Since the dawn of time, humankind has sought an explanation for our being on this planet, and some have looked for an answer in “liberal arts” education. But now – at Harvard at least – this profound search for meaning has apparently been transferred from the liberal arts department, where definitive answers have been rare, […]
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At first glance, this looks like a victory for free speech: University of Kansas assistant professor, Andrea Quenette, was allowed to keep her job after quoting the word “nigger” instead of referencing it by initial during a discussion of racism. But her victory was qualified–Quenette did not escape punishment. As The Washington Post reports, for […]
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Max Stern, the lawyer for the expelled Yale basketball captain Jack Montague, has spoken out, announcing that he will sue Yale on behalf of Montague in April, and clarifying some details in the case, including a very surprising one: that the aggrieved female did not file the sexual misconduct complaint. In his telling, Montague had […]
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Claude Steele, the social psychologist best known for developing the influential concept of “stereotype threat,” is in hot water. He is Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost of the University of California at Berkeley and holds appointments in the Psychology Department and the Graduate School of Education, ” He has come under fire for the way […]
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The thought police are at it again. The latest confrontation is at Virginia Tech University at Blacksburg where the usual suspects — a coalition of black activists and white leftists — have called upon the university president to withdraw an invitation to Charles Murray, where he is scheduled to speak on March 25 at Tech’s […]
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Mitchell Langbert, a professor at Brooklyn College, wrote last week about the grandly titled and resolutely leftist faculty union that he and all teachers at CUNY are stuck with, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC). Langbert mentioned, briefly, that PSC had made no effort to defend our excellent writer, KC Johnson when KC was under attack […]
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“Forget what the right says,” the title of a recent Washington Post OpEd proclaims, “Academia isn’t so bad for conservative professors.” The sub-title, “Right-leaning professors do face challenges on campus, but we can still thrive,” both reveals that the authors — Jon A. Shields, associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, and Joshua M. […]
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Passing on the right is dangerous and generally illegal driving. But a fair number of people do it anyway. The title Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn’s new book, Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University, combines the image of the careless driver with the other transgressive meaning of “passing.” Conservative professors can […]
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The anti-Semitic Boycott-Divest-Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel keeps reaching for—and finding—new depths of indecency. Among the deepest descenders into this abyss is Jasbir Puar, an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers. Professor Puar recently garnered national attention for her address at Vassar, February 3, “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters.” The talk has […]
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Last September, the English Department at Colby College in Maine posted a job opening for Associate or Full Professor of American Literature. It’s a plum position, one that hundreds of professors would love to have. As with all academic job listings, the ad files a diversity statement at the bottom, assuring applicants that some identities […]
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Southern Connecticut State University, where I teach, has gone to great lengths to accommodate Muslims — and reject the slightest manifestations of Islamophobia — while acting complacently toward egregious anti-Semitism and hate crimes. Concurrently, widely publicized events at Vassar and Oberlin Colleges reveal that displays of anti-Semitism typically cause uproar within the Jewish community but […]
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Jane Mayer is a writer for The New Yorker who knows her audience. It consists mostly of elitist progressives who like reading that their enlightened transformation of America is imperiled by greedy conservative villains. She has written many articles and most recently, a book entitled Dark Money on that theme. The February 26, 2016 issue […]
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Jack Montague, captain of Yale’s basketball team, has been expelled from the university on some sort of sex charge and the story continues to get uglier. Since his family has basically declined to comment (for understandable reasons) and because Yale chooses (for incomprehensible reasons) to employ “a more expansive definition of sexual assault” than state […]
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This has been a big week for feminist glaciology, that is, the possibly revolutionary application of feminist (and post-colonial) theory to glaciers. Four University of Oregon researchers produced the 15,000-word paper for the journal Progress in Human Geometry. Steven Hayward who apparently discovered the study, wrote, “This is why you get Trump” on Power Line. […]
Read MoreRemember Melissa Click? She is the communications professor fired by the University of Missouri after calling for “a little muscle” to keep a student journalist from covering campus protesters. The Website “Popehat” writes, “Firing her was the right thing to do, but what we need to realize is that she should not have been hired […]
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When President Adam Falk of Williams College wrote to the campus community on February 18, to say that he was disinviting John Derbyshire, he didn’t offer much explanation. Derbyshire, who had been invited by students as part of a program called “Uncomfortable Conversations,” was supposed to talk about immigration. Falk said that Derbyshire had “crossed […]
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The case of Yale basketball player Jack Montague, who was expelled from Yale, allegedly because of a rape charge, has gotten a lot of press in the last few days. At this stage, I know nothing of the facts of the case, but I do know that Montague has lawyered up and his father told […]
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Yale is the only university that regularly issues reports on its handling of sexual assault complaints, the result of a 2012 resolution agreement with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The university is also unusual in reporting so many sexual complaints, the result of its peculiar decision to broaden the campus definition of “sexual assault” […]
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