Today, many people, in the U.S., Canada, and the rest of the West, have rejected liberal democracy in favor of “woke” identity politics and cultural Marxist “social justice.” Following the Marxist vision of society as a division of classes, with the oppressed victims struggling against the privileged oppressors, identity politics has expanded the class struggle […]
Read More
For the diversity engineers in higher education, life keeps yielding disappointments. A new study shows once again how far colleges and universities lag relative to their vocal pledges of equity and inclusion. The study draws on Federal data to determine how well those institutions have improved the demographic make-up of the faculty—improvement defined by the […]
Read More
Some 500 lawsuits have been brought by accused college students in Title IX cases since the Obama administration’s “Dear Colleague” letter of 2011 made it easier for accusers to prevail. Of those 500, one of the most troubling has been the case of basketball star Jack Montague, expelled by Yale in 2016 just as his […]
Read More
Skin in the game for student loans, the idea that colleges should face financial consequence when their students default, is gaining momentum in policy discussions. After all, when students take out loans, the colleges get all their money upfront, leaving taxpayers holding the bag when students default on the loan payments years later. It seems […]
Read More
Are Oberlin College officials serious when they say they were defending students’ free speech? That remains the college’s defense even after a jury found the college guilty of libel and interference with business in its dealings with Gibson’s Food Mart and Bakery. Gibson’s Bakery felt defamed by Oberlin College’s involvement in a campaign accusing the […]
Read More
Fifty years ago, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published a celebratory article with the title: “Doors of Ivy League Colleges Reported Wide Open for Jewish Students.” Reporting that in 1967, “40 percent of the students at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania are now Jewish. At Yale, Harvard and Cornell, the Jewish student number between 20 […]
Read More
Today’s liberals not only tolerate but encourage colleges and universities to give preferences based on race (see affirmative action and the College Board’s new “adversity” score). Now they want to prohibit giving preferential admissions treatment based on … well, it’s not completely clear, but family wealth comes pretty close. As a result, many defenders of […]
Read More
Oberlin College just got hit again with a jury judgment that could cripple the college financially. Last Friday, the jury found the college guilty of libel and returned a verdict award of $11.2 million to Gibson’s, a local store and its proprietors. Today, the jury added $33 million in punitive damages – a clear sign […]
Read More
Over the last half-century, higher education in America has been transformed from a quiet backwater with relatively little influence or cost into a powerful system responsible for or at least deeply complicit in numerous deleterious trends that are today wreaking havoc on the nation. A bill of indictment would have to include the following. The […]
Read More
Op-Ed. An estimated 14.67 million college students attend what we call “state universities.” Some of them are renowned highly selective research institutions like the University of California at Berkeley or the University of Michigan, while others are relatively obscure schools with an open admissions policy. But all receive some degree of subsidization from the state […]
Read More
I keep being invited to talk about free speech on college campuses and every time I’m invited I make the same point: that this isn’t about free speech and this is only tangentially about college campuses. This is about a breakdown in the basic logic of civilization, and it’s spreading. College campuses may be the […]
Read More
People used to talk about the ends of the university and how the academic establishment was failing its students. Today, more and more people are talking about the end of the university, the idea being that it is time to think about closing them rather than reforming them. Last month at a conference in London, […]
Read More
“It’s Title IX, not Miranda,” Susan Riseling, former chief of police at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told a conference of academic administrators in 2015. “Use what you can.” Riseling was describing a case in which a Wisconsin student had been subjected to both a criminal and a Title IX complaint. The police originally didn’t have enough […]
Read More
As the humanities continue their steady slide toward the margins of the campus, the faculty still can’t look in the mirror and face the sources of the problem. Last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education, four assistant professors of English responded to a previous essay about the state of the field and unintentionally revealed […]
Read More
People’s vocabularies are shrinking at a time when more and more people have college degrees. As Zach Goldberg notes, people’s mastery of hard words has been falling for well over 20 years, and their mastery of easier words has been falling for over 15 years. Meanwhile, a higher proportion of Americans have college degrees than […]
Read More
It is not news that “social justice” ideology, supported by its pillars of “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “equality of results,” has replaced liberal democratic culture in our government, university, and business offices. Instead of being treated as individuals, people are treated according to the racial, gender, sexual preference, and ethnic categories that they belong to. Instead […]
Read More
The College Board, ever alert to cultural signals, has decided the SATs can be improved by adopting what might be called McNeil methods. In the 1930s, Charles K. McNeil, a math teacher at Riverdale Country School in New York, indulged a not very respectable hobby of gambling on the side. Growing bored with picking winners […]
Read More
The following is an excerpt from an op-ed in The New York Times by Randall Kennedy, a law professor at Harvard. I have been a professor at Harvard University for 34 years. In that time, the school has made some mistakes. But it has never so thoroughly embarrassed itself as it did this past weekend. […]
Read More
A recent article on the decline of reading by Steven Johnson for The Chronicle of Higher Education has drawn a good deal of attention. The article opens with David Joliffe, an English professor at the of the University of Arkansas, depicting his students’ inability to tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Johnson tells us this isn’t […]
Read More
Senator and Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) recently proposed a policy to cancel student loan debt. She wants to cancel up to $50,000 of debt for borrowers with annual household incomes under $250,00, including full cancellation for households with incomes under $100,000. It would be financed with an “Ultra-Millionaire Tax” – a massive redistribution […]
Read More
University faculty have been notable for “odd” views, but today’s campuses are manufacturing screwball ideas on an industrial scale. Moreover, these ideas are hardly harmless unlike say, Esperanto. Rather, they resemble toxic pathogens that have escaped a supposedly secure lab, and now cause untold harm in society more generally. I am talking about the likes […]
Read More
Last week Google told the Claremont Institute that the Institute’s advertisements for its annual conference were banned. This act of censorship by the internet giant followed Facebook’s announcement that it was banning Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones, Louis Farrakhan, and Paul Watson. Ryan P. Williams, the president of the Claremont Institute, posted his account of what […]
Read More
Last month, Chapman University’s film school removed from the walls posters that students and many professors deemed offensive. They were original posters promoting Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s sweeping silent classic set during the Civil War and after. The film was fabulously successful in its day, and historians regard it as a breakthrough […]
Read More
Which is it? Do universities these days want to be zones where no one will ever get offended, or do they want to promote free speech and academic freedom with all their attendant risks and discomforts? The University of Massachusetts Amherst is just one place that can’t make up its mind. For years now it […]
Read More
As demonstrated by both the complaint that Harvard discriminates against Asians (the Boston federal district judge’s decision is presumably imminent) and the furor over the spreading pay-to-admit scandal of rich parents buying their kids’ admission to selective colleges, affirmative action remains a hotly contested matter of ongoing public debate. The latest brouhaha comes from Washington […]
Read More
Anti-white hate is now mainstream American culture. Not just by racial extremists such as Black Lives Matter, for whom statements such as “all lives matter” or “blue lives matter” are racist. Our highest leaders sing the same song. Presidential candidate Barack Obama said of working class, white voters in 2008, “They get bitter, they cling […]
Read More
Colleges and universities can be relentless in pursuing their graduates for donations. They publish alumni magazines with glowing accounts of their faculty, students, and alumni, sponsor “Alumni Weekends” to show off new buildings and hear success stories, and of course, mail out regular solicitations with convenient return envelopes for donations. Although I have donated in […]
Read More
In higher education, disgraceful scandals and major embarrassments once arrived one by one. Now, they appear in clusters, like epidemics we should have been expecting. Take the University of Tulsa, suddenly in the grip of a “strategic plan” aimed at marketing the university to students who are career-oriented and lured by the idea of fighting […]
Read More
You might think that higher education leaders, who have almost all been steeped in the academic traditions of the free exchange of ideas, would uniformly stand up for free speech. Learning about those traditions is, after all, a key part of what college should be about for students. Sadly, college officials often bow down to […]
Read More
Op-Ed: In contemporary America, women and men still act out ancient roles. From the point of view of the men, the society is a matriarchy: Women have physically less demanding jobs — with the sole exception of childbirth, by now a rare event in the average woman’s life. Women sustain far fewer injuries on the […]
Read More