America is awash in culture wars, but one of the least noticed yet most consequential is the hostility between the academy and business. More is involved than a gaggle of Marxist professors condemning capitalism. Academics, especially those in the social sciences and humanities, not only support the increasingly anti-business Democratic Party; their loathing is often […]
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At Columbia University, the famous core curriculum, founded exactly one hundred years ago and centered on a rich, rigorous two-semester freshman course covering Western civilization from Plato to the present, remains in place and is largely the same as in 1919. But it’s a rare exception. One day in January 1987, hundreds of Stanford students, […]
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As intellectual historians have often had occasion to observe, there are times in a nation’s history when certain ideas are just “in the air.” Admittedly, this point seems to fizzle when applied to our particular historical moment. On the surface of American politics, as many have had cause to mention, it appears that the main trends predicted […]
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Political correctness – the academic aping of the class struggle — has increasingly generated campus hijinks unintentionally redolent of the cartoonist Al Capp’s 1960s depiction of S.W.I.N.E. (Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything). Recently, referring to the plague of campus hoaxes regarding rape and race, capped off by the ruckus at Oberlin College because of […]
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Speaking of business and management majors, Douglas Campbell and James E. Fletcher argue in A Better Way to Educate Professionals that their students “should have a strong base in the traditional liberal arts and the physical sciences….to effectively work with people to understand and solve problems as well as to accomplish individual, organizational, and social goals.” […]
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The passing of Steve Jobs has focused my mind on something I haven’t thought about for a while: American capitalism is so vibrant, so creative, so much a creator of wealth and happiness, while higher education is far less so on all scores. Perhaps this explains why, when we tax capitalists and their suppliers (including […]
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There is an old saying in politics that “They don’t scream unless you hurt them.” When your adversaries scream, it is a good sign that your measures have been effective. Judged by this standard, the Koch Brothers (David and Charles) have been very effective in recent years in advancing their causes of limited government and […]
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The Boston Globe brings news of “discord” at the Harvard Education School. The issue, incredibly, involves claims by graduate students and some faculty members that the institution is insufficiently committed to a left-wing educational agenda. Over the last few years, three “social justice” professors left the Graduate School of Education, including the husband-wife duo of Marcelo and Carola Suarez-Orozco. (She explores such only-in-academia […]
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Alan S. Kahan has cast new light on an ongoing conflict with origins in classical antiquity if not earlier. Kahan’s Mind vs. Money: The War Between Intellectuals and Capitalism is a learned and engaging account of the tension between the amorality of the marketplace and the moralism of would-be priestly authorities. Until the Enlightenment, merchants […]
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Video of our Capitalism on Campus event last week is now available here on on the Manhattan Institute site. The first two videos feature panels on the state of instruction in capitalism and political economy, showcasing a diverse range of academics from Jeffrey A. Miron, professor of economics and director of undergraduate studies at Harvard, […]
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This paper was prepared for yesterday’s conference on “Capitalism on Campus: What Are Students Learning? What Should They Know?” The one-day event in New York City was sponsored by the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University. Charlotte Allen, who writes frequently (and exceptionally well) for Minding the Campus, is preparing a report for us […]
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In the year 2000, American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, CA, was one of the worst-performing middle schools in the state. Not a single student tested above the fiftieth percentile on state or national exams in math, and only eight percent of sixth-graders and 17 percent of eighth-graders passed that bar in reading (the […]
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In the contemporary battle within the social sciences between free market think tanks and liberal- dominated universities, the former labor under a huge disadvantage: they lack students. Think-tank based scholars may daily issue erudite policy analyses, write incisive op-ed columns galore, dominate talk radio, publish in widely admired magazines like City Journal but the half-life […]
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