What are academic administrators waiting for? Will it take injuries, hospitalizations, or something worse for them to stop turning a blind eye—or even tacitly condoning—the aggression we’re seeing from anti-free speech students? In May, members of Congress heard a first-hand account of today’s academic dangers from former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines, who was mobbed by […]
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Editor’s Note: This piece is part of a new Minding the Campus article series called Minding the Sciences, wherein we are renewing our focus on the sciences given the many threats it faces in modern academia. Click here to learn more. A dozen years ago, National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood posed the provocative […]
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While employment opportunities have steadily diminished at traditional independent media outlets over the past quarter century, efforts to ameliorate or adapt to the decline have met mixed success. A group of wealthy foundations, however, cleared a rescue path uniquely for US education journalists. Many who followed this path, laid by the Bill and Melinda Gates […]
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The problems plaguing contemporary higher education are myriad and manifest. I will not try to summarize them here, except to note that they are not merely imagined or trivial. Instead, they are real and existential, reaching to the very heart of modern academe. But identifying the problems does not answer the more important question: what […]
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Vocational programs have long been required to help their students secure gainful employment, but until the early 2010s, gainful employment had never been defined. The Biden administration has just released a draft of the latest Gainful Employment regulations, and, like the previous iterations, it would terminate financial aid eligibility (Pell grants, students loans, etc.) for […]
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In 1927, Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals denounced those who would forsake truth in service of political aims. Nearly a century later, as a researcher and lecturer at Princeton University, I’m embroiled in a modern-day version of Benda’s tale. Indeed, I have become the target of a campaign to eradicate intellectual diversity on […]
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A law school dean tries to square the circle The ruckus at Stanford Law School surrounding the March 9 shout-down of Judge Kyle Duncan has abated. But we can learn much from four documents that have since emerged: Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach’s placatory speech, statements by two ‘marginalized’ student groups, […]
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On May 6, 2023, the California Reparations Task Force met at Northeastern University Oakland for a final discussion and vote on its full reparations report. Consisting of 40 chapters and a 104-page executive summary, the report offers sweeping policy recommendations on restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, and other forms of reparations. According to the taskforce, California, which […]
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Editor’s Note: This piece is part of a new Minding the Campus article series called Minding the Sciences, wherein we are renewing our focus on the sciences given the many threats it faces in modern academia. Click here to learn more. In late April 2023, twenty-nine scientists published a manifesto titled “In Defense of Merit […]
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College and university presidents, along with their often-compliant governing boards, have presided over a decline in academic freedom during the past decade, as so-called DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) bureaucracies have multiplied in size and power. Mandatory diversity statements, cancel culture, trigger warnings, and bias response teams evidence this decline. It has come with a […]
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Why are straight, white, male students completely ignored by the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices at public colleges and universities? There are no initiatives that explicitly encourage or support their success in the year 2023, but it would be very easy to find programs for all other demographic groups. Why exactly are white faculty, […]
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At the age of ten, while running on my family’s patio I slipped and put my arm through the window of the kitchen door. I paused to marvel. I hadn’t cut myself. But when I saw shards of glass in the frame, I jerked away, leaving a two-inch gash in my forearm. My mother telephoned […]
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Science should be just and representative, says Science editor “It matters who does science,” reads the headline of a recent editorial by Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the top American general science journal, Science. Well, of course it matters. Science should be done by people who are knowledgeable, honest, curious, and open to criticism. But that’s […]
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Review: Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities by Stanley Ridgley (Humanix, 290 pages, $29.99) I only attended Vanderbilt University’s 2022 Jumpstart Virtual Conference to see the presentations on “anti-racism” in STEMM education and research, but I decided to stay for the lunch-hour keynote presentation on “White Emotionalities,” anticipating that its […]
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Some critics think that to merely step foot on an American college campus today is to be immediately assaulted by gender studies speakers and decolonization posters. Each and every student, it appears, is caught in a web of woke studies from which there is no escape. But spend a cozy evening nestled by the fire […]
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Student loans operate very strangely in this country. A student borrows money from the federal government to pay for higher education expenses—thus, there are three parties involved (the student, the government, and the college or university). But only two of them face any risk from the loan. The student faces severe financial consequences if he […]
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When it comes to civic literacy, the average American is hardly a rocket scientist—and the problem seems to be getting worse. This is, of course, not exactly news for experienced professors who regularly encounter students unable to recall even the most rudimentary facts, turning lectures into high school level remedial courses. Despite America’s massive spending […]
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Curiosity or Ideology? On the morning of September 11, 2001, faculty members at an elite college in Massachusetts aimed their frustration at President Bush. We stood like a small crowd in the department lounge, all of us facing the TV. CNN showed the moment an assistant whispered in the president’s ear while he was reading […]
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In an effort to justify students’ protest against Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan’s invited speech, Stanford Law School Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach says that she supports free speech—but she also criticized the judge for harming “people of color.” After the chaotic event, in which about 100 Stanford students heckled Judge Duncan […]
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In my judgment, E. Gordon Gee is the dean of American university presidents. If you had visited West Virginia University (WVU) 40 years ago, Gee would have been president. The same is true if you visited today. But in the four-decade interval, Gordon also headed two other flagship state universities: the University of Colorado and […]
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Over the last few years, the rallying cry of “woke” activists has become “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (often abbreviated to DEI). There is little reason to object to such principles on the surface. After all, America was founded on the principle that all people are created equal. Unfortunately, the meaning of words can change over time. Rather […]
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This past weekend the University of Austin (UATX) held its second “First Principles Summit.” This Summit brought together professors, administrators, public intellectuals, and business-people. (I was also invited.) The purpose of the gathering was, as UATX President Pano Kanelos explained, to hold UATX’s founders accountable to their first principles. Founding is not for the faint-hearted. […]
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Higher education administration has become dysfunctional and dangerous—illiberal, incompetent at its core educative functions, but all too effective at infecting our republic’s civil society with woke ideology. It must be reformed. Yet the radicals who have captured our colleges’ and universities’ bureaucracies have been so effective that, at this point, it seems impossible for successful […]
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Wikipedia is probably the most widely used encyclopedia in the world. If you’re looking for facts, it is pretty reliable. For example, if you want to compare the number of traffic roundabouts per capita in the US and other countries, Wikipedia will provide a nice graph from the World Economic Forum showing that the UK […]
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On the evening of April 23, 2023, a fight broke out in Los Angeles. The masked mob threw chairs, shouted swear words, stole a laptop, and landed a few punches. The cops were called, and, eventually, the chaos subsided. One person was arrested for assault, and one victim ended up with a bloody nose. This […]
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Law students at the University of Chicago recently used colored playground chalk to protest a conservative speaker. This raises the question: are they maturing adults or regressing adolescents? Perhaps philosophy has some lessons for how to understand the problem, and where to look for a solution. One of my favorite philosophers is Robert Hanna. He specializes in the writings […]
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There may be some good news for those concerned about today’s campus madness: the cavalry is on the way. We will, hopefully, be rescued! A recent Wall Street Journal editorial celebrated Harvard’s new Council on Academic Freedom. The organization proclaimed that “… free speech is also essential to human progress,” and that intellectual orthodoxy “is […]
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While student loans are a widely acknowledged problem, one program sticks out as particularly troublesome: the Grad PLUS program. After graduate students max out their traditional student loans, which include an annual and an aggregate borrowing limit, there is no limit to how much they can borrow through the Grad PLUS program. Unsurprisingly, this has […]
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Many centrists and conservatives are leery of Michel Foucault’s enduring popularity in higher education. Some think he’s the very essence of a great postmodern conspiracy to take down Western Civilization. Perhaps. But even if he’s part of a bigger problem, we ought not dismiss the entirety of his work. Not all his books merit attention, […]
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Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard will not end higher education’s race discrimination by itself, even if the Supreme Court unequivocally strikes down affirmative action. America’s colleges and universities are already planning for massive resistance to preserve race discrimination, and they will have the support of state and federal bureaucracies, as well as the commanding […]
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