A well-known podcaster has the custom of going “off the grid” for a month each summer, to gain some perspective. I can beat that: I have been retired from academic teaching and research for nearly 14 years and have rarely visited my campus during that time. But last year, I finally encountered the university first-hand, […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was written by a professor who wishes to remain anonymous. I am a Latin American professor teaching at a university in the Gulf region. Many universities in Gulf countries are affiliated with institutions in the United States, and even those of us who teach in non-affiliated institutions strive hard to reproduce […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearEducation on July 21, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. According to entrepreneur and philanthropist Robert L. Luddy, many students today not only lack a basic knowledge of the “American system, including the lives and deeds of the Founders and the brilliance of the Constitution,” but also […]
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On July 15, a Reuters fact-check claimed that “many Americans embrace falsehoods about critical race theory.” But it is Reuters that embraced a falsehood, not the American people. Reuters denied that critical race theory teaches that “discriminating against white people is the only way to achieve equality,” saying that was a “misconception” promoted by “conservative […]
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“I see no value in participating in a Star Chamber that starts by convicting me and many others for the crime of not being black.” Our academic institutions fail us when their leaders abandon facts, analysis, and discourse in their zeal to replace merit and genuine multicultural respect with so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was written by a Canadian university professor who wishes to remain anonymous. The decision of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) executive on April 22, 2021, to censure the University of Toronto (U of T) for its infringement on “academic freedom” should be of concern for all universities. CAUT represents professors, […]
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Anytime someone praises Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a valuable interpretation of racism in America, it reminds me of a scene from the comic opera H.M.S. Pinafore. It’s when Little Buttercup sings, “things are seldom what they seem; skim milk masquerades as cream.” Buttercup would urge us to think critically about the masquerade of insinuations […]
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“Columbia and other wealthy universities steer master’s students to federal loans that can exceed $250,000. After graduation, many learn the debt is well beyond their means,” notes the Wall Street Journal. The Journal reports on Columbia University’s Master of Fine Arts Film program, one of the worst examples, in an article titled “Financially Hobbled for […]
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Editor’s Note: This essay was written by an emeritus professor who wishes to remain anonymous. Many in America are focused on the threat posed by small numbers of performative violent extremists (e.g., Antifa and the Proud Boys) and from far-out conspiracy theorists with little real influence (e.g., QAnon). However, a truly existential threat to our liberal […]
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By What Authority and With What Oversight Will They Exercise Their Control? “The Invisible Hand” is a notion coined by Adam Smith in the context of economics, and in particular, the free-market capitalist system. It’s a well-chosen image of how such markets work in a free society. If you’re not familiar with it, this Investopedia […]
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Fifty years ago, a little-known political philosopher at Harvard named John Rawls published a lengthy book titled A Theory of Justice at the well-cured age of 50. It was a bold offering because most people assumed that the major issues in political philosophy had been thrashed out by the greats. The only work remaining was […]
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As a result of government and university policies in both the U.S. and Canada, university students are not seen as individuals with records of educational achievement and the potential for both success in higher education and for contributions beyond in the wider society. Instead, they are reduced to no more than members of census categories […]
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A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education (Encounter, May 2021) is a remarkable collection of seven essays about the pernicious spread of “social equity,” “diversity” and critical race theory in academia. This book is a must-read for those who would never read it: woke academicians, journalists, and policymakers who have no idea how […]
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In a university course on the sociology of death and dying that I teach, we spend a few weeks discussing the death penalty. Students in my class are uniformly surprised to find on the syllabus sources that argue for it as well as authors taking up the other side of the issue. As is the […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is a brief submitted by Philip Carl Salzman, emeritus professor of anthropology at McGill University, to the Commission scientifique et technique indépendante sur la reconnaissance de la liberté académique dans le milieu universitaire, Organismes liés, Ministère de l’Enseignement supérieur, Gouvernement du Québec. Salzman addresses various issues related to academic freedom both in […]
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An assistant professor of “environmental economics” recently published an article in the journal Climate Change. The article’s central question was: “How much evidence would it take to convince ‘skeptics’ they are wrong?” The study concluded that “Those who are strongly skeptical about climate change are unlikely to change their minds for many years to come.” […]
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In 1956, then-Senator John F. Kennedy was presumed to have written a short book of biographical essays which chronicled the stories of eight U.S. senators who at times of potential crisis in American government defied conventional wisdom and made unpopular but right decisions. In some cases, these decisions cost them their political careers. He won […]
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Thomas Ricks’ First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country (2020) uses brief biographies of our first four presidents to explain how their studies of the classics shaped the system of checks and balances central to American democracy. One could create a similar narrative for American […]
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Editor’s Note: This article originally stated that the Six-Day War occurred in 1968, and that the Yom Kippur war occurred in 1972. These dates have been corrected to 1967 and 1973, respectively. When I began studying cultural anthropology in 1960, anthropologists still aspired to be scientific. Leaders in the discipline wrote books with titles like […]
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You want your classroom and your campus each to be a place of open and free inquiry and, thereby, a place of open and free critical discussion. You also want each to be a place of civility and a place welcoming to all inquirers and to all their various points of view. There’s a lot […]
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