When 2022’s Congressional Fads Mirror Nazi Germany Everything is not ok in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Recent laws, such as the legalization of recreational marijuana, a drug that negatively affects cognitive functioning, and the legalization of gay “marriage,” a precariously codified bill, were evil and well received by […]
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While we may have to wait until 2024 to see a Biden vs. DeSantis battle royale, we might have a preview in the skirmish over accreditation in Florida. To recap developments to date (see here for more), accreditors are private entities that have been entrusted with determining which colleges and universities are eligible for federal […]
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There are professors, and then there are professors. Donald Leslie Shaw (1930–2017) was a titan in the field of Hispanic literature. He wrote two definitive books on the principal literary movements of modern Spain and Latin America: The Generation of 1898 in Spain (1975) and Nueva narrativa Hispanoamericana (1981). He also wrote what remains the best […]
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How ‘Identity Science’ Canceled an Editor The U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1978 Bakke decision, shoehorned racial preferences into legality by identifying (racial and ethnic) diversity as an intrinsic good, a non-merit factor that may be legally used to tilt hiring and college admissions. Now, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have become part of the […]
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In my sixth year as a professor—the same year that Barack Obama’s Department of Justice reshaped Title IX into a tool to police political speech on campus—a student filed a Title IX complaint about me. He claimed that the B+ he had received in my class was a result of my “homophobia.” His evidence for […]
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The battle over racial preferences in college admissions usually focuses on universities and the courts, but no less important is what occurs among the applicants themselves. Gaining admission, particularly to elite schools, can be likened to a game, and it is hardly surprising that families lacking “diversity” often hire expensive consultants to give junior an […]
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White Coats for Black Lives is Bringing Racialized Medicine to a Doctor’s Office Near You The medical student activist group White Coats for Black Lives (WC4BL) is not only radical—it is also mainstreaming radicalism in medical education. WC4BL connects the profession of medicine to a larger woke zeitgeist. The group emerged in 2014 following a […]
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In the last part of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the main character, Winston Smith, is arrested by the Thought Police and subjected to a long interrogation process by O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party. “There are three stages in your reintegration,” O’Brien tells Winston, “There is learning, there is understanding, and there […]
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Stanford University has just apologized for its past discrimination … against Jews. As summarized in Stanford Magazine, a presidential task force made up of faculty, students, staff (including a rabbi), an alumnus, and a university trustee released a 75-page report in September, “A Matter Requiring the Utmost Discretion”, whose research was thorough and conclusion unsparing. […]
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A Review of Gloria Greenfield’s Documentary Film “Civilization in the Danger Zone” If you are married with kids, during the COVID lockdown you may have, like many other millions of American parents, discovered that your local school boards are teaching your children an ideology that is at odds with your most cherished beliefs and practices. […]
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What went wrong with American education? Why are preschoolers and kindergarteners being taught that they were born to combat racism and embrace transgender rights? How come concerned parents who oppose blatant indoctrination are now the bad guys? Any keen observer of contemporary education policy would point out the role played by schools of education in […]
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In 2001, Harvard President Larry Summers rebuked University Professor Cornel West for scholarship that did not meet Harvard’s standards. According to the Globe, Summers “rebuked West for recording a rap CD, for leading a political committee for the Rev. Al Sharpton’s possible presidential campaign, and for writing books more likely to be reviewed in The […]
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Judge Douglas Ginsburg, senior judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, has been contributing to civics education. Already distinguished as a judge and a scholar, Judge Ginsburg has now created Civics Fundamentals, in partnership with izzit.org, as a free, standards-aligned course based upon the naturalization test for would-be […]
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The common first-year reading for new students at my university this year was a comic book—or a ‘graphic novel,’ in the Newspeak of our contemporary culture. In it, George Takei (Mr. Sulu of Star Trek fame), through a team of ghostwriters, tells a monolithically woke version of the story of Japanese internment during WWII. First point: This is […]
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The Washington Post recently ran an exposé criticizing Yale’s policy of requiring suicidal students to withdraw from school, get treatment, and then apply for reinstatement. This article treads on familiar ground. Criticism of this policy—particularly (indeed, exclusively) at elite colleges—has been building for years and has been published in many other outlets. Why are universities […]
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The psychologists are burning another witch. A mob of professors, graduate students, and miscellaneous luftmenschen denounced Klaus Fiedler, the editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science, for “racism, general editorial incompetence, and abuse of power.” The Board of Directors of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), craven accomplices to the mob, swiftly told Fiedler to resign […]
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From November 10 to 13, I attended the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which was held in Seattle, Washington. The AAA is the largest anthropological association in the world. It is a scholarly and professional organization, and three-quarters of its members are academics—either professors or students. The AAA, unlike the other major anthropological […]
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In her piece on the problems of diversity, inclusion, and equity initiatives in the sciences, University of Southern California chemistry professor Anna Krylov compares the USSR, which she left in 1991, and modern universities. Krylov notes that universities are plagued by an “atmosphere of fear and self-censorship” and “an intolerance of dissenting opinions.” This, she […]
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President Biden has a civics lesson that he is fond of and regularly repeats. It is about how the United States is unique in the world because of the founding ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. “Unlike every other nation on Earth, we were founded based on an idea,” he notes before adding that […]
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There is considerable talk these days about the enrollment crash in higher education, especially in liberal-arts education. The Chronicle of Higher Education has been expressing worry about this crisis for several years and has provided evidence supporting it. In 2019, Bucknell University’s former vice president for enrollment management, Bill Conley, penned one such article, describing […]
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Radical Individualism and the Renaissance (for Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo) “By the side of the farm must early spring up a wide circle of industries …” – John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy (6.6) The egalitarianism that has dominated American education since the 1960s needs rethinking in order to remain the engine of our […]
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The Academic Bill of Rights revisited David Horowitz is a controversial fellow. Born into a communist family in New York and involved early on with the Black Panthers, he remained on the Left until he was repulsed by the murder of a woman friend, a killing for which he held the Panthers responsible. He describes […]
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I always thought that William Shakespeare was a bit too harsh when, in Henry VI, Part 2, he said “Let’s kill all the lawyers.” Given the antics of our nation’s leading law schools and the American Bar Association (ABA), however, perhaps Shakespeare was onto something when he penned those words over four centuries ago. In […]
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Fall is in the air, which means it’s time to award the annual Minding the Campus Trofim Lysenko Award for the Suppression of Academic Speech (a Lysenko Award, for short). As detailed in the inaugural award announcement, the Lysenko Award is named after Stalinist agronomist Trofim Lysenko. Like so many in today’s woke colleges and […]
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While it’s understandable to get riled up about the latest outrage on campus, there is some potential good news that we shouldn’t fail to notice: After decades of continuously increasing, college tuition now appears to be trending down. While the level of tuition may still be too high (decades of sustained increases will do that), […]
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Soon after this year’s ACT scores were released, a number of articles appeared commenting on the one-half-point drop in the overall, average composite score. The Wall Street Journal correctly pointed out that this is the fifth consecutive annual decline, and the first time the average composite score has been below 20 since 1991. To put […]
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