“Diversity is all the rage on college campuses. And for good reason. It is important for the diversity of our nation to be reflected in higher education and beyond. However, the people who champion gender, racial, and cultural diversity often shun viewpoint diversity. Universities have become increasingly ideologically homogeneous. This is especially the case in […]
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On our campuses, the election of Donald Trump is being treated as an emotional and personal disaster. It’s all about feelings. Classes have been canceled, therapeutic intervention offered and safe spaces filled. Here are three administrations in action, as reported on the Power Line blog: There Will Be a Self-Care Session with Cookies and Mindfulness […]
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NYU has been in tumult over far-right tweeting by a self-declared “deplorable” professor who revealed himself last week as Michael Rectenwald, assistant clinical professor of liberal studies. Yesterday he made another revelation in a Washington Post op-ed: his alt-right burst of opinions was a pose, a “thought experiment” intended to provoke an authoritarian reaction at […]
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By Rod Dreher Many readers will have heard of Anthony Esolen, the robustly orthodox Catholic literature professor at Providence College, the Dominican-run college in Rhode Island. Prof. Esolen is the author of a number of books, including an exquisite translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is one of the three translations I recommend to anyone who asks me […]
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Yale remains deeply unwelcoming to students with conservative political beliefs, according to a new but massively unsurprising Yale Daily News survey distributed in October and reported last week. Of the 2,054 respondents who completed the survey —about 38 % of all Yale undergrads— nearly 75 percent said they believe Yale does not provide a welcoming […]
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On campus, the holiday is at least as much fun as a 4-hour trip to the dentist. Students involved in fraternities and sororities at Tufts University, where the First Amendment is apparently not widely known, were told to not wear anything that could offend or annoy others during Halloween celebrations – or risk getting investigated […]
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Pro-life students at Marquette, a Catholic, Jesuit college in Milwaukee, applied for and got permission to mount an anti-abortion display on campus for 48 hours. Three times during that period the display, consisting mostly of small pink and blue flags representing unborn females and males, was vandalized by campus feminists and their allies. Pro-life messages […]
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Women’s centers on U.S. campuses are not often the subjects of controversy, but the Center at Princeton University is right now. The editorial board of the student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian wrote that the campus Women’s Center “is neither as inclusive nor as effective as it could be,” and is “so politically homogeneous” in its […]
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Registered Democratic professors outnumber Republican ones nearly 12 to 1 in history, economics, journalism, psychology and law programs at 40 leading U.S. universities, with Republicans clustered among retired professors and in some business schools and economics departments. Of the five departments analyzed, history was by far the most Democratic. There are more than 33 Democratic […]
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The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is running a satirical subtitle contest, asking readers to suggest appropriate PC subtitles for classic books. Example: Tom Sawyer: Adventures in Whitewashing. The assignment for the first week: any book by Jane Austen. Pick an Austen book and share your new subtitle on Twitter, with the hashtag #PCSubtitle and […]
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National Universities (in order of rank or tie) Princeton University (NJ) Harvard University (MA) University of Chicago (IL) (tie) Yale University (CT) (tie) Columbia University (NY) (tie) Stanford University (CA) (tie) Massachusetts Institute of Technology Duke University (NC) (tie) University of Pennsylvania (tie) Johns Hopkins University (MD) National Liberal Arts Colleges Williams College (MA) Amherst College […]
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Those of you who wonder what diversity officials do all day must listen to Sheree Marlowe, the new chief diversity officer at Clark University. During first-year orientation, a baffled and tense freshperson asked if she could sing along with a carful of other white people when a song containing the N-word filled the air. “No,” […]
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Christina Paxson, president of Brown University, published a ringing endorsement of free speech on campus yesterday in The Washington Post. The op-ed said, “Freedom of expression is an essential component of academic freedom, which protects the ability of universities to fulfill their core mission of advancing knowledge.” That’s nice. What the article didn’t say is […]
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Now that the University of Chicago announced that it does not condone “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces”—apparently the first major American university to do so—it is time for other institutions of higher learning to get behind this basic and rather obvious educational idea and create a genuine trend. For some 30 years now, the idea […]
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Harvard, which announced severe penalties on members of single-sex student groups in May, may have almost lived up to the ban in principle for as much as a couple of days. The Harvard Crimson revealed on August 15 that the College had assured the all-female Seneca organization in May that it could “continue to operate […]
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Rohini Sethi has beaten the rap at the University of Houston. As vice president of the student government at the University of Houston, she has escaped sanctions and a forced resignation from office. But she had to apologize profusely, take an unpaid leave of absence and serve some time in a diversity workshop to make […]
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This is an excerpt from the new ACTA report, No U.S. History? How College History Departments Leave the United States out of the Major. It reveals that fewer than 1/3 of the nation’s leading colleges and universities require students pursuing a degree in history to take a single course in American history. Read the full […]
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Every so often, a group of professionals signs a political letter claiming that their training uniquely qualifies them to announce that a particular candidate for president, traditionally a Republican, is totally unfit for office. In 1964 it was psychiatrists denouncing Barry Goldwater. “Fact,” a fly-by-night magazine, rounded up 2417 shrinks, half of whom were able […]
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Twenty years ago, writer and director Nora Ephron gave the commencement speech at Wellesley, her Alma Mater. Her words were ;ife lessons and still resonate, including this line: “We weren’t meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them.” President Walsh, trustees, faculty, friends, noble parents…and dear class of 1996, I am so proud of you. Thank you […]
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Black protesters and their allies shut down a speech by a conservative gay activist at DePaul University in Chicago last night. That’s not news, of course– it’s just what the campus left does. The news is that the security guards hired for $1000 to protect the speaker, Milo Yiannopoulos (after, he says, they threatened to […]
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In a crowd of protesters at Brigham Young University, Kelsey Bourgeois, 26, is shown carrying a sign in one hand and a megaphone in the other. The photo is in the May 27 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. She is not a BYU student, though she was one years ago. She is a […]
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Some 100 American colleges encourage their students to report offensive occurrences of non-criminal bias on campus. Writing in The Washington Post, Catherine Rampell tells us that the University of Oregon’s “bias report team” counted 85 incidents in the past year. including these: A poster featuring a “triggering image” displaying “body size” bias. Sexually explicit doodles […]
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Murray Straus, a researcher in family violence at the University of New Hampshire, died last weekend at the age of 89. He was a man of fierce integrity, and since I covered the social sciences for two national publications, I can tell you that his evidence always checked out. I can also tell you that his […]
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Richard A. Epstein, Defining Ideas, the Hoover Institution These final clubs enjoy widespread acceptance among their members because some young people prefer to organize their social lives around single-sex organizations. To a classical liberal like myself, these revealed preferences count a great deal…. But in the eyes of progressives like Faust, these preferences should be […]
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Yesterday The New York Times ran a column by Nicholas Kristof saying that American colleges and universities seem to have very few conservative teachers and display a conspicuous aversion to acquiring more. Readers of this site already know this, but the news must have come as a surprises to Times readers. “A Confession of LIberal […]
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Harvey Mansfield is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1962. He has written or translated works on Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Alexis de Tocqueville and Edmund Burke as well as a book on Manliness. His notable former students include: Andrew Sullivan, Alan Keyes, William Kristol. Clifford Orwin, Paul Cantor, Delba Winthrop, Mark Lilla, Francis Fukuyama, and Shen Tong. […]
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Last fall, Peter Salovey, president of Yale, badly botched the student protests that broke out over the insignificant issue of proper campus Halloween costume. Now he has made a few decisions in hopes of avoiding another round of protests. First, he announced that the “masters” of Yale’s twelve residential colleges will now be known as […]
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Have you noticed how many of the campus accusations of rape/sexual misconduct are reported after the 3rd, 4th, or 5th sexual encounter? It’s possible, of course that rape-minded males on campus like to let a relationship proceed a while before forcing themselves on a woman. Or it could be that something happens in the midst of a […]
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Mitchell Langbert, a professor at Brooklyn College, wrote last week about the grandly titled and resolutely leftist faculty union that he and all teachers at CUNY are stuck with, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC). Langbert mentioned, briefly, that PSC had made no effort to defend our excellent writer, KC Johnson when KC was under attack […]
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This has been a big week for feminist glaciology, that is, the possibly revolutionary application of feminist (and post-colonial) theory to glaciers. Four University of Oregon researchers produced the 15,000-word paper for the journal Progress in Human Geometry. Steven Hayward who apparently discovered the study, wrote, “This is why you get Trump” on Power Line. […]
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