Progressive colleges are often the worst offenders in all the ideological bullying that stains our colleges these days. Take my own institution, Sarah Lawrence. During the 2016 election cycle, a week did not go by on my campus, without a student or a small group of students coming to me and sharing stories where they […]
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At Columbia University, the famous core curriculum, founded exactly one hundred years ago and centered on a rich, rigorous two-semester freshman course covering Western civilization from Plato to the present, remains in place and is largely the same as in 1919. But it’s a rare exception. One day in January 1987, hundreds of Stanford students, […]
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While one kind of diversity is mandated by our governments, educational and scientific agencies, colleges and universities, and industries, three other kinds of diversity are forbidden. The mandated diversity is defined in “social justice” ideology as the diversities of race, gender, sexuality, economic class, and ethnicity. “Social justice” is alleged to be equal representation of […]
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President Trump recently announced that he would issue an executive order permitting federal research money to be withheld from universities that violated free speech. This may appear as welcome news for fans of open campus debate, but I am not optimistic. The problems here are formidable under the best of conditions but, more important, the […]
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The recent college admissions scandal is spectacular in its size and scope, but hardly surprising. Let me make four major points. Whenever there are scarce resources in much demand and a non-market solution is used to allocate those resources, there are bound to be problems. At the schools involved in this admissions scandal, there are […]
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In my recent book, The University We Need, I wrote, “A moment’s reflection should confirm how strange it is that no leading university has been founded in the United States since Stanford in 1891.” The reason cannot be that no one has enough money to establish such a university because the United States has more […]
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Years ago, when our youngest daughter was a junior at Trinity, an exclusive private school in Manhattan, my wife and I attended a meeting with other parents in a large auditorium to listen to admissions officers of four of the eight Ivy League schools. They all spoke about their schools, and what was required for […]
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Sam Abrams, a conservative professor at Sarah Lawrence College, is about to become quite well known. Last fall he wrote an op-ed for The New York Times, moderate in substance but muscular in tone, charging that college administrators across the country, are creating one-side progressive programs for college students to push students to the left. […]
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Should conservatives establish a new university of, by, and for conservatives? The idea has been relaunched about as many times as the Starship Enterprise. I first heard it in the 1990s, but doubtless, it is older. Most recently Frederick Hess and Brendan Bell at the American Enterprise Institute cast the vision in “An Ivory Tower […]
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It is getting awfully hard to be a humanities professor. Or rather, it’s getting hard to be a humanities professor and still maintain the heady confidence in the fields that the faculty had 20 years ago. The daily grind of teaching, research, and service haven’t much changed, especially for tenured professors who aren’t touched by […]
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Title IX, passed in 1972, seems like a simple enough federal civil rights law. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in higher education at colleges and universities that accept federal financial assistance—which almost all schools do to some extent. Yet its initial vagueness, combined with the inevitable mission creep, has caused it to create […]
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