Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars and author of “1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project.”
Janet Napolitano left her post as Secretary of Homeland Security in July to become the president of the University of California. The decision of the UC Regents to appoint her surprised me. As I wrote at the time, she had “no discernible qualification” for the position–other than a politician’s ability to raise money and a […]
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The heavily publicized campaign by gay activists against University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus is back in the news, this time with more ominous implications for peer review and academic freedom. A Florida court has ordered that records of confidential peer reviews of scholarly articles be turned over to a self-styled “investigative journalist.” It is […]
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New York City is bracing for the arrival of its new mayor, Bill de Blasio, whose policy preferences are rooted in the left-wing thinking prevalent in our universities. In his successful mayoral campaign, de Blasio, who collected 73 percent of the vote, had much to say about K-12 education and pre-K education. De Blasio expressed […]
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Hadley Arkes is the Edward N. Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions at Amherst College. He is something of an institution himself. He is a brilliant scholar but perhaps known as much for his irascible temper and aggressive style of argument as he is for the substance of his positions. The combination of intellectual […]
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I first heard of Trayvon Martin via a posted comment on an article I had written for the Chronicle of Higher Education in early March 2012. In retrospect that seems significant. The comment from some anonymous academic came a few days after the shooting and a month before President Obama observed in a Rose Garden […]
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Janet Napolitano’s appointment as president of the University of California is among the oddest choices ever for chief executive of a major university. Napolitano has no discernible qualification to serve as president of the nation’s premier public university. This is not to say that she lacks attainments. Before she was appointed Secretary of Homeland Security […]
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The Sunday New York Times this week included one of those impressive (and expensive) full-page ads that appear when an interest group wants to make a Big Statement. The new ad, sponsored by the Washington Higher Education Secretariat (WHES), is addressed to all of us. It declares in all-caps, “DIVERSITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION REMAINS AN […]
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The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has just issued the Heart of the Matter, a 61-page report (plus appendices) aimed at persuading Congress to spend more money on the humanities. This is one of the report’s immediate goals, phrased of course in the financial imperative, “Increase investment in research and discovery.” The report as […]
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In a letter dated May 9, the federal government dramatically expanded the definition of sexual harassment on campus. In the 31-page letter, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education, informed the president of the University of Montana, Royce […]
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“F*** Your Constructive Dialogue” reads the headline of an article by Kate Aronoff that’s posted on a website that “seeks to facilitate the discussion of political, cultural, and social issues that are often left out of mainstream discourse.” (The asterisks, as Stanley Kurtz nicely put it, are not in the original.) Ms. Aronoff is a […]
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My sorry academic discipline, anthropology, has been in the news the last few weeks. Napoleon Chagnon broke his long silence by publishing a memoir, Noble Savages, about his work among the South American Yanomamo Indians and the long nightmare of politically correct recrimination that greeted his work. Chagnon was infamously accused of infamy by a […]
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This past weekend the National Association of Scholars celebrated its 25th anniversary with a conference in New York attended by more than 250 guests. The concluding dinner on Saturday night featured Tom Wolfe as the keynote speaker. The […]
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Say you go down to local fishmonger and order a nice tuna steak. You take it home, cook it up, serve it, and find it is succulent and delicious. But before long you have cramps, nausea, and something worse. Chances are what you thought was tuna was another fish, escolar. Tasty but not recommended. The New […]
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Near the beginning of Dickens’ novel Little Dorrit (1857), a character named Monsieur Rigaud explains to a companion, “I am a cosmopolitan gentleman. I own no particular country. My father was Swiss–Canton de Vaud. My mother was French by blood, English by birth. I myself was born in Belgium. I am a citizen of the […]
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Perhaps as long as people have made maps they have also made maps of imaginary places. Sometimes inadvertently, of course. Some cartographers really did think Terra Australis filled up the bottom of the globe or the red marks on Mars were the canals of Martian commerce. But imaginary maps have mostly been a recreation for […]
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Central Connecticut State University is doing its part for international diplomacy. The campus newspaper, The Central Reporter, tells us that in late September CCSU professor of political science Ghassan El-Eid brought a dozen CCSC students “to attend a dinner with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran,” who was in New York for a meeting of […]
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Jonathan Marks, professor of politics at Ursinus College and an expert on Rousseau, has posted an important article on Inside Higher Ed admonishing conservatives for their seeming eagerness to see the higher education establishment collapse under the weight of excessive costs, insupportable student loans, and graduates ill-prepared for the workforce. In “Conservatives and the Higher […]
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UCLA has found a novel way to improve the politicization of its curriculum. UCLA Today, the faculty and staff newspaper, reports that the university’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and the Sustainability Committee have teamed up to help faculty members across the university figure out ways to slip sustainability messages into their classes, regardless […]
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Barry Commoner died on September 30 at age 95. His passing shouldn’t go unmarked, as he was one of the architects of what has become the dominant ideological movement on American college campuses: sustainability. Commoner, a professor of biology and a third party candidate in 1980 for President of the United States, was the chief […]
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Bruce Bawer’s new book, The Victims’ Revolution: the Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind, arrived on the front page of the “Back to School” issue of the New York Times Book Review. Any author of a book on higher education would have to be delighted to be awarded such prominence. The review itself, […]
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My editors at the Chronicle last week declined to permit me to publish my last piece on the same-sex marriage debate. They pointed out, reasonably enough, the topic is “too far afield from and tangential to academe and academic policy to run on Innovations.” That topic has, of course, had plenty of play on another Chronicle blog, Brainstorm, but I understand […]
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These are banner days for the gay-rights movement. “Banner Days” is in fact the front page headline in The New York Times Book Review for a review of Linda Hirshman’s new book, Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution. The reviewer, Rich Benjamin, praises Hirshman’s work but feels the need to chasten her on the extent of […]
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What is it with universities in California? Financially strapped, troubled by protesters making impossible demands, and worried about the declining value of their academic programs, many of the state’s great universities decide to…redouble their commitment to a fast-fading political ideology. The latest example is the impending vote by the faculty of UCLA’s College of Letters […]
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Cross-posted from NAS. Several weeks ago, KC Johnson–a scholar I much admire, not least for his fearless dedication to principle–published an essay on Minding the Campus under the title, “Keeton Defense Contradicts NAS Principles.” We offered Professor Johnson the opportunity to re-post his article or contribute a further statement on the NAS website. He accepted […]
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Crossposted at the National Association of Scholars. Last year, Berkeley physicist Richard Muller quietly assembled a team of researchers for the purpose of creating a new and independent assessment of the evidence for global warming. The group, which eventually called itself Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST), came to public notice in February 2011 in an article by […]
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This article appeared on the National Association of Scholars site on August 30th. Eros is notorious for its power to thwart our better judgment and to baffle the rational mind. It can draw us to destinations we would do better to avoid and can prompt forms of resistance that are themselves out of balance and […]
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The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, by Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring, $32.95, Jossey-Bass, 475 pages. Online college courses are a “disruptive technology” destined to drive profound changes in higher education in the United States and around the world. This is not an especially new idea. […]
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I head an organization, the National Association of Scholars (NAS), that is often accused by its critics on the academic left of nostalgia for days when higher education was an exclusive club for the privileged. The accusation is false. NAS focuses on the enduring principles of the university: rational inquiry, liberal learning, and academic freedom. […]
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President Botstein’s portrait of Bard College’s summer reading assignments in the context of the college’s curriculum and larger educational aims is winsome and compelling. The college leads its students astutely into reading important books. It attends to the order in which such books should be read—Virgil before Dante. It is mindful of the need to […]
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Congratulations to Minding the Campus for its forum on academic freedom. Saying something constructive about academic freedom doesn’t look all that difficult. It is one of the core doctrines of higher education. It has an abundant history, full of colorful characters, eloquent declarations, incisive legal arguments, and enlivening controversies. Yet somehow University of Chicago president […]
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