Is This Our Most Corrupted Campus Department?

That question
was the start of an item I posted yesterday on Facebook, referring to KC
Johnson’s excellent essay (above), The Ruinous Reign of Race-and-Gender
Historians.  It was a question for a reason: the two super techies in our
family, my wife Jackie, editor of the quite brilliant
financial-business-political site, The
Fiscal Times
, and my youngest daughter Alex, a technical whiz at Reuters,
have been telling me (a dedicated non-techie) that to attract comments on Facebook
and other social media sites, it’s always best to start with a question. Sure
enough, my item drew a lot of comments. The  15th and best came from Alan Charles Kors, an outstanding
professor of history at Penn, co-founder of FIRE and co-author of “The Shadow
University.” He wrote: ” Not the most corrupted department on campuses—try
English, Comp Lit, Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies, and on—but the most
tragically corrupted department.” I agree–his list is worse. But history
matters and reform of our wayward history departments is urgent.

Author

  • John Leo

    John Leo is the editor of Minding the Campus, dedicated to chronicling imbalances within higher education and restoring intellectual pluralism to our American universities. His popular column, "On Society," ran in U.S.News & World Report for 17 years.

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