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. Barry Glassner’s classic The Culture of Fear just turned 20. In the text, Glassner became perhaps the first serious social scientist to point out to an intelligent […]
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Professors, students, and all other members of an academic community should be free from sanction to say what they please. Freedom of expression should be guaranteed in official university documents, including, of course, collective agreements. Guarantees, though, are not worth much if the university’s culture is hostile to freedom of expression. One duty members of […]
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We recently published a book titled Repatriation and Erasing the Past (University Press of Florida, 2020), its reception on social media reflects the emotional and dogmatic thinking that has infected so much academic work in the United States and abroad. In our book, we are critical of repatriationism, which we define as any law, practice, […]
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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 Part II of this series, evidence for the race Implicit Association Test (IAT) was evaluated as to (1) the plausibility of the underlying construct that it […]
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I must apologize at the outset for offering to the reader what is by now a truism known to everybody who has had even short periods of sobriety during the last decade. Whatever imaginings the reader may have had during the twentieth century about being a unique individual and about treating others as individuals, the […]
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The toxic ideas that have corrupted today’s universities all began as tiny, obscure musings before escaping from the laboratories. They may have started with an unpublished paper or two, a request for modest institutional funding, or an informal discussion group. Eventually, they earn a panel at a regional disciplinary convention and an experimental course. In […]
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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 Part I of this series, the introduction in 1998 of the race Implicit Association Test (IAT) — developed originally by Professor Anthony G. Greenwald and his […]
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In what may be a rare (and possibly unique) example of “reverse canceling” — firing someone because he is woke, not because he is not — Garrett Felber, an assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi, has recently been informed that his contract will not be renewed. As reported by Inside Higher Ed (“Outspoken […]
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In August 1996, at the height of a 6-million-dollar campaign coalition to preserve race-based affirmative action over against Proposition 209, Dr. Shirley Weber spoke at the Million Man March statewide conference organized by Dr. Manulana Karenga for a revolutionary agenda of black empowerment. At the time, Dr. Weber was a member of the San Diego School Board […]
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My university, Saint Mary’s in Halifax, Nova Scotia, makes a lot of noise about respect. We have a Safe and Respectful Saint Mary’s working group that issues reports and recommendations now and again, a Policy on Conflict Resolution that directs members of the university community to contribute to a respectful environment, and even a senate-approved […]
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In 1996, Californians passed by a wide margin a citizens’ ballot initiative, the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), also known as Proposition 209, that disallowed use of race and sex preferences by state and local governments in hiring, public contracting, and admissions to public universities. Authored by philosopher Tom Wood and anthropologist Glynn Custred, it […]
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Editor’s Note: National Association of Scholars Board Member Richard Vedder originally published this piece with Forbes on January 7, 2021. It has been removed from the Forbes website. Minding the Campus proudly republishes Professor Vedder’s article, slightly reformatted for the length preferences of our site. The National Association of Scholars, the publisher of Minding the Campus, […]
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Details aside, it is hard to conclude that our side is winning the campus battle. If we were a publicly traded firm, stockholders would be furious. That unpleasant reality acknowledged, let me suggest a key but never articulated explanation for our failures: universities are not afraid of us. Machiavelli got it right: “Ideally, a prince […]
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The Miller Center, an affiliate of the University of Virginia that specializes in presidential scholarship, public policy, and political history, has long prided itself — with some reason — on being “non-partisan” and striving “to apply the lessons of history and civil discourse to the nation’s most pressing contemporary governance challenges.” Recently, however, like so […]
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