Student loan forgiveness is a topic that isn’t going away. Progressives want all student loan debt forgiven, and the Biden administration has been trying to deliver. In fact, the Biden team has been the most aggressive administration on student loan forgiveness in history. But it’s not clear to me whether the administration is winning or […]
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My grandfather attended the University of Toronto. My father attended the University of Toronto. I attended the University of Toronto. And now my daughter is attending the University of Toronto. This is a large public university that is not particularly difficult to get into with decent grades. But the fact of this great chain of […]
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At long last, some state legislatures have begun reacting to the “wokeness” epidemic that has consumed both K-12 and higher education. Unfortunately, many of these bills are likely doomed to accomplish little or nothing because they fail to address an essential issue: enforcement. Particularly in the context of public universities, expecting state employees to simply […]
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In 1753, English writer Samuel Richardson has his main character proclaim, “Women must not encourage Fops and Fools. They must encourage Men of Sense only.” While “fool” belongs to most English speakers’ lexicon today, “fop” likely does not. According to Google Ngram (below), “fop” has seen about a 95% decline in relative usage since its […]
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Affirmative-action peer review The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has supported extramural biomedical research since the end of WWII. This year, the program spent close to $40 billion. The basic concept is simple. Write down what you, the scientist, want to do and why; estimate how much it will cost each year; and send the […]
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“Diversity” is all the rage these days. It even attracts support across the ideological spectrum: demographic diversity on the Left and viewpoint diversity on the Right. For some, it has a magical quality. As Harvard’s president recently announced, to defend the university from those who claim it racially discriminates, “We write today to reaffirm the […]
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A racialist worldview is destroying the nation’s largest higher education system There is no clearer evidence than the June 29, 2023, webinar presented by Colegas—an organization sponsored by the California Community Colleges (CCC) system—that the specter of white supremacy has transformed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into an insidious and unassailable ideology. The Colegas email […]
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The Atlantic is a magazine with a splendid history. Yet it recently published an article—“‘Race Neutral’ Is the New ‘Separate but Equal,’” by Uma Mazyck Jayakumar and Ibram X. Kendi—that is both self-contradictory and morally questionable. “Separate but equal,” the policy outlawed by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, was explicitly racist because students […]
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The recent ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States declaring unconstitutional affirmative-action preferences in college and university admissions is a vindication of the noble objectives of the original Civil Rights Movement, encapsulated in Martin Luther King’s iconic commandment at the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963 that people be judged on the basis of […]
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A University Without Walls, A Prison Without Cells, and Extinction Superintelligent Bot by Joe Nalven and DALL●E 2 Science fiction may foreshadow the future of AI. Antony Bryant’s call for papers cites Stanisław Lem’s short story, Golem XIV, written in 1981, which sought to anticipate where humanity and its AI technology were headed. In Lem’s […]
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When Thomas Jefferson returned from France in the fall of 1789, he turned his home at Monticello 180 degrees. The building had originally faced east, that is, toward the Atlantic, Europe, and the Mediterranean. Now he made it face west, that is, toward Louisiana, Texas, Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, California, Oregon, and the Pacific. Any Hispanist […]
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Why do we feel lied to when we are admonished to “Follow the Science”? Is it because “the Science” is herding us to energy suicide? For our own good, of course. Is it because “the Science” insists that the distinction between men and women is illusory, and enthusiastically backs up the delusion with stunning non […]
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The trouble with a day job spent defending Western civilization and the Great Books canon is that you obsess over what clueless eighteen-year-olds desperately need to have assigned to them in class. They are blank slates who know nothing earlier than Friends re-runs; how do we convey to them most efficiently the thread from Plato […]
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In 1954 and 1955, the United States Supreme Court reached a unanimous decision in several consolidated cases, “declaring the fundamental principle that racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional . . .” (Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483 (1954); and Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 349 U.S. 294, 298 (1955) (“Brown II”)). In […]
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British author Douglas Murray once shared a platform with Iranian-born activist Maryam Namazie as part of her One Law for All campaign. The two were there to discuss the illiberalism encircling British society—particularly with respect to Islamism and Sharia—including the leftists who seemed ever willing to open the gates for it. A major problem with […]
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The Supreme Court has finally banned racial preferences in higher education. Alas, those familiar with the academy’s penchant for race-related chicanery know that the celebrations may be premature. Yes, few college and university presidents will announce their outright resistance, but many, perhaps most, will surreptitiously find a way to sneak racial preferences back in. Ideologues […]
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The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine forget … Science In July 2020, just two months after the killing of George Floyd, chairwoman of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, 84-year-old civil-rights pioneer Eddie Bernice Johnson, asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) [T]o take action on research […]
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Ties to the Chinese military—and to U.S. national security Portland State University (PSU) is at the cutting edge of geopolitical competition, with its simultaneous ties to both Beijing’s military establishment and America’s National Security Agency (NSA). Thanks to “collaborative partnerships” between PSU’s Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science and three different Chinese universities with […]
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Strategic Ambiguity, the Motte-and-Bailey Fallacy, and the Allure of Simplistic Morality Who doesn’t support being more tolerant and culturally sensitive? What kind of a monster thinks that Black Lives Don’t matter? Just be kind. Our academic morass starts with some banal platitude, with which almost everyone agrees, but ends with a far more controversial claim, […]
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Republicans in both the House and the Senate have recently released a slew of new legislation focused on reforming higher education. In the Senate, Republicans announced the Lowering Education Costs and Debt Act, which itself comprises a bundle of five bills. The College Transparency Act (CTA) is a bipartisan bill that aims to remove the […]
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In January, University of Toronto psychologist Yoel Inbar interviewed for a role at UCLA. His girlfriend had received a job offer from the psychology department, and like many universities, UCLA has a dual career program designed to facilitate partner appointments. The interview went well, and as Inbar notes in a recent podcast, he thought that […]
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California is a peculiar case of counteracting, yet converging forces regarding affirmative action. In 1996, it was the first state to codify a statewide constitutional ban on preferential treatment on the basis of race, color, sex, ethnicity, or national origin via the passage of Proposition 209. Over the last two decades, big players in the […]
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When the Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s plan for massive student loan forgiveness ($10,000 to $20,000 for 98% of borrowers), I said to friends, “Biden will sneak in most of what he wanted in other ways.” Specifically, I thought he would continue the extremely generous income-repayment scheme that he and Education Secretary Miguel […]
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Gustave Doré, Don Quijote 2.22 (1869) I wondered what all the fuss was about after I saw the movie There Will Be Blood (2007). It’s visually remarkable but overly moralizing. After two and a half hours, you’re supposed to think American capitalism is about greed, treachery, and murder. In Texas the movie is a litmus […]
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Once upon a time, liberals and conservatives could converse easily. I know that sounds implausible, but it is true. Now, I am fairly old. Fred Flintstone was just two grades ahead of me at Bedrock High. Back then we could debate questions such as whether it was a good idea to let dinosaurs turn into […]
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Last year, Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E Act banned the teaching of certain race-based concepts in K–12 schools and higher education, including the notion that one race is superior or inferior to others. That is an appropriate prohibition in the K–12 system, where young people are particularly vulnerable to the misuse of research by ideological teachers. This […]
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The Declaration of Independence is one of the most important statements on human liberty ever written. Not only did it launch the American Revolution, but it also inspired freedom fighters all around the world. From Frederick Douglass and the struggle against chattel slavery to Winston Churchill and the battle against totalitarianism, the ideas of the Declaration have been a rallying point […]
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The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan on Friday. The administration was attempting to forgive $10,000 of student loans for borrowers making less than $125,000 per year, and $20,000 for those who had received a Pell grant. The alleged authority for this action was a 20-year-old law that allows […]
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Last Thursday, June 29, the U.S. Supreme Court released its ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, which it bundled with the University of North Carolina (UNC) case, putting an end to race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Framing the decision as one that embraces “the transcendent aims of the Equal Protection Clause,” […]
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