Over the past three years, the general public has been inundated with appeals to “Trust the science.” In spite of this, many have grown increasingly distrustful of both science and scientists. It is the height of hypocrisy to expect people to put their blind faith in scientific authority—for that is what “trust the science” amounts […]
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In July, five college presidents resigned in a week—one for each workday. Some ran small to mid-sized eastern colleges and universities: Seton Hall University, Thomas Jefferson University, and the Berklee College of Music. Others led large research powerhouses: Stanford and Texas A&M universities. Only one, Marc Tessier-Lavigne of Stanford, had been in office for more […]
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“All sentiment is right; because sentiment has a reference to nothing beyond itself, and is always real, wherever a man is conscious of it. But all determinations of the understanding are not right; because they have a reference to something beyond themselves, to wit, real matter of fact; and are not always conformable to that […]
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Ignore the fancy rhetoric surrounding legacy admissions. Deep down, we all know that this newfound passion for merit is a punitive response to the Supreme Court’s recent ban on racial preferences in college admissions. It’s pure tit for tat: If whites want to keep blacks out of top schools, then racial preferences supporters will return […]
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In July, I attended the 41st Annual Meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (DDP) in Tucson, Arizona. The meeting opened with the national anthem played beautifully on the trumpet and the violin by the teenage sons (Benjamin and Franklin!) of Willie Soon, the first speaker. DDP was founded in the early 1980s as a “group […]
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On July 12, after giving the public less than ten days to submit written comments, the California State Board of Education (SBE) voted to adopt the 2023 Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools, which will guide math instruction in the state’s nearly 1,000 public K–12 school districts. The controversial framework has received and continues to […]
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Bureaucrats wouldn’t have an excuse to hide documents if the documents were born-open—that is, publicly accessible electronic documents from the moment of their creation. And bureaucrats do hide documents, especially in the schools and universities. Want to know if China is donating money to your university? Secret. Want to know your child’s curriculum? Very secret. […]
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Plato is credited with writing that we should ignore loud voices that come from the minds of the untrained. His rationale? “The untrained mind keeps up a running commentary, labelling everything, judging everything. Best to ignore that commentary. Don’t argue or resist, just ignore. Deprived of attention and interest, this voice gets quieter and quieter […]
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What is federalism? Historians and political philosophers will bicker about its origins and definitions. I like the natural-law approach—think Locke and Madison in the Anglo tradition. It’s tangible, comparable, and verifiable. Further, any policy decisions related to federalism can be kept simple. A warning, however: I come from the field of literature. I’ve read too […]
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George Washington University (GWU) will be a less anti-Semitic place after its recent decision to evict the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). In a terse note, GWU stated that the relationship between the university and MESA “had run its course” and that the two institutions were “now parting ways amicably.” Observers of Middle East studies […]
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Student loan forgiveness is a topic that isn’t going away. Progressives want all student loan debt forgiven, and the Biden administration has been trying to deliver. In fact, the Biden team has been the most aggressive administration on student loan forgiveness in history. But it’s not clear to me whether the administration is winning or […]
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My grandfather attended the University of Toronto. My father attended the University of Toronto. I attended the University of Toronto. And now my daughter is attending the University of Toronto. This is a large public university that is not particularly difficult to get into with decent grades. But the fact of this great chain of […]
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At long last, some state legislatures have begun reacting to the “wokeness” epidemic that has consumed both K-12 and higher education. Unfortunately, many of these bills are likely doomed to accomplish little or nothing because they fail to address an essential issue: enforcement. Particularly in the context of public universities, expecting state employees to simply […]
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In 1753, English writer Samuel Richardson has his main character proclaim, “Women must not encourage Fops and Fools. They must encourage Men of Sense only.” While “fool” belongs to most English speakers’ lexicon today, “fop” likely does not. According to Google Ngram (below), “fop” has seen about a 95% decline in relative usage since its […]
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Affirmative-action peer review The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has supported extramural biomedical research since the end of WWII. This year, the program spent close to $40 billion. The basic concept is simple. Write down what you, the scientist, want to do and why; estimate how much it will cost each year; and send the […]
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“Diversity” is all the rage these days. It even attracts support across the ideological spectrum: demographic diversity on the Left and viewpoint diversity on the Right. For some, it has a magical quality. As Harvard’s president recently announced, to defend the university from those who claim it racially discriminates, “We write today to reaffirm the […]
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A racialist worldview is destroying the nation’s largest higher education system There is no clearer evidence than the June 29, 2023, webinar presented by Colegas—an organization sponsored by the California Community Colleges (CCC) system—that the specter of white supremacy has transformed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into an insidious and unassailable ideology. The Colegas email […]
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The Atlantic is a magazine with a splendid history. Yet it recently published an article—“‘Race Neutral’ Is the New ‘Separate but Equal,’” by Uma Mazyck Jayakumar and Ibram X. Kendi—that is both self-contradictory and morally questionable. “Separate but equal,” the policy outlawed by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, was explicitly racist because students […]
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The recent ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States declaring unconstitutional affirmative-action preferences in college and university admissions is a vindication of the noble objectives of the original Civil Rights Movement, encapsulated in Martin Luther King’s iconic commandment at the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963 that people be judged on the basis of […]
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A University Without Walls, A Prison Without Cells, and Extinction Superintelligent Bot by Joe Nalven and DALL●E 2 Science fiction may foreshadow the future of AI. Antony Bryant’s call for papers cites Stanisław Lem’s short story, Golem XIV, written in 1981, which sought to anticipate where humanity and its AI technology were headed. In Lem’s […]
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