Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars and author of “1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project.”
From kneeling football players to campus shout-downs to professors and a president Tweeting out malignancies, America now has a new problem. Taken out of its Christian context, to witness is to make an emphatic assertion to someone else who doesn’t share your view that your view is right. That assertion, moreover, doesn’t aim to persuade […]
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Once many years ago I spoke to an Army recruiter who tried to convince me that I would learn many valuable skills in the military, including how to jump from helicopters. I was puzzled. How exactly was learning to jump from a helicopter a valuable skill? He explained that I could then qualify for a […]
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I have been reading essays by David Horowitz for nearly fifty years, starting when he became an editor of the radical new-left magazine, Ramparts, in 1968, and I was a high school student prepping for debates about the Vietnam war. David famously moved beyond his red diaper origins, his Marxist enthusiasms, and his admiration of […]
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Portland State University scholar Bruce Gilley drew a lot of attention with his August 29 article on Minding the Campus, “Why I’m leaving the Political Science Association.” A week or so later, he provoked an even greater controversy by telling readers of the Third World Quarterly what they don’t want to hear. “The Case for […]
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Alt-Right, Alt-Left, “both sides,” white supremacists, Antifa, CEO resignations: America is having a moment. Tempers are flaring, and statues are falling. President Trump and the press are in an angry stand-off. The death of a young woman, Heather Heyer, in the midst of protests and counter-protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the injuries to 19 others […]
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Robert Maranto and Mathew Woessner are not alone. They are two political scientists who assure us that leftist domination of the faculty does not mean that college students are coming away from their campuses indoctrinated in progressive ideology. Maranto and Woessner’s latest version of this argument was published in The Chronicle of Higher Education as […]
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I am heartened by the news (from Pew that 58% of GOP voters disrespect our colleges). It has taken a lot to break through the complacency of these voters. Of course, the real credit for this turnaround goes to those students at Middlebury and their counterparts at dozens of other colleges and universities. It goes […]
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Evergreen State College Biology professor Bret Weinstein is surprised. Indignant. Alarmed. Weinstein is the new Allison Stanger—the progressive Middlebury professor still suffering a concussion from the attack by the masked anti-Charles Murray rioters on March 2. Weinstein is also the new Laura Kipnis, the progressive Northwestern professor hauled up on Title IX charges in 2015 […]
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The right to breathe is not generally understood as the right to choke others. The right to move freely is not widely understood as the right to slip into your neighbor’s house in the middle of the night unannounced. The right to listen to Neil Diamond’s greatest hits is not universally interpreted as the right […]
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The following are excerpts from a report released January 10 by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) on MAKING CITIZENS: HOW AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES TEACH CIVICS. The full report includes case studies at the University of Colorado (Boulder), Colorado State University, University of Northern Colorado and the University of Wyoming. […]
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John Fund, writing in the National Review last week, drew attention to the vote in Congress last year to increase by seven percent the $100 million budget of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the Department of Education. Fund is especially critical of the Republican Congressmen whose vote seemed to reflect bizarre indifference to OCR’s role […]
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Since its founding by progressive academics 101 years ago, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has had little affection for the governing authorities of colleges and universities. Of course, when college presidents, trustees, and boards of regents bow in submission to its edicts, the AAUP will spare a few words of non-condemnation for the […]
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The great threat to academic freedom today arises not from plutocrats determined to weed from the campus garden any sprouts of pro-unionism; nor from censorious divines on the hunt for misinterpretations of the Sermon on the Mount; nor yet from defenders of the flag who suspect disloyal thoughts among the cosmopolitan professoriate. Those were demons […]
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Liberal. Progressive. Liberal progressive. Progressive liberal. Radical. Social democrat. Democratic socialist. Occupiers. Social justice warriors. What do we call today’s leaders of the political left? Where do they stand in the eye of history? Answering these questions resembles sometimes trying to grab an eel with your bare hand. Most likely it will slip away, but […]
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The never-resting Office for Civil Rights (OCR) U.S. Department of Education and the equally insomnolent Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department have just issued their latest “Dear Colleague” letter advising the stewards of the nation’s schools of their newest responsibility. The “Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students” consists of five pages of text, […]
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The knock against anthropologists used to be that they were all relativists. Not anymore. Many anthropologists today are hardcore moral absolutists. The members of the American Anthropological Association are busy voting (until May 31) on a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The proposed resolution jumps off in its first sentence in universalist language, claiming that […]
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The University of Missouri has eliminated Respect and Excellence. I have to write this in a hurry because it won’t be long before others will seize on this gift. Respect and Excellence are the names for two residence halls at the University. They are being closed because the University suddenly finds that its enrollments are […]
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The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has just dipped its oar in the dank water of Title IX. The AAUP’s draft of its new document, The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX, leaves much to be desired. But welcome to the fight, AAUP. We’ve been wondering when you would show up. From 1972 […]
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Passing on the right is dangerous and generally illegal driving. But a fair number of people do it anyway. The title Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn’s new book, Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University, combines the image of the careless driver with the other transgressive meaning of “passing.” Conservative professors can […]
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The anti-Semitic Boycott-Divest-Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel keeps reaching for—and finding—new depths of indecency. Among the deepest descenders into this abyss is Jasbir Puar, an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers. Professor Puar recently garnered national attention for her address at Vassar, February 3, “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters.” The talk has […]
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When President Adam Falk of Williams College wrote to the campus community on February 18, to say that he was disinviting John Derbyshire, he didn’t offer much explanation. Derbyshire, who had been invited by students as part of a program called “Uncomfortable Conversations,” was supposed to talk about immigration. Falk said that Derbyshire had “crossed […]
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By Peter Wood In 2014 Senator Marco Rubio lent his support to CASA, the Campus Accountability and Safety Act—the effort by Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill and New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand to strip the due process rights of students accused of sexual assault. The bill died that year but McCaskill and Gillibrand brought it back […]
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In January 2015 the University of Chicago Committee on Freedom of Expression issued a brief report which eloquently made a case for the importance of free speech as “an essential element of the University’s culture.” I commented at the time in an approving manner. Over the ensuing months, the Chicago statement has gathered more and […]
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Sixty-six percent of the graduates of my alma mater earn more than people who have only a high-school diploma. This fact comes courtesy of the U.S. Department of Education’s new “College Scorecard.” I took advantage of the online interactive system to see how well Haverford College alumni stack up in the race to achieve financial […]
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Academic “consensus” is in the news. Stetson University professor of psychology Christopher Ferguson, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education,recently gave a run-down on how the American Psychological Association supposedly compromised itself by manipulating a task force into endorsing harsh interrogations of prisoners. Ferguson says the APA “crafted a corrupted ‘consensus’ by excluding those who […]
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The annual controversy over books assigned to freshmen as summer reading is upon us. Spoiler alerts. Odysseus makes it home. Hamlet dies. The Whale wins. Oh, not those books. We are talking more about White Girls (by Hilton Als, 2013) and Purple Hibiscus (by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2003). White Girls, as one reviewer puts it, is “an inquiry into otherness” by a […]
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When I was in college I got a job one summer blasting, scraping, and sanding the corroded sides of dry-docked ships. It sounded like nasty, if well-paid, work. But before I could don gloves and mask in my war on barnacles, some union called a strike and my job was wiped out. I ended up […]
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The AAUP—the American Association of University Professors—held its annual Conference on the State of Higher Education at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. June 10-14. A few subway stops away, the Heartland Institute held its tenth International Conference on Climate Change at the Washington Court Hotel, June 11-12. I suspect that I am the only […]
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Kevin Carey is convinced that online learning has created a watershed moment in the history of higher education. Not since Johannes Gutenberg assembled an ensemble of movable type, meltable alloy, oil-based ink, and a screw press in 1439 has there been such a moment—or so says Carey in his new book, The End of College: […]
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The movement to impose a boycott on Israeli universities, to get colleges to divest from Israeli companies, and to impose other sanctions on Israel—the BDS movement (boycott, divest and sanction)—was launched in 2005 by a collection of Palestinian organizations. Over the last decade it has gathered significant support in American higher education, but the enthusiasm of […]
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