There was a time, within living memory, when the term multiculturalism was hardly known. More than twenty years ago, Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and in late July speaker at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, wrote a book with fellow Stanford alum David Sacks called The Diversity Myth: ‘Multiculturalism’ and the Politics of Intolerance […]
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Many factors have been suggested to explain the explosion in Black protest and Black rage over the past two years on college campuses and in cities like Ferguson, Baltimore, and Milwaukee: racist police, insensitive college administrators, bigoted White students, pervasive “micro-aggressions,” the stigma-creating effect of racial preference policies, among others. But most such factors fail […]
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Those of you who wonder what diversity officials do all day must listen to Sheree Marlowe, the new chief diversity officer at Clark University. During first-year orientation, a baffled and tense freshperson asked if she could sing along with a carful of other white people when a song containing the N-word filled the air. “No,” […]
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Christina Paxson, president of Brown University, published a ringing endorsement of free speech on campus yesterday in The Washington Post. The op-ed said, “Freedom of expression is an essential component of academic freedom, which protects the ability of universities to fulfill their core mission of advancing knowledge.” That’s nice. What the article didn’t say is […]
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The Knight Foundation survey, conducted by Gallup, of where the First Amendment stands among college students and U.S. adults has several interesting findings. One of them cuts to the heart of all the other issues of the First Amendment on campus today: There is a real perception that campuses are not fully open environments. A slight […]
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One of the year’s most important essays on higher education appeared earlier this week in The New York Times op-ed page. Historians Fredrick Logevall and Kenneth Osgood wrote of the decline of U.S. political history. “The public’s love for political stories,” they correctly noted, “belies a crisis in the profession. American political history as a field of […]
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One of the pillars of our education establishment, The Education Trust, recently published a report meant to pressure colleges and universities with large endowments into spending more of their earnings on one of its pet causes – very low or even free tuition for students from poorer families. The study, “A Glimpse Inside the Coffers: […]
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Now that the University of Chicago announced that it does not condone “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces”—apparently the first major American university to do so—it is time for other institutions of higher learning to get behind this basic and rather obvious educational idea and create a genuine trend. For some 30 years now, the idea […]
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Calling all college students: Do you love the intellectual climate on your campus? Or do you sometimes wish that a broader range of viewpoints was represented in the classroom, and by invited speakers? Are some students reluctant to speak up in class because they are afraid they’ll be shunned if they question the dominant viewpoint? […]
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The bizarre procedures of Yale’s sprawling sexual assault bureaucracy may well be the worst in the nation. We have come to realize this because Yale is the only university to publicly document all campus allegations of sexual assault, the result of a 2012 agreement with the Obama administration. Reports issued by Deputy Provost Stephanie Spangler […]
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John Fund, writing in the National Review last week, drew attention to the vote in Congress last year to increase by seven percent the $100 million budget of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the Department of Education. Fund is especially critical of the Republican Congressmen whose vote seemed to reflect bizarre indifference to OCR’s role […]
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Harvard, which announced severe penalties on members of single-sex student groups in May, may have almost lived up to the ban in principle for as much as a couple of days. The Harvard Crimson revealed on August 15 that the College had assured the all-female Seneca organization in May that it could “continue to operate […]
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Although I am not a member of the faculty union at the City University of New York (CUNY) where I teach, I am required to pay its annual fee. The courts allow this arrangement called an “agency shop,” so that non-members like me don’t become free riders – getting benefits from union representation in contract […]
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The speech below was delivered on March 19, 2001, by then U.S. News & World Report columnist John Leo, who is the founder and editor of Minding the Campus. Leo has spent much of his career reporting on the vicissitudes of campus political correctness, many of them recorded in his latest book, “Incorrect Thoughts: Notes on […]
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Rohini Sethi has beaten the rap at the University of Houston. As vice president of the student government at the University of Houston, she has escaped sanctions and a forced resignation from office. But she had to apologize profusely, take an unpaid leave of absence and serve some time in a diversity workshop to make […]
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Some politicians and media outlets seem to believe that college and university campuses are beset by a culture that is indifferent to rape and that the procedures for investigating and adjudicating claims of sexual assault are so one-sided as to constitute gender discrimination against female accusers. In reality, schools for decades have denied meaningful due […]
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By Chance Layton In April, when the U.S. Department of Education released its list of religious colleges with exemptions from certain Title IX regulations, it unleashed a torrent of outrage and criticism directed against “bigoted and “intolerant” institutions of religious instruction. Two hundred thirty-two colleges had requested waivers from the Department’s gender identity non-discrimination policy, which would […]
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It appears as though the University of California succumbed to the relentless pressure from the California legislature to discriminate more effectively against Asians and whites, i.e., to admit more Hispanics and blacks. The headline of a Los Angeles Times article announces that “UCLA, UC Berkeley boost admissions of Californians, including blacks and Latinos.” The article […]
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With the demise of the Friedrichs case, with the post-Scalia Supreme Court giving a 4-4 victory to organized labor, it seems likely that the faculty unions that currently exist at public universities will survive. At the same time, the increasing number of adjuncts creates a potentially awkward situation: should faculty unions equally seek to represent […]
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Friday morning brought important news from the Second Circuit, which vacated a decision from Judge Jesse Furman in the Doe v. Columbia U. case, giving the accused student a rare new chance to prove his university denied him a fair proceeding. It was the first decision by an Appeals Court to deal with campus sexual […]
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Political orthodoxy and lack of viewpoint diversity in the academy is now a well-known problem, thanks in large part to Heterodox Academy and the many scholars who contribute to the site. Yet even Jonathan Haidt–one of the more productive combatants of this growing trend–will admit that intolerance to opposing ideas and the spread of victimhood […]
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Monday’s Chronicle of Higher Education featured an article by Sarah Brown, a very one-sided article, on a gathering dealing with campus efforts to cope with sexual assault. It reviewed a federally-funded program, the National Center for Campus Public Safety, to better train colleges in adjudicating allegations of sexual assault. “I want to get this right,” […]
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This is an excerpt from the new ACTA report, No U.S. History? How College History Departments Leave the United States out of the Major. It reveals that fewer than 1/3 of the nation’s leading colleges and universities require students pursuing a degree in history to take a single course in American history. Read the full […]
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One common complaint of protesting students is the old multiculturalist argument that the curriculum is too white and male and Western. The petition filed by students at Seattle University is a case in point. Once again, we have outlandish allegations of racism and harassment leveled against one of the most progressive enclaves on Planet Earth, […]
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“Hate speech is excluded from protection,” CNN anchor Chris Cuomo tweeted last year, echoing a dangerously common misconception. “Hate speech isn’t free speech,” people say, assuming they have a right not to hear whatever they consider hateful language and ideas. Government officials sometimes share this view: The Mayor of West Hollywood confirmed to Eugene Volokh […]
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Every so often, a group of professionals signs a political letter claiming that their training uniquely qualifies them to announce that a particular candidate for president, traditionally a Republican, is totally unfit for office. In 1964 it was psychiatrists denouncing Barry Goldwater. “Fact,” a fly-by-night magazine, rounded up 2417 shrinks, half of whom were able […]
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(Part II) The incoherence of the new Office for Civil Rights transgender policy becomes even clearer when one looks beyond bathrooms to locker rooms, and the athletic teams they serve. The “Dear Colleague” letter states that “Title IX regulations permit a school to operate or sponsor sex-segregated athletics teams when selection for such teams is […]
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After the death of Justice Scalia, most people who have been following the protracted Fisher v. University of Texas case (myself included) expected that the Court would let the university’s racial preference system stand. It did that in a 4-3 decision released on June 23. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Ginsburg, […]
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Although it seems as though the transgender tsunami has been howling forever, in fact it hit the shore of national fixation only four months ago, in March, when the North Carolina legislature passed, and Gov. Pat McCrory signed, House Bill 2, which restricted access to the state’s public sex-segregated restrooms by, well, sex, as defined […]
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Censorious antics of ‘snowflake’ students have regularly made front-page news here in the UK. No longer. The momentous political fall-out from the June 23rd referendum, when a majority of citizens voted in favor of Britain leaving the European Union, has swept all other concerns aside. Whatever occurs in the coming months, whether ‘Brexit’ actually happens, […]
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