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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“The grand fallacy of our times is that various groups would be equally represented in institutions and occupations if it were not for discrimination.” – Thomas Sowell Something is happening in education. It is widespread and Machiavellian. By widespread I mean that it is ubiquitous, and ubiquitous in two ways: 1) every institution, program, discipline, and […]
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New Year’s is a time when many people, enchanted by the vision of a fresh start, think about time. For those of us habituated to the academic calendar, it can feel more like the hump of the year. I was reminded of its charm, though, in a call last week with a client. He was […]
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In the twilight of the second year of the COVID pandemic, hysteria continues to run amok. While many folks have gotten on with their lives thanks to vaccines or natural immunities, many others continue to live in fear and demand ever more protections and state interventions. My favorite excuse yet for the “new normal” comes […]
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In the war of ideas, the Right holds a weak hand for the simple reason that it has minimal access to America’s 20 million college students. Yes, Heritage, the Manhattan Institute, and other right-leaning organizations can publish brilliant, wonkish papers, but this reach pales in comparison to the countless airheaded, lefty professors who indoctrinate thousands […]
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When I was ready to write up my dissertation fieldwork, I was stymied by conceptual perspectives for organizing my data. What I thought about data collection before entering the field of anthropology had been overwhelmed by the reality of fieldwork. That was in the mid-1970s, when the concept of the ‘web’ of society was giving […]
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