This is the third of a three-part review of Charles Murray’s latest book, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race and Class. Self-identified progressives–who make up the great bulk of North America’s coastal and urban government, business, media, and academic elites–are great champions of equality, even at the expense of freedom, justice, and prosperity. But […]
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UCLA has found a novel way to improve the politicization of its curriculum. UCLA Today, the faculty and staff newspaper, reports that the university’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and the Sustainability Committee have teamed up to help faculty members across the university figure out ways to slip sustainability messages into their classes, regardless […]
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American history has been radically transformed on our campuses. Traditional topics are now not only marginalized but “re-visioned” to become more compatible with the dominant race/class/gender paradigm. In two posts last fall, I took a look at U.S. history offerings at Bowdoin College. The liberal arts college, one of the nation’s finest, long enjoyed a reputation as a training […]
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(Picture: UC Chico’s 2011 Sustainability Report) California State University at Chico takes sustainability seriously. Yahoo listed it last year as one of the top five ‘green’ colleges in America. The university has made creating “environmentally literate citizens” an official strategic priority, and it has elaborated its general education program to include a “sustainability studies” track. […]
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Cross-posted from National Association of Scholars. Climategate, both 1 and 2, are textbook cases of gross lapses in professional ethics and scientific malfeasance. To understand why, one must first understand what science is and how it is supposed to operate. Science is the noble pursuit of knowledge through observation, testing and experimentation. Scientists attempt to […]
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Crossposted at the National Association of Scholars. Last year, Berkeley physicist Richard Muller quietly assembled a team of researchers for the purpose of creating a new and independent assessment of the evidence for global warming. The group, which eventually called itself Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST), came to public notice in February 2011 in an article by […]
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I do not want us to shut down economic drive to support false science, and on the other hand, I do not want to leave behind a scorched earth. …. Let’s get the science right! A better debate and research is needed by honest and believable scientists who study climate professionally. Richard Lindzen, Professor of […]
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Rush University Medical Center in Chicago reserves 25 parking stalls for hybrid cars at the entrance of its parking garage. Likewise, Xavier University in Cincinnati assigns 9 close-in spaces for low-emission, high gas-mileage cars. Both parking allocations were guided by LEED standards– Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, an internationally recognized green-building certification system, equivalent […]
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Within days of the GOP sweep that marked the Nov. 2 election, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Buildings and Grounds” blog featured an entry whose headline wondered: “What Future for College Sustainability Programs?” Such worrying might seem strange because in fact “sustainability”—the green mania that has inspired institutions of higher learning across the country to […]
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A couple of weeks ago Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, wrote a serious, humorous, penetrating assessment of the rise of “sustainability” as the new ideology de riguer on college campuses. (The article is also available here, but read it on the Chronicle site if you can — the comments there are […]
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In the October 3rd issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education is a broad comparison of diversity and sustainability “ideologies.” In it, Peter Wood offers several general remarks about the terms (or notions, attitudes, commitments . . . what is the right word for these hazy but potent “-ities” that bear so many psycho-political undertones […]
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With great fanfare Columbia University recently announced that starting this fall it will offer an undergraduate major in the new interdisciplinary field of “sustainable development.” That makes Columbia the first Ivy League school to offer such a major, which sounds as though it ought to be a practical mix of hard science, “green” technology, and […]
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Van Jones, the Oakland, Calif.-based radical activist and author who was forced to resign his post as the Obama administration’s “green jobs czar” in September after it was revealed that he had signed a “truther” petition in 2004 calling for an investigation of President George W. Bush’s supposed collusion in the massacres of Sept. 11, […]
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The good news is that neither the House nor the Senate version of President Obama’s $825 billion so-called economic stimulus package opens the sluicegate of federal slush-funding for higher-education construction projects as wide as many college presidents would like. Back in December some 31 university presidents and trustees, representing some of the biggest public university […]
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The term “College Green” has a whole new meaning these days. No longer does it refer to the tree-lined verdant lawn at the heart of the classic college campus. It now reflects an environmental faddishness sweeping academia with a fervor exceeding even that for deconstructionism or take-back-the-night events. The big buzzword on campus is “sustainability.” […]
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“Parents asking, ‘Where’s the trash?’ were promptly corrected by event staff and volunteers, who proudly provided composting crash courses to the thousands of students and family members.” The “event”—described in an online news release–was the Second Annual Zero-Waste Freshman Orientation Picnic at Duke University on Aug. 19, a campus event for entering Duke students and […]
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The academic left is fond of buzzwords that sound harmless but function in a highly ideological way. Many schools of education and social work require students to have a good “disposition.” In practice this means that conservatives need not apply, as highly publicized attempts to penalize right-wing students at Brooklyn College and Washington State University […]
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