Everyone is familiar with fake news. Now the University of California (UC) has presented us with what can only be described as fake research: an unpublished policy paper by a UC employee, Zachary Bleemer, criticizing Proposition 209 and defending affirmative action. The paper was also shared and distributed by the UC Office of the President. […]
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Higher education has begun a transformation similar to the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” of 1966. This claim may sound extreme, but look at the similarities for yourself. Like the Cultural Revolution, the energized identity-politics movement presents itself as a cleansing force. Pure Maoism was being corrupted by covert capitalist sympathizers—they had to be rooted out. In […]
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A faculty coalition at Cornell University is calling for race-based hiring and promotions. What it is demanding violates two laws against racial discrimination, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and 42 U.S.C. 1981. That’s because Cornell has no justifiable rationale for using race in employment decisions at all, much less to the extent that […]
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We’re now more than one month into the implementation of the new Title IX regulations—improvements which the nation’s higher-education establishment uniformly opposed. The amended regulations require two major changes: they narrow the definition of sexual harassment (but not sexual assault) to the definition offered by the Supreme Court in Davis. And they confine a university’s […]
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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. A writer for a popular online entertainment publication once remarked that a James Bond movie is often only as good as its villain. This applies to the “Black […]
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UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank’s new 2020 Diversity Plan, described in her July 8, 2020 blog entry, is more disturbing than suggested by the bland front-page headline: “Blank targets racial climate” (since retitled “National unrest sparks new efforts by UW-Madison to improve campus climate”). The chancellor’s array of proposed new “commitments” to diversity reflects her response to recent […]
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This week, the Virginia Board of Education will meet to discuss a report that may promote destructive racial ideologies — the August 2020 “Report from the Governor’s African American History Education Commission.” James Sherlock laments “the fiercely negative approach to the teaching of African American history offered by the Governor’s Commission.” He says says its […]
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The statement “black lives matter” must be affirmed in light of the recent killing of George Floyd. The police officer did not act as if Mr. Floyd’s life mattered, and by extension, as if black lives matter. His actions, and those of many other policemen, have failed to recognize the equal worth and dignity of […]
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In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, one of the novel’s heroes describes Robin Hood as “a justification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own living, has demanded the power to dispose of the property of his betters. … It is this foulest of creatures—the double-parasite who lives on the sores of the poor and […]
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Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive! – in Marmion, Sir Walter Scott, 1808 Jean Twenge, a social psychologist at San Diego State University, gives us the most detailed picture yet of the behavior, values, and mental state of today’s teenagers and college students. She calls the generation after […]
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As you read this, an open letter that I recently wrote is circulating online among academics and professors who share a deep concern about the rising ideological conformity and intimidation on display in our colleges and universities. As of the publication of this brief invitation, 41 academics from all over the world have signed the […]
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Editor’s Note: This article the first in an ongoing symposium on white fragility and its related concepts. To view all of the essays in this series, click here. Five years ago, no one had heard of the term “white fragility.” But today, fueled by social media, elite corporations, and educational institutions, white fragility (and Robin DiAngelo’s bestselling book of that […]
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Last spring semester began with my five courses offered in the usual classroom setting and ended with all of them converted to an online format. My community college, along with virtually all of higher education, went into complete lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and all of our courses were either canceled or taught […]
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When Robert Taft and Adlai Stevenson faced off in the 1952 presidential race, I don’t remember any proposal to overhaul the humanities. Both candidates loved America but had differing political views. Universities were not yet on the front lines of the culture war—institutions had their own leanings, but these views were largely limited to the […]
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If Black Lives Matter were actually about protecting and enriching black lives, then it would be a praise-worthy organization—but it’s not. BLM’s stated goals have little to do with black lives and more to do with social revolution. One of the movement’s founders, Patrisse Cullors, once described BLM’s members as “trained Marxists.” Indeed, they are. […]
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Medpage Today reports that “a paper advocating against affirmative action in cardiology programs is melting under a blast of Twitter heat.” Melting is more wishful thinking than reporting—the substance of the paper was untouched by the firestorm, which was instead inflamed by the author’s opinions—but the assault has indeed been vicious. It also raises an ominous […]
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American higher education is failing. There are numerous reasons for this, such as the pervasive deconstructionism in the academy exampled by young rioters destroying monuments to the very heroes who in the past supported similar causes to those of our modern-day “revolutionaries.” Rarely discussed, however, are the negative externalitiesof careless accreditation. Accreditors are supposed to assess the […]
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The death of a black man under the knee of a brutal police officer in Minneapolis sent shock waves of racial guilt throughout America. Protestors, led principally by Black Lives Matter, took to the streets to malign America’s troubled history with race and reignite the conversation about how to atone and pay for the country’s […]
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The University of Virginia’s Racial Equity Task Force has released its final report, recommending 12 initiatives to promote “systemic change” and racial equity, and it’s everything you’d expect it to be. Reflecting the blinkered thinking of the academic Left, the report provides a lot of navel-gazing, virtue-signaling and window dressing while doing nothing to change […]
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As lawyers like Barack Obama have noted, law school is already a year too long, with lots of nonessential classes. As a result, law students often graduate with over $150,000 in student-loan debt. Yet law students may soon be required to take more unnecessary classes. 150 law school deans have asked the American Bar Association […]
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