The troubling story of NYU professor Avital Ronell has been covered extensively by Scott Greenfield at Simple Justice; Brian Leiter has also broken several items on his blog, including the scholars’ letter on her behalf. A long article in The New York Times and a very sympathetic account in the Chronicle brought the matter to […]
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The latest Spangler Report from Yale is now out—and it portrays a deeply dangerous campus: around 1.75 percent of Yale undergraduate females as victims of sexual assault in the first six months of 2018. (That’s a violent crime rate around twice as high as that of Detroit, which the FBI rates as the nation’s most […]
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When John Searle, a philosopher at UC Berkeley, was charged with sexual harassment a year ago, about 50 intellectuals and academics wrote a heated group letter insisting the charges were not true. How could they tell? Because they knew him to be a beloved mentor and great scholar of fine character. Oh, wait. That didn’t […]
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Two-thirds (66.3%) of English departments responding to a survey indicated that the number of undergraduates majoring in English is either lower or sharply lower. Only 8.7% reported an increase in the number of majors; none reported a sharp increase. That’s the abysmal finding of a survey of English departments issued last month by the Association […]
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A university that does nothing when faced with clear evidence of academic misconduct deserves some public scrutiny. Case in point: The University of Houston, Texas’s third largest university, is having some trouble with academic standards. Since early this year, the University has been stonewalling allegations that a school superintendent plagiarized the doctoral dissertation he submitted […]
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While radical feminism in the 1960s called for challenging existing gender roles and abolishing what the feminists saw as the pervasive patriarchy that permeated social institutions, churches, politics, and schools, today’s radical feminists call for the elimination of men. In an offshoot of the #MeToo movement, the #YesAllMen campaign rejects the goodness of all men. […]
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In two recent articles (Asia Times and PJ Media), David Goldman criticized the Trump administration’s trade policy with China, in particular, the notion that tariffs will help U.S. competitiveness. Instead, he points to a lack of U.S. innovation. In the PJ Media article, Goldman concludes with five recommendations, the first four being: As we did […]
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In May, the University of Texas-Austin hastily pulled back a program on “healthy masculinity” that its counseling staff had devised–amid a flood of ridicule over such aspects of the program as posters depicting young men wearing penciled-in dresses (complete with bustlines) and encouraging UT’s male students to try nail polish and makeup. The program, titled […]
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It is a truth universally acknowledged by “progressives” that all cultures are equally good and equally valuable. Common sense says that this is nonsense. I lived for eighteen months with a nomadic tribe in southeastern Iran in order to study their way of life. These people were ethnically Baluch and religiously Sunni Muslim. They lived […]
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This is an excerpt from “The University We Need,” a new book highly critical of our colleges and universities by Prof. Warren Treadgold of St. Louis University. The state of the American university remains precarious for several reasons. College costs and student debt have reached a level beyond which they cannot keep rising indefinitely. Colleges […]
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Progressive journalists have a message for you: Free expression is for them, not for you — and not for conservative bloggers and academics. Left-leaning journalists like Margaret Carlson are angry that the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in favor of a conservative professor whose academic freedom rights were violated by Marquette University. It effectively fired him for a blog post that […]
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Writing in the Washington Post, Megan McArdle points to the threat to racial preferences posed by the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, noting that although his nomination has led to much handwringing over the fate of Roe v. Wade, the future of “another landmark case,” Regents of the University of California v. […]
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“Higher education is in a lot of trouble, barely kept on track by massive price increases, grade inflation that keeps the mostly inattentive customers sedated, and a class of academic serfs, called adjuncts, who work for meager wages…. And what does the money buy?” Not much, according to Warren Treadgold, author of a new book, The […]
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Courtney Lawton became the central figure of an hour-long episode of This American Life by making a few derogatory comments on an activist from Turning Point USA, a campus conservative group. Last August, UNL undergraduate Kaitlyn Mullen set up a table with literature and fliers, in the middle of the University of Nebraska campus at […]
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Freedom of expression is making a comeback. That might not be immediately obvious in the age of disinvitations, shout downs, trigger warnings, speech codes, “bias response teams,” and the other components of leftist suppression of ideas and speech on campus. Nor if we look beyond campus to the assaults on public officials, the doxing of […]
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Editor’s note: Even though the Trump administration has reversed Obama era affirmative action policies as they apply to schools, and even though Trump will likely appoint another conservative Supreme Court Justice before the end of the year, academia will continue to write its own rules and institute its own policies on racial preferences. More important […]
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Marquette University has been trying to get rid of John McAdams, a conservative gadfly, for nearly four years. In October 2014, they came close to making that happen. When Cheryl Abbate, a grad student in philosophy, was teaching a course about John Rawls and asked students for examples of current events to which Rawlsian philosophy […]
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In a reproof to Obama-era guidance on campus sex hearings, Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos issued interim Title IX guidance fair to the accused as well as the accusers. This brought a storm of abuse from the founders of the kangaroo court system, favored by the Obama team. The lawsuits against the interim guidance issued by […]
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Conservatives, libertarians, traditionalists, and classical liberals need to get clear on something: the ideological contests are fading. What Irving Kristol famously said in his 2001 Bradley Lecture, “We in America fought a culture war, and we [conservatives] lost,” applies well to higher education. Conservatives fought wars over multiculturalism, Western Civilization, affirmative action, the Academic Bill […]
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In today’s campus battles, the forces of political correctness enjoy an immense advantage, and to compound this edge, conservatives scarcely notices they’re losing. This is the power to silence critics, indeed remove entire topics from discussion by adroit name calling. Woe to the professors who casually acknowledges that black students rank toward the bottom in […]
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