It’s no secret that America’s colleges and universities have become bastions of political rectitude. This is often attributed to the left-liberal political orientation of the faculty. Typically, however, the administration, not the faculty, is the driving force behind efforts to promote campus diversity, to build multicultural programming and to regulate campus speech. The president of […]
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A few years ago, under intense pressure from Congress, NCATE (the national organization that accredits Education programs) abandoned its requirement that, in order to obtain accreditation, Education schools needed to measure the “disposition” of each and every prospective public school teacher to promote social justice. (The mandate didn’t apply to schools that don’t list promotion […]
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Many people, some conservatives included, say we need to get ideology out of the college classroom. Some professors say proudly, “my students never come to know where I stand.” I practice an opposite approach. I tell students that I am a free-market economist, a classical liberal or libertarian. And I am not suggesting that […]
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A recently-decided case involving academic freedom all but defines a frivolous lawsuit. The website for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS), based at the University of Minnesota, contained an item noting “unreliable websites” on Holocaust issues. The link’s purpose–to discourage students from using these sites in their research–was clearly academic. (The site’s wording: […]
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At about the same time as the release of MIT’s new study on the status of its women, which I discussed recently here, two more studies appeared on the anemic underrepresentation on higher education faculties of another marginalized group, political conservatives. Both studies, by Neil Gross, Ethan Fosse, and Jeremy Freese, conclude that “self-selection,” not […]
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Social psychology has long been a haven for left-wing scholars. Jonathan Haidt, one of the best known and most respected young social psychologists, has heaved two bombshells at his field–one indicting it for effectively excluding conservatives (he is a liberal) and the other for what he sees as a jaundiced and cult-like opposition to religion […]
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Stigmatism, n. A variant of astigmatism, particularly virulent in academia, in which visual impairment derives not from an irregularly curved cornea but from ideologically distorted vision that in many cases prevents its victims from perceiving the stigma from which they suffer and in others prevents them from recognizing the source of the stigma they do […]
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At the Student Free Press Association, we’ve partnered with the Institute for Jewish & Community Research to establish $1000 awards for excellence in student reporting on anti-Semitism. To learn how to enter, go here. From the press release: Campuses have become staging grounds for campaigns demonizing Israel, intimidating Jewish students and threatening the foundation of […]
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At first glance, John Tierney’s report in the New York Times on the liberal-conservative imbalance of faculty looks like just another account of a very familiar subject. But read it twice and you can see why it became one of the most talked-about articles on higher education in months. How did this happen? First, it […]
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It is not really news to most of us that the most avid and outspoken devotees of “diversity” often live and work in the most politically and ideologically un-diverse pockets of America, academic communities, but that must have been news to editors at the New York Times since they found reporter John Tierney’s surprisingly intelligent […]
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The hiring of former Brooklyn College adjunct Kristofer Petersen-Overton was quite extraordinary. Even though New York’s fiscal problems have led to a slashing of the adjunct budget for required, undergraduate Core classes, Brooklyn’s Political Science Department chose to assign an adjunct to teach a Masters’-level elective course, on Middle Eastern politics. And then, even though […]
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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit not only upheld racial preferences in college admissions decisions on Jan. 18 but upheld them with a vengeance. The Fifth Circuit’s three-judge panel unanimously agreed, in Fisher vs. University of Texas at Austin, that UT’s flagship campus in Austin could consider an applicant’s race and ethnicity […]
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What a different scene at Columbia University in the last month of 2010 from the glory days of the 1960s, when student radicals took over the campus! On December 13th, mild-mannered students with pleasant smiles nodded in agreement with establishment politicians and political strategists at the “No Labels” conference. As political analysts have pointed out, […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education has just added a new nail to the coffin of American Academia. Lax admission policies, politically correct texts, underpaid assistants who do the teaching in place of the big name professors busy on their next books, incompetent management, to name just a few liabilities, are wrecking the once-proud reputation of […]
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Radical Math held its third annual conference in New York last weekend. Four hundred high school math teachers and education professors attended the conference on “Creating Balance in an Unjust World: Math Education and Social Justice.” At thirty-two workshops on Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus and in half a dozen city public schools, math teachers […]
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The Arizona Civil Rights Amendment, also known as Proposition 107 or HCR 2019, will be on the November, 2, 2010, ballot. Virtually identical to similar measures launched by Ward Connerly and passed by substantial margins in California, Washington, Michigan, and Nebraska, Prop. 107 would amend the Arizona constitution to prohibit the state from “discriminat[ing] against […]
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One of the saddest effects of the plague of political correctness that infects most selective campuses is the rampant dissatisfaction and unhappiness it produces. Those who care enormously about the purity of anything are often frustrated by even rumors of deviation from perfection. Just as hi-fi buffs searching for the absolute sound tend to listen […]
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Casual or even close readers of the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed could be forgiven for concluding that higher education in the United States these days is fixated on — indeed, consumed by — an overweening concern with “diversity.” Indeed, if all the reports on and studies of and efforts to promote […]
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In his seminal article analyzing the “groupthink” that pervades the modern academy, my colleague Mark Bauerlein described the effects of the Common Assumption (“that all the strangers in the room at professional gatherings are liberals”), creating an academy in which “members may speak their minds without worrying about justifying basic beliefs or curbing emotions.” Alas, […]
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Here is what Andrew Hacker, co-author of Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It , says about tenure in a recent interview in Atlantic Monthly: Here’s what happens. Academics typically don’t get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their […]
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In the epilogue of a new compendium volume, Mark Bousquet notes that, “In July 2007, the American Sociological Association reported that one-third of its members felt their academic freedoms were threatened, a significantly higher figure than the one-fifth ratio recorded during the McCarthy years.” Sounds dire, doesn’t it? Well not if you’ve spent the prior […]
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Stephanie Grace, an editor at the Harvard Law Review, has been outed as the third-year student who emailed to two friends her opinion that “I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African-Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent.” That triggered yet another racial flap at Harvard Law, with the school’s […]
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A frequent allegation against efforts to inculcate “dispositions” in student-teachers is that they are fuzzy and un-quantifiable. Especially in a high-accountability climate, the rise of “disposition” outcomes is particularly hard to sustain. Here’s a study in The New Educator that answers the objection. Authored by educators at Boston College, it appears under the title “Learning […]
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Earlier this month the United States Commission on Civil Rights issued a series of recommendations on Title IX enforcement. Chief among their analysis was the idea that the Model Survey promoted by the Bush Administration “currently provides the best method available” for measuring student interest, which has been a method of Title IX compliance since […]
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If only Carole Carrier and her peers felt more aggrieved, the new report released by the American Association of University Women on women in science would make more sense. On the day the AAUW report was released, Carrier, a 34 year-old mechanical engineer who works part-time, was walking down the street in early spring with […]
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The City University of New York (CUNY) serves as a type of funhouse mirror to faculty conditions throughout the academy: for a variety of structural reasons (the vise-like grip of the faculty union and the legacy of economic difficulties in the 1970s and 1980s, which drove out many high-quality scholars searching for better-paying jobs, leaving […]
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AEI recently released a fine compendium volume The Politically Correct University, edited by Robert Maranto, Richard E. Redding, and Frederick M. Hess, featuring an excellent slate of essays and contributors: here’s a sampling: Do take a look; there’s much of worth here: – “The American University: Yesterday, Today – and Tomorrow” James Piereson – “Linguistics […]
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Growing Anti-Semitism On The Campus The sad evidence that American campuses have been the site of rising anti-Semitism is truly an alarming phenomenon. Anti-Semitism has come from various sources: African-American student organizations; the Muslim Student Association at various colleges and universities, and the widespread movement on behalf of disinvestment in Israel, whose sponsors regularly compares […]
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Two researchers offer a new twist on an old question—why do college professors overwhelmingly lean to the left? Bias against conservatives is not the main reason, nor are the allegedly higher IQs of liberals, say Neil Gross of the University of British Columbia and Ethan Fosse of Harvard. Instead they suggest a theory of “path […]
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Sometimes people who don’t work in academia wonder why colleges are often the object of debates over free speech. Sure, some observers know that campuses are liberal enclaves, and they regard professors and administrators as easily intimidated by identity politics. But most people remember their college days as pretty much apolitical, and they continue to […]
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