Colleges and universities seem obsessed with race and other social “identities.” Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies are often powerful on campus, and college staffs are sometimes required to swear fealty to “diversity” in order to secure and maintain employment. Yet polling data suggest a majority of the public opposes evaluating people at least partly […]
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Many Americans are familiar with the president’s headline efforts to cancel student debt altogether (currently awaiting consideration by the Supreme Court following legal challenges), but fewer know that the White House’s student loan forgiveness agenda, which includes several lesser known policy actions, has already cost taxpayers billions; $255 billion, to be exact. Earlier this week, […]
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“If a belief guides practical actions, it works best if it is true, but if a ‘belief’ defines a group identity then it can still work, or even work better, if it is not true.” – Neil Van Leeuwen, “The Puzzle of Belief,” Cognitive Science Vol. 47 (2023) The comments and reactions to a recent […]
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Accountability is getting more and more attention in higher education. Democrats will soon release new gainful employment regulations, while Republicans are considering a range of accountability approaches, including risk-sharing that would put colleges on the hook when students can’t repay their student loans. With so many new ideas for accountability systems in the air, it […]
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Background Traditional liberal arts courses were the cornerstone of Western Civilization curricula but have fallen out of favor in American academia, where they have been gradually replaced by progressive ideologies. Political considerations in administrative and faculty hiring make it highly unlikely that this will be easily reversed. For those who consider a liberal arts background […]
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Has American higher education reached peak woke? Alas, probably not, given that activists can find almost anything to protest. While it may be difficult to predict the next campus absurdity, let me suggest what may soon arrive: importing the anti-police, pro-crime movement into our colleges and universities. In fact, the first outcroppings of this movement […]
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Artificial intelligence is becoming too important for people not to appreciate its core mathematical foundations in calculus, probability theory, and linear algebra. Most advanced countries are regearing their secondary schools to introduce these topics to teenagers. The US is not, largely because its educators are obsessed with remedial arithmetic. This needs to change. Calculus and […]
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On March 2, the magazine of record for professional librarians in the United States, Library Journal, will host an online seminar entitled “Resisting Book Bans.” On the surface, the seminar could not be more timely. Since 2018, academic and public libraries have been banning books with increasing frequency because they fail to promote the progressive political […]
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Many Americans are aware of the Biden administration’s battle for student loan forgiveness. But a major policy decision that has flown under the radar is a change to the way federal student aid will be distributed among students. Stuffed into those end-of-the-year pork-filled bills is a provision that spells trouble for families. In 2020, Congress […]
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“Key components of the [Lamat] Institute include intensive research instruction … and social justice discussions. In addition, a comprehensive mentoring professional development program is designed to encourage mentors and mentees to adopt an anti-racist, critical approach to mentoring relationships.” So reads the Lamat Institute’s About page. According to its Home page, the institute’s goal over […]
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The tenured law professor fights back against those seeking to crush her academic freedom. When Orwell wryly observed that “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act,” he may well have had academia in mind. Challenging prevailing ideology can have a calamitous effect on one’s personal reputation and academic career—something especially […]
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University of Lethbridge philosophy professor Paul Viminitz invited political scientist Frances Widdowson to speak to some of his students and to give a public talk. In class, Widdowson spoke about so-called “indigenous ways of knowing” and why universities’ insistence that they be respected are misguided. The title of her planned public talk was “How ‘Woke-ism’ […]
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Earlier this month, I published an article in the Wall Street Journal exposing how Texas Tech University’s Department of Biological Sciences evaluated job candidates’ contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The department’s evaluations—which I uncovered through a public records request—showed how candidates were penalized for failing to adopt the language of contemporary identity politics. […]
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Dear Gov. Abbott, After National Association of Scholars Senior Fellow John Sailer’s bombshell report in the Wall Street Journal documented the use of “diversity statements” as ideological hiring filters at Texas Tech University, your chief of staff hastily issued a statement reminding state employees that such practices are, in fact, illegal. This has been cited […]
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Named after the mountain where God gave the law to Moses, the Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine is one of the most prestigious medical schools in the United States. In recent years, however, Mount Sinai has not been the site of divine revelation, but of the golden calf of woke revolution. In fact, the […]
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A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post reported on the shattered career of “renowned AIDS researcher” Jeffrey Parsons, a psychologist who spent most of his career at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY). The Post’s story was about the settlement in a long-running civil case over Parsons’ use and abuse […]
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“Die Hydra der Diktator” (1946) is a famous drawing by Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) finished about a decade before he went blind in 1955. Today Borges rests firmly in the pantheon of classical liberalism. His stories convey a complex, yet also mysteriously ordered vision of the cosmos. His smooth, organic style makes him particularly compatible […]
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Diversity statements—short essays that express one’s past contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and future plans to advance the cause—have become ubiquitous in academia. As I’ve written before, many universities embrace these requirements not only for faculty hiring but also for all levels of employment. And in a recent piece for the Wall Street […]
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In recent years, American higher education has popularized the idea that students do better academically when taught by professors from the same racial or ethnic group. It is hard to imagine that such a theory of “racial pairing” has risen from a testable (and refutable) hypothesis in the 1990s to an industry standard adopted by […]
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In 2003, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote: The Constitution abhors classifications based on race, not only because those classifications can harm favored races or are based on illegitimate motives, but also because every time the government places citizens on racial registers and makes race relevant to the provision of burdens or benefits, it demeans […]
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