelcoming” attitudes and practices, and either implicit or outright bias. But the work of two Cornell psychologists, Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams, co-directors of the Cornell Institute for Women in Science, has upset this apple […]
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It’s now a trifecta of political correctness at the expense of sanity—and also justice—at Wesleyan University. The very latest was the “Halloween Checklist,” a poster that invited students at the elite liberal-arts college in Middletown, Conn., to ask themselves: “Is your costume offensive?” The answer was “yes” if the costume tended to “mock religious or […]
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British feminist Julie Bindel was scheduled to speak at Manchester University on a panel discussing the subject “From Liberation to Censorship: Does Modern Feminism Have a Problem with Free Speech?’ That question was answered by the university student union, which canceled her appearance on the panel as a potential violation of “safe space” for transgender […]
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Progressive faculty justify the absence of moderate and conservative voices on campus by saying that conservatives are stupid. As a result, moderate Republicans with Ivy League degrees and genius level IQs sometimes can’t find a job in academia. My former boss had a degree from the highest-ranked law school (Yale) and had published scholarly articles, but […]
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A good rule of thumb when considering campus due process matters: If the Senate’s two most ardent foes of campus civil liberties, Kirsten Gillibrand and Claire McCaskill oppose something, the measure is probably worth a good look. The Safe Campus Act, which recently received criticism from the two senators, deserves more than a look. It […]
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It’s easy to mock the sheer silliness of postmodernism. But the pretensions of our present-day sophists, who traffic in knowingness as opposed to knowledge, have wormed their way off campus and into American life. No evidence, no logic is required to take a position on any issue since everything is merely about story telling backed by […]
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Many legal experts were surprised in June of 2013 when the U.S Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited decision in the University of Texas affirmative action case, Fisher v. Texas. The mere fact that the Court had taken up the case when it could easily have declared it moot indicated to many that at least […]
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It was a shocking story that seemed to confirm the worst suspicions about sexism in science: a Nobel laureate asked to speak at a luncheon honoring female scientists announces that he’s a male chauvinist, then tells a stunned audience that “girls” in the lab are trouble because “you fall in love with them, they fall […]
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Last Wednesday, 72 left-wing groups, including the Feminist Majority Foundation, American Association of University Women, and Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, asked federal civil-rights officials to crack down on anonymous politically-incorrect speech on campus, which they claim violates federal civil-rights laws such as Title IX. They claim they are concerned about “harassment” on anonymous […]
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A few highlights from the online site of Cornell University’s conservative student newspaper, the Cornell Review: At her inauguration as Cornell’s new president, Elizabeth Garrett said, “We must heed the call to be radical and progressive.” Later she issued apparently contradictory statements on free speech, calling herself “an avid supporter of freedom of speech” at a […]
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The demand for equality that’s emerging on campuses today is primarily underpinned by two things: identity politics and a perception of individuals as suffering from trauma. Students have become attached to the particular trauma they identify with; they see it as a badge of honor and any perceived slight becomes a threat to their sense […]
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Along with many others, I received an email last week from Rudy Fichtenbaum, president of the American Association of University Professors. Because the AAUP is best known for defending academic freedom, valued by both liberals and conservatives, and because it represents the academic profession as a whole, it has cultivated a reputation for nonpartisanship. Fichtenbaum […]
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It has been nearly 30 years since Jesse Jackson led a group of protesters around the Stanford University campus chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has gotta go!” The target back then was patriarchal Eurocentric content, the books, art, words, and ideas of Dead White Males. The solution was a more multicultural syllabus, plus more […]
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On October 15, The New York Times published a balanced news story that inadvertently revealed the stupidity of “Yes Means Yes” policies. Those policies redefine a great deal of consensual sex and touching as “sexual assault,” and effectively require college students to engage in “state-mandated dirty talk” during sexual encounters (as one supporter of “Yes Means Yes” policies gloated). That potentially violates the Constitution, and such policies have […]
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One major and negative narrative about the justice system is that wealthy and well-connected people get to live by different rules than the rest of us. One can find examples both reinforcing and undermining this, but the prevailing narrative remains. If one wanted to find a blatant example of wealthy, privileged people getting their own […]
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“Can I touch you here?” (repeat 15 or 16 times). California’s “Yes Means Yes” rule requires repeated authorizations for every step toward sexual intercourse. From the NY Times Oct. 15: “‘What does that mean – you have to say ‘yes’ every 10 minutes?’ asked one student. ‘Pretty much,’ replies the instructor…” How to drag anti-black […]
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The greatest threats to academic freedom come from academics themselves, not from their students or from politicians. That provocative claim is the thesis of Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity: Confronting the Fear of Knowledge, an important new book by Joanna Williams slated for publication by Palgrave Macmillan in January 2016. Williams, who directs the […]
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The FBI has issued an alert about a new type of phone scam in which the primary targets are college students. According to the FBI, a scammer calls a student and claims to be a U.S. government official or a federal agent, feigning legitimacy by “spoofing” or mimicking a local FBI phone number on the receiving caller […]
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College officials usually wait until there has been some “crisis” – most often imaginary, based on a hoax or misapprehension – before they introduce new measures meant to “improve diversity” on campus. At Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, however, the administration recently introduced a new “bias incident response team” (BIRT) as a way to […]
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The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has just released its sixth edition of “What Will They Learn,” examining the coherence (or lack of it) of the subjects and courses American college students take. These are excerpts from the executive summary. By and large, higher education has abandoned a coherent, content-rich general education curriculum. […]
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Excerpts from a blog on the new site, Heterodox Academy The overall levels of tolerance in society do fluctuate. People are more willing to restrict political rights to their foes during times of war or international threat. Yet, while the baseline for tolerance fluctuates over time, it has always been the case, until recently, that […]
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In January 2015 the University of Chicago Committee on Freedom of Expression issued a brief report which eloquently made a case for the importance of free speech as “an essential element of the University’s culture.” I commented at the time in an approving manner. Over the ensuing months, the Chicago statement has gathered more and […]
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Ice cream cake has a disturbingly short lifespan in my home. When one is nearby, I ruthlessly hunt it down and devour it. Some days, when I have biked to work or gone for a run, I easily convince myself that I deserve cake as a reward. But exercise does not cause my cake-eating. It […]
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The joke goes like this: When Brezhnev first became President he invited his elderly mother to come up and see his suite of offices in the Kremlin and then put her in his limousine and drove her to his fabulous apartment there in Moscow. She spoke not a word. Then he put her in his […]
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Sixty-six percent of the graduates of my alma mater earn more than people who have only a high-school diploma. This fact comes courtesy of the U.S. Department of Education’s new “College Scorecard.” I took advantage of the online interactive system to see how well Haverford College alumni stack up in the race to achieve financial […]
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In the week that a new organization, Heterodox Academy, was established to press for more ideological diversity in academic life, the learned association in my own profession showed how much it is needed. The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) sent around a notice of its prospective annual meeting, highlighting its most prominent speakers. Of the […]
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The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has dismissed the longstanding discrimination complaints of Asian Americans, giving Ivy League and other institutions a green light to continue chromatically contouring the results of their “holistic” admissions processes so that applicants who are black or brown or red consistently are admitted with lower academic scores than […]
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