When James Taranto edited the Best of the Web Today feature on the Wall Street Journal Opinion page, there was a recurring trope: “Everything seemingly is spinning out of control.” This featured hysterical reactions to ordinary things, such as a new Heinz ketchup recipe “shaking up” fans of the condiment. It seems now that we […]
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If you’re considering graduate school in the humanities, I suggest a dose of wide-open thinking. You’ll see shortly what I mean by that, but first, let’s be sure you understand the conditions that await you. I’ll assume you’ve been told about the academic job shortage. It’s severe, and it won’t be getting better. Your chance […]
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While college empties your wallet, it can divide your family. During a recent discussion of my book Brutal Minds, someone remarked, “It never occurred to me that deviant worldview training began at university welcoming events. I thought it emanated from professors, not office bureaucrats.” Likewise, many folks routinely pummel the faculty for “indoctrination” in colleges […]
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With first-year orientations already underway and classes starting shortly at thousands of colleges and universities, it is critical to remember that despite the ubiquitous rhetoric of “openness,” “inclusion,” and “respect for difference” in American academe, Republicans are not welcome. At first glance, statements from diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices seem to promote viewpoint diversity. […]
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Betraying the premises and ethics of anthropology, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) has thrown its weight behind the anti-Israel, antisemitic Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. This is the final act in transforming a field of honest academic study into a program of far-left ideology and propaganda. For most of the 20th century, anthropology defined its purpose […]
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You may not want to hear this, but the fall semester is fast approaching. Most of the students I teach are freshmen, and their high school chemistry class was most likely spent sitting at home in front of a computer during COVID. In other words, they have learned next to nothing about chemistry. To help […]
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One of the key stories in higher education finance is so-called “state disinvestment,” which alleges that states have made relentless cuts to college and university funding. But state disinvestment is a myth—states have not, in fact, disinvested in higher education. In this debate, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is a figure […]
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“Stopping first at Ephesus he made sacrifice to Artemis …” —Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (fifth century BC) “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” —Eagles, “Hotel California” (1976) America depends on and produces a large supply of freaks. This causes anxiety as well as comfort. Eric Hoffer—the “longshoreman philosopher” […]
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Over the past three years, the general public has been inundated with appeals to “Trust the science.” In spite of this, many have grown increasingly distrustful of both science and scientists. It is the height of hypocrisy to expect people to put their blind faith in scientific authority—for that is what “trust the science” amounts […]
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In July, five college presidents resigned in a week—one for each workday. Some ran small to mid-sized eastern colleges and universities: Seton Hall University, Thomas Jefferson University, and the Berklee College of Music. Others led large research powerhouses: Stanford and Texas A&M universities. Only one, Marc Tessier-Lavigne of Stanford, had been in office for more […]
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“All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it. But all determinations of the understanding are not right; because they have a reference to something beyond themselves, to wit, real matter of fact; and are not always conformable to that […]
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Ignore the fancy rhetoric surrounding legacy admissions. Deep down, we all know that this newfound passion for merit is a punitive response to the Supreme Court’s recent ban on racial preferences in college admissions. It’s pure tit for tat: If whites want to keep blacks out of top schools, then racial preferences supporters will return […]
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In July, I attended the 41st Annual Meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (DDP) in Tucson, Arizona. The meeting opened with the national anthem played beautifully on the trumpet and the violin by the teenage sons (Benjamin and Franklin!) of Willie Soon, the first speaker. DDP was founded in the early 1980s as a “group […]
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On July 12, after giving the public less than ten days to submit written comments, the California State Board of Education (SBE) voted to adopt the 2023 Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools, which will guide math instruction in the state’s nearly 1,000 public K–12 school districts. The controversial framework has received and continues to […]
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Bureaucrats wouldn’t have an excuse to hide documents if the documents were born-open—that is, publicly accessible electronic documents from the moment of their creation. And bureaucrats do hide documents, especially in the schools and universities. Want to know if China is donating money to your university? Secret. Want to know your child’s curriculum? Very secret. […]
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Plato is credited with writing that we should ignore loud voices that come from the minds of the untrained. His rationale? “The untrained mind keeps up a running commentary, labelling everything, judging everything. Best to ignore that commentary. Don’t argue or resist, just ignore. Deprived of attention and interest, this voice gets quieter and quieter […]
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What is federalism? Historians and political philosophers will bicker about its origins and definitions. I like the natural-law approach—think Locke and Madison in the Anglo tradition. It’s tangible, comparable, and verifiable. Further, any policy decisions related to federalism can be kept simple. A warning, however: I come from the field of literature. I’ve read too […]
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George Washington University (GWU) will be a less anti-Semitic place after its recent decision to evict the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). In a terse note, GWU stated that the relationship between the university and MESA “had run its course” and that the two institutions were “now parting ways amicably.” Observers of Middle East studies […]
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Student loan forgiveness is a topic that isn’t going away. Progressives want all student loan debt forgiven, and the Biden administration has been trying to deliver. In fact, the Biden team has been the most aggressive administration on student loan forgiveness in history. But it’s not clear to me whether the administration is winning or […]
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My grandfather attended the University of Toronto. My father attended the University of Toronto. I attended the University of Toronto. And now my daughter is attending the University of Toronto. This is a large public university that is not particularly difficult to get into with decent grades. But the fact of this great chain of […]
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At long last, some state legislatures have begun reacting to the “wokeness” epidemic that has consumed both K-12 and higher education. Unfortunately, many of these bills are likely doomed to accomplish little or nothing because they fail to address an essential issue: enforcement. Particularly in the context of public universities, expecting state employees to simply […]
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In 1753, English writer Samuel Richardson has his main character proclaim, “Women must not encourage Fops and Fools. They must encourage Men of Sense only.” While “fool” belongs to most English speakers’ lexicon today, “fop” likely does not. According to Google Ngram (below), “fop” has seen about a 95% decline in relative usage since its […]
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Affirmative-action peer review The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has supported extramural biomedical research since the end of WWII. This year, the program spent close to $40 billion. The basic concept is simple. Write down what you, the scientist, want to do and why; estimate how much it will cost each year; and send the […]
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“Diversity” is all the rage these days. It even attracts support across the ideological spectrum: demographic diversity on the Left and viewpoint diversity on the Right. For some, it has a magical quality. As Harvard’s president recently announced, to defend the university from those who claim it racially discriminates, “We write today to reaffirm the […]
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A racialist worldview is destroying the nation’s largest higher education system There is no clearer evidence than the June 29, 2023, webinar presented by Colegas—an organization sponsored by the California Community Colleges (CCC) system—that the specter of white supremacy has transformed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into an insidious and unassailable ideology. The Colegas email […]
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The Atlantic is a magazine with a splendid history. Yet it recently published an article—“‘Race Neutral’ Is the New ‘Separate but Equal,’” by Uma Mazyck Jayakumar and Ibram X. Kendi—that is both self-contradictory and morally questionable. “Separate but equal,” the policy outlawed by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, was explicitly racist because students […]
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The recent ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States declaring unconstitutional affirmative-action preferences in college and university admissions is a vindication of the noble objectives of the original Civil Rights Movement, encapsulated in Martin Luther King’s iconic commandment at the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963 that people be judged on the basis of […]
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A University Without Walls, A Prison Without Cells, and Extinction Superintelligent Bot by Joe Nalven and DALL●E 2 Science fiction may foreshadow the future of AI. Antony Bryant’s call for papers cites Stanisław Lem’s short story, Golem XIV, written in 1981, which sought to anticipate where humanity and its AI technology were headed. In Lem’s […]
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When Thomas Jefferson returned from France in the fall of 1789, he turned his home at Monticello 180 degrees. The building had originally faced east, that is, toward the Atlantic, Europe, and the Mediterranean. Now he made it face west, that is, toward Louisiana, Texas, Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, California, Oregon, and the Pacific. Any Hispanist […]
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Why do we feel lied to when we are admonished to “Follow the Science”? Is it because “the Science” is herding us to energy suicide? For our own good, of course. Is it because “the Science” insists that the distinction between men and women is illusory, and enthusiastically backs up the delusion with stunning non […]
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