In my judgment, E. Gordon Gee is the dean of American university presidents. If you had visited West Virginia University (WVU) 40 years ago, Gee would have been president. The same is true if you visited today. But in the four-decade interval, Gordon also headed two other flagship state universities: the University of Colorado and […]
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Over the last few years, the rallying cry of “woke” activists has become “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (often abbreviated to DEI). There is little reason to object to such principles on the surface. After all, America was founded on the principle that all people are created equal. Unfortunately, the meaning of words can change over time. Rather […]
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This past weekend the University of Austin (UATX) held its second “First Principles Summit.” This Summit brought together professors, administrators, public intellectuals, and business-people. (I was also invited.) The purpose of the gathering was, as UATX President Pano Kanelos explained, to hold UATX’s founders accountable to their first principles. Founding is not for the faint-hearted. […]
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Higher education administration has become dysfunctional and dangerous—illiberal, incompetent at its core educative functions, but all too effective at infecting our republic’s civil society with woke ideology. It must be reformed. Yet the radicals who have captured our colleges’ and universities’ bureaucracies have been so effective that, at this point, it seems impossible for successful […]
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Wikipedia is probably the most widely used encyclopedia in the world. If you’re looking for facts, it is pretty reliable. For example, if you want to compare the number of traffic roundabouts per capita in the US and other countries, Wikipedia will provide a nice graph from the World Economic Forum showing that the UK […]
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On the evening of April 23, 2023, a fight broke out in Los Angeles. The masked mob threw chairs, shouted swear words, stole a laptop, and landed a few punches. The cops were called, and, eventually, the chaos subsided. One person was arrested for assault, and one victim ended up with a bloody nose. This […]
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Law students at the University of Chicago recently used colored playground chalk to protest a conservative speaker. This raises the question: are they maturing adults or regressing adolescents? Perhaps philosophy has some lessons for how to understand the problem, and where to look for a solution. One of my favorite philosophers is Robert Hanna. He specializes in the writings […]
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There may be some good news for those concerned about today’s campus madness: the cavalry is on the way. We will, hopefully, be rescued! A recent Wall Street Journal editorial celebrated Harvard’s new Council on Academic Freedom. The organization proclaimed that “… free speech is also essential to human progress,” and that intellectual orthodoxy “is […]
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While student loans are a widely acknowledged problem, one program sticks out as particularly troublesome: the Grad PLUS program. After graduate students max out their traditional student loans, which include an annual and an aggregate borrowing limit, there is no limit to how much they can borrow through the Grad PLUS program. Unsurprisingly, this has […]
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Many centrists and conservatives are leery of Michel Foucault’s enduring popularity in higher education. Some think he’s the very essence of a great postmodern conspiracy to take down Western Civilization. Perhaps. But even if he’s part of a bigger problem, we ought not dismiss the entirety of his work. Not all his books merit attention, […]
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Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard will not end higher education’s race discrimination by itself, even if the Supreme Court unequivocally strikes down affirmative action. America’s colleges and universities are already planning for massive resistance to preserve race discrimination, and they will have the support of state and federal bureaucracies, as well as the commanding […]
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As free speech and expression have come under assault on college and university campuses, a number of clear trends have emerged. One of the most powerful findings is that elite schools are typically less open to free speech. Further analysis reveals a troubling gender gap between male and female students: women are far more liberal […]
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On Monday, academic workers at Rutgers University, including part-time faculty and graduate assistants, returned to their positions, effectively ending the university’s first-ever labor stoppage since its founding in 1766. After the university reached a framework agreement promising comprehensive pay raises, over 67,000 Rutgers students are now able to resume classes after a week of disruptions […]
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Some states are known for being innovative or expressive in outsized ways, with governmental policies that are often bold, and business entrepreneurship that is similarly spectacular in its magnitude. For example, among states with a liberal-progressive tradition, California is seldom dull and ordinary. Similarly, among states with a more conservative-libertarian orientation, Texas and Florida often […]
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Affirmative action in today’s colleges and universities is a giant failure machine. Every year thousands of black and Hispanic students, who have been led to believe that a college degree is well within reach and a first step toward economic success, are admitted to schools for which they barely qualify. The inevitable consequence is failure, […]
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From Resolution to Radicalism In the spring of 2020, Madera Community College was granted full accreditation and became the newest California community college in the nation’s largest higher education system. It was a time of hope and optimism amongst the faculty, in particular. This could be a fresh start as we separated from our parent […]
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Justifying one form of racism justifies all forms of racism, both historical and invented. All racists claim that vilifying and persecuting certain categories of people is justified. The German National Socialists claimed that Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and the disabled polluted their pure Aryan blood. The Ku Klux Klan argued that blacks were quasi-human and that […]
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“Animal Cognition” becomes “Human Ideology” “Allies … will have ‘ALLY’ presented on their name badges at the conference.” What kind of conference is this, one wonders? Athletic? Religious? Political? None of the above. This is the 2023 conference of the Comparative Cognition Society (CCS), a small scientific organization devoted to understanding the intelligence and learning […]
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Chatbots like Google’s Bard, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Baidu’s Wenxin Yiyan (Ernie), and ChatSonic allow humans to communicate with machines using natural human language through text-based or, in the case of Alexa and Siri, voice-based systems. Some see these early versions of an increasingly sophisticated human–machine communication framework as a Pandora’s box that needs to be paused […]
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Everywhere you look, there is a growing backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that implement racist, sexist, and exclusionary policies masquerading as solutions to those very problems. A cultural revolution that divides society into immutable victim and oppressor classes, inflames resentments and suspicions, facilitates anonymous denunciations, promotes segregation, ostracizes critics, aggravates mental illness, […]
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Lean over on the bookcase. If you really wanna get straight, Read Norman Mailer Or get a new tailor. – Lloyd Cole, “Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken?” Sometimes Norman Mailer looks to me like George Bush, Jr. after an all-night bender at Yale. That’s where the resemblance stops, I think. Mailer counts among the […]
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Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jarrod Kelly chides the Right for pushing back on accreditation. While the headline is a bit aggressive (“The Right-Wing War on Accreditation”), authors generally don’t get to choose their headlines, and the piece itself is quite measured. While the ostensible focus of our disagreement is accreditation, I think […]
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There have been discussions about AI writing programs like ChatGPT in the academy. The past few months have seen a flurry of activity with college administrators calling emergency meetings, professors changing their assignments, and educators writing essays (some perhaps written by AI?) that range in reaction from the nonchalant to the apocalyptic about the fate […]
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Editor’s Note: This piece is part of an ongoing series of articles by Professor Bruce Gilley. To read the other articles in the series, click here. Let’s start with the obvious. The plague of junk citations in modern academic research will not be curbed by digital or bureaucratic means. For every clever new software tool […]
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The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the nation’s premiere professional organization for the sciences. As part of our expanding outreach into the sciences, we at the National Association of Scholars (NAS) decided to set up a booth at the annual March meeting of the AAAS, so that we could get out […]
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On March 9, 2023, the Arkansas State Senate—controlled by a 29-to-6 Republican majority—narrowly passed a legislative ban on race-based affirmative action: Senate Bill 71 (SB 71). If signed into law, SB 71 would make the Natural State the tenth U.S. state to prohibit racial preferences in public programs. However, when the bill made its way […]
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How social science has become social commentary It is well known that social science—psychology, sociology, and economics—has devolved into more than one hundred sub-specialties. Less well known is the result: criticism, which is essential to science, is increasingly restricted to bubbles of the like-minded. This has allowed critical criteria to diverge to the point that […]
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James Moore’s recent epistle in this space, “The Rise of the Pseudo Faculty,” has jolted my aging brain to suggest an economist’s view on why college and university faculty have lost clout in their institutions over time. But first, a little history. If you asked a professor on an American campus 100 years ago, “Are […]
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Paradoxes are excellent pedagogical exercises, and any professor worth his salt knows at least a few. To this storehouse of familiar examples, let me add a new paradox that is especially relevant to today’s academy: oikophobia, a term elucidated by Benedict Beckeld in his recently published Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations. As […]
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Editor’s Note: This piece is part of an ongoing series of articles by Professor Bruce Gilley. To read the other articles in the series, click here. Just when serious scholars started to worry about the pandemic of junk citations, others were positively promoting them. The “citation justice” movement I discussed in the last installment is […]
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