Author’s Note: This excerpt is from my weekly “Top of Mind” email, sent to subscribers every Thursday. For more content like this and to receive the full newsletter each week, sign up on Minding the Campus’s homepage. Simply go to the right side of the page, look for “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” and […]
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On August 18, the Sunday New York Times included a section, The 1619 Project. It announced a goal unusual in journalism, reframing American history, “making explicit how slavery is the foundation on which this country is built.” The Times seemed to imagine that all the protestors were far-right conservatives, but one that caught our eye […]
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Bari Weiss of The New York Times has a long opinion piece on “The intellectual dark web,” meaning a collection of intellectuals, left, right and center who are amassing large audiences outside of the collection of liberals who preside over the suffocatingly conventional opinions in politics, journalism, and academe. Jordan Peterson is there, along with […]
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Near the beginning of Bruce Bawer’s strong new book, The Victims’ Revolution, he talks about the anti-American attitudes that are nearly mandatory on campuses today and how they radiate throughout our culture. Those attitudes, inculcated by so many professors, range from apologetic and guilt-ridden to outright contemptuous and reflexively supportive of our enemies. The incredibly […]
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Remarks delivered at a Manhattan Institute luncheon, March 28, 2012 in New York City. Professor Johnson and attorney Harvey Silverglate, whose talk will be presented here tomorrow, spoke on “Kangaroo Courts: Yale, Duke and Student Rights.” *** Before the Patrick Witt case, I had some experience writing about how the New York Times handles […]
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Richard Perez-Pena’s New York Times article on Patrick Witt consisted of little more than dubious inferences and negative insinuations. But the story did, unequivocally, feature one revelation: someone (presumably either in the accuser’s entourage or a Yale administrator) violated Yale’s procedures by leaking existence of the “informal” complaint against Witt–with the motive of torpedoing his […]
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The denouement of the Times’ coverage of Duke lacrosse came when then-sports editor Tom Jolly apologized for the paper’s guilt-presuming, error-ridden articles on the case. Will the paper ever get around to giving former Yale quarterback Patrick Witt an apology? With a few days perspective, it’s become clear that the Times‘ mishandling of the Witt […]
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Over the past year, FIRE has led a campaign of civil liberties organizations against the Obama administration’s infamous “Dear Colleague” letter, which ordered colleges and universities to lower the burden of proof in their on-campus judicial proceedings. The letter demanded that all universities receiving federal funds employ a “preponderance of the evidence” standard (in other […]
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At first glance, John Tierney’s report in the New York Times on the liberal-conservative imbalance of faculty looks like just another account of a very familiar subject. But read it twice and you can see why it became one of the most talked-about articles on higher education in months. How did this happen? First, it […]
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Today’s New York Times editorial on President Obama’s speech yesterday in Arizona bears the title “As We Mourn”, a straightforward and simple heading, but the first sentence is striking: It is a president’s responsibility to salve a national wound. As with the title, the phrasing is clear and direct, sententiously so, the “It is” bearing […]
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Sunday’s “U” Issue of the New York Times offers a few interesting features: – How dropping test score requirements is also a convincing tool for the benefit of colleges. – An interesting University of Cincinatti dorm effort to retain first-generation college students. – Some advice on balancing grad school prospects and debt. And plenty more, […]
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