KC Johnson is a history professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author, along with Stuart Taylor, of The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America's Universities.
The Brooklyn College pro-BDS event–with which the school’s Political Science Department formally voted to affiliate itself–has come and gone. The big news from the gathering last Thursday came not in anything the two pro-BDS speakers said (their anti-Israel ramblings were entirely predictable) but in reports from Tablet and the Daily News that four anti-BDS students […]
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After the indictment of former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, Penn State did something quite rare for an institution of higher learning facing scandal–it hired a respected outside investigator (former FBI director Louis Freeh) and gave him total access to the relevant university records, including e-mails between key administrators. The resulting Freeh Report used senior […]
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In early 2012, Yale University admitted that its campus grounds are a hotbed of violent crime–far more dangerous, in fact, than the surrounding high-crime areas of New Haven. That, at least, was the finding of a document produced by Deputy Provost Stephanie Spangler, who claimed to offer a “comprehensive, semi-annual report of complaints of sexual […]
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The New York Daily News had a question yesterday about the coming anti-Israel hatefest in the city: “Why is Brooklyn College’s political science department officially sponsoring a one-sided event that calls for divestment, boycotts and sanctions against Israel?” As they have done on other campuses, anti-Israel activists talk colleges into sponsoring events featuring rabid Israel haters (in […]
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Brooklyn College – my home institution — doesn’t exactly enjoy the best reputation for fair-mindedness regarding Israel. A few years ago, the institution embarrassed itself by requiring incoming freshmen to read one and only one book, written by Moustafa Bayoumi, containing unsubstantiated, inflammatory attacks on U.S. policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict. To its credit, the […]
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The new report from Moody’s Investors Service, casting doubt on the financial state of affairs in higher education, has provoked a good deal of anxiety. The report referenced five revenue streams affecting all public universities. Two (philanthropy and endowments) deal primarily with broad, macro-economic trends over which university leaders have little, if any, control. On […]
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In 2004, the Duke Conservative Union conducted a study of the political affiliations of the Duke humanities faculty, finding an overwhelming (142-8) tilt toward the Democrats. In and of itself, this discovery had many plausible explanations, though the overwhelming partisan discrepancy did raise eyebrows. (Full disclosure: I’m a registered and strongly partisan Democrat.) But reaction […]
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Kudos to NAS, for a thoroughly-researched–and deeply troubling–report regarding instruction of U.S. history at Texas’ two flagship public universities, the University of Texas and Texas A&M. The overall finding: U.S. history faculty members at both institutions, and especially at the University of Texas, are dominated by advocates of race, class, and gender. As a result, […]
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Over the past several weeks, I’ve penned several posts examining the transformation of how U.S. history is taught, and studied, in higher education. The two clear patterns: (1) a decline in U.S. historians who study topics deemed “traditional”; and (2) a “re-visioning” of many of those who continue to study “traditional” topics to make their […]
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In July, relying on the findings of the university’s own report penned by former FBI director Louis Freeh, the NCAA imposed sanctions against Penn State, citing senior administrators’ mishandling of the allegations against former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky and the football culture that caused these administrators to look the other way. At the time, […]
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A team headed by former North Carolina governor (and Davidson professor) James Martin has released its long-awaited report regarding academic misconduct in the UNC Department of African and African-American Studies. Heavy on euphemism and delicate language, the reports sidesteps troubling questions about both the role of athletics at UNC and how an academic department at a […]
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I’ve written previously about the controversy regarding CUNY’s Pathways plan, the common-sense proposal of the administration to set a common general education curriculum at all CUNY campuses–so as to ensure minimum standards, and to allow students to easily transfer from one campus to any other. The proposal has generated strong opposition. Some has come in […]
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My City University of New York colleague David Gordon has penned a convincing analysis about the current state of history in higher education. I share, and fully endorse, his critique about the direction of the field, with the vise-grip of the race/class/gender trinity “distort[ing] historical enquiry.” Stressing above all else victimization and oppression poorly serves […]
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Increasing the likelihood that innocent college students in the future will instead be branded rapists is a legacy of which few government officials can boast. Yet this was the prime accomplishment of Russlynn Ali, who announced late last week that she would be stepping down as director of the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. […]
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The 1997 film Good Will Hunting features Matt Damon’s character in a conversation with Harvard students, touting Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States as a way to better understand the American past. The scene was cringe-worthy for at least two reasons. First, there was something more than a little off-putting about a movie whose lead character demonstrated […]
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The Office of Civil Rights’ mandated procedures for investigating sexual assault are tilted heavily against the accused party. The institution can hire “neutral fact-finders” who produce the equivalent of a grand jury presentment, deny the accused an advisor of his choice, add witnesses that the accused student does not request, forbid the students from cross-examining […]
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In a move that should come as little surprise, former Penn State president Graham Spanier has been indicted for perjury, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and child endangerment. The indictments come in the wake of the Freeh Report’s revelations that–after Penn State’s former athletic director proposed not reporting to police an allegation against Jerry Sandusky–Spanier had […]
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That certain quarters of the academy–humanities departments, most social sciences departments, and many graduate programs (social work, education, and to a lesser extent law)–are ideologically imbalanced is not news. A decision in an Iowa court, however, exposed the difficulty in addressing the problem. The case, which received extensive coverage in the Des Moines Register and […]
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Few figures involved in the Duke lacrosse case behaved more disgracefully than Wendy Murphy, an adjunct professor at the New England School of Law. A frequent TV commentator on the case, she earned a reputation for defending Mike Nifong’s prosecution through myriad errors of fact, misstatements of the law, and deeply offensive statements such as […]
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American history has been radically transformed on our campuses. Traditional topics are now not only marginalized but “re-visioned” to become more compatible with the dominant race/class/gender paradigm. In two posts last fall, I took a look at U.S. history offerings at Bowdoin College. The liberal arts college, one of the nation’s finest, long enjoyed a reputation as a training […]
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If you doubt that leftist activists now dominate the study and teaching of U.S. history, take a look at the program for the 2013 American Historical Association conference in New Orleans. The pattern is similar to the University of Michigan’s history department, discussed here yesterday—a heavy emphasis on race, class, and gender, with more “traditional” […]
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The University of Michigan history department has 28 tenured or tenure-track professors whose research specialties in some way relate to U.S. history after 1789. Race is the favorite topic; at least eleven of the department’s professors indicate that their research in some way deals with race in America. Gender is the next prominent area of […]
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I’ve written before about the Pathways plan, a sensible proposal to create a common core curriculum at the City University of New York (CUNY). It has been sponsored by the administration of Chancellor Matthew Goldstein and approved by the CUNY Board of Trustees. The extraordinary–and student-unfriendly–process that currently exists at CUNY contradicts the vision of […]
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Using federal statistics, Laura Norén has prepared a series of graphics showing gender distribution among recent recipients of undergraduate, M.A., and Ph.D./professional degrees. The charts are visually striking, especially since all three sets of charts show movement in an identical direction. According to Norén, by 2020, women are projected to earn 61 percent of all […]
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Over the past several weeks, high-profile criticisms of the Freeh Report, which examined the Penn State administration’s failed response to a report of inappropriate sexual behavior by former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky, generated more heat than light. Nearly identical missives from a handful of renegade PSU trustees, the family of ex-coach Joe Paterno, and a […]
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To predictable outrage among anti-Israel activists worldwide, a Haifa court ruled Tuesday that former U.S. college student Rachel Corrie’s 2003 death was an accident. Corrie, a member of the fanatic International Solidarity Movement, was in Gaza at the time, trying to obstruct the work of the Israeli Defense Force; she was killed as she tried […]
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This week featured some interesting political news regarding campaign contributions: confirming the partisan shift on Wall Street, Business Week revealed that around 70 percent of Goldman Sachs employees who have donated to this year’s presidential campaign send funds to Mitt Romney. The contrast to 2008, when about 75 percent who made contributions had donated to […]
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Over the past several years, a number of studies have shown that registered Democrats far outnumber registered Republicans in the academy, or in particular academic departments (history, for instance) that would seem to have no reason to have wide partisan imbalances. Invariably, the most interesting thing about these studies is not the finding itself–which, after […]
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In 2005, amidst the Harvard faculty’s ultimately successful effort to purge President Larry Summers, Columbia president Lee Bollinger announced that his university would launch its own “diversity” hiring initiative. Bollinger committed $15 million to “add between 15 and 20 outstanding women and minority scholars to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences over the next three […]
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The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has entered into its latest Title IX-related agreement with Xavier University. Unlike the OCR’s agreement with Yale, which used a manufactured controversy to weaken the due process rights of the university’s students, at least at Xavier the OCR involved itself only in response […]
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