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.
Joe Paterno’s statue at Penn State was taken down not because it was “divisive,” at the university’s new president foolishly said, but because Paterno was morally obtuse and unworthy of the honor. So far so good. But what should we think of the NCAA’s flabbergasting decision to erase history–vacating 13 years of football wins? As […]
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As many critics have noticed, the gap between Page One news coverage of social issues in the New York Times and the editorial response inside is often not a spacious one. Yesterday the Times ran a huge news article (more than two full pages), “Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do,” on the economic and social […]
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Peter Wood’s latest blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Leftist Nostalgia for Academic Standards,” is a must read. Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, weaves a fascinating commentary about two unexpected cracks in the current (and ruinous) regime of higher education: one a lament about the impact of literary theory by one […]
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Almost everybody famous, inventive, erudite, or eccentric has spoken at some time or other at the great TED conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design)–make that TED conferences, once held only in Monterery, now in Long Beach and Palm Springs, and various sites in Europe and Asia. Now a controversy has broken out over a 6-minute talk delivered […]
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(from City Journal, summer 1998) Like many people, I can deliver a competent public speech without much fuss. But a commencement address is different. I can’t recall stewing about a speech as much as I did before donning academic garb and talking at the St. John’s College graduation in Santa Fe on May 17. After […]
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Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, is scheduled to speak Friday at a Georgetown University commencement event, setting off protests among Catholics and others who believe the Obamacare mandate violates religious liberty. So far, some 25,000 people have signed petitions asking for the invitation to be withdrawn. On campus, the reaction seems more […]
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Why did the Chronicle of Higher Education fire Naomi Schaefer Riley? Writing on the American Thinker site, Abraham Miller offers a deft and elegantly phrased explanation: “for revealing what almost everyone on any campus knows, but is reluctant to say, about black studies: it is a political cause masquerading as an academic discipline, and if […]
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Until Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) began linking to Walter Russell Mead at Via Meadia, I hadn’t been aware of Mead’s work. He is a superb blogger on many subjects. Today, for example, he offers an impressive assessment of the Chen Guangcheng case, the best I’ve read so far. Though his expertise is foreign policy–please don’t stop […]
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The Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School has weighed in on the long Associated Press series of articles attacking the New York Police Department for its surveillance of Muslims. This series has won a Polk Award, a White House Correspondents Association award, a Pulitzer Prize and now $25,000 from the Shorenstein Center for excellence […]
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We sometimes Google our contributors to see how they are doing. That’s how we noticed that Professor Donald A. Downs of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, delivered a talk on free speech at another branch of the University of Wisconsin (River Falls) and added these words in a letter to the student paper praising its […]
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Since colleges and universities are coming to the end of the 2011-2012 school year, that means it’s time for commencement protests to begin. Here are some commencement speakers and the reasons given for the irritation they provoke among students:
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Jonathan B. Imber, the Jean Glasscock professor of sociology at Wellesley and editor of Society, offered a tribute in the April 27 Chronicle of Higher Education to Irving Louis Horowitz, who died last month at the age of 82. Horowitz, a renowned sociologist, was the founder of Society, and a major academic publisher. An excerpt:
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Various colleges and universities have tried for years to hobble or eliminate Christian student groups. Some of these institutions have succeeded in forcing these groups to knuckle under. Other administrations have backed down rather than face lawsuits. The primary tactic has been using anti-discrimination regulations to force these groups to allow non-believers as officers. Evangelical […]
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“A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California,” a recent report from the California Association of Scholars (CAS), detailed the radicalization and decline of the once-great UCal system. Charlotte Allen wrote about it here.
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Do some professors offer bribes to their students for promising to support leftist causes? Yes, it happens, and a few teachers, at least, see nothing wrong with it. Mary Grabar, a regular contributor to this site, discusses the practice here, and has video of a Georgia State education professor named Jennifer Esposito offering extra marks […]
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We missed this unusual column when it appeared in the Harvard Crimson two weeks ago, but it’s worthy of comment even at this late date. It begins with Olympia Snow’s complaint that the Senate is not a place “that ensures all voices are heard and considered,” then moves swiftly to argue that Harvard isn’t such […]
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As an academic specialty, psychology suffers from a distinct lack of respect. For one clue as to why, consider the story last week on Inside Higher Ed, Does Income Inequality Promote Cheating?. A doctoral student at Queens University in Ontario says yes–and he didn’t even have to leave his computer to reach that conclusion. A […]
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This is an excerpt from the Q&A following talks March 28 by KC Johnson and Harvey Silverglate on campus “Kangaroo Courts” that fit no concept of the fairness or justice valued in the rest of America. Here Harvey Silverglate expresses concern that students are beginning to imbibe “the utter, arrant nonsense” of their campus prosecutors. […]
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Two of our best writers here at Minding the Campus, KC Johnson and Harvey Silverglate, spoke quite brilliantly at a Manhattan Institute luncheon last Wednesday on “Kangaroo Courts: Yale, Duke and Student Rights.” It is, in our opinion, the best possible short course for understanding the star-chamber proceedings that students face these days at campuses […]
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George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, has been an in-and-out student at Seminole State College. Now he is out–expelled by the college. Why did Seminole do this? Zimmerman is certainly in a lot of trouble, but he has not yet been convicted, tried, indicted or even arrested. Did the college […]
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We noticed an article the other day on The Atlantic web site, arguing that the Republican Party is turning against higher education. The evidence cited for this apparently alarming development was scant: Rick Santorum referred to colleges as “indoctrination mills,” and Mitt Romney told high-school seniors to shop around for low college tuition and not […]
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The third round of a very engaging and amiable debate on affirmative action is here on the National Association of Scholars site. The debaters are James P. Sterba, professor of philosophy at Notre Dame and author of “Affirmative Action for the Future” (pro) and George Leef, a frequent writer here, director of research for the […]
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Vartan Gregorian once said the way to become a successful college president is simple: stand up, give a speech on “diversity,” then sit down. Richard Levin, president of Yale, is the longest-lasting president of an Ivy League university, and following Gregorian’s sage advice is surely one reason why. Whenever a serious incident occurs at Yale, […]
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The phrase “dominant narrative” is a sure sign that a postmodern, anti-Western or anti-male story line is about two seconds away. It appears early in a flattering Harvard Gazette profile of Susan Greenhalgh, “the newest professor of anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences” at Harvard. The profiler, Katie Koch of the Harvard Gazette […]
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Two former students of Thurgood Marshall School of Law are suing the school for giving them poor marks. Walter Olson of overlawyered.com offered this comment: “Doesn’t it sort of prove you deserve the bad law-school grade when you bring a frivolous lawsuit over it?”
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That question was the start of an item I posted yesterday on Facebook, referring to KC Johnson’s excellent essay (above), The Ruinous Reign of Race-and-Gender Historians. It was a question for a reason: the two super techies in our family, my wife Jackie, editor of the quite brilliant financial-business-political site, The Fiscal Times, and my […]
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FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has attracted important support for its open letter asking the Department of Education to define harassment narrowly enough to allow genuinely free speech on campus. Many colleges and universities ban expression that might be considered “offensive” or cause “embarrassment” or “ridicule.” The January 6 letter, sent to […]
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What were the best books of the year on higher education? A panel of ten prominent people in the field, invited to vote by Minding the Campus, picked as their top two choices, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa; and “Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting […]
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Time magazine has named The Protester as its Person of the Year. As a result, my brother Peter, intrepid humor columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, writes to brag that he has now been picked as the magazine’s Person of the Year four times: 1966 (everyone under age 25), 1968 (middle Americans), 2006 (YOU, i.e., everyone […]
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The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA (HERI) continues its studies of graduation rates with a new report aimed at understanding which factors increase the likelihood of graduating from college. According to the data, 38.9 percent of those entering college can expect to graduate in four years, 56.4 in five years and 61.2 in six […]
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