David Richardson, a tenured history professor at Madera Community College (MCC), and my colleague and friend, is embroiled in a fast-escalating brouhaha concerning free chocolate bars, free thought, and free speech—all good things that seem to have offended certain members of our MCC campus community. Professor Richardson was hired to teach history in the State […]
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In a 2003 Supreme Court decision, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously said, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” Five years to go and … fat chance. Academia’s support for racial preferences has only increased since 2020—the year of racial hysteria and COVID panic—and it shows […]
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Guiding Readers Toward the Problem “Mailer finally came to decide that his love for his wife while not at all equal or congruent to his love for America was damnably parallel.” – Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night (1968) Alexis de Tocqueville’s epic Democracy in America (1835/40) offers a curious preview of the American […]
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Two inexorable forces are driving the woke movement toward an unavoidable reckoning. The first is the binding force of intersectionality, which holds that all marginalized identities must band together to fight systemic oppression. The second is the energizing force of a permanent revolution that recognizes no limiting principles—the movement always seeks the next cultural convention […]
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“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.” – C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain Every year, I teach a cohort of nursing students that has to pass through my chemistry class. They are almost all freshmen and almost all females. In the laboratory sections I […]
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What are academic administrators waiting for? Will it take injuries, hospitalizations, or something worse for them to stop turning a blind eye—or even tacitly condoning—the aggression we’re seeing from anti-free speech students? In May, members of Congress heard a first-hand account of today’s academic dangers from former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines, who was mobbed by […]
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Editor’s Note: This piece is part of a new Minding the Campus article series called Minding the Sciences, wherein we are renewing our focus on the sciences given the many threats it faces in modern academia. Click here to learn more. A dozen years ago, National Association of Scholars President Peter Wood posed the provocative […]
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While employment opportunities have steadily diminished at traditional independent media outlets over the past quarter century, efforts to ameliorate or adapt to the decline have met mixed success. A group of wealthy foundations, however, cleared a rescue path uniquely for US education journalists. Many who followed this path, laid by the Bill and Melinda Gates […]
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The problems plaguing contemporary higher education are myriad and manifest. I will not try to summarize them here, except to note that they are not merely imagined or trivial. Instead, they are real and existential, reaching to the very heart of modern academe. But identifying the problems does not answer the more important question: what […]
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Vocational programs have long been required to help their students secure gainful employment, but until the early 2010s, gainful employment had never been defined. The Biden administration has just released a draft of the latest Gainful Employment regulations, and, like the previous iterations, it would terminate financial aid eligibility (Pell grants, students loans, etc.) for […]
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In 1927, Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals denounced those who would forsake truth in service of political aims. Nearly a century later, as a researcher and lecturer at Princeton University, I’m embroiled in a modern-day version of Benda’s tale. Indeed, I have become the target of a campaign to eradicate intellectual diversity on […]
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A law school dean tries to square the circle The ruckus at Stanford Law School surrounding the March 9 shout-down of Judge Kyle Duncan has abated. But we can learn much from four documents that have since emerged: Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach’s placatory speech, statements by two ‘marginalized’ student groups, […]
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On May 6, 2023, the California Reparations Task Force met at Northeastern University Oakland for a final discussion and vote on its full reparations report. Consisting of 40 chapters and a 104-page executive summary, the report offers sweeping policy recommendations on restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, and other forms of reparations. According to the taskforce, California, which […]
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Editor’s Note: This piece is part of a new Minding the Campus article series called Minding the Sciences, wherein we are renewing our focus on the sciences given the many threats it faces in modern academia. Click here to learn more. In late April 2023, twenty-nine scientists published a manifesto titled “In Defense of Merit […]
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College and university presidents, along with their often-compliant governing boards, have presided over a decline in academic freedom during the past decade, as so-called DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) bureaucracies have multiplied in size and power. Mandatory diversity statements, cancel culture, trigger warnings, and bias response teams evidence this decline. It has come with a […]
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Why are straight, white, male students completely ignored by the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices at public colleges and universities? There are no initiatives that explicitly encourage or support their success in the year 2023, but it would be very easy to find programs for all other demographic groups. Why exactly are white faculty, […]
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At the age of ten, while running on my family’s patio I slipped and put my arm through the window of the kitchen door. I paused to marvel. I hadn’t cut myself. But when I saw shards of glass in the frame, I jerked away, leaving a two-inch gash in my forearm. My mother telephoned […]
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Science should be just and representative, says Science editor “It matters who does science,” reads the headline of a recent editorial by Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the top American general science journal, Science. Well, of course it matters. Science should be done by people who are knowledgeable, honest, curious, and open to criticism. But that’s […]
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Review: Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities by Stanley Ridgley (Humanix, 290 pages, $29.99) I only attended Vanderbilt University’s 2022 Jumpstart Virtual Conference to see the presentations on “anti-racism” in STEMM education and research, but I decided to stay for the lunch-hour keynote presentation on “White Emotionalities,” anticipating that its […]
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Some critics think that to merely step foot on an American college campus today is to be immediately assaulted by gender studies speakers and decolonization posters. Each and every student, it appears, is caught in a web of woke studies from which there is no escape. But spend a cozy evening nestled by the fire […]
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