Why the heckler’s veto is wrong and why universities must prevent its use As further confirmation that universities have devolved into islands of repression in a sea of freedom, some 120 Yale Law School students seriously disrupted a panel event on March 10th. Sponsored by the Yale Federalist Society, the event featured Kristen Waggoner, lead […]
Read More
As universities continue to shift toward the endorsement of a social justice and equity-based agenda, academics are increasingly confronted with the need to be more inclusive and diverse in their teaching practice, module content, and modes of evaluation. We are told that this is desirable, typically without any real explanation or grounded argument for why […]
Read More
Professors are speaking out against progressive dogma University faculties are reeling from an unrelenting bombardment of progressive artillery aimed at decimating American traditions and laws intended to protect free speech, academic freedom, and racial and gender impartiality. Expressing even modest dissent prompts escalating aggression from students, administrators, and others. Careers, the Fourteenth Amendment, civil rights […]
Read More
A revealing article in the February 2022 issue of Frontiers in Communications provides tremendous insight into the roadmap that Critical Theory advocates are using to conquer STEM, the last academic sector still holding out against the long march through the institutions. Titled “Acknowledging and Supplanting White Supremacy Culture in Science Communication and STEM: The Role […]
Read More
In my last piece, I covered the recent decision in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School District, where the court declared that a new admissions process for a highly-regarded STEM-focused high school was unconstitutional, finding that scrapping the old merit-based process in favor of “racial balancing” (based on Kendian “equity” principles) was clearly illegal […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearEducation on March 9, 2022, and is republished here with permission. The CDC has changed its list of children’s developmental milestones for infants and young children, marking the first update of its kind since 2004. The move has generally been portrayed in the media as a positive adjustment, with claims that it […]
Read More
It is not a good time in today’s academy for those who prize truth. One false step, one off-hand remark, one “wrong” vote on the latest hare-brained DIE initiative, and it’s off to purgatory or worse. Even if found innocent of corrupting young minds by telling the truth, the very thought of facing a Kafkaesque […]
Read More
UC Hastings law students expose the intolerance of the race-obsessed Left As further evidence that the campus woke persist in trying to determine what may and may not be said on university campuses, activist students at UC Hastings College of Law shut down the appearance of conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro at a March 1st […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearPublicAffairs on March 3, 2022, and is republished here with permission. As part of its domination of cultural institutions, the far left decides who gets anointed as heroes. That leaves some of the greatest Americans forgotten, their lessons ignored. So another Black History Month has passed without a national recognition […]
Read More
Numbers are in the air we breathe, even thicker than the Omicron variant it seems. Though it’s become passé to mention the COVID case count (53,000 last week, for anyone who’s still interested), one can instead cite 1.4 million (Ukrainian refugees), over 14 million (illegal aliens residing in the United States), 7.5% (US annual inflation), […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics on March 5, 2022, and is republished here with permission. In July 2020, a Princeton University professor, Joshua Katz, wrote an article containing provocative language that generated controversy on campus. While voicing strong disagreement with that language, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber clearly and publicly stated a few days later […]
Read More
In recent years, many higher education institutions have abandoned standardized testing in their admissions processes or made these tests optional, arguing that SAT or ACT scores do not reliably project student performance and that these tests have built-in biases against underrepresented minorities (URMs). As of February 9, 2022, over 1,820 accredited U.S. colleges and universities […]
Read More
Have you noticed how frequently students, and the general public for that matter, are asked to provide their ethnic or racial identity? All you have to do is fill out an online survey after making a purchase at the bookstore, and you will quickly be barraged with queries about your ethnicity. My usual practice is […]
Read More
At Sarah Lawrence College, protesting about various perceived injustices is something of a campus pastime. When I discuss these demonstrations with my students, I warn them that the progressives behind them will never be satisfied, as their goals are constantly shifting and are often unclear. Leftists frequently promote narratives of harm and victimization and rarely […]
Read More
In the last few years, academia has utterly embraced the concept of “equity” as articulated by Ibram X. Kendi; i.e., that if a particular identity group is statistically under- or over-represented in anything, the reason for the imbalance is indisputably systemic discrimination, and thus positive discrimination to correct the imbalance is not only proper but […]
Read More
It may have taken decades, but thanks to an upcoming Supreme Court case, American universities may soon be legally required to end racial preferences. At least that’s what many hope. Unfortunately, even if the Supreme Court bans racial preferences, the battle will hardly end. It may even become more acrimonious. One should recall what transpired […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Spectator World on February 19, 2022 and is crossposted here with permission. In January, the Department of Justice dropped charges against Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Gang Chen, a mechanical engineer accused of concealing illicit ties to the Chinese government early last year. United States Attorney Rachael Rollins said regarding the decision, […]
Read More
Earlier this month, the Anti-Defamation League released an “interim definition” of racism, after its 2020 definition was widely criticized. That earlier definition held that racism is the “marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.” Of course, if this were accurate, countless instances of racial […]
Read More
Its discrimination against Asians mirrors its treatment of Jews, but for different reasons On January 24th, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University, which not only has profound implications for the future of affirmative action in college admissions but also recalls an ignoble part of Harvard’s history […]
Read More
This is not an article about censorship. It is an article about critical thinking—framed within legislated guardrails. Boundaries are important in elementary and secondary education, more so than in higher education. We immediately think of age-appropriate materials, but there is also the more difficult issue of how we ought to frame education. At some point, […]
Read More
In 1986, economist Herbert Stein proposed what is now known as Stein’s Law: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” This may have been true 35 years ago, but we’d be hard-pressed to apply this law to today’s colleges and universities. The parade of crackpot ideas is unending, and one can only wonder […]
Read More
At California State University San Marcos (CSUSM), the Craven Taskforce is busy at work to cleanse the university of its connections to the late Senator William A. Craven, who helped found the school in 1978. The renaming taskforce consists of 23 members drawn from the faculty, the student body, and the larger community, who are […]
Read More
More lethal ammunition for the campus cognitive war against Israel In May, while Hamas was firing more than 3,000 deadly rockets from Gaza with the express purpose of murdering Jewish Israelis, members of academic communities around the world were falling over themselves to express their solidarity, not with the beleaguered citizens of the Jewish state […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by First Things on February 8, 2022 and is crossposted here with permission. In 1919, Columbia University added a new class: “Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West.” Partly a response to World War I, it was designed as a “peace issues” course to correspond with a “war issues” […]
Read More
Last week, former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores made headlines in the sports world after he filed a class action lawsuit against the National Football League and all 32 of its teams. Flores, who is African American, was interviewed for a position as head coach of the New York Giants. The job was given […]
Read More
A recent Wall Street Journal article told of how Bard College, my alma mater, has tasked three undergraduates, funded by the school’s Office of Inclusive Excellence, to peruse the college’s 400,000-book library and evaluate “… each book for representations of race/ethnicity, gender, religion, and ability.” According to the library’s newsletter, this evaluation was the first […]
Read More
The National Association of Scholars recently appointed Dr. J. Scott Turner as Director of our Diversity in the Sciences project. Dr. Turner is a retired professor of biology at the State University of New York, though he continues his research on ecology, evolution, and (in particular) termite colonies in Namibia. He is well-positioned to help […]
Read More
No sooner had the Supreme Court alarmed higher ed leaders and their elite allies by agreeing to revisit its past support for racial preference—thus ensuring months of contentious culture war conflict over the possibility that it might adopt Chief Justice Roberts’ aphorism in Parents Involved (“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race […]
Read More
Children who visit libraries in some American cities have grown accustomed to encountering drag queens who read LGBTQ+ stories to them. Parents began to object. Now it seems that public school librarians are on the receiving end of parental complaints. A January 2022 Education Week article highlighted a growing battle between parents and school librarians. […]
Read More
In my last article, I detailed the cancellation of Professor Lawrence Alexander’s invited contribution to the Festschrift honoring Emory University law professor Michael Perry. As I and many other commentators pointed out, the actions by the editorial board of the Emory Law Journal (ELJ) were a shocking abandonment of fundamental principles of scholarly discourse in […]
Read More