Writing in the Washington Post, Megan McArdle points to the threat to racial preferences posed by the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, noting that although his nomination has led to much handwringing over the fate of Roe v. Wade, the future of “another landmark case,” Regents of the University of California v. […]
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“Higher education is in a lot of trouble, barely kept on track by massive price increases, grade inflation that keeps the mostly inattentive customers sedated, and a class of academic serfs, called adjuncts, who work for meager wages…. And what does the money buy?” Not much, according to Warren Treadgold, author of a new book, The […]
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Courtney Lawton became the central figure of an hour-long episode of This American Life by making a few derogatory comments on an activist from Turning Point USA, a campus conservative group. Last August, UNL undergraduate Kaitlyn Mullen set up a table with literature and fliers, in the middle of the University of Nebraska campus at […]
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Freedom of expression is making a comeback. That might not be immediately obvious in the age of disinvitations, shout downs, trigger warnings, speech codes, “bias response teams,” and the other components of leftist suppression of ideas and speech on campus. Nor if we look beyond campus to the assaults on public officials, the doxing of […]
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Editor’s note: Even though the Trump administration has reversed Obama era affirmative action policies as they apply to schools, and even though Trump will likely appoint another conservative Supreme Court Justice before the end of the year, academia will continue to write its own rules and institute its own policies on racial preferences. More important […]
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Marquette University has been trying to get rid of John McAdams, a conservative gadfly, for nearly four years. In October 2014, they came close to making that happen. When Cheryl Abbate, a grad student in philosophy, was teaching a course about John Rawls and asked students for examples of current events to which Rawlsian philosophy […]
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In a reproof to Obama-era guidance on campus sex hearings, Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos issued interim Title IX guidance fair to the accused as well as the accusers. This brought a storm of abuse from the founders of the kangaroo court system, favored by the Obama team. The lawsuits against the interim guidance issued by […]
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Conservatives, libertarians, traditionalists, and classical liberals need to get clear on something: the ideological contests are fading. What Irving Kristol famously said in his 2001 Bradley Lecture, “We in America fought a culture war, and we [conservatives] lost,” applies well to higher education. Conservatives fought wars over multiculturalism, Western Civilization, affirmative action, the Academic Bill […]
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In today’s campus battles, the forces of political correctness enjoy an immense advantage, and to compound this edge, conservatives scarcely notices they’re losing. This is the power to silence critics, indeed remove entire topics from discussion by adroit name calling. Woe to the professors who casually acknowledges that black students rank toward the bottom in […]
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As a freshman applicant to Washington & Lee University just after the middle of the last century, I had an interview with Frank Gilliam, its legendary, long-time dean of admissions (he could recognize and call by name any student or former student who attended during his 30+ year tenure). Naively — from a small town […]
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Much of the news regarding free speech on campus is enough to make anyone despair. Year after year more people and ideas are muzzled. But some very heartening news of late comes from Princeton. Due largely to a new book promoting free speech by Princeton University political scientist Keith Whittington and the unusual support and […]
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What’s to be done about the large and growing number of Americans who cannot repay their student loans? There are two new developments. The New York Times reports, “Senators Marco Rubio and Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill on Thursday that would prevent states from suspending residents’ driver’s licenses and professional licenses over unpaid federal student […]
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A major survey sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and conducted by YouGov shows that college students—2225 were surveyed in late January or early February, from two- and four-year institutions— strongly support due process for accused students facing Title IX tribunals. Indeed, the gap between the policies that would flow from […]
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Today, thanks to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, launched in 2005, campuses around the world are treated every year to Israeli Apartheid Week. The plan, orchestrated by an array of student and non-student organizations, and aided by academic departments that host breathtakingly dishonest anti-Israel speakers, is to depict Israel as just like apartheid-era […]
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In an attempt to pressure and embarrass Duke University’s President Vincent Price, an undergraduate student group, known as the “People’s State of the University,” interrupted the President’s speech during an alumni weekend event and delivered 12 demands for institutional change. The protestors’ demands ranged from a $15 an hour minimum salary for all hourly Duke employees; […]
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Soon after arriving at McGill University in 1968 from a year of ethnographic field research in Iran, I met an intelligent and sincere young man, an anthropology student, who told me that North American culture was the most corrupt culture in the world. I asked him where else he had been in the world, where […]
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Two college associations are purporting to defend the liberal arts, the areas of study that undergird higher education in Western history and educate society about universal principles essential for a free person to know to participate in civic life. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) […]
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Two national publications—the New York Times and the Atlantic—have recently reported on procedural abuses in the Title IX system. Both pieces are must-reads, and reminders of how the one-sided nature of campus Title IX tribunals, analyzed for years mostly by smaller media outlets like this one, has at last decisively permeated mainstream media. Michael Powell’s […]
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Perhaps the greatest shift in any academic field in the past 30 or 40 years has been in anthropology. Call it an epistemological paradigm shift away from science. Three main influences led to this shift: One was the morphing of symbolic anthropology into interpretive anthropology under the influence of Clifford Geertz, who distanced himself from […]
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Anyone who believes that the hard sciences could never capitulate to identity politics in the way the humanities and softer sciences have should not read Heather MacDonald’s report just posted at City Journal. It’s too infuriating, and the impacts could be devastating. MacDonald surveys the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and accrediting organizations […]
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