The fight for free speech is growing ever more urgent, argues Greg Lukianoff in Freedom from Speech, his new Encounter Broadside. Lukianoff, the President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and a frequent contributor to Minding the Campus, suggests that the trend of censoring “offensive” content exists on a stage broader than […]
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While mandatory college orientation programs have always veered toward the absurd, they’ve now sunk to new depths. Today Glenn Reynolds (the Instapundit) noted that some of these programs even imply that every male student is a potential rapist. One student thought his college effectively told him that “You’re a rapist, and we’re watching you.” Reynolds says that […]
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From City Journal: “How good-natured joshing turned two college football teammates—one black, one white–into pariahs. Rarely does the modern Left’s humorlessness, authoritarianism, and subversion of its own goals come together as starkly as in this case.”
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This is an excerpt from Roger Kimball’s Wall St. Journal review of “Seeking the North Star,” a collection of essays by the late John R. Silber, academic reformer and president of Boston University. *** Silber was often labeled “conservative.” In fact, and as he always insisted, he was a liberal of the old school. He […]
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William Deresiewicz has a provocative piece of advice in this month’s New Republic: “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League.” Deresiewicz, a Columbia graduate and former Yale professor, argues that elite institutions often produce students who are entitled and lack purpose. He also suggests that elite schools promote inequality by catering mostly to high-income […]
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Articles by Professor W. Lee Hansen at the Pope Center site and by John Leo here at Minding the Campus attracted wide attention last week by deploring a suggestion in a diversity report at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that called for, among other things, the “proportional participation” of underrepresented racial/ethnic groups “in the distribution of […]
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MTC contributor KC Johnson first made waves with his stunning work on the Duke lacrosse case of 2006. His reporting, which revealed how the accused students were repeatedly denied their due process rights, first appeared on his blog and later in Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, the definitive account of the case […]
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Here’s some good news for those of us concerned about the lack of due process on campus sexual assault cases. Three women whose sons were brought to campus tribunals on charges of sexual misconduct have just launched Families Advocating for Campus Equality (FACE), an organization committed to “ensuring fairness and due process for all parties […]
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If you’re feeling hopeless about the apathy of today’s college students, check out FIRE’s latest video. Entitled “Don’t Shut Up–Stand Up For Speech!,” it highlights students who’ve asserted their First Amendment rights in defiance of hostile administrators and professors. The video also informs students of FIRE’s role in assisting such students. Check it out here:
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Cristina Hoff Sommers–the “Factual Feminist”–has a few suggestions:
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Should you be allowed to hand out copies of the Constitution anywhere and any time you like at a public college? California’s Modesto Junior College didn’t think so. In 2013 its administrators and campus police prevented student Robert Van Tuinen from distributing Constitution pamphlets outside its “free speech zone” and without having requested to do so in advance. […]
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AEI’s Cristina Hoff Sommers is now hosting “The Factual Feminist,” an excellent YouTube series which punctures the conventional wisdom on “feminist philosophies and practices.” Today’s episode explores the damage Title IX has done to college sports:
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Our friends at FIRE has just released a video explaining why the 2006 Duke lacrosse case is still relevant. It features frequent Minding the Campus contributor KC Johnson, who wrote the definitive history of the case. Check it out here:
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Posted by A Voice For Male Students 1. John Doe at Occidental College 2. Andre L. Henry at Delaware State University 3. Benjamin King at Depauw University 4. Edwin Bleiler at College of the Holy Cross 5. John Doe at Williams College 6. Drew Sterrett at University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 7. Kevin Parisi at Drew University […]
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5/20: Admiral William H. McRaven at the University of Texas, Austin
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Despite growing concern over the rights of accused parties in campus sexual assault hearings, the mainstream press has largely ignored these worries. Our friends at SAVE (Stop Abusive and Violent Environments) have compiled a helpful list of the many writers who have called out the denial of due process on our campuses. Unsurprisingly, a good number of the pieces originally […]
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The questionable assumptions of campus “rape culture” activists are finally receiving mainstream attention. In National Review, Heather Mac Donald noted the irony behind campus hearings on sexual assault: The campus sexual-assault tribunal also has a performative aspect: It dramatizes the patriarchy before a sympathetic audience of adults. “Our task is to give voice to the […]
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“As Erin Ching, a student at 60-grand-a-year Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, put it in her college newspaper the other day: ‘What really bothered me is the whole idea that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.’ Yeah, who needs that? There speaks the voice of a generation: celebrate […]
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Today’s respondents to our symposium question, “Should we be unhappy that the liberal arts are going down?,” are Patrick Deneen, Peter Wood, and Peter Lawler. * * * .Patrick Deneen, Notre Dame We should be unhappy that the liberal arts are “going down” in theory but not in fact. Because the liberal arts, of course, have already […]
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As students and their families rethink the value of the liberal arts, defenders of traditional education are understandably ambivalent. On the one hand, the diminished stature of the liberal arts seems long overdue, and this critical reevaluation might lead to thoughtful reform. On the other, this reevaluation might doom the liberal arts to irrelevance. To that […]
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These are slightly edited remarks delivered by Professor Mead at a Manhattan Institute luncheon on April 1 in New York City. He is James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and he currently teaches American foreign policy at Yale. He has served as Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and […]
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By Greg Lukianoff and Ari Cohn The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) receives countless requests from professors claiming that they’ve suffered in hiring and promotion because of their political or personal viewpoints. These cases are notoriously hard to prove and to win–and that’s why University of North Carolina-Wilmington professor Dr. Mike Adams’ court […]
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From Volokh: A patient police interrogator tries hard to draw some common sense from the mind of a feminist studies professor.
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This is an excerpt from remarks by Professor Robert Paquette, co-founder of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, on winning the Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick Prize for Academic Freedom, Friday, March 7, at the CPAC convention in Maryland. The award is sponsored by the American Conservative Union Foundation and the Lynde and […]
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This is an excerpt from an essay in The American Conservative by Patrick Deneen on the Harvard Crimson column by Harvard senior S.V. Korn,”The Doctrine of Academic Freedom” which argued for dispensing with longstanding commitments to “academic freedom” in favor of what she calls “academic justice.” *** What is particularly telling in Ms. Korn’s article is that she […]
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Free speech has finally returned to Modesto Junior College. One can only hope that other schools will follow suit. Last September, MJC students Robert Van Tuinen and Megan Rainwater attempted to hand out copies of the U.S. Constitution outside MJC’s student center. It was Constitution Day, after all, and Van Tuinen and Rainwater hoped to […]
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On January 9th, Minding the Campus and the Manhattan Institute hosted Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit fame) for a lecture on his recently released book, The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. C-SPAN was there to film his talk, and has just made it available online here.
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By Jonathan Marks The Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association narrowly passed a resolution last Saturday urging the State Department to “contest Israel’s denial of entry to the West Bank by U.S. academics who have been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian universities.” The anti-Israel movement within academia will try to […]
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