As free speech and expression have come under assault on college and university campuses, a number of clear trends have emerged. One of the most powerful findings is that elite schools are typically less open to free speech. Further analysis reveals a troubling gender gap between male and female students: women are far more liberal […]
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On Monday, academic workers at Rutgers University, including part-time faculty and graduate assistants, returned to their positions, effectively ending the university’s first-ever labor stoppage since its founding in 1766. After the university reached a framework agreement promising comprehensive pay raises, over 67,000 Rutgers students are now able to resume classes after a week of disruptions […]
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Some states are known for being innovative or expressive in outsized ways, with governmental policies that are often bold, and business entrepreneurship that is similarly spectacular in its magnitude. For example, among states with a liberal-progressive tradition, California is seldom dull and ordinary. Similarly, among states with a more conservative-libertarian orientation, Texas and Florida often […]
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Affirmative action in today’s colleges and universities is a giant failure machine. Every year thousands of black and Hispanic students, who have been led to believe that a college degree is well within reach and a first step toward economic success, are admitted to schools for which they barely qualify. The inevitable consequence is failure, […]
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From Resolution to Radicalism In the spring of 2020, Madera Community College was granted full accreditation and became the newest California community college in the nation’s largest higher education system. It was a time of hope and optimism amongst the faculty, in particular. This could be a fresh start as we separated from our parent […]
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Justifying one form of racism justifies all forms of racism, both historical and invented. All racists claim that vilifying and persecuting certain categories of people is justified. The German National Socialists claimed that Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and the disabled polluted their pure Aryan blood. The Ku Klux Klan argued that blacks were quasi-human and that […]
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“Animal Cognition” becomes “Human Ideology” “Allies … will have ‘ALLY’ presented on their name badges at the conference.” What kind of conference is this, one wonders? Athletic? Religious? Political? None of the above. This is the 2023 conference of the Comparative Cognition Society (CCS), a small scientific organization devoted to understanding the intelligence and learning […]
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Chatbots like Google’s Bard, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Baidu’s Wenxin Yiyan (Ernie), and ChatSonic allow humans to communicate with machines using natural human language through text-based or, in the case of Alexa and Siri, voice-based systems. Some see these early versions of an increasingly sophisticated human–machine communication framework as a Pandora’s box that needs to be paused […]
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Everywhere you look, there is a growing backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that implement racist, sexist, and exclusionary policies masquerading as solutions to those very problems. A cultural revolution that divides society into immutable victim and oppressor classes, inflames resentments and suspicions, facilitates anonymous denunciations, promotes segregation, ostracizes critics, aggravates mental illness, […]
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Lean over on the bookcase. If you really wanna get straight, Read Norman Mailer Or get a new tailor. – Lloyd Cole, “Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken?” Sometimes Norman Mailer looks to me like George Bush, Jr. after an all-night bender at Yale. That’s where the resemblance stops, I think. Mailer counts among the […]
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Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jarrod Kelly chides the Right for pushing back on accreditation. While the headline is a bit aggressive (“The Right-Wing War on Accreditation”), authors generally don’t get to choose their headlines, and the piece itself is quite measured. While the ostensible focus of our disagreement is accreditation, I think […]
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There have been discussions about AI writing programs like ChatGPT in the academy. The past few months have seen a flurry of activity with college administrators calling emergency meetings, professors changing their assignments, and educators writing essays (some perhaps written by AI?) that range in reaction from the nonchalant to the apocalyptic about the fate […]
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Editor’s Note: This piece is part of an ongoing series of articles by Professor Bruce Gilley. To read the other articles in the series, click here. Let’s start with the obvious. The plague of junk citations in modern academic research will not be curbed by digital or bureaucratic means. For every clever new software tool […]
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The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the nation’s premiere professional organization for the sciences. As part of our expanding outreach into the sciences, we at the National Association of Scholars (NAS) decided to set up a booth at the annual March meeting of the AAAS, so that we could get out […]
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On March 9, 2023, the Arkansas State Senate—controlled by a 29-to-6 Republican majority—narrowly passed a legislative ban on race-based affirmative action: Senate Bill 71 (SB 71). If signed into law, SB 71 would make the Natural State the tenth U.S. state to prohibit racial preferences in public programs. However, when the bill made its way […]
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How social science has become social commentary It is well known that social science—psychology, sociology, and economics—has devolved into more than one hundred sub-specialties. Less well known is the result: criticism, which is essential to science, is increasingly restricted to bubbles of the like-minded. This has allowed critical criteria to diverge to the point that […]
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James Moore’s recent epistle in this space, “The Rise of the Pseudo Faculty,” has jolted my aging brain to suggest an economist’s view on why college and university faculty have lost clout in their institutions over time. But first, a little history. If you asked a professor on an American campus 100 years ago, “Are […]
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Paradoxes are excellent pedagogical exercises, and any professor worth his salt knows at least a few. To this storehouse of familiar examples, let me add a new paradox that is especially relevant to today’s academy: oikophobia, a term elucidated by Benedict Beckeld in his recently published Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations. As […]
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Editor’s Note: This piece is part of an ongoing series of articles by Professor Bruce Gilley. To read the other articles in the series, click here. Just when serious scholars started to worry about the pandemic of junk citations, others were positively promoting them. The “citation justice” movement I discussed in the last installment is […]
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The purpose of ruthless objectivity and extreme expertise “Those who are looking ahead to a new movement in education, should think in terms of Education itself. Any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism’ becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms’ that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is a speech delivered by Professor Elizabeth Weiss of San Jose State University at a meeting of the California Association of Scholars on March 16, 2023. It has been edited prior to publication. Recent reports from Texas Tech University, Stanford University, and the University of North Carolina show promising signs that […]
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“So justice is driven back, and righteousness stands at a distance; truth has stumbled in the streets, honesty cannot enter.” – Isaiah 59:14, NIV I am a sixty-six-year-old philosophy professor. If you are still reading, consider an approach to teaching and writing that I have practiced ever since I went to college and, especially, since […]
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The last 30 years have seen a substantial change in the composition of college and university faculties, including a significant increase in the share of instruction delivered by non-tenure-track, contingent faculty, both full time and part time. Based on data from the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, the U.S Government […]
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The higher education accountability movement has seen very little progress over the years. The main success was the establishment of Cohort Default Rates, which revoked financial aid eligibility for colleges where too many students defaulted on their student loans. But this was both obscenely forgiving (a college could only lose eligibility if 30% or more […]
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Why the heckler’s veto is wrong, and why universities must stop it Something disturbing is taking place with increasing regularity at elite law schools. For the third time this year, a guest speaker has been rudely confronted by a mob of tendentious scolds intent on suppressing views with which they disagree. Not content to merely […]
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Western civilization depends on science, but science, especially social science, is now under threat. Until WWII, science was mostly a vocation. Scientists were motivated by curiosity and the search for verifiable truth. Since the growth of centralized, largely governmental funding, science has become not so much a vocation as a profession. Career incentives now increasingly […]
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“Each side is coming face to face with its own conception of the devil!” – Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night Arthur Rackham’s 1935 illustration of Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom” At some point while reading The Peloponnesian War (late fifth century BC) you begin to realize that Thucydides is up […]
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Portland State University (PSU) closed its Confucius Institute (CI) in January 2021, citing “a range of financial, staffing and operational reasons.” Thus it shuttered its China-backed language program of 13 years. In its announcement of the closure, PSU noted that it intended to “expand direct academic ties” with China. PSU has made good on its […]
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Editor’s Note: This piece is part of an ongoing series of articles by Professor Bruce Gilley. To read the other articles in the series, click here. If you plan to present a paper at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Spokane next year, please be advised: your submission needs to be chock full […]
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The higher education reform movement, as pursued by Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature, has run into a heavy barrage of criticism from both the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and Keith Whittington, who, though writing in his individual capacity, is chairman of the governing committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA). Normally, […]
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