Children who visit libraries in some American cities have grown accustomed to encountering drag queens who read LGBTQ+ stories to them. Parents began to object. Now it seems that public school librarians are on the receiving end of parental complaints. A January 2022 Education Week article highlighted a growing battle between parents and school librarians. […]
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In my last article, I detailed the cancellation of Professor Lawrence Alexander’s invited contribution to the Festschrift honoring Emory University law professor Michael Perry. As I and many other commentators pointed out, the actions by the editorial board of the Emory Law Journal (ELJ) were a shocking abandonment of fundamental principles of scholarly discourse in […]
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The J-Word and the F-Word Join the N-Word As difficult as it is to believe that someone on a contemporary university campus could be so socially tone-deaf that he would publicly utter an ethnic slur, professors do regularly find themselves the target of indignant parties they have “harmed” with their careless, often inappropriate speech. Consider, […]
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One man’s fight for justice after critiquing BLM If you work for a well-established American institution, be it a Fortune 500 company or a prestigious research foundation, are you constantly worried about being targeted for not endorsing political fads or prevailing cultural symbols? The often-dichotomous struggle between inconvenient truths and popular beliefs is nothing new. […]
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The United States Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear cases against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina challenging the use of racial preferences in college admissions. The cases could lead to the overturning of the Court’s 1978 and 2003 holdings in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and Grutter v. […]
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When discussing academic freedom with university administrators, there arises the question of how to distinguish political attacks from academic criticism. Certainly, there is no simple answer to this question, and the practical use of such a distinction would likely draw resistance from those who wish to impose their political views. Yet universities often make such […]
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Anti-racist discrimination is not a victimless offense. A glaring skeleton in the closet of American education is its intentional and long-established discrimination against Asian Americans, both in college admissions and in access to quality K-12 education. In light of such endemic practices that should embarrass any classical liberal, a federal lawsuit filed by Coalition for […]
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A Virginia State Senator has proposed a bill targeting “hate speech” and “racially insensitive expressions” in academic or athletic competitions between schools — even at private schools. His bill, SB 285, doesn’t define “hate speech,” though. There are many places in society where hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, and thus can’t be […]
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When Talking About Diversity and Inclusion, Jews Are Not Part of the Discussion In 1978, the landmark case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke brought the term “diversity” into the lexicon of higher education. Although the Supreme Court found that the University of California at Davis School of Medicine had used an unconstitutional quota system in denying Alan […]
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“The grand fallacy of our times is that various groups would be equally represented in institutions and occupations if it were not for discrimination.” – Thomas Sowell Something is happening in education. It is widespread and Machiavellian. By widespread I mean that it is ubiquitous, and ubiquitous in two ways: 1) every institution, program, discipline, and […]
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New Year’s is a time when many people, enchanted by the vision of a fresh start, think about time. For those of us habituated to the academic calendar, it can feel more like the hump of the year. I was reminded of its charm, though, in a call last week with a client. He was […]
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In the twilight of the second year of the COVID pandemic, hysteria continues to run amok. While many folks have gotten on with their lives thanks to vaccines or natural immunities, many others continue to live in fear and demand ever more protections and state interventions. My favorite excuse yet for the “new normal” comes […]
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In the war of ideas, the Right holds a weak hand for the simple reason that it has minimal access to America’s 20 million college students. Yes, Heritage, the Manhattan Institute, and other right-leaning organizations can publish brilliant, wonkish papers, but this reach pales in comparison to the countless airheaded, lefty professors who indoctrinate thousands […]
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When I was ready to write up my dissertation fieldwork, I was stymied by conceptual perspectives for organizing my data. What I thought about data collection before entering the field of anthropology had been overwhelmed by the reality of fieldwork. That was in the mid-1970s, when the concept of the ‘web’ of society was giving […]
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Editor’s Note: After this article was published, Emory University and others responded to the Emory Law Journal controversy in general and to this article in particular. To read Louis Bonham’s follow-up response to these responses, click here. Another year, another incident of fundamental scholarship principles being sacrificed in favor of “feelings” and the woke agenda—and […]
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Over the 2021 holiday season, Kaiser Permanente, the largest managed care organization in the United States, quietly conducted a mandatory training targeting its California employees in the name of “Providing Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services in California.” Filled with boilerplate progressive jargon including “unconscious bias,” “diversity and equity,” “racial disparities,” and “systemic barriers,” the training […]
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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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Five days before Christmas, one of Canada’s most courageous scholars was fired by her university because she had consistently dissented from its rigid ideology on indigenous issues. I wish there were more to say about the shameful expulsion of Professor Frances Widdowson by administrative heavies at Mount Royal University (MRU) in Calgary. Alas, the story […]
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The Enlightenment ideal of the university is a community of scholars seeking the truth. The methodology of this ideal is a multiplicity of voices and views engaged in discussion and debate, in seeking and adducing evidence, and in drawing and challenging conclusions. Western universities have gradually but decisively moved away from the Enlightenment ideal. Many […]
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Author’s Note: While I am a lawyer, I’m not your lawyer. Nothing in this article is intended to be legal advice from me, my firm, Minding the Campus, or anyone else. If you have a specific legal issue, I encourage you to contact counsel, particularly one familiar with the state law applicable to your situation. Since I began writing about […]
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Thuy Thi Nguyen, our nation’s first Vietnamese-American college president and leader of California’s Foothill College, was recently ousted by the college’s Academic Senate in an unprecedented vote of no confidence. The Senate, which gives recommendations to the District Board of Trustees on academic and professional matters, accused Nguyen’s administration of prioritizing equity over educational competitiveness. […]
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If the proverbial Martian toured today’s American universities, he would be perplexed. On the one hand, elite institutions have never been better. Endowments are soaring, applications for admission are similarly increasing, and families willingly pay ever-higher tuition bills while the schools’ prestige is as unquestioned as always. Yet, our keen-eyed Martian would surely notice underlying […]
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Let’s say that I made the argument that smoking causes cancer, and that I backed this up with a mountain of scientific data and peer-reviewed studies. Now suppose that someone were to respond to all of this with the following: “But my grandpa Bob smoked cigarettes all of his life and never developed cancer! So […]
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As we live through our current “Woke” Revolution, it is helpful to reflect on what we can learn from past revolutions and revolutionaries. Long before he was a Founding Father, Ben Franklin was one of the most successful “influencers” (as we’d say now) in the American colonies. His Poor Richard’s Almanack was a multi-decade bestseller. […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearWire on December 7, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. The American Idea podcast looks “to restore an understanding of the history and principles that show us what it means to be an American,” says Ashbrook Center executive director Jeff Sikkenga. Presented by Ashbrook, the podcast “explores […]
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In 2003, Adam Bellow published a piece in The Atlantic titled “In Praise of Nepotism”—he would later expand his argument into a book with the same title. Playing the contrarian in the room, Bellow argues that nepotism is in our genes (as per the phenomenon of kin selection), and that we might as well learn […]
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Progressive activists seek to blacklist and purge pro-Israel Jews from campus As if to confirm the depth of its anti-Israel animus, the Student Union of the University of Toronto at Scarborough (SCSU) passed a poisonous motion during its virtual November 24th meeting. The motion stipulates that SCSU “reaffirm its commitment to the BDS movement by […]
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The University of Georgia (UGA), “the birthplace of public education in America,” recently posted a tenured faculty cluster hiring notice for its Integrative Precision Agriculture program. The program, a cross-disciplinary undertaking between the Engineering and Agricultural & Environmental Sciences colleges, seeks tenured or tenure-track professors who have expertise in distributed sensing, systems modeling, AI-enabled decision […]
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Schools are teaching critical race theory, even as liberal education reporters deny it is taught anywhere, and falsely claim it is not taught in in even a single school system. Detroit’s school superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, says critical race theory is deeply embedded in his school system: “Our curriculum is deeply using critical race theory, especially […]
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For a model, we must turn to the U.K. “We learn how to behave as lawyers, soldiers, merchants, by being them. Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.” Letter from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Frederick Pollock, April 1926 “As a man is said to have a right in his property, he may equally be said to […]
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