Anne Hendershott is a professor of sociology and Director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. She is the author of Status Envy: The Politics of Catholic Higher Education (Transaction Books) and The Politics of Deviance (Encounter Books).
Less than a decade after the Supreme Court issued its 2012 ruling in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School vs. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, giving religious organizations wide latitude in selecting their employees, the Court has agreed to review yet again whether two Catholic K-12 schools should be able to hire and fire their own […]
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Fifty years ago, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published a celebratory article with the title: “Doors of Ivy League Colleges Reported Wide Open for Jewish Students.” Reporting that in 1967, “40 percent of the students at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania are now Jewish. At Yale, Harvard and Cornell, the Jewish student number between 20 […]
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As Anti-Semitism continues to grow unchecked on colleges campuses, and within a small cohort currently serving in the United States Congress, Belgium offers a glimpse into a frightening future for us if the hateful rhetoric is allowed to escalate. During the same week that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) complained about undue Jewish influence in this […]
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More than 4,000 people have signed a petition supporting a Brown University social scientist who is under fire from activists and her own university for research raising questions about whether social factors, rather than biological ones, could influence young adults’ transgender identities. Lisa Littman, an Assistant Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences, in a peer-reviewed […]
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While radical feminism in the 1960s called for challenging existing gender roles and abolishing what the feminists saw as the pervasive patriarchy that permeated social institutions, churches, politics, and schools, today’s radical feminists call for the elimination of men. In an offshoot of the #MeToo movement, the #YesAllMen campaign rejects the goodness of all men. […]
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Marquette University has been trying to get rid of John McAdams, a conservative gadfly, for nearly four years. In October 2014, they came close to making that happen. When Cheryl Abbate, a grad student in philosophy, was teaching a course about John Rawls and asked students for examples of current events to which Rawlsian philosophy […]
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In an attempt to pressure and embarrass Duke University’s President Vincent Price, an undergraduate student group, known as the “People’s State of the University,” interrupted the President’s speech during an alumni weekend event and delivered 12 demands for institutional change. The protestors’ demands ranged from a $15 an hour minimum salary for all hourly Duke employees; […]
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As totalitarian modes of rule continue to decline throughout the world, readers of Minding the Campus will recognize the insidious strain of totalitarianism that has emerged on many college campuses—one that is characterized by the bullying, and sometimes silencing of faculty and students who deviate even slightly from the prescribed progressive campus politics. Most recently, […]
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Bowing to pressure from MoveOn.org, Monsignor Franklyn M. Casale, the President of St. Thomas University in Miami, issued an ultimatum on March 13 to Anita Britt, his Chief Financial and Administrative Officer: choose between your work for this university or membership on the Board of American Outdoor Brands, the former Smith & Wesson Holding Company […]
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The no-confidence season for college presidents got off to an early start this spring with a nay vote from the Michigan State faculty for the university’s interim president and the entire Board of Trustees in the wake of the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal. Starting with the angry rebellion against Harvard president Lawrence Summers in […]
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Amid the tidal wave of sexual abuse allegations against powerful individuals in politics, sports, the media, the entertainment industry, and in academia, one stands out because it has not inspired the kind of collective outrage that the others have. Ithaca College’s new President, Shirley M. Collado, was accused—and convicted—of sexually abusing a female patient in […]
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Millennials, perhaps our most insulted generation, have taken quite a heavy beating, both in the media and parts of academia. They are “the snowflake generation,” (fragile and overprotected)’ the dumbest generation” (Mark Bauerlein) the “most narcissistic generation” of all time (Jean Twenge in her book Generation Me), “lazy” and “entitled” (in a Time cover story), […]
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Continuing its attack on what it calls the “politically tinged” philanthropy of the Charles Koch Foundation, The Chronicle of Higher Education followed-up last year’s essay entitled, “How Right Wing Billionaires Infiltrated Higher Education,” with last month’s “Think You Know What Type of College Would Accept Charles Koch Foundation Money? Think Again.” Left-wing billionaires like George […]
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Sociologist Emile Durkheim would find validation for his theory of deviance in the fury surrounding sexual harassment and abuse by powerful men in politics, the media, business, and academia. More than one hundred years ago, Durkheim argued that the reason acts of deviance are identified and publicly punished is because defining deviant behavior reinforces social […]
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In an attempt to document “the impact of web-driven political outrage” on the lives of professors, The Chronicle of Higher Education launched a series called “Professors in the Political Cross Hairs.” Updated periodically whenever a new story unfolds of web-based attacks on professors for their classroom comments, opinion essays, tweets, or Facebook posts, The Chronicle […]
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In her speech last week on how colleges handle accusations of sexual assault., Education Secretary Betsy DeVos promised to “end the era of rule by letter” begun by the Obama administration. The reference was to the “Dear Colleague” letter sent to colleges and universities by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights on April 4, 2011, […]
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More than forty years ago, sociologist Robert Merton called attention to an emerging “Black Insider Doctrine” within sociology, the viewing of white sociologists as “outsiders,” incapable of understanding or conducting research on matters concerning blacks. Groups in conflict in 1972 wanted to make their own interpretation of reality the prevailing one. Over the years, as […]
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While the American Sociological Association continues to congratulate itself for a rising number of bachelor’s degrees in sociology, traditional sociology seems to matter less than ever before. Apart from the recent and brilliant Strangers in Their Own land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild, not many sociologists have a good […]
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While Georgetown University leaders may have said a silent prayer last week for the repose of the soul of one of its most distinguished alums, the best-selling author, William Peter Blatty, it is unlikely that most were mourning his passing. Blatty, the author of The Exorcist, had been making life difficult for Georgetown for more than a […]
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In the latest expansion of the intent of Title IX, a University of Kentucky Professor drew punishment this month, partly, he says, because he was found to have engaged in “sexual misconduct” by singing a Beach Boys song at a university gathering in China last year. The professor, Buck Ryan, who directs the University’s Scripps […]
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Sociologists define a moral panic as a feeling of fear shared by a large number of people that some evil threatens the well-being of society. The recent clown panic that has emerged from the belief that that murderous clowns have surfaced throughout the country to terrorize schools –including college campuses — says more about the […]
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In an essay on Catholic higher education published in First Things before his death in 2009, Fr. Richard Neuhaus wrote: “When a school is haggling over its mission statement, it is a sure sign that it has already lost its way.” While Fr. Neuhaus never taught on a Catholic campus, he understood that debating over […]
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