Just a few short weeks ago, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa once again rocked the world of American higher education with the publication of their new book, Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates. Their study found that many of today’s college graduates were not provided with the tools and skills to transition smoothly […]
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In its response to my column on my relationship with the Federalist Society’s speakers bureau, the Federalist Society claims that it continues to host events on the same topic that got me dropped from their list—challenging hardline feminist doctrines on “rape culture” and rape legislation—and speakers who share the same “basic perspective” as mine. The […]
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The Federalist Society aims to host programs on law school campuses and elsewhere on important and controversial legal topics by offering top libertarian and conservative thinkers a small speaking fee and defraying their travel expenses. Cathy Young recently posted a piece objecting to our decision no longer to include her on the list of speakers we […]
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The latest due process lawsuit—albeit one with quite unsympathetic defendants—has been filed, this one against the University of Houston. You can read the complaint here, and the motion for a preliminary injunction here. The specifics of this case are tawdry. A male Houston student named Ryan McConnell, after a night of drinking heavily, hooked up […]
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Last year, when the American Studies Association announced its boycott of Israeli institutions of higher learning, the development was seen as a great step forward for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Now: not so much. As often occurs when extremist academics encounter the real world, the ASA has been forced to effectively neuter […]
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George Will’s scheduled October 22 appearance at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio has drawn protests from those angered by his June column questioning the campus culture of victimhood and the anti-rape crusade. Anita Manur, director of the school’s Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program, argued that Will’s commentary could “re-victimize and re-traumatize some of our […]
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In an attempt to defend the indefensible, Ezra Klein penned a meandering column responding to the many critics of his “yes-means-yes” defense. Or, I should say, responding to some critics: he ignored perhaps the most troubling response to his piece, Cathy Young’s observation that he had blatantly misrepresented a column by her—which suggested that false […]
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This week has featured a potential tipping point in the debate about due process and campus sexual assault. The first event came in publication of an extraordinary column by Ezra Klein, defending California’s “affirmative consent” law. In one respect, it wasn’t surprising to see Klein defend the proposal; too many liberal commentators (not to mention, […]
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This week has featured a potential tipping point in the debate about due process and campus sexual assault. The first event came in publication of an extraordinary column by Ezra Klein, defending California’s “affirmative consent” law. In one respect, it wasn’t surprising to see Klein defend the proposal; too many liberal commentators (not to mention, […]
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In my freshman year at Duke in the mid-1960s, C’s were still the most common grade in my courses, about equal to the total number of A’s and B’s combined. In my first-semester freshman composition course, there were no A’s given, only two B’s, one or two D’s — and all the rest C’s. The […]
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Over at PJ Media, Ron Radosh reveals that a banner on UCLA’s campus promotes Angela Davis, the radical activist and former UCLA professor from 1969-1970. The banner includes an old image of Davis—presumably taken during her time at UCLA—with the words “WE QUESTION” underneath. As Radosh notes, the ad, which is supposed to boost UCLA […]
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“We are never sending our boys to college.” That line came not from some far-right crank, but instead from Robin Steinberg, a public defender. For an article in the New Republic, author Judith Shulevitz had asked Steinberg to review Columbia’s new sexual assault policy. (I had profiled the policy previously for Minding the Campus.) Shulevitz […]
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A particular nostalgia is at work in academic discussion. We still talk about of liberal education, the liberal arts, and the humanities as if they remain viable activities in higher education, threatened, yes, and losing ground, but open to revival. Universities have grown ever more “corporate,” students flock to business and vocational programs, the sciences […]
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Coal miners used to bring a canary down into the mine to warn them when the air was becoming too dangerous. If the canary went limp, it was time to get out. For the last several years, conditions for American law schools have been getting progressively more dangerous, as students respond to the realities of […]
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Suppose you follow the tortured treatment of gender politics on campus, and someone told you that a male “gender expert” funded by the MacArthur Foundation had just published a Time essay strikingly hostile to men. Could you identify the author? Why yes—that would have to be Michael Kimmel, in this essay arguing that fraternities should […]
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A familiar campus drama just played out at Colgate: a few bigoted remarks, followed by protests (good), then a cornucopia of diversity demands, including major changes to the curriculum (not so good). The Colgate Association of Critical Collegians recently staged a sit-in on campus which drew support from professors and grew to 350 protestors by its […]
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In a consistent pattern in the recent debate over due process on campus, federal actions have triggered more aggressive reactions, both on campus and by self-styled activists and their media and political allies. The most obvious example of this has been California’s “affirmative consent” law (which, for reasons its sponsors have never explained, applies only […]
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A 14-year old Colorado boy with an Aztec name travels the world with his younger brother, 11, as a missionary for “global sustainability,” rapping, dancing and speaking for Earth Guardians, a group he directs. Xiuhtezcatl Martinez is not descended from Aztecs, the bloody tyranny that ruled central Mexico for several centuries until Cortes and his Native […]
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In Minds on Fire: How Role Immersion Games Transform Colleges, Mark C. Carnes makes the case that they might. Students at Pace University have become so engrossed in a game called Henry VIII and the Reformation Parliament that class spills into the dorms: “students endlessly debated, gossiped, and strategized Tudor religion and politics.” At Dordt […]
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“As employees in institutions of higher learning, we have a particular responsibility to oppose Israel’s widespread and systematic violations of the right to higher education of Palestinians… As anthropologists, we feel compelled to join academics around the world who support the Palestinian call to boycott Israeli academic institutions. In responding to the Palestinian call, we […]
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