Remember Melissa Click? She is the communications professor fired by the University of Missouri after calling for “a little muscle” to keep a student journalist from covering campus protesters. The Website “Popehat” writes, “Firing her was the right thing to do, but what we need to realize is that she should not have been hired […]
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From FIRE’s site (The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) Williams College has disinvited a second speaker from its student-run “Uncomfortable Learning” speaker series, a program specifically developed to bring controversial viewpoints to campus. Unlike the first disinvitation (Conservative writer Suzanne Venker), which came at the behest of the speaker series’ student organizers, this order came directly from the […]
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“Beach Books 2014-2016,” released yesterday by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), is a study of mostly summer reading assigned by colleges and universities to their incoming freshman. NAS reports: Our study of common readings during the academic years 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 covers 377 assignments at 366 colleges and universities for the first year and […]
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The New York Times published an article Sunday on how painful it was at Yale for Erika Christakis, whose harmless opinion on Halloween costumes triggered non-negotiable demands by enraged black students and their allies. But The Times buried the lede. Here is the actual nugget of fresh information in the article: “Yet the mood on campus […]
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On January 11, John Leo, editor of “Minding the Campus,” interviewed social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, one of the editors of the five-month-old site, “Heterodox Academy,” and perhaps the most prominent academic pushing hard for more intellectual diversity on our campuses. Haidt, 52, who specializes in the psychology of morality and the moral emotions, is Professor […]
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By Harvey Silverglate Harvard College appears locked into one of those momentous transformational challenges that from time to time roils the eminently roil-able undergraduate campus: What title should replace the sobriquet “House Master?” While the term “House Master” has been used for generations to denote the faculty members who reside in, and oversee, the student […]
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By James Huffman In response to the campus protests, much has been written and spoken about how universities can best serve the interests of their students of color. Those who sympathize with the protesters argue that students of color, in particular, should be nurtured and protected from uncomfortable experiences that distract from their education. Others […]
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John K. Wilson, editor of The Academe Blog, severely criticized Peter Wood’s January 13 article, “What Candidates Can Do for Higher Education Now.” His text is below, followed by Peter Wood’s reply. By John K. Wilson National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood has a column at Minding the Campus today arguing for an 7-point plan for […]
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By David M. Rosen Four anthropology professors stood at the entrance of the ballroom at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver last November, where members of the American Anthropological Association would soon vote to boycott Israeli academic institutions, organized by the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement (BDS). Each professor held up one of a […]
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Jack Fowler, on National Review Online’s “The Corner,” wrote, “Congratulations to the 2015 Sheldon winner. And condolences to the students.” Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) said naming Peter Salovey of Yale the winner was “a good call, though it was a rich field this year.” Perhaps with a touch of regional pride, Charlie Sykes, a well-known Milwaukee blogger, […]
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Oregon State University is launching a series of “social justice retreats” to “promote a campus dialogue about race and racism.” Translation: the university is sponsoring therapized programs to makes non-whites more aware of micro-aggression, more separatist and how aggrieved they ought to be at the hands of whites. There are also programs to render whites […]
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Demands by student protesters at Emory University here, include extending student evaluations of faculty to include a tallying up of microaggressions each teacher has made and a stipulation that Emory “shall not protect the privilege of students to vocalize hate speech.” Power Line blog said: “Emory’s provost, Claire E. Sterk, and the dean of campus life, […]
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The problem of political correctness at Yale has comes up again because it let a good scholar quit teaching under heavy pressure from students over a very mild email she wrote about Halloween costumes at Yale. The email said she thought that an official campus group really shouldn’t be telling students what costumes to avoid. PC […]
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As protest season expands, students at a growing number of colleges and universities are listing their demands. Many of them are want to expand the campus diversity bureaucracies, curb free speech to stop microaggressions and anti-protest remarks, and impose mandatory social-justice training for students and faculty. Walter Olson of Cato and Overlawyered.com compiled a list […]
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Here’s how conservative scholar Steven F. Hayward responded to the question, which was asked by the Intercollegiate Review Michael Sandel, who is a critic of the left from within the left; Robert Putnam, whose work tends to ratify a lot of conservative insights about social order; William Galston, one of the few liberal students of […]
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Richard A. Shweder, the University of Chicago anthropologist, who is speaking tonight in Denver at the annual American Anthropological Association convention, is recommending a “no-action” option on Israel/Palestine, meaning that he considers it inappropriate for the Association, as an entity, to support either side of the dispute. An AAA task force has come down on the […]
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Following student protests, the President of Pomona College has acceded to a long list of demands from blacks and other “marginalized” students, according to a report in the Claremont Independent, a magazine covering the Claremont McKenna consortium of colleges in Claremont, California. President David Oxtoby reportedly signed off on demands that include the following: A diversity […]
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A retired Harvard professor received this email today from Harvard’s Dean of Undergraduate Education, Jay M. Harris: “To Faculty of Arts and Sciences: I am writing to let you know that many of our students plan to leave their classrooms today at 3:15 in a show of solidarity with Black students nationwide. They will gather in the […]
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According to the conservative Dartmouth Review, a crowd of “Black Lives Matter” protesters surged into a campus library November 12, shouting obscenities at whites (“Fuck your white privilege!” “You filthy white piece of shit!”), pushing and shoving as well. The Dartmouth, a non-conservative paper, buried its report of the library incursion at the end of […]
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Mary Spellman, dean of students at Claremont McKenna College in California, resigned under pressure after sending a gracious note to a troubled minority student. A student demonstration argued that Spellman’s comforting message was in effect a way of saying that minorities didn’t belong at the school. Charlotte Allen has the story at her blog, Stupid Girl […]
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“The universities have done this to themselves. They created the whole phenomenon of modern identity politics and Politically Correct rules to limit speech. They have fostered a totalitarian microculture in which conformity to those rules is considered natural and expected. Now that system is starting to eat them alive, from elite universities like Yale, all […]
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Black student protesters and their allies got the scalp they were looking for at the University of Missouri—the university president, Tim Wolfe, resigned today after criticism for not responding strongly enough to reports of racial incidents on or near campus. Wolf had issued a few benign “let us listen to one another” comments, while the […]
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British feminist Julie Bindel was scheduled to speak at Manchester University on a panel discussing the subject “From Liberation to Censorship: Does Modern Feminism Have a Problem with Free Speech?’ That question was answered by the university student union, which canceled her appearance on the panel as a potential violation of “safe space” for transgender […]
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A few highlights from the online site of Cornell University’s conservative student newspaper, the Cornell Review: At her inauguration as Cornell’s new president, Elizabeth Garrett said, “We must heed the call to be radical and progressive.” Later she issued apparently contradictory statements on free speech, calling herself “an avid supporter of freedom of speech” at a […]
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“Can I touch you here?” (repeat 15 or 16 times). California’s “Yes Means Yes” rule requires repeated authorizations for every step toward sexual intercourse. From the NY Times Oct. 15: “‘What does that mean – you have to say ‘yes’ every 10 minutes?’ asked one student. ‘Pretty much,’ replies the instructor…” How to drag anti-black […]
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A group of professors and researchers, about half of them psychologists, launched a web site today –Heterodox Academy–to promote “viewpoint diversity” in academe. The group includes Harvard Psychologist Steven Pinker, Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt of NYU’S Stern School of Business, Wharton Professor of Management and Professor of Psychology Philip Tetlock, Sociologist Carlotta Stern of the […]
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Michael Derrick Hudson, a white guy from Indiana, wrote a poem that was rejected 40 times by various publishers. Then he started sending the oft-spurned work around under the name Yi-Fen Chou, causing it to be snapped up for the 2015 edition of The Best American Poetry. Sherman Alexie, the author and poet who guest […]
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Total students enrolled (2013): 20,375,521 (f: 11,514,975, m: 8,860,546). Most students enrolled: U. of Phoenix-online: 212,044 Most students enrolled (public, doctoral): U. of Central Florida., 59,589. Most expensive: Sarah Lawrence, $65,480 (list price, tuition, rm, bd & fees) Avg. Return on college endowments (2014): 15.5% Avg. freshman tuition discount rate (2014): 46.4% Most spending by research […]
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A disappointing report says African-American students score low on college readiness even when they successfully complete coursework intended to prepare them for college. The report, The Condition of College and Career Readiness 2014: African American Students comes from ACT and the United Negro College Fund. It shows that 62 percent of ACT-tested African American students […]
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“There may be good cause to learn about those topics, but when they become the dominant trend for summer reading programs over multiple years, one starts to wonder what really is the intent of these programs. Such consistent pounding away at similar themes, given the entire vast array of books from which to choose, suggests the programs […]
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