John Leo is the editor of Minding the Campus, dedicated to chronicling imbalances within higher education and restoring intellectual pluralism to our American universities. His popular column, "On Society," ran in U.S.News & World Report for 17 years.
The New York Times has followed the issue of campus rape for a number of years without mentioning the shaky procedures and lack of due process in college hearings on sexual assault. The first acknowledgement we have seen in the Times that these hearings are basically unfair came in a Sunday Review opinion piece November […]
Read MoreMove over Captain Renault. Like the Claude Rains character in Casablanca who was “shocked, shocked” to learn that there was gambling at Ricks, Carol Folt seems terribly surprised that athletes at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she is chancellor, were attending (or not attending) bogus classes and getting high bogus marks. How […]
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Suppose you follow the tortured treatment of gender politics on campus, and someone told you that a male “gender expert” funded by the MacArthur Foundation had just published a Time essay strikingly hostile to men. Could you identify the author? Why yes—that would have to be Michael Kimmel, in this essay arguing that fraternities should […]
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“As employees in institutions of higher learning, we have a particular responsibility to oppose Israel’s widespread and systematic violations of the right to higher education of Palestinians… As anthropologists, we feel compelled to join academics around the world who support the Palestinian call to boycott Israeli academic institutions. In responding to the Palestinian call, we […]
Read MoreThis illustration is part of an anti-discrimination training policy presented as a game or puzzle. All faculty and graduate assistants at Marquette, the Jesuit university in Milwaukee, must take the test. It gives the test-takers 50 seconds to spot eight objects that are harassing or potentially harassing. Not to keep you in suspense, (spoiler alert) […]
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Marches and rallies against global warming once catered to broad middle-class concerns that cut across partisan lines. No longer. Peter Wood’s account of last Sunday’s climate march in New York City noted the signs that pointed to the dominance of the cause by extremists: “Capitalism Is a Crime,” “Capitalism = Ecocide” and “Turn Everything Off,” […]
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This has been a big year for sleep at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The Shapiro Undergraduate Library cleared away some dusty and disposable books on the first floor and six cots were installed, offering weary students “a safe place for brief spells of restorative sleep,” or “naps,” as they are known in campus […]
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Does the University of Wisconsin-Madison have a plan to introduce diversity in grading—making sure that African Americans, Hispanics and other non-Asian minorities get the same proportion of good marks as whites and Asians? No. “Nothing could be further from the truth,’ said Professor Patrick Sims, UW Chief Diversity Officer and interim Vice Provost for Diversity […]
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A remarkable article on the University of Wisconsin (Madison) appeared yesterday on the John William Pope Center site. In it, UW economics professor W. Lee Hansen writes about a comprehensive diversity plan prepared for the already diversity-obsessed campus. The report, thousands of words long, is mostly eye-glazing diversity babble, filled with terms like “compositional diversity,” […]
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The news media took little notice when 14 organizations and religious leaders, including Rick Warren, Christianity Today and Catholic Charities, sent a letter to President Obama last week seeking religious exemptions from his forthcoming executive order barring federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. But the Boston Globe and gay activists noticed […]
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Last Monday, Bowdoin College made page one of the New York Times with its decision to de-recognize an evangelical student group for refusing to sign an anti-discrimination pledge. This meant the group could not use the chapel, the multicultural center, any room at Bowdoin, or even campus bulletin boards. The pledge said all campus groups […]
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In the Brown University rape-charge scandal, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has declared that the complaining student was “nearly choked to death.” The male involved says the “choking” was minor and meant to be affectionate: “Both (the female and male students, Lena Sclove and Daniel Kopin) acknowledge that Sclove had an intensely negative reaction when Kopin put his hand on her […]
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Columnist Mike Adams reports that at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, where he is an embattled conservative professor, graduating students can get commencement cords in three colors: gold for good grades, purple for being a homosexual and lavender for being supportive of homosexuals. We had no idea that they gave out tassels for orientation and orientational support, […]
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Is it reasonable for a university to insist that campus Christian groups accept non-Christian or anti-Christian students as group leaders? Ask a hundred ordinary Americans and you would very likely get 99 or 100 noes. Ask the same question at our most politically correct colleges and universities, though, and you’d get a different answer. Because of campus anti-discrimination codes, all […]
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We noticed no reporting in the New York Times on Michael Bloomberg’s notable commencement address at Harvard. Google couldn’t find any Times coverage either. Very strange. Bloomberg had been mayor of the Times’ home city for twelve years and except for the nannyism over big sodas and his clear support for stop-and-frisk, he has been […]
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Number One finding in the annual survey of Harvard seniors: about 60 percent of African-Americans and more than 40 percent of Latino and Asian-American students have felt marginalized because of their race while at Harvard. “Marginalized,” an invitation to aggrievement, is now a mainstream college term, raising the question, “How marginalized can you be if […]
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Reaction is beginning to set in against the campus trend of letting angry protesters act to remove commencement speakers they don’t like. In one of the three graduation speeches at Haverford College yesterday, former Princeton President William G. Bowen criticized both Robert Birgeneau for withdrawing as a commencement honoree, and the activist students and professors who pressured Birgeneau to withdraw. Bowen called the […]
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Dear Azusa President Jon Wallace, I read with interest that you have disinvited the distinguished scholar Charles Murray as a speaker tomorrow at your university, Azusa Pacific. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Cancelling speeches is a hallowed campus tradition, like pantie raids were in the 1950s. But have you done it the wrong way […]
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In an unexpected burst of common sense, Oberlin College has tabled its new policy on “trigger warnings,” the alerts that were scheduled to be given to sensitive students about upcoming class material that might traumatize them. The warnings directly concerned sex, violence and racism, but were called for across the board “to anything that might […]
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Sensibly enough, the Wall Street Journal berated Phil Hanlon, the president of Dartmouth, for mishandling the two-day takeover of the university administration building by a small group of diversity-obsessed students. Instead of the obvious move–having the protesters tossed out–Hanlon met with them, then announced: “Their grievance, in short, is that they don’t feel like Dartmouth […]
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For years, efforts have been made, legal and illegal, to get around the provisions of California’s Prop 209. That’s the 1996 measure that prevents consideration of gender, race or ethnicity in public education, employment or contracting. But for many weeks, it has seemed likely that the overwhelmingly Democratic California legislature would vote to exempt education from […]
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On Monday, a columnist at the Harvard Crimson came out against academic freedom, because it often interferes with “something I think much more important: academic justice.” Her name is Sandra Y.L Korn, class of 2014, and she is unwilling to tolerate research that threatens her political goals. She writes: “If our university community opposes racism, […]
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An unusual article appears in the Education Life section of Sunday’s New York Times. The headline is disturbing: “If She Can’t Stop Him, YOU CAN. Bystander intervention may be the best hope to reduce sexual assault on campus.” The strong implication here, and in the article, is 1) that rape is out of control on […]
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Karen Straughan, a soft-spoken Canadian activist, gave a controversial speech last night at Ryerson University in Toronto. Her topic was, “Are Men Obsolete? Feminism, Free Speech and the Censorship of Men’s Issues.” This is not a favored topic at Ryerson. Last March, the Ryerson Student Union banned the formation of any campus group dealing with […]
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The term “rape culture,” invented in the 1970s by radical feminists, seemed confined for decades to women’s studies programs and free-lance extremists. Now, as Cathy Young’s article today on this site shows, the term and the ideology behind it have been going mainstream, even at such prominent campuses as the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Wikipedia […]
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The most common mark given at Harvard College these days is an A, and the median grade is A-. This information, from Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris, came out in response to a question from Professor Harvey Mansfield at the monthly meeting yesterday of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Mansfield is […]
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“As Interest Fades in the Humanities, Colleges Worry,” said the headline in the New York Times. True enough. But the long front-page story described only half of the problem–that the rise of the computer culture and the recession have turned many students away from the traditional curriculum. On his blog, Via Meadia, Walter Russell Mead […]
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A hundred or more excited students at Brown University shouted down New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly last night and prevented him from speaking on “Proactive Policing.” Shutting down speakers whose messages are out of favor with the left is common. On campus, free speech is regularly trumped by leftist concerns–in this case resentment […]
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“How Amherst Raises Money from Alums: Calling Them a Bunch of Drunken Lechers.” That was the headline on the blog Stupid Girl citing a Newsweek report that Amherst College sent residence counselors an advisory email that included this warning: “Keep an eye out for unwanted sexual advances. A lot of alums come back for Homecoming […]
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Here’s another Orwellian intervention at a U.S. university by the Federal Government: in response to feminist pressure about the handling (under Title IX and Title IV) of sexual harassment and sexual assault cases on campus, the University of Montana agreed to accept a resolution agreement with the Department of Justice and the Education Department’s Office […]
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