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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This is an age of gender fluidity, when many are embarrassed to be caught occupying one of the two traditional gender identities year after year, as if no progress at all has been made on the gender frontier. Not Evelyn Waugh, however. The great British writer lived 63 years as a man, and if he […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that “Fulbright Seeks More Diverse Pool of Scholars and Students.” What it doesn’t report is why. Fulbright, of course, does not really want a more diverse “pool.” What it wants is more minorities (presumably not including Asians) actually awarded grants. But the only reason given for its efforts to […]
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According to many critics, the case is shut. Higher education — the one American institution that should make intellectual diversity a first priority — actually appears to do just the opposite. In fact, some critics suggest that universities have made it a top priority to create an environment of intellectual homogeneity – to an extent […]
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The buzzword in education these days is “global.” Education reformers promise to prepare students for “global citizenship” with suitable work skills for a “global economy.” Where the word “global” ascends, the word “American” tends to fade. This is true in history as well as in ideas of citizenship beamed at the young. “Big History,” with […]
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The most disturbing thing about mismatch research (examining the contention that a student can be adversely affected attending a school where her level of preparation is substantially lower than that of her typical classmate ) is that it demonstrates a tense inequity: recipients of affirmative action at selective colleges are not as smart as non-recipients. […]
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Justice Scalia had an important impact among many college students, certainly among mine, and especially among those who often or usually disagreed with his conclusions. I taught law-oriented classes for thirty-five years—constitutional law and politics, civil liberties, criminal law and justice, jurisprudence and legal theory, and the First Amendment. During this span, Scalia’s opinions were […]
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From FIRE’s site (The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) Williams College has disinvited a second speaker from its student-run “Uncomfortable Learning” speaker series, a program specifically developed to bring controversial viewpoints to campus. Unlike the first disinvitation (Conservative writer Suzanne Venker), which came at the behest of the speaker series’ student organizers, this order came directly from the […]
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Black Lives Matter supporters and allies gather inside the Minneapolis City Hall rotunda on December 3, 2015, following the police shooting death of Jamar Clark. Photo: Tony Webster [email protected] By John McWhorter My mother gave me an anthropological article about the Nacirema to read in 1956. Since I was 13 at the time, what I […]
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“Beach Books 2014-2016,” released yesterday by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), is a study of mostly summer reading assigned by colleges and universities to their incoming freshman. NAS reports: Our study of common readings during the academic years 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 covers 377 assignments at 366 colleges and universities for the first year and […]
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By KC Johnson The University of Cincinnati has a fascinating response to a recent lawsuit filed by two students alleging serious misconduct by UC and several of its administrators in sexual assault proceedings: “Even accepting Plaintiffs’ allegations as true, they received constitutional due process protections.” Since UC informed them of the charges, and gave them a hearing, […]
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The New York Times published an article Sunday on how painful it was at Yale for Erika Christakis, whose harmless opinion on Halloween costumes triggered non-negotiable demands by enraged black students and their allies. But The Times buried the lede. Here is the actual nugget of fresh information in the article: “Yet the mood on campus […]
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Mount St. Mary’s in Maryland, a low-profile Catholic university, is suddenly the focus of heavy national publicity. “Drown the bunnies,” (Let’s get rid of academically weak freshmen), announced as a policy by the school’s president, Simon Newman, attracted attention, but when the bunny-drowning strategy was followed by the firing of two people, one a tenured […]
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By Richard Vedder I didn’t sleep too well last night, thanks to Heterodox Academy’s (and NYU’s) Jonathan Haidt and John Leo, who recently carried on a provocative exchange in this space. Two questions really bothered me: Why is there so little intellectual diversity in the academy? And what can we do about the related problem […]
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By Daphne Patai While American education goes further down the tubes, lame-brained notions are raised to levels of respectability in academe that should shock any halfway reasonable person. What has happened is the normalization of bad ideas, thanks mostly to identity politics. We constantly hear that we live in a hopelessly racist and sexist society, […]
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By John S. Rosenberg The University of Virginia has just released data about it applicants for the class of 2020, including a “record number of Early Action minority applications.” These numbers reveal a prima facie case of racial discrimination by the university. The cover of the February 1 Cavalier Daily presents a graphic display of […]
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On January 11, John Leo, editor of “Minding the Campus,” interviewed social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, one of the editors of the five-month-old site, “Heterodox Academy,” and perhaps the most prominent academic pushing hard for more intellectual diversity on our campuses. Haidt, 52, who specializes in the psychology of morality and the moral emotions, is Professor […]
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By Patrick Deneen My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, […]
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By Harvey Silverglate Harvard College appears locked into one of those momentous transformational challenges that from time to time roils the eminently roil-able undergraduate campus: What title should replace the sobriquet “House Master?” While the term “House Master” has been used for generations to denote the faculty members who reside in, and oversee, the student […]
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By Luke Milligan Since 1846 the law school at the University of Louisville has provided nonpartisan space for individuals to teach, discuss, and research matters of law and public policy. Despite the thousands of partisans who’ve walked its halls, the law school as an institution has remained nonpartisan, preserving its neutrality, and refusing to embrace […]
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By Fred Siegel Twenty-five years ago, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.—premier historian of twentieth-century American liberalism, highbrow courtier to the Kennedys, and grey eminence for the Kennedy’s would-be successors—published The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. The Schlesinger of the 1950s idolized Adlai Stevenson, whose professorial demeanor endeared him to academia. Academic expertise was, as […]
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By George Leef: With the surge in online education over the past few years, one course at the University of California has been exceptional. “Learning How to Learn” with an enrollment of 1,192,697 since it was initially offered last year, is the world’s most popular online course, according to The New York Times, narrowly beating […]
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