Mark Bauerlein is a professor emeritus of English at Emory University and an editor at First Things, where he hosts a podcast twice a week. He is the author of five books, including The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults.
An article in the Atlantic about college students not reading books got a lot of circulation this month. Even at top schools such as Columbia University, undergraduates struggle with works of more than short-story length. Some of them tell their professors that in all their high school years, they never had to read a hefty book from […]
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Given the power that trustees of a college possess, one must ask why trustees are so negligible a factor in the institution’s operations. Trustees oversee matters of personnel, finance, curriculum, athletics, building construction, and overall mission—or at least that’s what they are supposed to do. Of course, they aren’t the only voice, but they are the final voice on many […]
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The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) recently released a report revealing that the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, a taxpayer-funded program that supports promising young individuals with aspirations to serve in government and the like, has overwhelmingly favored candidates with leftist views in recent years. According to the report, the Foundation has selected a significantly higher […]
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For how many years have elite colleges been playing a double game of inclusivity/selectivity? Some years back, Yale President Peter Salovey had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal affirming the high regard the school placed on inclusion and the opening of Yale to voices of all responsible kinds. A variant of the beloved word […]
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Ten years ago I proposed a Great Books course to my department. The chairman responded with an email noting that in marking certain books as “Great,” I was implying that books assigned in other courses were not great. The problem, in other words, wasn’t the course itself. It was what a course with a title […]
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When I entered graduate school in English in the mid-1980s, I didn’t understand the importance of undergraduate enrollments in the field. I was so caught up in scholarship and research and theory that the junior and senior classrooms didn’t much count. The freshman and sophomore classes were even more remote. They registered to me only […]
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George Will’s column last month on leftist bias in faculty hiring got to the heart of the practice but showed that conservatives can’t do a damn thing about it. He cites the policy at the University of California of requiring all applicants in every field to submit, along with their CV and letters of recommendation, […]
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Now we know that the conquest of academia by political correctness is complete. A repressive system succeeds when the overlords of it no longer must exert any pressure. Instead, the group that is the target of the repression censors and harasses itself. This is the finding of a study by two professors at UNC-Chapel Hill. […]
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The humanities have become such a minor activity on college campuses that it is almost unimaginable that 30 years ago a change in a humanities course was a national controversy. That’s what happened, though, when an article appeared in The New York Times on Jan. 19, 1988 with the headline “In Dispute on Bias, Stanford Is Likely to Alter Western Culture Program.” […]
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The news that Jordan Peterson has entered an addiction facility in Russia is no surprise to those of us who have watched the interviews, discussions, and debates for the last four years. The immediate cause is his dependence on an anti-anxiety medication, but it is certainly the case that since 2016 an army of students, […]
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Several years ago, I was a visiting professor at a large public university beyond the Mississippi. Early on, I introduced myself to a few of the colleagues in the department, some of whom proved to be vigorous liberals unhappy with the social state of things on campus. One of them said to me as I […]
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Is it possible for an entire institution to go crazy? Two years ago, posters were placed around the Indiana Wesleyan campus before Halloween warning students against wearing costumes that perpetrated crimes of cultural appropriation. The text had the standard plea for sensitivity, with a heading “THINK IT THROUGH.” A request, “Let’s actively care for each […]
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The readers, writers, and editors of Minding the Campus have it all wrong. If they were to hear the words “Williams College English Department,” a vision of politically correct, exquisitely liberal professors would instantly spring to mind. If they went to the department web site, to be sure, they could find support for their judgment, […]
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Science magazine recently studied eight science disciplines at 50 select universities, tabulating the ones that include Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) as an application requirement. In 2018, 44 percent of molecular biology programs had stopped asking for GRE scores, and the study predicted the rate would pass 50 percent in the following year’s applications. In the fields […]
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Columbia University has decided to add a contemporary multicultural component to its famed core curriculum, Insidehighered.com reported. You knew it was coming. The Western Civilization orientation in general education coursework has been utterly routed for a long time now. The few remaining cases, such as Columbia’s, won’t endure because the academic left won’t let them. […]
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The progressivist insistence on feeling safe and included, along with accompanying acts of censorship and personnel complaint, has proven so successful in recent years that one can hardly blame conservative students for joining in. But they should hold back. When conservatives proclaim that they are offended and unsafe, though they may win a quick victory […]
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At this point in time, the word diversity is spoken with such pedestrian calm that people forget that it used to have an edgy import. Not that many years ago, “diversity” meant the introduction of women and minorities into academic jobs and the academic curriculum—as it does now. But back then, that introduction was cast […]
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Harvard’s decision last month to rescind admission to Kyle Kashuv because of nasty racial tweets he sent three years ago is a curiously unprincipled action. Kashuv is obviously contrite. He shows all the indications of a reformed sinner eager to undergo Harvard’s diversity training. One would think that an institution so solemnly dedicated to social […]
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For the diversity engineers in higher education, life keeps yielding disappointments. A new study shows once again how far colleges and universities lag relative to their vocal pledges of equity and inclusion. The study draws on Federal data to determine how well those institutions have improved the demographic make-up of the faculty—improvement defined by the […]
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As the humanities continue their steady slide toward the margins of the campus, the faculty still can’t look in the mirror and face the sources of the problem. Last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education, four assistant professors of English responded to a previous essay about the state of the field and unintentionally revealed […]
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Last month, Chapman University’s film school removed from the walls posters that students and many professors deemed offensive. They were original posters promoting Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s sweeping silent classic set during the Civil War and after. The film was fabulously successful in its day, and historians regard it as a breakthrough […]
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The English departments of Cornell and Harvard have dropped the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) requirement for graduate applicants—a noteworthy move that amounts to a setback for the quality of education and a win for diversity and lower standards. Insidehighered.com reports the Cornell development and includes a link to a candid statement from the English department […]
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It is getting awfully hard to be a humanities professor. Or rather, it’s getting hard to be a humanities professor and still maintain the heady confidence in the fields that the faculty had 20 years ago. The daily grind of teaching, research, and service haven’t much changed, especially for tenured professors who aren’t touched by […]
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Stanley Kurtz has laid out an interesting proposal for stopping once and for all the shutdowns and hecklers and mobs that have increasingly plagued higher education in recent years. It’s called the Intellectual Diversity Act, and it has a simple provision. The law, as passed by state legislatures, will direct public colleges and universities to […]
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Last year, a former student of mine won a job interview at the satellite campus of a state university system. One of the first questions she had to answer was this: “Tell us how you will contribute to diversity on our campus.” My ex-student was Shiite, female, heterosexual, and 50 years old. As far as she […]
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Heather Mac Donald’s book The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, was published more than four months ago, but I just checked Amazon, and it still stands impressively among all book sales at #798. It ranks #1 in two sub-categories of education. She appeared on Tucker Carlson’s […]
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When jobs are scarce, and when you’ve spent your 20s living spartanly, reading books, books, books, writing a dissertation, and you’re sick of being a nobody whose only recognition comes from students in your freshman comp course who thank you for spending time correcting their grammar and punctuation, you’ll say anything the people who control […]
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It remains to be seen how the Avital Ronell affair will play out. The letter presented in her defense and signed by well-known theorists and many lesser figures has evoked more scorn than sympathy, and it may signify a generational turn in literary studies. There is one element of the whole thing, however, that seems beyond […]
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Two-thirds (66.3%) of English departments responding to a survey indicated that the number of undergraduates majoring in English is either lower or sharply lower. Only 8.7% reported an increase in the number of majors; none reported a sharp increase. That’s the abysmal finding of a survey of English departments issued last month by the Association […]
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Conservatives, libertarians, traditionalists, and classical liberals need to get clear on something: the ideological contests are fading. What Irving Kristol famously said in his 2001 Bradley Lecture, “We in America fought a culture war, and we [conservatives] lost,” applies well to higher education. Conservatives fought wars over multiculturalism, Western Civilization, affirmative action, the Academic Bill […]
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