Looking forward to a lively annual conference of the American Political Science Association, due to start this week in San Francisco, I proposed a panel on “Viewpoint Diversity in Political Science.” After all, I thought, wasn’t the 2016 election a signal lesson in the continuing relevance of diverse viewpoints in the American body politic? My […]
Read More
James Damore, the author of the ten-page “anti-diversity manifesto” that got him fired from Google, is not likely to fade to the level of a remote trivia question. That’s because Damore, a 28-year-old engineer, former chess champion, and researcher in computational biology at both Harvard and Princeton, sharply focused evidence and argument that shook the […]
Read More
A movement to crush dissent is under way and a good deal of it involves discussion and objections to diversity being declared illegitimate. Political and economic leaders and organizations speak about offense and intolerance taking place inside and outside their walls, but when we hear the actual content of those crimes, they appear far less than […]
Read More
American University’s pervasive left-wing political climate has not prevented nasty racial incidents, but it sure has facilitated official overreaction antithetical to academia. AU is rapidly moving further than many other colleges and universities to enshrine ideological indoctrination into the curriculum in the name of diversity and inclusion. Racist Incidents on AU’s Campus The campus witnessed […]
Read More
While Education Secretary Betsy DeVos considers reforming the Title IX policies she inherited from her predecessor, states have acted on their own. On the one side, some blue states moved beyond Obama’s guilt-presuming approach. Four states (California, New York, Illinois, and Connecticut) have adopted “affirmative consent” laws that define sexual assault differently for college students […]
Read More
Alt-Right, Alt-Left, “both sides,” white supremacists, Antifa, CEO resignations: America is having a moment. Tempers are flaring, and statues are falling. President Trump and the press are in an angry stand-off. The death of a young woman, Heather Heyer, in the midst of protests and counter-protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the injuries to 19 others […]
Read More
Do girls avoid STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields because of ongoing, widespread discrimination? Or do girls with the skill sets that would give them entrance to STEM fields prefer fields that involve working with people over fields that involve working with things? (A note on the correct use of language. Women are justifiably offended when people, especially […]
Read More
More than forty years ago, sociologist Robert Merton called attention to an emerging “Black Insider Doctrine” within sociology, the viewing of white sociologists as “outsiders,” incapable of understanding or conducting research on matters concerning blacks. Groups in conflict in 1972 wanted to make their own interpretation of reality the prevailing one. Over the years, as […]
Read More
Maranto and Woessner reply to Peter Wood’s excellent critique: Our recent Chronicle of Higher Education essay makes the case that while conservatives and libertarians are dramatically outnumbered among higher education faculty by those on the left, fears that college students suffer ideological indoctrination are overblown. In his sensible, nuanced reply, our friend Peter Wood suggests […]
Read More
Robert Maranto and Mathew Woessner are not alone. They are two political scientists who assure us that leftist domination of the faculty does not mean that college students are coming away from their campuses indoctrinated in progressive ideology. Maranto and Woessner’s latest version of this argument was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education as […]
Read More
The choice of Linda Sarsour, an Arab-American activist, as a commencement speaker at CUNY’s School of Public Health last Spring generated much-heated debate. Good. Speech and counter-speech shed welcome light on the views of controversial figures. That Sarsour once advocated violence against a political opponent – stating that Ayaan Hirsi Ali needed an “ass-whipping” and […]
Read More