Two American elite universities, Yale and Harvard, are now in the crosshairs of the Education Department. Why? They accepted money from foreign countries like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran and not reporting the gifts or contracts, which federal investigators estimate to be at least $6.5 billion. The story, which appears in The Wall Street […]
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Yale is ending the teaching of one of its most storied courses—a survey of Western Art history from the Renaissance to the present. The Yale Daily News called the action a result of the latest student uneasiness over an idealized Western “canon” a product of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists.” […]
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In an interview last year with ESPN, former OCR head Catherine Lhamon gushed, “The capturing of the hearts and minds of the American public is what has moved this issue. The response of student communities to sexual violence among athletes has been really important.” Lhamon could have been referring to the expulsion of former Yale […]
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Last week, a New Haven jury acquitted Yale student Saifullah Khan of rape. Coverage of the case provided only the latest reminder of the one-sided, often effectively misleading manner in which the mainstream media covers the issue of campus sexual assault. Because criminal charges were filed against Khan, he was entitled to constitutional protections (the […]
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While Yale is the only institution required by the Federal government to outline its campus sexual assault adjudications, (albeit in an increasingly limited way), a second university — Stanford — has now started to do so. As with Yale, these reports unintentionally reveal the moral panic over sexual assault on many of the nation’s leading campuses. […]
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In a 2012 resolution agreement with the Office for Civil Rights, Yale became the nation’s only university required to document all sexual assault allegations on campus. The reports, prepared by Yale Deputy Provost Stephanie Spangler, are generally bare-bones (and became even more so last year, after Spangler announced she’d decided to supply less information about […]
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Because my English professors at Yale are largely liberal, the political message in my classes is always the same: Trump is a demagogue, American society is doomed, and English literature is our refuge. The liberal domination of the classroom is one problem, but even if the Academy reached political equilibrium, the imposition of politics into […]
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Edgar Rice Burroughs foresaw the situation at Evergreen State and other campuses. He described it in Tarzan Untamed, a 1919 novel in which the hero finds himself in the lost city of Xuja. Xuja, hidden in a secret valley, cut off from the rest of the world, resembles the typical American campus today in that […]
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It is awfully tempting to laugh at the case of Yale dean June Chu, for writing Yelp reviews of restaurants and food stores that referred to customers as “low class folks” and included statements like, “If you are white trash, this is the perfect night out for you!” Watching the sensitivity monitors go after one of their own […]
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Politically-correct college administrators in Madison, Wisconsin asked the police to investigate speech mocking campus Clinton supporters. The police reportedly did so, even though that could lead to a violation of the First Amendment. This occurred at Edgewood College. Reason Magazine reports that an investigation at Edgewood has begun over a “Suck it up, pussies” Post-it note […]
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Peter Salovey, president of Yale, posted this in the Yale Daily News Since last week’s presidential election, many in our community have expressed concern about the new administration’s proposals to move toward much more aggressive enforcement of immigration laws. Students and others at Yale and around the country have called for the creation of sanctuary […]
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The Obama administration, acting through the Office of Civil Rights, has made a terrible mess out of sexual misconduct hearings on our campuses, but it did one good thing without thinking much about it: it targeted one university—Yale—for regular reports on how it dealt in sexual assault hearings. The reports, released by Deputy Provost Stephanie […]
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Yale remains deeply unwelcoming to students with conservative political beliefs, according to a new but massively unsurprising Yale Daily News survey distributed in October and reported last week. Of the 2,054 respondents who completed the survey —about 38 % of all Yale undergrads— nearly 75 percent said they believe Yale does not provide a welcoming […]
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Elle Woods, the sexy Harvard Law School student from la-la land in the 2001 comedy Legally Blonde, got a taste of what has become a daily diet of politically corrected speech. In that movie, Enid, the super-smart lesbian in the study group from which Elle was excluded, was lobbying to change the word semester to […]
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Among all the idiocies on campus in the last year, there is no more dispiriting statement than a line quoted in The Wall Street Journal on June 3rd. In an op-ed entitled “How the Yale Halloween Vigilantes Finally Got Their Way,” an undergraduate named Zachary Young records the final episode of the whole affair in […]
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Last fall, Peter Salovey, president of Yale, badly botched the student protests that broke out over the insignificant issue of proper campus Halloween costume. Now he has made a few decisions in hopes of avoiding another round of protests. First, he announced that the “masters” of Yale’s twelve residential colleges will now be known as […]
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Connecticut is going through the motions of trying to tax Yale’s $25.6 billion endowment to help relieve the state’s $266 million shortfall. That effort will fail, but public opinion is starting to question the appropriateness of government-conferred tax benefits for university endowment funds. At Harvard, alumni as politically diverse as conservative Ron Unz and progressive […]
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Max Stern, the lawyer for the expelled Yale basketball captain Jack Montague, has spoken out, announcing that he will sue Yale on behalf of Montague in April, and clarifying some details in the case, including a very surprising one: that the aggrieved female did not file the sexual misconduct complaint. In his telling, Montague had […]
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Jack Montague, captain of Yale’s basketball team, has been expelled from the university on some sort of sex charge and the story continues to get uglier. Since his family has basically declined to comment (for understandable reasons) and because Yale chooses (for incomprehensible reasons) to employ “a more expansive definition of sexual assault” than state […]
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Yale is the only university that regularly issues reports on its handling of sexual assault complaints, the result of a 2012 resolution agreement with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The university is also unusual in reporting so many sexual complaints, the result of its peculiar decision to broaden the campus definition of “sexual assault” […]
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The New York Times published an article Sunday on how painful it was at Yale for Erika Christakis, whose harmless opinion on Halloween costumes triggered non-negotiable demands by enraged black students and their allies. But The Times buried the lede. Here is the actual nugget of fresh information in the article: “Yet the mood on campus […]
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By Richard Vedder I didn’t sleep too well last night, thanks to Heterodox Academy’s (and NYU’s) Jonathan Haidt and John Leo, who recently carried on a provocative exchange in this space. Two questions really bothered me: Why is there so little intellectual diversity in the academy? And what can we do about the related problem […]
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Not all Yale students agree with the tactics employed by the bullies. Freshman Connor Wood said, “The acceptance or rejection of coercive tactics is a choice that will literally decide the fate of our democracy. Our republic will not survive without a culture of robust public debate. And the far more immediate threat is to academia: […]
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The problem of political correctness at Yale has comes up again because it let a good scholar quit teaching under heavy pressure from students over a very mild email she wrote about Halloween costumes at Yale. The email said she thought that an official campus group really shouldn’t be telling students what costumes to avoid. PC […]
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I mostly agree with Peter Schuck’s viewpoint (What the President of Yale Should Have Said) but disagree strongly with his suggestion that colleges and universities have been working to support diversity on campus (and improved race relations) through their policies and practices of offering so-called “ethnocultural” dorms and identity/affinity housing. Indeed, what the colleges are […]
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The students at Mizzou and Yale caught in twin episodes of contrived campus racial hysteria have been described as narcissists and self-indulgent brats catered to by their parents who told them how special they were and expecting the same judgment from college. Handed what they understand as the attitudinal keys to the kingdom, they’re enraged when […]
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Since 2011, as part of its settlement with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, Yale has published biannual reports that provide brief summaries of each sexual assault allegation at the university. (Yale is the only university in the country to have such an obligation.) I’ve analyzed each of these reports, issued by the […]
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The conventional meritocratic recipe for success is simple enough: study hard in school, get good grades, be involved in one’s community, find an appropriate college, apply for jobs in your field of study, and everything else falls in place. But that’s not how it really works says Lauren A. Rivera, author of Pedigree: How Elite Students […]
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Few figures involved in the Duke lacrosse case behaved more disgracefully than Wendy Murphy, an adjunct professor at the New England School of Law. A frequent TV commentator on the case, she earned a reputation for defending Mike Nifong’s prosecution through myriad errors of fact, misstatements of the law, and deeply offensive statements such as […]
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My new book, Sex & God at Yale, covers many of the shabby low points of sex at the university: Live nudity in the classroom, oral sex seminars, masturbation how-tos and other examples of dedicated folly. But it’s important to focus on the underlying problem I address in the book. Simply put: Yale, along with […]
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