From FIRE’s site (The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) Williams College has disinvited a second speaker from its student-run “Uncomfortable Learning” speaker series, a program specifically developed to bring controversial viewpoints to campus. Unlike the first disinvitation (Conservative writer Suzanne Venker), which came at the behest of the speaker series’ student organizers, this order came directly from the […]
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Black Lives Matter supporters and allies gather inside the Minneapolis City Hall rotunda on December 3, 2015, following the police shooting death of Jamar Clark. Photo: Tony Webster [email protected] By John McWhorter My mother gave me an anthropological article about the Nacirema to read in 1956. Since I was 13 at the time, what I […]
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“Beach Books 2014-2016,” released yesterday by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), is a study of mostly summer reading assigned by colleges and universities to their incoming freshman. NAS reports: Our study of common readings during the academic years 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 covers 377 assignments at 366 colleges and universities for the first year and […]
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By KC Johnson The University of Cincinnati has a fascinating response to a recent lawsuit filed by two students alleging serious misconduct by UC and several of its administrators in sexual assault proceedings: “Even accepting Plaintiffs’ allegations as true, they received constitutional due process protections.” Since UC informed them of the charges, and gave them a hearing, […]
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The New York Times published an article Sunday on how painful it was at Yale for Erika Christakis, whose harmless opinion on Halloween costumes triggered non-negotiable demands by enraged black students and their allies. But The Times buried the lede. Here is the actual nugget of fresh information in the article: “Yet the mood on campus […]
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Mount St. Mary’s in Maryland, a low-profile Catholic university, is suddenly the focus of heavy national publicity. “Drown the bunnies,” (Let’s get rid of academically weak freshmen), announced as a policy by the school’s president, Simon Newman, attracted attention, but when the bunny-drowning strategy was followed by the firing of two people, one a tenured […]
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By Richard Vedder I didn’t sleep too well last night, thanks to Heterodox Academy’s (and NYU’s) Jonathan Haidt and John Leo, who recently carried on a provocative exchange in this space. Two questions really bothered me: Why is there so little intellectual diversity in the academy? And what can we do about the related problem […]
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By Daphne Patai While American education goes further down the tubes, lame-brained notions are raised to levels of respectability in academe that should shock any halfway reasonable person. What has happened is the normalization of bad ideas, thanks mostly to identity politics. We constantly hear that we live in a hopelessly racist and sexist society, […]
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By John S. Rosenberg The University of Virginia has just released data about it applicants for the class of 2020, including a “record number of Early Action minority applications.” These numbers reveal a prima facie case of racial discrimination by the university. The cover of the February 1 Cavalier Daily presents a graphic display of […]
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On January 11, John Leo, editor of “Minding the Campus,” interviewed social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, one of the editors of the five-month-old site, “Heterodox Academy,” and perhaps the most prominent academic pushing hard for more intellectual diversity on our campuses. Haidt, 52, who specializes in the psychology of morality and the moral emotions, is Professor […]
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By Patrick Deneen My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, […]
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By Harvey Silverglate Harvard College appears locked into one of those momentous transformational challenges that from time to time roils the eminently roil-able undergraduate campus: What title should replace the sobriquet “House Master?” While the term “House Master” has been used for generations to denote the faculty members who reside in, and oversee, the student […]
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By Luke Milligan Since 1846 the law school at the University of Louisville has provided nonpartisan space for individuals to teach, discuss, and research matters of law and public policy. Despite the thousands of partisans who’ve walked its halls, the law school as an institution has remained nonpartisan, preserving its neutrality, and refusing to embrace […]
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By Fred Siegel Twenty-five years ago, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.—premier historian of twentieth-century American liberalism, highbrow courtier to the Kennedys, and grey eminence for the Kennedy’s would-be successors—published The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. The Schlesinger of the 1950s idolized Adlai Stevenson, whose professorial demeanor endeared him to academia. Academic expertise was, as […]
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By George Leef: With the surge in online education over the past few years, one course at the University of California has been exceptional. “Learning How to Learn” with an enrollment of 1,192,697 since it was initially offered last year, is the world’s most popular online course, according to The New York Times, narrowly beating […]
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By Mark Bauerlein In recent years, several critics have chided those of us who say the humanities are fading by citing statistics on undergraduate enrollments that show no real declines at all since the 1980s. One reason for the rebuke is that many arguing the “crisis” do so on the basis of intellectual decline, specifically, […]
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By James Huffman In response to the campus protests, much has been written and spoken about how universities can best serve the interests of their students of color. Those who sympathize with the protesters argue that students of color, in particular, should be nurtured and protected from uncomfortable experiences that distract from their education. Others […]
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John K. Wilson, editor of The Academe Blog, severely criticized Peter Wood’s January 13 article, “What Candidates Can Do for Higher Education Now.” His text is below, followed by Peter Wood’s reply. By John K. Wilson National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood has a column at Minding the Campus today arguing for an 7-point plan for […]
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By David M. Rosen Four anthropology professors stood at the entrance of the ballroom at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver last November, where members of the American Anthropological Association would soon vote to boycott Israeli academic institutions, organized by the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement (BDS). Each professor held up one of a […]
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By John S. Rosenberg In my first year of graduate school at Yale, the debate over admitting women to the college was still raging. A joke (or maybe it wasn’t) at that time was that the Old Yalies were perfectly willing for the college to go co-ed — so long as no male who would […]
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