By now, plenty of people have learned of the removal by their publisher, Penguin Random House, of a half-dozen books by the legendary children’s author Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), including such beloved classics as If I Ran the Zoo (the one I most enjoyed reading to my daughters several decades ago, and more recently to my […]
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Cancel culture is seemingly rampant and omnipresent in our nation’s colleges and universities. These days, examples surface so often that they don’t even make the news as they once did at places like Yale, Sarah Lawrence, and Middlebury. Nonetheless, students of all ideological backgrounds report that they regularly self-censor and limit what they say due […]
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On the evening of April 26, 1777, John Adams sat down at his desk to write one of his innumerable letters to his wife, Abigail. By the time he wrote this letter, the initial euphoria of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence and the evacuation of the British troops from Boston the year prior […]
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During my fifty years teaching anthropology at McGill University, my impression of undergraduate students was of reasonable young people, many of whom were seriously engaged in learning about the world and its peoples. Graduate students were fiercely focused on gaining professional status, were more ideologically militant than undergraduates, and were consistently on the wrong side […]
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A law professor at Georgetown University has been fired for pointing out that black students got lower grades in her classes. This was not due to racism. Black students get lower grades at selective colleges because they are admitted with lower grades and test scores than their non-black classmates, due to racial preferences in admissions […]
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It is hardly a surprise that Sa’ed Atshan would be given tenure at Swarthmore College. What is noteworthy is how this came about, something well beyond the normal tenure process in academe. It points to the special place Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) supporters have in academia. To start, Atshan is a well-known BDS activist, […]
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Three professors have been wrongly suspended over Halloween costumes they wore over six years ago. One of them is being investigated for having dressed as a Confederate general. As the College Fix notes: Three University of South Alabama professors have been placed on administrative leave over Halloween costumes they wore and posed with at an […]
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Based on informal observation of Virginia’s public colleges and universities over many years, I have oft lamented “mission creep” as a factor pushing the cost of college attendance ever higher. But I never explored the idea systematically. Fortunately, a new study has done that job for me. In “Priced Out: What College Costs America,” Neetu […]
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Radio giant Rush Limbaugh’s death on February 17th after a battle with lung cancer has occasioned a moment of bittersweet reflection for free speech advocates and for those who share Limbaugh’s reverence for the values embedded in the American creed. Limbaugh’s wildly successful run touched off the ascendance of post-Reagan conservative political power, but its […]
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Editor’s Note: This article is the last in a symposium on white fragility and its related concepts. To view all of the prior essays in this series, click here. On Race, the Best of Times and the Worst of Times For inter-ethnic relations in America, it is the best and worst of times. It is […]
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George Mason University in Virginia plans to illegally give minorities a racial preference, until its mostly white faculty has the same racial balance as its more heavily non-white student body, which is more ethnically diverse than the average college. Under GMU’s draft “ARIE Task Force Recommendations,” GMU will “recruit, hire, and retain faculty” and “staff […]
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Why are progressives so angry at the police, to the point where a significant minority of them want to abolish the police? Because they vastly overstate the number of police shootings of unarmed black people, often by a factor of 40 or more—exaggerating police killings by around 4,000 percent. That leads some of them to […]
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I spent my early years believing in a euphonious lie that modern China was beautifully multicultural, with all its 56 ethnic groups living as one family in utter adoration of the motherland. This patriotic belief, consolidated through years of Marxist and Maoist training, was slightly shaken when I met my college best friend—a Yao minority who talks […]
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Introduction Recent statistical research (such as Krymkowski’s The Color of Culture) as well as the lived experience of Black and Brown people demonstrate that the “outdoors” are among the most racially exclusive spaces in Eurocentric nations. It is obvious, as Krymkowski notes, that the exclusion of BIPOCs from the outdoors is the result of systemic […]
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Former President Donald J. Trump has been acquitted in his second impeachment trial. This time, Mr. Trump was charged with inciting the mob that assaulted the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. on January 6th. Mr. Trump’s lawyers relied on the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which protects free speech. But Mr. Trump’s critics allege that his […]
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In Part I of this essay, we discussed the origins of the term “equity,” its original meaning of fairness, its degeneration into forced equality of outcome, and its eventual inversion into unfair repression of some groups as a necessary means to bring about successful outcomes for others. In this second part, we describe how equity—equality […]
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In my last essay here, “‘Equity?’,” I noted that President Biden’s recent executive orders and appointments dealing with race have been almost universally mischaracterized as “aimed at reversing as many of President Trump’s policies as possible.” In fact, I argued, they reverse “the civil rights policy not just of Trump but of every American president […]
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Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing symposium on white fragility and its related concepts. To view all of the essays in this series, click here. In this piece, I argue for a new way of conceiving national identity and ethnic relations. This entails a porous ‘melting-pot’ ethnic majority, which is informal and […]
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I have decided to prohibit my undergraduate business students from using Google when they write their semester papers. In my teaching, I emphasize interpersonal communication and critical thinking. Future business executives will, as they always have, need to work with others, negotiate, resolve conflict, write clearly, integrate information, and have good judgment. Google attenuates such […]
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On the one hand, universities should seek talent wherever it exists and without concern for credentials or professional values. On the other hand, the academic milieu is strange and difficult, and those brought into universities who have had little experience of it might well dislike it, and that could harm it. These two hands matter […]
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I. A Good Term Gone Bad The modern term “equity” originally comes to us from the Old French term, equite, which in turn came from the original Latin, aequitatem, a word that could mean a number of different things, including equality, fairness, uniformity, or even symmetry. At the end of the 16th century, Western Europeans began […]
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Our current monomaniacal obsession with identity was midwifed by postmodern theory. In the past, students of society and culture emulated science in theory and methodology, striving to offer objective, disinterested, and impartial knowledge about human life. Postmodernism attacked science and rejected the goal of objective knowledge about people, arguing that objectivity was impossible and that […]
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Editor’s Note: This excerpt is part of a longer essay published by The Heritage Foundation on the conservative policy response to COVID for higher education. The full essay can be found at The Heritage Foundation website. The key to finding policies that can garner widespread conservative support lies in understanding the four schools of thought through […]
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Twenty years ago, when Hollywood still made movies to entertain and when the Academy Awards were based on talent and appeal instead of an “inclusion scorecard,” Jude Law starred in a compelling if not entirely historically accurate film called Enemy at the Gates. It followed a young Vasily Zaitsev during the Battle of Stalingrad as […]
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America has moved to the left so rapidly that Europeans are now expressing alarm about it. As journalist Glenn Greenwald notes, “Obama-endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron has joined numerous French intellectuals & journalists in warning that ‘out-of-control woke leftism of US campuses and its attendant cancel culture’ poses a grave threat due to the social […]
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Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing symposium on white fragility and its related concepts. To view all of the essays in this series, click here. The great enemy to the American vision is essentialism, which says that your ethnicity or your race is who you are in your unchangeable essence … The […]
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Who is that masked man, sitting alone at his desk signing “a flurry of executive orders”? There is dispute over whether he comes as a peacemaker promoting unity or as a progressive tool extirpating conservatism, but there is near-universal agreement that the thirty executive orders President Biden signed in his first days in office were […]
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Students in colleges and universities across America and Canada have recently taken to writing “Open Letters,” such as here, here, and here, in order to “take a stand” on an ideological issue and, just as important, to vent their fury on one or more professors or administrators who are deemed to have deviated from ideological […]
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Every institution in the United States and in Canada has endorsed diversity as a fundamental value and goal, and has formally committed to sex, race, sexuality, and ethnic diversity in its personnel. This is seen at every level, from national governments to universities to primary schools, from international corporations to the media to street corner […]
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Thoughtful commentators, from both the Left and the Right, have noted that political legitimacy requires allowing all in the polity to participate in the political process, the outcome of which all are obligated to follow. Thus, in a democracy, all must be given the opportunity to comment on, and attempt to influence, the policies to […]
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