By Mark Bauerlein In recent years, several critics have chided those of us who say the humanities are fading by citing statistics on undergraduate enrollments that show no real declines at all since the 1980s. One reason for the rebuke is that many arguing the “crisis” do so on the basis of intellectual decline, specifically, […]
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By James Huffman In response to the campus protests, much has been written and spoken about how universities can best serve the interests of their students of color. Those who sympathize with the protesters argue that students of color, in particular, should be nurtured and protected from uncomfortable experiences that distract from their education. Others […]
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John K. Wilson, editor of The Academe Blog, severely criticized Peter Wood’s January 13 article, “What Candidates Can Do for Higher Education Now.” His text is below, followed by Peter Wood’s reply. By John K. Wilson National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood has a column at Minding the Campus today arguing for an 7-point plan for […]
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By David M. Rosen Four anthropology professors stood at the entrance of the ballroom at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver last November, where members of the American Anthropological Association would soon vote to boycott Israeli academic institutions, organized by the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement (BDS). Each professor held up one of a […]
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By John S. Rosenberg In my first year of graduate school at Yale, the debate over admitting women to the college was still raging. A joke (or maybe it wasn’t) at that time was that the Old Yalies were perfectly willing for the college to go co-ed — so long as no male who would […]
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Jack Fowler, on National Review Online’s “The Corner,” wrote, “Congratulations to the 2015 Sheldon winner. And condolences to the students.” Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) said naming Peter Salovey of Yale the winner was “a good call, though it was a rich field this year.” Perhaps with a touch of regional pride, Charlie Sykes, a well-known Milwaukee blogger, […]
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By Roger Clegg Kudos to Peter Wood for encouraging the presidential candidates to opine – and opine wisely – on higher education issues in his article, “What Candidates Can Do for Higher Education Now.” With regard to his Item #3 (“End higher education’s destructive focus on race”), I’d like to point out two specific proposals […]
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By Peter Wood In 2014 Senator Marco Rubio lent his support to CASA, the Campus Accountability and Safety Act—the effort by Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill and New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand to strip the due process rights of students accused of sexual assault. The bill died that year but McCaskill and Gillibrand brought it back […]
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By KC Johnson The Chronicle of Higher Education has received a good deal of attention for putting together a website cataloguing all the Title IX complaints currently pending with the Obama administration’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). But the site should mostly be seen as a concrete demonstration of how little we know about these […]
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Political correctness – the academic aping of the class struggle — has increasingly generated campus hijinks unintentionally redolent of the cartoonist Al Capp’s 1960s depiction of S.W.I.N.E. (Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything). Recently, referring to the plague of campus hoaxes regarding rape and race, capped off by the ruckus at Oberlin College because of […]
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Just how much viewpoint diversity do we have in social psychology? In 2011, nobody knew, so I asked 30 of my friends in the field to name a conservative. They came up with several names, but only one suspect admitted, under gentle interrogation, to being right of center. A few months later I gave a talk at […]
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We are reviving the Sheldon award for worst college president of the year. It is named for the late Sheldon Hackney, who presided over many college disasters, including Penn’s water buffalo controversy and the theft of a complete edition of the University of Pennsylvania student newspaper that included a column criticizing affirmative action. The thieves […]
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Oregon State University is launching a series of “social justice retreats” to “promote a campus dialogue about race and racism.” Translation: the university is sponsoring therapized programs to makes non-whites more aware of micro-aggression, more separatist and how aggrieved they ought to be at the hands of whites. There are also programs to render whites […]
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A month before the Yale Halloween meltdown, I had a bizarre and illuminating experience at an elite private high school on the West Coast. I’ll call it Centerville High. I gave a version of a talk that you can see here, on Coddle U. vs. Strengthen U. (In an amazing coincidence, I first gave that talk at […]
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