In late April, the media were abuzz with the tale of yet another horrific injustice inflicted by a university on a female student who had been a victim of sexual assault on campus. “Brown University lets rapist who choked his victim reenroll after a semester-long suspension,” thunderedthe headline on Salon.com. The reports were based on the account of Brown […]
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The Center for Individual Rights has filed a lawsuit in Connecticut on behalf of Pamela Swanigan, a graduate student in English at the University of Connecticut. The suit alleges that Ms. Swanigan was not allowed to compete for a highly prestigious, merit-based scholarship despite being the top applicant the year she applied to UConn. Instead she was […]
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Liberalism and the left have become virtually indistinguishable (as Fred Siegel’s impressive Revolt Against The Masses persuasively documents), becoming more intolerant and hence more intolerable. An exemplary recent example is the recent attack orchestrated by GetEqual, a Berkeley-based militant gay rights group, against University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock. Laycock, ubiquitously described, as here, as “husband of UVA President Teresa Sullivan [and] […]
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Last month, the Modern Language Association (MLA) issued the report of its Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature. The crucial word in the report is “unsustainable.” The authors recognize that the old model of luring students into doctoral programs, keeping them at work on degrees for up to a decade, and then […]
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In the Brown University rape-charge scandal, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has declared that the complaining student was “nearly choked to death.” The male involved says the “choking” was minor and meant to be affectionate: “Both (the female and male students, Lena Sclove and Daniel Kopin) acknowledge that Sclove had an intensely negative reaction when Kopin put his hand on her […]
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English departments have pretty much given up on their mission of preserving a literary canon or teaching poetic form and rhetorical strategies. Decades ago, politics of race, class, and gender overtook any concern for preserving and perpetuating poetic art. In fact, to claim that there is such a thing as Literature was to align oneself […]
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Columnist Mike Adams reports that at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, where he is an embattled conservative professor, graduating students can get commencement cords in three colors: gold for good grades, purple for being a homosexual and lavender for being supportive of homosexuals. We had no idea that they gave out tassels for orientation and orientational support, […]
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Is it reasonable for a university to insist that campus Christian groups accept non-Christian or anti-Christian students as group leaders? Ask a hundred ordinary Americans and you would very likely get 99 or 100 noes. Ask the same question at our most politically correct colleges and universities, though, and you’d get a different answer. Because of campus anti-discrimination codes, all […]
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Suppose you’re a wealthy investor, and an enterprising businessman comes to you requesting a billion dollar investment in his company. He promises an incredible ROI. Your interest is piqued, so you ask him for some data to justify such a large investment. “No can do,” he says. “That information is private.” Of course, you’d laugh […]
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Slate‘s Emily Bazelon recently took a look at the tensions in campus sexual assault matters by looking into a the case of Leah Francis, a Stanford student who said that she was brutally raped on campus. Though Bazelon conceded due process problems, her column suggested that issues regarding campus due process are likely to get worse before […]
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President Obama announced today an executive order that will make the student loan program a worse deal for taxpayers. Though the federal government already allows some students to cap their loan repayments at 10 percent of their monthly incomes, the President hopes to expand the program. Students who borrowed before October 2007 or who haven’t borrowed since […]
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The thesis of my 2008 book, The Dumbest Generation, was that digital tools and media have become so prominent in teens’ and 20-somethings’ thoughts and acts that their intellectual and civic capacities are bound to deteriorate. While devices and social networks allow the possibility of intellectual and civic engagement, I argued, they mean something else entirely […]
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The latest due process lawsuit comes against a highly vulnerable target: Occidental. Occidental is the California college whose rules allow branding a male student a rapist even if his female partner says “yes” to sexual intercourse. Moreover, the school includes what seems to be a disproportionate number of anti-due process “activists,” professors inclined toward delusional claims against their […]
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In his new book, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities, James Turner has written a rich intellectual history of what many American scholars would describe as the long lost art and science of philology. A rebirth of philology is also long overdue, says Turner, who is the Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities at the University of Notre […]
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A federal district court in Ohio made an interesting ruling Wednesday in a lawsuit filed against Case Western Medical School by a student who had not reported his DWI arrest to school administraators. The issue was somewhat afield from the current debates about due process in higher education, but the reasoning of Judge James Gwin, […]
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Before going bungee jumping, you sign a hefty waiver that you understand that death and other serious consequences may result. Before every movie preview is a rating to give audiences an idea of how much sex and violence they will see. Many books are also dangerous, raunchy, scary. Some literary characters even hold offensive points […]
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Representative Alan Grayson, a Democrat from Florida’s 9th District has introduced H.R. 4776, “to prohibit an institution of higher education that participates in a boycott of the Israeli government, economy, or academia from receiving funds from the U.S. federal government.” The text of the bill is not yet available, but it is not too early to say that Grayson’s […]
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The New School prides itself as an epicenter of progressivism, so it’s fitting that its 31st annual Social Research conference focused on a beloved progressive cause: sustainability. Sustainability pairs environmentalism with social activism. It takes aim at the free market, which it holds responsible for destroying the environment. It also takes aim at traditional social structures (especially “the patriarchy”) […]
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We noticed no reporting in the New York Times on Michael Bloomberg’s notable commencement address at Harvard. Google couldn’t find any Times coverage either. Very strange. Bloomberg had been mayor of the Times’ home city for twelve years and except for the nannyism over big sodas and his clear support for stop-and-frisk, he has been […]
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Tim Groseclose’s new book, Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA, is a masterful expose of the lying and deception UCLA officials employ to evade Prop. 209’s prohibition of racial preferences in admissions. In his otherwise positive review, Russell Nieli expresses disappointment that Groseclose’s criticism of UCLA’s continuing and […]
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