Does a black professor deserve tenure because his college hasn’t granted tenure to very many black professors in the past? To provide a role model for black students? To help the school achieve ethnic diversity faster than it otherwise might? To ensure that the proportion of black professors matches the proportion of black college students? […]
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President Obama’s call for an increase in college graduation rates and the establishment of a $2.5 billion college completion fund begins to address a vexing issue for those of us employed in higher education, namely, how do we make the United States more economically competitive in a world that demands a well-trained, college-educated workforce? The […]
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While this year has become best known as the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, it was also forty years ago that the first African-American Studies department was established, at San Francisco State University. Forty-one fall semesters later, there are hundreds of such departments. Has what they teach evolved with the march of time? What should the […]
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By Edward Blum As the saying goes, “fuzzy law begets controversy”, and nothing has proven this maxim better than the Supreme Court’s 2003 landmark ruling on “diversity” in higher education. Lacking clarity, the ruling has left individual institutions to interpret how to achieve diversity on their campuses, stoking never-ending conflict over race and admissions. However, […]
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AAUP president Cary Nelson recently e-mailed his membership about an important new venture for the academic union. Proclaiming “this is not your grandparents’ AAUP,” Nelson celebrated the work of the “Department of Organizing and Services,” which had discovered “a faculty band from Ohio performing original songs about the ironies of current academic life.” Perhaps Nelson […]
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During my twelve-year term as a Regent of the University of California (UC), I served for several of those years as Chairman of the Committee on Finance, which has jurisdiction over the budget of the UC system. Adopting a budget was among the most complex and painful tasks that confronted the Board. For me, the […]
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John Rosenberg (Discriminations) and Mickey Kaus (Kausfiles) note that the slippery term “cultural competence” pops up often in the health care bill passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Once a harmless term in medical literature referring to the need to understand and communicate with patients of different races and ethnicities, “cultural competence” mutated […]
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“If I couldn’t study something that’s about myself then I wouldn’t want to be here,” the black sophomore once told me, explaining how crucial to him it was to be able to major in African-American Studies. It always stuck with me. The African-American Studies department he was a major in was one of about 300 […]
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We’re looking for any upcoming or recent accounts of freshman orientation from those who’ve undergone the process or shortly will. PC skits, “white privilege” games, and the like, we’re interested in all of this. Any stories are welcome and encouraged. Write us or urge anyone you know who might be going through the process to […]
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One of the key contributions of second-wave feminism to the academy is what is known as “standpoint theory,” which asserts that members of oppressed groups have special “ways of knowing” based on their group’s unique experiences. The problem standpoint theory attempted to address is how to respond to the apparent monopoly of knowledge and power […]
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A few weeks ago a teenaged pot dealer was shot dead in a Harvard dormitory. That alone was depressing enough. However, Harvard suspects a black senior, Chanequa Campbell, of an association with the pot dealer — Justin Cosby, also black — and last week was barred from her dormitory and prevented from graduating. Campbell grew […]
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About five years ago, shortly before my term ended as a Regent of the University of California (UC), I was having a casual conversation with a very high-ranking UC administrator about a proposal that he was developing to increase “diversity” at UC in a manner that would comply with the dictates of California’s Constitution and […]
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What acid rain is to our irreplaceable forests, lakes and streams, leftist dogma is to American higher education. In every corner of the land, it has turned once-flourishing departments of English and history into barren wastelands where only the academic equivalent of cockroaches can thrive. Its corrosive poison – infantile anti-Americanism, hatred of capitalism, scorn […]
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Every few weeks or so a new marginalized group is discovered on campus, requiring new bursts of emotional inclusion and sometimes a demand for special housing and curriculum change as well. At Cornell the latest people revealed to be suffering discomfort are transfer students. “Study Finds Transfers Feel Marginalized on Campus,” said the headline in […]
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By John McWhorter Debra Dickerson said of the Cornell students who took over Willard Straight Hall at Cornell in 1969, “What they actually wanted was beyond the white man’s power to bestow.” Even after they were granted a Black Studies department as they demanded, a core of black students remained infuriated at Cornell as still […]
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This is a letter to the editor of the Cornell Daily Sun, responding to a Sun report today about a campus Christian group apparently violating anti-discrimination rules by not allowing a gay student to become a leader. To the Editor: Alex Berg (“Outcry Erupts from Alleged Homophobia” April 23) seems to think the Chris Donohoe […]
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Forty years ago this week, an armed student insurrection erupted on the Cornell campus. I was a sophomore on campus at the time and later wrote a book on the events, Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. To some the drama represented a triumph of social justice, paving the way for […]
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Yesterday, our own John McWhorter participated in a debate on Affirmative Action hosted by the Miller Center. Other participants included Julian Bond and Lee Bollinger. You can watch it here.
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Virginia Tech has backed down from its attempt to force a diversity loyalty oath on its faculty. The credit goes to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the National Association of Scholars (NAS), with a strong assist from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). Under proposed guidelines, Virginia Tech faculty […]
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In the early 90s we noticed that Brown and Yale were conducting separate freshman orientations for non-white students. Since then this casual segregation of new students has spread widely and has come to be seen as normal. Typically minority students arrive a week early and are instructed on how to cope with a historically white […]
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The nine-campus University of California system is reducing the number of freshman admissions because of the financial crisis. But “underrepresented groups”—non-Asian-American minorities—shouldn’t worry at all. Apparently all the cuts will come from white and Asian-American applicants. Down in the ninth paragraph of a 13-paragraph Associated Press story in the San Jose Mercury News, we learn […]
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The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) took its customary bystander role in the Ward Churchill case, as it regularly does when academic integrity is the issue and the evidence of malfeasance is obvious. But among the many mealy-mouthed statements by AAUP president Cary Nelson, one was surely true: “Colorado knew what it was getting […]
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In his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer distills the betrayal of trust by corrupt public servants into a memorable expression: “If gold rust, what shall iron do?” This is the metaphor that his honest parson lives by, and it reflects on the venal churchmen among the pilgrims who betray the ideals of the […]
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Several years ago, in a seminal Chronicle of Higher Education essay, Mark Bauerlein lamented a campus in which “the simple trappings of deliberation make academics think that they’ve reached an opinion through reasoned debate—instead of, in part, through an irrational social dynamic. The opinion takes on the status of a norm. Extreme views appear to […]
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The Kellogg Foundation is funding a survey of four college campuses by Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute and the Educational Testing Service to examine how students of color’s experiences on college campuses impact the notorious black-white achievement gap. Namely, it will examine how the students feel “welcome and unwelcome, respected and disrespected, supported and unsupported, […]
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Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) is attempting to force faculty to take an ideological oath to “diversity.” Promotion and tenure will depend on a willingness to embrace the vague but militant ideology dear to the left side of the political spectrum. Peter Wood broke this astonishing story on the National Association of […]
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I have been teaching a class at Columbia on Western Civilization since September. The class is highly diverse. By that, I mean that among the 21 students there is an Orthodox Jew, a child of Russian immigrants, and a couple of Korean-Americans. Plus a Chinese-American. And one of them grew up in France; just why […]
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Whenever David Horowitz issues a broadside against leftwing bias in higher education, academics have a ready reply. He packs his sallies with pointed illustrations but the record is feeble, they say. He cherry-picks evidence and magnifies a few bad cases into an epidemic of malfeasance. He relies on indirect documents (for instance, course descriptions) but […]
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In a recent op-ed, New York Times columnist David Brooks raised an interesting and important question. Drawing on a recent book (largely neglected) by Hugh Heclo entitled On Thinking Institutionally, Brooks critiqued a report on education that a Harvard University faculty committee issued a few years ago. According to the report, “the aim of a […]
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By Anonymous In March 2008 I reluctantly made the decision to leave academia. After six years in graduate school and three years as a professor, it was clear to me that the discrimination I faced was so pervasive that there would be no escaping it in the years ahead. Don’t misunderstand what I write in […]
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