Every so often, a group of professionals signs a political letter claiming that their training uniquely qualifies them to announce that a particular candidate for president, traditionally a Republican, is totally unfit for office. In 1964 it was psychiatrists denouncing Barry Goldwater. “Fact,” a fly-by-night magazine, rounded up 2417 shrinks, half of whom were able […]
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(Part II) The incoherence of the new Office for Civil Rights transgender policy becomes even clearer when one looks beyond bathrooms to locker rooms, and the athletic teams they serve. The “Dear Colleague” letter states that “Title IX regulations permit a school to operate or sponsor sex-segregated athletics teams when selection for such teams is […]
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After the death of Justice Scalia, most people who have been following the protracted Fisher v. University of Texas case (myself included) expected that the Court would let the university’s racial preference system stand. It did that in a 4-3 decision released on June 23. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Ginsburg, […]
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Although it seems as though the transgender tsunami has been howling forever, in fact it hit the shore of national fixation only four months ago, in March, when the North Carolina legislature passed, and Gov. Pat McCrory signed, House Bill 2, which restricted access to the state’s public sex-segregated restrooms by, well, sex, as defined […]
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Censorious antics of ‘snowflake’ students have regularly made front-page news here in the UK. No longer. The momentous political fall-out from the June 23rd referendum, when a majority of citizens voted in favor of Britain leaving the European Union, has swept all other concerns aside. Whatever occurs in the coming months, whether ‘Brexit’ actually happens, […]
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University of Virginia dean Nicole Eramo’s lawsuit against Rolling Stone has produced hundreds of pages of documents on how the botched article about University of Virginia came to be published—and how UVA employees handled sexual assault claims. Last week, Rolling Stone filed affidavits and notes from the key people involved in the project. I’ve provided […]
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Since its founding by progressive academics 101 years ago, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has had little affection for the governing authorities of colleges and universities. Of course, when college presidents, trustees, and boards of regents bow in submission to its edicts, the AAUP will spare a few words of non-condemnation for the […]
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Scholars from the University of California at Berkeley have played a pivotal role in making income inequality a major political issue. But while they decry the inequities of the American capitalist system, Berkeley professors are near the top of a very lopsided income distribution prevailing at the nation’s leading public university. Among the most prominent […]
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The Supreme Court today upheld the University of Texas’s use of racial preferences in student admissions. The vote was 4-3, with Justice Kennedy writing the majority opinion, joined by Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor (Justice Kagan was recused). Justice Alito write a powerful, 51-page dissent, which he read from the bench. Needless to say, for […]
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Both campus rape activists and their political allies—such as Kirsten Gillibrand—have consistently championed “campus climate surveys,” which they claim are necessary to provide more data about the purported epidemic of violent crime sweeping the nation’s campuses. It’s hard to argue against more data. But these surveys always are incomplete—they never ask about campus attitudes toward […]
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The great threat to academic freedom today arises not from plutocrats determined to weed from the campus garden any sprouts of pro-unionism; nor from censorious divines on the hunt for misinterpretations of the Sermon on the Mount; nor yet from defenders of the flag who suspect disloyal thoughts among the cosmopolitan professoriate. Those were demons […]
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Yale has brought controversial charges against two star athletes in recent years, both on the eve of their biggest games: quarterback Patrick Witt in 2014 just before the Yale-Harvard game (and when he was up for a Rhodes scholarship) and Jack Montague, captain of the Ivy-League championship basketball tram just before this year’s rare appearance […]
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What the College Board did to American history two years ago it has now done to European history: erase and contort. Writing at the National Review Online’s The Corner, Stanley Kurtz makes clear what is at stake: “The curriculum will shape textbooks and the way in which all high school and college students are taught about […]
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Nearly 600,000 foreign undergraduate students now study at US colleges and universities, some 165,000 of them from China, the total from China grew by nearly 30 percent in 2009/2010, with a percentage rise in double digits every year since, according to the Institute of International Education’s “Open Doors” report, funded by the U.S. Department of […]
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Among all the idiocies on campus in the last year, there is no more dispiriting statement than a line quoted in The Wall Street Journal on June 3rd. In an op-ed entitled “How the Yale Halloween Vigilantes Finally Got Their Way,” an undergraduate named Zachary Young records the final episode of the whole affair in […]
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Liberal. Progressive. Liberal progressive. Progressive liberal. Radical. Social democrat. Democratic socialist. Occupiers. Social justice warriors. What do we call today’s leaders of the political left? Where do they stand in the eye of history? Answering these questions resembles sometimes trying to grab an eel with your bare hand. Most likely it will slip away, but […]
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In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post Stuart Taylor, Jr. and I discuss the Brock Turner case at Stanford. We argue that the case proves that campus felonies like sexual assault are better handled by the criminal justice system than by campus tribunals—in no small measure because the public can have confidence in the Turner verdict […]
Read MoreAmong the many anti-campus due process groups that have appeared in the past five years, the most prominent is Know Your IX, co-founded by two self-described sexual assault victims, Dana Bolger and Alexandra Brodsky. The group has an active presence on social media; trains activists to crusade against due process at their home campuses; and […]
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Not long ago, I wrote a piece for City Journal about my alma mater entitled, unsubtly: How My Friends and I Wrecked Pomona College. I saw it as a very belated mea culpa, for it detailed the malicious glee with which, back in the Sixties, we student radicals forced well-meaning, weak-willed administrators to abandon the […]
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Our recent campus upheavals, focusing at times on offensive speech, have provoked a worry: are colleges infantilizing their students? Last March, the journalist and cultural critic Judith Shulevitz raised this concern in a tour de force of an op-ed, in which she argued that protecting students from offensive speech, except in the most extreme cases, […]
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