It was a college campus right out of fiction, complete with the classical architecture of 19th-century buildings, quiet and leafy outdoor quads, and wood-paneled classrooms befitting a small, private, liberal arts college. Speaking as a then-professor of political science, the students were incredible, except for those who never turned in their work during the semester. […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Law & Liberty on January 18, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. For a number of years now pleasant young women (or persons identifying as women, or with female-sounding names) have been contacting me from the university’s diversity office, inviting me to attend sessions to discuss our DEI policies. […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Quadrant on November 20, 2023 and is crossposted here with permission. “Everywhere we see true culture vanishing, and what is replacing it is barbaric” — Romano. Guardini, 1924 Voted into power by the Palestinian people of Gaza during 2006, and with extensive support in the West Bank (Samaria and […]
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If there’s one thing to thank “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) experts for, it’s their knack for revealing the stunning hypocrisy behind universities’ DEI initiatives. Case in point: Maria Thompson and Susan C. Turell’s 2022 DEI audit of the University of Illinois Springfield (UIS), laying bare the university’s failure to adequately address a rape case […]
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Editor’s Note: A version of this article was previously published on the author’s substack, Saving America, on September 21, 2023. With his permission, an updated version has been published below. But what will become of men then?’ I asked him, ‘without God and immortal life? All things are permitted then, they can do what they like? — […]
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Suppose I were to tell you that in a North Carolina county, neighborhoods with a “lower percentage of White individuals … lower economic and racial spatial advantage, and higher area deprivation” and “higher reported violent crimes, evictions, poverty, unemployment, uninsurance, and child care center density, as well as lower election participation, income, and education,” are […]
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Counseling has an identity problem. Since the American Counseling Association (ACA) was established in 1952 by a group of guidance counselors, students, and college personnel, the profession has struggled to distinguish itself from clinical psychology and other types of therapy professions. Like a younger sibling dissatisfied with hand-me-down clothes, the counseling elite cast about for […]
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Editor’s Note: A version of this article was previously published on the author’s substack, Saving America, on Jun 13, 2023. With his permission, an updated version has been published below. As a political science instructor, I have followed many stories of the left using various means to cancel those who they deem “undesirable” or “deplorable” […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The American Conservative on July 5, 2022, and is crossposted here with permission. The proposed new Title IX regulations by President Biden’s Department of Education have opened the door for universities to restrict and compel student speech even more than they already do. If universities follow these guidelines, students’ First […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The American Conservative on January 14, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. One might think the world had tilted an additional 40 degrees on its axis on January 2. Judging from news accounts, the northern hemisphere was plunged into darkness, and an even more bone-chilling cold than […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by City Journal on December 7, 2023 and is crossposted here with permission. The American Museum of Natural History’s newest “revitalized” hall—the Northwest Coast Hall, which reopened in 2022 after five years and $19 million spent—includes a case with a warning label: CAUTION: This display case contains items used in the […]
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The higher education community awaited a Supreme Court decision regarding campus admissions with great anxiety. After the Court issued Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA) banning such racial discrimination, many campuses deplored it and sought ways to avoid its effect. An official letter to the “Dear Terrapin Community” […]
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The scene was deeply troubling. Hundreds of college students proclaimed that Hamas’ October 7, 2023, assault on Israeli civilians was a heroic and justified act of liberation. It confirmed a level of ignorance engendered by decades of decay in our colleges and universities. But equally troubling is the fact that the United States Congress immediately […]
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Noah Webster, known as the Father of American Scholarship and Education, wrote in 1788: It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and […]
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Much ink and many gigabytes have been spilled on the topic of Claudine Gay’s defenestration from the presidency of Harvard University. The commentary ranges from the tedious and predictable gnashing of liberal teeth that racism and sexism somehow were the cause, orchestrated—naturally—by Republicans, who have made plagiarism a “weapon” in their “war on education.” More […]
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“What can liberal education mean here and now?” asked Leo Strauss in an address he gave in 1959. Three years later he asked, “What then are the prospects for liberal education within mass democracy?” Timothy Burns, professor of political science at Baylor University—and National Association of Scholars member—recently returned to Strauss’s questions in his searching […]
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Millions of potential and current college students fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) every year. In 2020, Congress passed a law updating the FAFSA and the aid formulas for 2024, but the Department of Education’s (ED) release of the new FAFSA has been a fiasco. Despite having three years to prepare, […]
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I had a conversation about fifteen years ago with a colleague from Seville. We sat in a restaurant in Charlottesville, Virginia, as she expounded on the dangers of economic freedom and defended what seemed to me like the divinely ordained need for government regulation. I was perplexed. “That’s not my tradition and it’s not my […]
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Colleges and K-12 schools penalize students for written work that copies from a source without quotation marks and citations. But many colleges provide wiggle room for faculty. Harvard allowed its former president, Claudine Gay, to correct the record by adding quotation marks and citations long after papers were published. Imagine a school being unwilling to […]
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I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America — Alexis de Tocqueville From 1991 to 1994, at Duke University, I edited a publication called the Faculty Newsletter. The Newsletter had a short and rather erratic history and folded a couple of years […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Spectator World on January 3, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission. In the end Barack Obama, Penny Pritzker, 700-some members of the faculty, the mighty voice of the Harvard Crimson and the entire nomenclature of the DEI movement could not save her from herself. Claudine Gay resigned as […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by American Greatness on January 4, 2023 and is crossposted here with permission. Last month, the Biden Education Department announced plans to issue two Title IX rules in March, having missed prior deadlines in May and October. The delays are good news since both rules are bad, representing a more top-down sexual pathology […]
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If economic rationality guided American universities, the recent Supreme Court decision declaring racial preferences unconstitutional should have been welcomed. The decision provides an off-ramp to costly failures at a time when higher education struggles financially. Given these fiscal strains, why fund diversity, particularly if this invites expensive litigation? Even those embracing the “diversity is our […]
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Yesterday, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) learned that Carol Iannone had passed away in her Manhattan apartment sometime during the holiday season. It’s heartbreaking news. She was that rare chimera, the hardened idealist, coupling an innocence ever shocked by the world as it is, to a tough-minded tenacity that never relented in fighting back. […]
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As stated previously, if I were dictator for a day, I would empty the Maryland Avenue headquarters of the U.S. Department of Education (ED), have the Air Force bomb it out of existence, and after the Corps of Engineers removed the rubble, I would give the land to the Smithsonian Institution for an expansion of […]
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They sold America, the greatest nation on Earth, for next to nothing because that’s what they believe it’s worth. The Ukrainian energy company Burisma paid Mr. Hunter Biden up to a million dollars a year! Wow! It seems like a lot of money. But what were the Bidens selling? Not Hunter’s expertise in, say, energy, […]
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