In June, more than 100 deans signed a joint letter calling for law schools to support constitutional democracy by teaching students to disagree respectfully and engage across ideological divides. As around 40,000 new law students begin their professional education this fall, it is fair to question whether law schools have demonstrated a commitment to this […]
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Scarcely a month passes without encountering yet one more new faculty group dedicated to promoting intellectual diversity on campus, yet one more manifesto celebrating campus free speech, and yet one more account of a canceled professor successfully suing those who canceled him. Then, add accounts of red states banning “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) from […]
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Today’s Marxist Left has captured America’s K-12 schools hire by hire, curriculum tweak by curriculum tweak, and nefarious reform by nefarious reform. Good luck enrolling Junior in a school where he is not conscripted to be an assistant commander in the war on hate, racism, and colonial oppression. The American Association of School Administrations recently […]
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Jane Mayer is a writer for The New Yorker who knows her audience. It consists mostly of elitist progressives who like reading that their enlightened transformation of America is imperiled by greedy conservative villains. She has written many articles and most recently, a book entitled Dark Money on that theme. The February 26, 2016 issue […]
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According to many critics, the case is shut. Higher education — the one American institution that should make intellectual diversity a first priority — actually appears to do just the opposite. In fact, some critics suggest that universities have made it a top priority to create an environment of intellectual homogeneity – to an extent […]
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By Roger Clegg Kudos to Peter Wood for encouraging the presidential candidates to opine – and opine wisely – on higher education issues in his article, “What Candidates Can Do for Higher Education Now.” With regard to his Item #3 (“End higher education’s destructive focus on race”), I’d like to point out two specific proposals […]
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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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Just how much viewpoint diversity do we have in social psychology? In 2011, nobody knew, so I asked 30 of my friends in the field to name a conservative. They came up with several names, but only one suspect admitted, under gentle interrogation, to being right of center. A few months later I gave a talk at […]
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When critics of higher education complain about a lack of “intellectual diversity,” mostly what they deplore is the shortage of conservative professors. But there is much more at stake than that. Consider climate change: As I write this, parts of the nation have endured sweltering heat, serious drought, and treacherous storms, at one point leaving […]
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As one who has spent nearly four decades in the academy, let me confirm what outsiders often suspect: the left has almost a complete headlock on the publication of serious (peer reviewed) research in journals and scholarly books. It is not that heretical ideas are forever buried. They can be expressed in popular magazines, op-eds […]
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The NAS has announced that it is undertaking an intriguing case study examining “the curriculum, student activities, and campus values of Bowdoin College as a case study to learn what a contemporary liberal arts college education consists of,” with the hopes of creating “a template for how such a rigorous study could be undertaken at […]
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The many surveys backing up what those of us in the academy know only too well—that liberals vastly outnumber conservatives—are used to bolster the idealistic argument for “intellectual diversity.” But a viewing of an incident at the recent CPAC conference and a video of a philosophy professor further confirmed my beliefs that it is not […]
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Chancellor G. P. Peterson of the University of Colorado, Boulder, plans to raise $9 million to endow a visiting chair in conservative thought and policy, on grounds that intellectual diversity is a good thing. Like all radical ideas, having an unorthodox professor on campus sounds a bit risky, maybe even startling, but after some reflection, […]
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