“Political parties live in a house of power. They are organizations for social fighting. The contents of a definite moral choice are never selected. The only criterion is the ubiquitous use of a method.” C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America. Training for irregular political operations and lawfare originates from an […]
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A major survey sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and conducted by YouGov shows that college students—2225 were surveyed in late January or early February, from two- and four-year institutions— strongly support due process for accused students facing Title IX tribunals. Indeed, the gap between the policies that would flow from […]
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First, the good news: My undergraduate students here at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, are quite literate, contrary to all the bad press and fears. Every week I give them a 20-minute writing assignment in class, the sole preparation for which is having done the week’s homework. Turns out they write pretty well; arguably, in […]
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After rejecting several previous proposals over the past several years, the UCLA faculty has finally succumbed to politically correct pressure from above (Eugene Block, the Chancellor, and other administrators) and below (“progressive” students) and voted to impose a four-unit “diversity” course requirement on all undergraduates. Ironically, the felt necessity for this new course requirement reveals […]
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If you doubt that leftist activists now dominate the study and teaching of U.S. history, take a look at the program for the 2013 American Historical Association conference in New Orleans. The pattern is similar to the University of Michigan’s history department, discussed here yesterday—a heavy emphasis on race, class, and gender, with more “traditional” […]
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The Daily Texan has reported that a conservative student group at University of Texas-Austin has inaugurated a “watch list” containing the names of professors who “politicize the classroom” and squash “dissenting opinion.” The chapter of Young Conservatives of Texas describes the list as an information resource, providing information on wayward instructors before students sign up […]
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Today Professor William Jacobson (of Legal Insurrection fame) launched College Insurrection, a new website devoted to higher education. The site, according to Professor Jacobson, will help “conservative/libertarian students…find out what is going on with like-minded students on other campuses, and understand that they are the many, not the few, no matter what they are told.” […]
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When critics of higher education complain about a lack of “intellectual diversity,” mostly what they deplore is the shortage of conservative professors. But there is much more at stake than that. Consider climate change: As I write this, parts of the nation have endured sweltering heat, serious drought, and treacherous storms, at one point leaving […]
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Over the past several years, a number of studies have shown that registered Democrats far outnumber registered Republicans in the academy, or in particular academic departments (history, for instance) that would seem to have no reason to have wide partisan imbalances. Invariably, the most interesting thing about these studies is not the finding itself–which, after […]
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As one who has spent nearly four decades in the academy, let me confirm what outsiders often suspect: the left has almost a complete headlock on the publication of serious (peer reviewed) research in journals and scholarly books. It is not that heretical ideas are forever buried. They can be expressed in popular magazines, op-eds […]
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Back in 2010, University of Illinois, Chicago, Professor and former Weatherman radical Bill Ayers gave a presentation on Public Pedagogy at the American Education Research Association annual meeting. Ayers, then a member of AERA’s governing board, made the claim that he, Bill Ayers, was really not a terrorist. Ten of the first 11 sentences in […]
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It wasn’t so long ago that the infrequent charge of liberal bias on college campuses was met with mockery and disdain. The allegations go all the way back to William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951) and Russell Kirk’s Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition (1955), neither of which earned the authors anything […]
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By Charlotte Allen and George Leef This article was prepared by Minding the Campus and the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. A new movement is rising on American campuses, timed perfectly to feed the frenzy over the income gap that is Occupy Wall Street’s main complaint. But this movement […]
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It is no secret that what passes for an education at most of the nation’s colleges and universities is suspiciously akin to indoctrination. An asterisk: With the exception of a few areas–specifically, climate and the environment, certain fields within biology and medicine, history of science and the interaction between science and public policy–the rot that […]
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Cross-posted from Open Market. Diversity training doesn’t work, according to an article in Psychology Today. In it, Peter Bregman notes, “Diversity training doesn’t extinguish prejudice. It promotes it.” But don’t expect it to stop. Government regulations often require that a school be accredited, a condition that accreditors like the American Bar Association use to force […]
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Do some professors offer bribes to their students for promising to support leftist causes? Yes, it happens, and a few teachers, at least, see nothing wrong with it. Mary Grabar, a regular contributor to this site, discusses the practice here, and has video of a Georgia State education professor named Jennifer Esposito offering extra marks […]
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Are the 234,000 students enrolled in the massive University of California system receiving an education or a re-education? It’s the latter–or something fairly close–according to “A Crisis of Competence,” a report just released by the California Association of Scholars (CAS), the Golden State affiliate of the National Association of Scholars. The devastating 87-page report addressed […]
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The criminal trial of Dharun Ravi commanded national attention and focus on our controversial hate-crime laws. The issue was whether Ravi spied on his Rutgers roommate, Tyler Clementi, and whether he spied because of prejudice against homosexuals generally and against his gay roommate in particular. Ravi’s conviction last Friday on the most serious charge against […]
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Dr. London, a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, received the Jeane Kirkpatrick Award for Academic Freedom on February 9 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the American Conservative Union Foundation. These were his remarks on the occasion. *** It is with enormous humility and gratitude that I accept this award from the […]
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On February 2 Daniel Golden, former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of a highly regarded book on college admissions, reported in Bloomberg’s Business Week that Harvard and Princeton are being investigated by the Dept. of Education’s Office for Civil Rights for discrimination against Asians. It’s not the first time. In fact, for the past […]
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The law school at the University of Iowa, like so many departments at so many institutions of higher learning, has a faculty that is politically pretty much of one mind, with (as of 2007) 46 registered Democrats and only one registered Republican. When instructor Teresa Wagner applied for a professor’s post in her specialty, legal […]
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A central component of the groupthink academy is the law of group polarization–that in environments (such as most humanities and social sciences departments) in which people basically think alike, more extreme versions of the common assumption will emerge. Within the academy, that condition has had the effect of producing more extreme new faculty hires and […]
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In the groupthink academy, perhaps the most opaque, but significant, personnel process comes in the hiring of new faculty. In a flawed tenure case (as I came to discover), some precedent exists for the courts (or, in my case, fair-minded senior administrators) intervening to undo an ethically improper outcome. In the typical hiring process, however, […]
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Among those prizing truth, modern social science does not enjoy an especially good reputation. As a political scientist myself, I’ve long encountered conservatives who often complain that much contemporary social science does little more than demonize conservative views. Unfortunately, such grumbling is often correct but that said, complainers rarely grasp how this bias is imposed […]
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I’ve often written of how groupthink has negatively affected the quality of higher education–while, of course, ensuring that those whose views fall within the academic majority have a better chance of success on campus. Ironically, however, what Mark Bauerlein had termed the Common Assumption effect and the law of group polarization also have combined to […]
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I’m totally baffled by the general looniness that seems to pop up when the liberal-left side talks about Republicans and the wealthy. And it all “trickles down,” so that students parrot the same attitudes. Today a student of mine from last year, who’s smart and nice, said in passing that the Tea Partiers are “racist.” I said, […]
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As Mark Bauerlein observed in his seminal essay on the topic, groupthink has the effect of producing more extreme versions of the common assumption. It stands to reason, therefore, that campuses with unusually one-sided faculties will feature more frequent episodes of extremist assertions. Such certainly seems to be the case at my own institution, Brooklyn […]
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At long last an attempt is bring made to curtail blatant anti-Semitic commentary on American campuses. The Israel Law Center warns that colleges and universities “may be liable for massive damage” if they fail to prevent anti-Semitism. The center sent hundreds of letters to university presidents drawing a line in the sand. This Israel civil […]
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There’s good news out of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit: On Friday, the full court agreed to rehear a now infamous decision in which a three-judge panel had earlier struck down the state of Michigan’s Proposal 2. Proposal 2, in turn, is a ban on government discrimination and preference on the basis of […]
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Of the criticisms directed toward the contemporary academy, the charge of “indoctrination” strikes me as the most overhyped. The phenomenon certainly occurs; the most obvious recent example came in the “dispositions” controversy, when education students around the country could choose between agreeing with their professors’ political opinions and finding another career path. But it’s relatively […]
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