Are Oberlin College officials serious when they say they were defending students’ free speech? That remains the college’s defense even after a jury found the college guilty of libel and interference with business in its dealings with Gibson’s Food Mart and Bakery. Gibson’s Bakery felt defamed by Oberlin College’s involvement in a campaign accusing the […]
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Fifty years ago, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published a celebratory article with the title: “Doors of Ivy League Colleges Reported Wide Open for Jewish Students.” Reporting that in 1967, “40 percent of the students at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania are now Jewish. At Yale, Harvard and Cornell, the Jewish student number between 20 […]
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Today’s liberals not only tolerate but encourage colleges and universities to give preferences based on race (see affirmative action and the College Board’s new “adversity” score). Now they want to prohibit giving preferential admissions treatment based on … well, it’s not completely clear, but family wealth comes pretty close. As a result, many defenders of […]
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Oberlin College just got hit again with a jury judgment that could cripple the college financially. Last Friday, the jury found the college guilty of libel and returned a verdict award of $11.2 million to Gibson’s, a local store and its proprietors. Today, the jury added $33 million in punitive damages – a clear sign […]
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Over the last half-century, higher education in America has been transformed from a quiet backwater with relatively little influence or cost into a powerful system responsible for or at least deeply complicit in numerous deleterious trends that are today wreaking havoc on the nation. A bill of indictment would have to include the following. The […]
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Op-Ed. An estimated 14.67 million college students attend what we call “state universities.” Some of them are renowned highly selective research institutions like the University of California at Berkeley or the University of Michigan, while others are relatively obscure schools with an open admissions policy. But all receive some degree of subsidization from the state […]
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I keep being invited to talk about free speech on college campuses and every time I’m invited I make the same point: that this isn’t about free speech and this is only tangentially about college campuses. This is about a breakdown in the basic logic of civilization, and it’s spreading. College campuses may be the […]
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People used to talk about the ends of the university and how the academic establishment was failing its students. Today, more and more people are talking about the end of the university, the idea being that it is time to think about closing them rather than reforming them. Last month at a conference in London, […]
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“It’s Title IX, not Miranda,” Susan Riseling, former chief of police at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told a conference of academic administrators in 2015. “Use what you can.” Riseling was describing a case in which a Wisconsin student had been subjected to both a criminal and a Title IX complaint. The police originally didn’t have enough […]
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As the humanities continue their steady slide toward the margins of the campus, the faculty still can’t look in the mirror and face the sources of the problem. Last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education, four assistant professors of English responded to a previous essay about the state of the field and unintentionally revealed […]
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People’s vocabularies are shrinking at a time when more and more people have college degrees. As Zach Goldberg notes, people’s mastery of hard words has been falling for well over 20 years, and their mastery of easier words has been falling for over 15 years. Meanwhile, a higher proportion of Americans have college degrees than […]
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It is not news that “social justice” ideology, supported by its pillars of “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “equality of results,” has replaced liberal democratic culture in our government, university, and business offices. Instead of being treated as individuals, people are treated according to the racial, gender, sexual preference, and ethnic categories that they belong to. Instead […]
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The College Board, ever alert to cultural signals, has decided the SATs can be improved by adopting what might be called McNeil methods. In the 1930s, Charles K. McNeil, a math teacher at Riverdale Country School in New York, indulged a not very respectable hobby of gambling on the side. Growing bored with picking winners […]
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The following is an excerpt from an op-ed in The New York Times by Randall Kennedy, a law professor at Harvard. I have been a professor at Harvard University for 34 years. In that time, the school has made some mistakes. But it has never so thoroughly embarrassed itself as it did this past weekend. […]
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A recent article on the decline of reading by Steven Johnson for The Chronicle of Higher Education has drawn a good deal of attention. The article opens with David Joliffe, an English professor at the of the University of Arkansas, depicting his students’ inability to tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Johnson tells us this isn’t […]
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Senator and Presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren (D, MA) recently proposed a policy to cancel student loan debt. She wants to cancel up to $50,000 of debt for borrowers with annual household incomes under $250,00, including full cancellation for households with incomes under $100,000. It would be financed with an “Ultra-Millionaire Tax” – a massive redistribution […]
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University faculty have been notable for “odd” views, but today’s campuses are manufacturing screwball ideas on an industrial scale. Moreover, these ideas are hardly harmless unlike say, Esperanto. Rather, they resemble toxic pathogens that have escaped a supposedly secure lab, and now cause untold harm in society more generally. I am talking about the likes […]
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Last week Google told the Claremont Institute that the Institute’s advertisements for its annual conference were banned. This act of censorship by the internet giant followed Facebook’s announcement that it was banning Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones, Louis Farrakhan, and Paul Watson. Ryan P. Williams, the president of the Claremont Institute, posted his account of what […]
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Last month, Chapman University’s film school removed from the walls posters that students and many professors deemed offensive. They were original posters promoting Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s sweeping silent classic set during the Civil War and after. The film was fabulously successful in its day, and historians regard it as a breakthrough […]
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Which is it? Do universities these days want to be zones where no one will ever get offended, or do they want to promote free speech and academic freedom with all their attendant risks and discomforts? The University of Massachusetts Amherst is just one place that can’t make up its mind. For years now it […]
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