Earlier this month, the Anti-Defamation League released an “interim definition” of racism, after its 2020 definition was widely criticized. That earlier definition held that racism is the “marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.” Of course, if this were accurate, countless instances of racial […]
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Its discrimination against Asians mirrors its treatment of Jews, but for different reasons On January 24th, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University, which not only has profound implications for the future of affirmative action in college admissions but also recalls an ignoble part of Harvard’s history […]
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This is not an article about censorship. It is an article about critical thinking—framed within legislated guardrails. Boundaries are important in elementary and secondary education, more so than in higher education. We immediately think of age-appropriate materials, but there is also the more difficult issue of how we ought to frame education. At some point, […]
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In 1986, economist Herbert Stein proposed what is now known as Stein’s Law: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” This may have been true 35 years ago, but we’d be hard-pressed to apply this law to today’s colleges and universities. The parade of crackpot ideas is unending, and one can only wonder […]
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At California State University San Marcos (CSUSM), the Craven Taskforce is busy at work to cleanse the university of its connections to the late Senator William A. Craven, who helped found the school in 1978. The renaming taskforce consists of 23 members drawn from the faculty, the student body, and the larger community, who are […]
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More lethal ammunition for the campus cognitive war against Israel In May, while Hamas was firing more than 3,000 deadly rockets from Gaza with the express purpose of murdering Jewish Israelis, members of academic communities around the world were falling over themselves to express their solidarity, not with the beleaguered citizens of the Jewish state […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by First Things on February 8, 2022 and is crossposted here with permission. In 1919, Columbia University added a new class: “Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West.” Partly a response to World War I, it was designed as a “peace issues” course to correspond with a “war issues” […]
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Last week, former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores made headlines in the sports world after he filed a class action lawsuit against the National Football League and all 32 of its teams. Flores, who is African American, was interviewed for a position as head coach of the New York Giants. The job was given […]
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A recent Wall Street Journal article told of how Bard College, my alma mater, has tasked three undergraduates, funded by the school’s Office of Inclusive Excellence, to peruse the college’s 400,000-book library and evaluate “… each book for representations of race/ethnicity, gender, religion, and ability.” According to the library’s newsletter, this evaluation was the first […]
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The National Association of Scholars recently appointed Dr. J. Scott Turner as Director of our Diversity in the Sciences project. Dr. Turner is a retired professor of biology at the State University of New York, though he continues his research on ecology, evolution, and (in particular) termite colonies in Namibia. He is well-positioned to help […]
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No sooner had the Supreme Court alarmed higher ed leaders and their elite allies by agreeing to revisit its past support for racial preference—thus ensuring months of contentious culture war conflict over the possibility that it might adopt Chief Justice Roberts’ aphorism in Parents Involved (“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race […]
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Children who visit libraries in some American cities have grown accustomed to encountering drag queens who read LGBTQ+ stories to them. Parents began to object. Now it seems that public school librarians are on the receiving end of parental complaints. A January 2022 Education Week article highlighted a growing battle between parents and school librarians. […]
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In my last article, I detailed the cancellation of Professor Lawrence Alexander’s invited contribution to the Festschrift honoring Emory University law professor Michael Perry. As I and many other commentators pointed out, the actions by the editorial board of the Emory Law Journal (ELJ) were a shocking abandonment of fundamental principles of scholarly discourse in […]
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The J-Word and the F-Word Join the N-Word As difficult as it is to believe that someone on a contemporary university campus could be so socially tone-deaf that he would publicly utter an ethnic slur, professors do regularly find themselves the target of indignant parties they have “harmed” with their careless, often inappropriate speech. Consider, […]
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One man’s fight for justice after critiquing BLM If you work for a well-established American institution, be it a Fortune 500 company or a prestigious research foundation, are you constantly worried about being targeted for not endorsing political fads or prevailing cultural symbols? The often-dichotomous struggle between inconvenient truths and popular beliefs is nothing new. […]
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The United States Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear cases against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina challenging the use of racial preferences in college admissions. The cases could lead to the overturning of the Court’s 1978 and 2003 holdings in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and Grutter v. […]
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When discussing academic freedom with university administrators, there arises the question of how to distinguish political attacks from academic criticism. Certainly, there is no simple answer to this question, and the practical use of such a distinction would likely draw resistance from those who wish to impose their political views. Yet universities often make such […]
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Anti-racist discrimination is not a victimless offense. A glaring skeleton in the closet of American education is its intentional and long-established discrimination against Asian Americans, both in college admissions and in access to quality K-12 education. In light of such endemic practices that should embarrass any classical liberal, a federal lawsuit filed by Coalition for […]
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A Virginia State Senator has proposed a bill targeting “hate speech” and “racially insensitive expressions” in academic or athletic competitions between schools — even at private schools. His bill, SB 285, doesn’t define “hate speech,” though. There are many places in society where hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, and thus can’t be […]
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When Talking About Diversity and Inclusion, Jews Are Not Part of the Discussion In 1978, the landmark case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke brought the term “diversity” into the lexicon of higher education. Although the Supreme Court found that the University of California at Davis School of Medicine had used an unconstitutional quota system in denying Alan […]
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