In Review: Jeffrey M. Bale and Tamir Bar-On’s Fighting the Last War: Confusion, Partisanship and Alarmism in the Literature on the Radical Right Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried “Wolf!” may have been originally addressed to children, but of course, adults are the ones who are in most desperate need of its lesson. This […]
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Should conservatives establish a new university of, by, and for conservatives? The idea has been relaunched about as many times as the Starship Enterprise. I first heard it in the 1990s, but doubtless, it is older. Most recently Frederick Hess and Brendan Bell at the American Enterprise Institute cast the vision in “An Ivory Tower […]
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By Rod Dreher Many readers will have heard of Anthony Esolen, the robustly orthodox Catholic literature professor at Providence College, the Dominican-run college in Rhode Island. Prof. Esolen is the author of a number of books, including an exquisite translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is one of the three translations I recommend to anyone who asks me […]
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Passing on the right is dangerous and generally illegal driving. But a fair number of people do it anyway. The title Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn’s new book, Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University, combines the image of the careless driver with the other transgressive meaning of “passing.” Conservative professors can […]
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One consistent challenge in teaching is remembering how little students really know and how much they think they know. This is not a putdown of students. On the contrary, it is a celebration of optimism in the best sense of the word, the same optimism that was supposed to have inspired Winston Churchill to observe: […]
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Over at Uncommon Knowledge, the National Review interview show hosted by Peter Robinson, there is a long interview with Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield “on the state of the American academy.” It is absoltuely, positively essential viewing. Here are some intriguing quotes: Robinson: “Why are the faculty at so many impressive institutions so monolithically to the […]
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In every discussion of left-wing bias on college campuses, a good portion of faculty defenders come to the table with a blunt contention. There is NO bias, they insist. Sure, most humanities and social science faculty register Democrat, but it doesn’t much affect teaching, and besides, campuses have their fair share of conservatism and libertarianism […]
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