I. A Good Term Gone Bad The modern term “equity” originally comes to us from the Old French term, equite, which in turn came from the original Latin, aequitatem, a word that could mean a number of different things, including equality, fairness, uniformity, or even symmetry. At the end of the 16th century, Western Europeans began […]
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Our current monomaniacal obsession with identity was midwifed by postmodern theory. In the past, students of society and culture emulated science in theory and methodology, striving to offer objective, disinterested, and impartial knowledge about human life. Postmodernism attacked science and rejected the goal of objective knowledge about people, arguing that objectivity was impossible and that […]
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Editor’s Note: This excerpt is part of a longer essay published by The Heritage Foundation on the conservative policy response to COVID for higher education. The full essay can be found at The Heritage Foundation website. The key to finding policies that can garner widespread conservative support lies in understanding the four schools of thought through […]
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Twenty years ago, when Hollywood still made movies to entertain and when the Academy Awards were based on talent and appeal instead of an “inclusion scorecard,” Jude Law starred in a compelling if not entirely historically accurate film called Enemy at the Gates. It followed a young Vasily Zaitsev during the Battle of Stalingrad as […]
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America has moved to the left so rapidly that Europeans are now expressing alarm about it. As journalist Glenn Greenwald notes, “Obama-endorsed French President Emmanuel Macron has joined numerous French intellectuals & journalists in warning that ‘out-of-control woke leftism of US campuses and its attendant cancel culture’ poses a grave threat due to the social […]
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Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing symposium on white fragility and its related concepts. To view all of the essays in this series, click here. The great enemy to the American vision is essentialism, which says that your ethnicity or your race is who you are in your unchangeable essence … The […]
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Who is that masked man, sitting alone at his desk signing “a flurry of executive orders”? There is dispute over whether he comes as a peacemaker promoting unity or as a progressive tool extirpating conservatism, but there is near-universal agreement that the thirty executive orders President Biden signed in his first days in office were […]
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Students in colleges and universities across America and Canada have recently taken to writing “Open Letters,” such as here, here, and here, in order to “take a stand” on an ideological issue and, just as important, to vent their fury on one or more professors or administrators who are deemed to have deviated from ideological […]
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Every institution in the United States and in Canada has endorsed diversity as a fundamental value and goal, and has formally committed to sex, race, sexuality, and ethnic diversity in its personnel. This is seen at every level, from national governments to universities to primary schools, from international corporations to the media to street corner […]
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Thoughtful commentators, from both the Left and the Right, have noted that political legitimacy requires allowing all in the polity to participate in the political process, the outcome of which all are obligated to follow. Thus, in a democracy, all must be given the opportunity to comment on, and attempt to influence, the policies to […]
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Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing symposium on white fragility and its related concepts. To view all of the essays in this series, click here. Barry Glassner’s classic The Culture of Fear just turned 20. In the text, Glassner became perhaps the first serious social scientist to point out to an intelligent […]
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Professors, students, and all other members of an academic community should be free from sanction to say what they please. Freedom of expression should be guaranteed in official university documents, including, of course, collective agreements. Guarantees, though, are not worth much if the university’s culture is hostile to freedom of expression. One duty members of […]
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We recently published a book titled Repatriation and Erasing the Past (University Press of Florida, 2020), its reception on social media reflects the emotional and dogmatic thinking that has infected so much academic work in the United States and abroad. In our book, we are critical of repatriationism, which we define as any law, practice, […]
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Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing symposium on white fragility and its related concepts. To view all of the essays in this series, click here. In Part II of this series, evidence for the race Implicit Association Test (IAT) was evaluated as to (1) the plausibility of the underlying construct that it […]
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I must apologize at the outset for offering to the reader what is by now a truism known to everybody who has had even short periods of sobriety during the last decade. Whatever imaginings the reader may have had during the twentieth century about being a unique individual and about treating others as individuals, the […]
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The toxic ideas that have corrupted today’s universities all began as tiny, obscure musings before escaping from the laboratories. They may have started with an unpublished paper or two, a request for modest institutional funding, or an informal discussion group. Eventually, they earn a panel at a regional disciplinary convention and an experimental course. In […]
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Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing symposium on white fragility and its related concepts. To view all of the essays in this series, click here. In Part I of this series, the introduction in 1998 of the race Implicit Association Test (IAT) — developed originally by Professor Anthony G. Greenwald and his […]
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In what may be a rare (and possibly unique) example of “reverse canceling” — firing someone because he is woke, not because he is not — Garrett Felber, an assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi, has recently been informed that his contract will not be renewed. As reported by Inside Higher Ed (“Outspoken […]
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In August 1996, at the height of a 6-million-dollar campaign coalition to preserve race-based affirmative action over against Proposition 209, Dr. Shirley Weber spoke at the Million Man March statewide conference organized by Dr. Manulana Karenga for a revolutionary agenda of black empowerment. At the time, Dr. Weber was a member of the San Diego School Board […]
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My university, Saint Mary’s in Halifax, Nova Scotia, makes a lot of noise about respect. We have a Safe and Respectful Saint Mary’s working group that issues reports and recommendations now and again, a Policy on Conflict Resolution that directs members of the university community to contribute to a respectful environment, and even a senate-approved […]
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