University of Virginia English professor Mark Edmundson has a penetrating, but saddening article in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week. It’s called “Narcissus Regards a Book”, and it laments a terrible outcome of the academic culture wars of the late-1980s and early-1990s. Edmunson recalls the infamous chant of students at Stanford—in his rendition, “Hey-ho, […]
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Many universities have set up centers to examine the history of the Cold War. The Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington D. C., for example, created an offshoot called The Cold War International History Project. That institute has over the years hosted many conferences, with panels of scholars representing all points of view. Two years […]
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Teaching in the universities about the so-called McCarthy era has become an area most susceptible to politically correct and one-sided views of what the period was all about. One historian who strenuously objects to the accepted left-wing interpretation that prevails in the academy is Jennifer Delton, Chairman of the Department of History at Skidmore College. […]
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A few years ago, the University of Iowa’s History Department conducted a search for a new hire in U.S. foreign relations. After the department denied a preliminary, or screening, interview to Mark Moyar—a highly qualified (B.A. summa cum laude in history from Harvard, Ph.D. In history from Cambridge), but also clearly conservative, historian—it came to […]
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E. D. Hirsch, famed literary critic and educator, founder of Core Knowledge Foundation and author of Cultural Literacy, has a new book out. It’s called The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools , and the arguments there are worth repeating again and again. While the preferred academic approach to American history and society is […]
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Take a look at ISI’s latest civic literacy survey “The Shaping of the American Mind: The Diverging Influences of the College Degree & Civic Learning on American Beliefs.” One finding: more than half of students polled did not know the three branches of the federal government.
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Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University is a short, provocative book that raises many more questions than it answers. Its greatest contribution is that it clearly delineates the development of the American university from its origins in the late 19th century to the many absurdities that characterize it […]
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</> Howard Zinn’s death yesterday affords us the opportunity to evaluate the remarkable influence he has had on the American public’s understanding of our nation’s past. His book A People’s History of the United States, published in 1980 with a first printing of 5000 copies, went on to sell over two million. To this day […]
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Last week, the Boston Globe reported on the founding of a two-year college (for junior and senior transfer students) in New Hampshire. The curriculum of the American College of History and Legal Studies will consist solely of history classes. The college will accept community college transfer students, and has promised small classes that focus largely […]
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Last November, Rob Koons, director of the Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions at the University of Texas, was abruptly fired from that position. In swift succession, the name of the program and its leadership was changed to conform more closely to the ideological tastes of the faculty of the College of Liberal Arts. […]
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“Senior officials never discussed hippo phase-out” In case you were wondering.
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We’re pleased to announce the opening of the Philadelphia headquarters of the Jack Miller Center, an educational organization dedicated to “strengthen the teaching of America’s founding principles and history”. The institute, founded by Chicago businessman Jack Miller, and led by Mike Ratliff, plans to offer two-week summer institutes for professors, support for “partnered” academic programs, […]
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Edward Rothstein’s remarkable article today in the Arts section of the New York Times carries the obligatory bland headline: “Two New Shows Cast Light and Darkness on Early Cultures in America.” The reference is to “Exploring the Early Americas” at the Library of Congress, and more egregiously, an embarrassing drowned-in-cultural-relativism show at Chicago’s Field Museum, […]
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Black History Month college speakers axiomatically slant left. This February, Al Sharpton appeared at Adelphi University, Nikki Giovanni at Southern University, and Mary Frances Berry at Reed College, to name just a few. The right-most speaker this year was likely an elected Democrat, Harold Ford Jr., who also spoke at Reed. It’s little change in […]
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In order to fulfill the requirements for a major in history at Northwestern University, my daughter took a course called “The Cold War At Home.” As one might imagine in the hothouse of the college system, left wing views predominate. The students read Ellen Shrecker, not Ronald Radosh. Joseph McCarthy has been transmogrified into Adolf […]
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The University of Texas at Austin has just approved the formation of a field of study for the recently-established Program In Western Civilization and American Institutions. This enables the center to begin offering great books-based classes on Greek and Roman Philosophy, literature, and the American founding, among other topics. It’s a broad step forward for […]
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The University of Colorado’s dismissal of Ward Churchill for academic fraud was not only a welcome decision in support of scholarly standards, it will also go some way towards discrediting one of the most depressing tendencies of our era, the politicisation of history. In Australia, Churchill has long been frequently cited by historians of Aboriginal […]
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The Intercollegiate Studies Institute released its second annual survey of civic awareness among American college students, and the results are just as depressing as last year’s. “The average college senior know astoundingly little about America’s history, government, international relations and market economy,” according to the ISI report, “Failing Our Students, Failing America.” Harvard seniors scored […]
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According to a 2007 poll, 95% of Sweden’s young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty know what Auschwitz was, yet 90% don’t know what the word ‘Gulag’ refers to, despite the Russians having dispatched to these infamous labor camps thousands of innocent people. This lack of knowledge is not the fault of the […]
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