Bored of reading? Want something to hear? See John Leo and Peter Berkowitz discuss the afflictions of the modern academy in our new podcast.
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David Leonhardt, an economics columnist for the New York Times, recently visited the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and took a careful look at the current admissions process of that campus in the wake of Proposition 209, the California ballot initiative that outlawed race and gender preferences in public education, as well as […]
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Variety reports that HBO has acquired the rights to Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson’s Until Proven Innocent. After our featuring the authors here in New York, we’re surprised it took this long for a screen deal. Our prodigious influence aside, the Duke case fully merits a fuller media treatment, and there’s no better account […]
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Inside Higher Ed today reports on yet another canceled college speech: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won the prize for his nonviolent opposition to South Africa’s apartheid regime, was deemed unworthy of appearing at St. Thomas because of comments he made criticizing Israel – comments the university says were “hurtful” to some Jewish people. Further, the […]
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An excerpt from the new book Education’s End, Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life by Anthony T. Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law, Yale Law School (Yale University Press) By the early 1970s, the humanities were floundering. Ideological rifts were widening. Traditional ways of teaching had lost much of […]
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The Manhattan Institute’s Center For the American University is hosting a conference today here in New York celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Allan Bloom’s The Closing Of The American Mind. The book was an astonishing best-seller on the misdirection of the University, and the Center for the American University has assembled Robert George, Mark Steyn, […]
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“The Hungry Student: Reopening After The Closing of the American Mind” At the end of the introduction to Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, Bloom mentions that only Socrates knew that he was ignorant, albeit “after a lifetime of unceasing labor.” Bloom observes at the time of his writing that every high school student […]
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“Bloom’s Closing Revisited” It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself. Introduction: Fifteen years after his death, Allan Bloom still commands a rapt audience. This past April, his thoughts once again filled a University of Chicago lecture hall. Though he was a brilliant essayist, translator, and educator in his own […]
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“The Permanent Questions Are Still Permanent: A Reflection on Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind” Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, “a meditation on the state of our souls, particularly those of the young, and their education”, ultimately reflects on a problem that goes back to Socrates: the tension between the […]
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Senator Grassley, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, has turned his attention to the tax status of collegiate athletic programs – wondering “what gives the IRS comfort that they have met the requirements of being a charity.” The Chronicle furnishes Grassely abundant cause to wonder, reporting that athletics donations now amount to more than a […]
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In an Op-Ed in last Monday’s New York Times, UC-Berkeley sociologist Jerome Karabel painted an alarming picture of our elite universities as institutions that systematically discriminate against poor and middle-class students. In Karabel’s words, these schools are “serving less as vehicles of upward mobility than as transmitters of privilege from generation to generation.” This is […]
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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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President Bush just signed into law the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, passed by both houses of Congress on September 7. CCRAA – think of a crow signaling to his buddies that dinner is served – comes with the tag line, “The largest investment in higher education since the GI Bill – at no […]
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Ann Coulter seems to be the first writer to guffaw over Lee Bollinger’s statement that Columbia University has a “long-standing tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate…” There is no such tradition, and very little debate at Columbia, particularly if one of the proposed debaters or speakers happens to be conservative. Last […]
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By Robert Paquette On 17 September, Constitution Day, my two co-founders (professors Douglas Ambrose and James Bradfield) and I unveiled the Alexander Hamilton Institute in a historic mansion about a mile from the Hamilton College campus. Our goal is to promote the study of American ideals and institutions. This was not our first try. A […]
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[this also appeared in the Washington Examiner] Last week’s withdrawal of a speaking invitation to Lawrence Summers by the University of California’s Board of Regents placed the spotlight on a central member of the radical campus constituency – the administrator. Recent spats over radical professors have obscured this corner of the university – where the […]
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If anyone hasn’t realized that the new AAUP Statement on academic freedom is a sham, then there are two excellent means to inform yourself today. First, Erin O’Connor’s new piece here at the site, on the AAUP’s ducking of almost every serious complaint to which it pretends to respond. A small but telling indicator of […]
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Last summer, AAUP president Cary Nelson announced that the AAUP would be issuing a back to school statement on academic freedom in the classroom. Now that statement has gone public – and it makes for very interesting and informative reading. Written by a subcommittee of the AAUP’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, “Freedom in […]
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You can read a passel of editorials on Ahmadinejad above, and if you’re enterprising, you can easily find another, oh, thirty of so op-eds on the topic of his appearance. None of these, except for one, address any substantive findings from Ahmadinejad’s speech, because there weren’t any. That one exception, The Columbia Spectator now urges […]
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President Bollinger is displaying a new-found talent for confounding expectations. After barring Ahmadinejad from Columbia last year, he suddenly invited him back on Wednesday, to widespread criticism, for offering a platform to a despot. Then, Bollinger further surprised with a caustic introduction and a roundup of pointed questions about Iranian nuclear ambitions, persecution of women […]
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You might have seen John Coatsworth, the acting dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs posing questions to Ahmadinejad today. It was Coatsworth who declared that he would invite Hitler to speak at Columbia. He was also a signatory to a “Joint Harvard-MIT Petition for Divestment from Israel” when he was a professor […]
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Wow. The “mind of evil” – he really did mean Ahmadinejad. “Today I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for,” Mr. Bollinger told Mr. Ahmadinejad. “I only wish I could do better.”
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The New York Times City Room is blogging on Ahmadinejad’s Columbia speech. Read this passage from President Bollinger and see if it makes any sense: “To those who believe that this event should never have happened, that it is inappropriate for the university to conduct such an event, I want to say that I understand […]
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K C Johnson, on his web site Durham-in-Wonderland, has written about 850,000 words over the past 18 months on the Duke lacrosse scandal. It has been an astonishing, brilliant effort -graceful, accurate, penetrating and fair. Because of the terrible performance of the mainstream press, Johnson’s blogging quickly became the gold standard of reporting on the […]
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Here’s a game. The following quote is from The Columbia Spectator yesterday. To which campus lecture is the article referring? A university’s free speech is not the same as a country’s free speech, and failing to distinguish the two is hazardous to the intellectual and social climate we are all striving to maintain. After all, […]
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Minding The Campus celebrated its public launch yesterday evening here in New York with a cocktail reception featuring Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson. John Leo introduced our project, followed by KC and Stuart’s lively remarks about their excellent new book Until Proven Innocent. Each detailed the lunacy of the Duke case – the professors’ lockstep assumption […]
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Many college freshmen face their first academic task before they even set foot in a classroom – the freshman summer reading project. Many colleges now select a single volume for all incoming freshmen to read, and construct discussion groups and attendant orientation activities around the book. Temple University’s explanation of its program is fairly representative: […]
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On the surface, Lee Bollinger seems determined to make up for criticisms of his free speech record – in a big way – He’s scheduled to introduce President Ahmadinejad in a speech at Columbia on Monday. Columbia seemed to be making efforts to amend its record, by reinviting both Ahmadinejad, whose speech was canceled last […]
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By Anne Neal Question: What happens when you take a world-class public university, let political correctness run amok, and give it regents who are asleep at the switch? Answer: You get the University of California. Over the last week, UC faculty, administrators and regents have illustrated, in gory and public detail, a principle one would […]
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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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