Five days before Christmas, one of Canada’s most courageous scholars was fired by her university because she had consistently dissented from its rigid ideology on indigenous issues. I wish there were more to say about the shameful expulsion of Professor Frances Widdowson by administrative heavies at Mount Royal University (MRU) in Calgary. Alas, the story […]
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The Enlightenment ideal of the university is a community of scholars seeking the truth. The methodology of this ideal is a multiplicity of voices and views engaged in discussion and debate, in seeking and adducing evidence, and in drawing and challenging conclusions. Western universities have gradually but decisively moved away from the Enlightenment ideal. Many […]
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Author’s Note: While I am a lawyer, I’m not your lawyer. Nothing in this article is intended to be legal advice from me, my firm, Minding the Campus, or anyone else. If you have a specific legal issue, I encourage you to contact counsel, particularly one familiar with the state law applicable to your situation. Since I began writing about […]
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Thuy Thi Nguyen, our nation’s first Vietnamese-American college president and leader of California’s Foothill College, was recently ousted by the college’s Academic Senate in an unprecedented vote of no confidence. The Senate, which gives recommendations to the District Board of Trustees on academic and professional matters, accused Nguyen’s administration of prioritizing equity over educational competitiveness. […]
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If the proverbial Martian toured today’s American universities, he would be perplexed. On the one hand, elite institutions have never been better. Endowments are soaring, applications for admission are similarly increasing, and families willingly pay ever-higher tuition bills while the schools’ prestige is as unquestioned as always. Yet, our keen-eyed Martian would surely notice underlying […]
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Let’s say that I made the argument that smoking causes cancer, and that I backed this up with a mountain of scientific data and peer-reviewed studies. Now suppose that someone were to respond to all of this with the following: “But my grandpa Bob smoked cigarettes all of his life and never developed cancer! So […]
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As we live through our current “Woke” Revolution, it is helpful to reflect on what we can learn from past revolutions and revolutionaries. Long before he was a Founding Father, Ben Franklin was one of the most successful “influencers” (as we’d say now) in the American colonies. His Poor Richard’s Almanack was a multi-decade bestseller. […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearWire on December 7, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. The American Idea podcast looks “to restore an understanding of the history and principles that show us what it means to be an American,” says Ashbrook Center executive director Jeff Sikkenga. Presented by Ashbrook, the podcast “explores […]
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In 2003, Adam Bellow published a piece in The Atlantic titled “In Praise of Nepotism”—he would later expand his argument into a book with the same title. Playing the contrarian in the room, Bellow argues that nepotism is in our genes (as per the phenomenon of kin selection), and that we might as well learn […]
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Progressive activists seek to blacklist and purge pro-Israel Jews from campus As if to confirm the depth of its anti-Israel animus, the Student Union of the University of Toronto at Scarborough (SCSU) passed a poisonous motion during its virtual November 24th meeting. The motion stipulates that SCSU “reaffirm its commitment to the BDS movement by […]
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The University of Georgia (UGA), “the birthplace of public education in America,” recently posted a tenured faculty cluster hiring notice for its Integrative Precision Agriculture program. The program, a cross-disciplinary undertaking between the Engineering and Agricultural & Environmental Sciences colleges, seeks tenured or tenure-track professors who have expertise in distributed sensing, systems modeling, AI-enabled decision […]
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Schools are teaching critical race theory, even as liberal education reporters deny it is taught anywhere, and falsely claim it is not taught in in even a single school system. Detroit’s school superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, says critical race theory is deeply embedded in his school system: “Our curriculum is deeply using critical race theory, especially […]
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For a model, we must turn to the U.K. “We learn how to behave as lawyers, soldiers, merchants, by being them. Life, not the parson, teaches conduct.” Letter from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Frederick Pollock, April 1926 “As a man is said to have a right in his property, he may equally be said to […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by American Thinker on November 27, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. Climate change prophecy hangs its hat on computer climate models. The models have gigantic problems. According to Kevin Trenberth, once in charge of modeling at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, “[None of the] models correspond even […]
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Duke’s student government shuts down a new pro-Israel group for defending the Jewish state from lies As if further evidence were needed for the First-Amendment hypocrisy on college campuses, the recent action by the Duke Student Government (DSG) to withhold recognition from a new pro-Israel student group seems to confirm that academic free speech is […]
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The airwaves have combusted. Parents confront school boards. Across the country, state and government agencies are moving in opposite directions: some release the genie of racial equity and Critical Race Theory (CRT) while others try to corral it and squeeze it back into the bottle. In California, CRT, either explicitly or implicitly through its aligned […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is a letter to the editor of Duke Today, written by an anonymous professor in response to Duke University President Vincent Price’s November 18 article, “President Price Update on Campus Climate Survey.” Good to see that something is finally being done about the appalling racial climate that exists on the Duke campus. […]
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I’m a professor of engineering at a large progressive university. I’ve written and just released a short book with James Lindsay called Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond. I’ve written it to help academics who believe in traditional liberal values to counter and overturn the Woke juggernaut […]
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When you are looking for a scientist, an engineer, a designer, or an artist, if the most brilliant, accomplished, and talented candidate is a white male, reject him! White males are not “diverse,” are “privileged oppressors,” and “overrepresented,” so instead hire a member of a “marginalized. underserved minority,” such as a person of color, a […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Nathan A. Schachtman on November 17, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. “You are more than entitled not to know what the word ‘performative’ means. It is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it does not mean anything very much. But at any rate […]
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Does Harvard need an ethnic studies department? That question has fueled debates at the university for several decades. Academics made the first call for such a department in 1972. In recent years, pressures have mounted. The Harvard ethnic studies campaign may now be approaching resolution. As it does so, a key question remains as to […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearWire on November 16, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. Christopher Flannery insists that a civic rebirth depends “on the great truths of the Western heritage” and “the liberating principles of the American Revolution and Founding ” – the foundational truths that Abraham Lincoln called the “principles […]
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At the height of globalization in the 1990s and early 2000s, many political economists—including Susan Strange, Philip G. Cerny, and Nita Rudra—argued that forces of economic and cultural neoliberalism were steadily eroding traditional nation-states and welfare societies. In developed countries, backlash against globalism often manifested as labor protectionism, trade barriers, and nationalism. Meanwhile, in developing […]
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For me and other alumni of the University of Texas, it has become less and less surprising how deeply the gospel of wokeness has permeated and corrupted the institution. Whether it is the dean of UT Law preemptively surrendering to the wokesters and neutering the newly endowed First Amendment Center before it even opened, or […]
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Academics and activists (if there is any difference between them today) claim that racism is a unidirectional relationship through which whites oppress blacks. For example, the leftist Anti-Defamation League defines racism as “A combination of systems, institutions and factors that advantage white people and for people of color, cause widespread harm and disadvantages in access […]
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California has become the first state to require ethnic studies for high school graduates. Assembly Bill 101 (an appropriately Orwellian number!), signed by Governor Gavin Newsom on October 8, will indoctrinate students through the use of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a Marxist-inspired ideology that, if left unchecked, will form the foundation for the restructuring of […]
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In a recent video, filmmaker Ami Horowitz asks students at the University of California, Berkeley to pledge money to the Taliban so that it can mount terrorist attacks inside the United States. The students happily pledge their money to enable that. They belong to a woke, self-hating academic culture that is reshaping our society. “We’re […]
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To ban or to disclose, that is the question. A largely partisan imbroglio has been quietly simmering about the billions of dollars of foreign funds received by American universities. The dispute generally pits conservatives who are concerned about the effects of foreign funding against the elites who often embrace the communist and Jihadist-supporting countries that […]
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As Minding the Campus readers are all too aware, these are dark times in higher education. Political correctness and an enforced far-left ideology (complete with loyalty oaths, departmental diversity commissars, Red Guard-style cancel culture mobs, and cowardly administrators and regents) have created an environment where intellectual rigor and academic freedom are dismissed as the products […]
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As free speech increasingly disappears from today’s campus, the seemingly good news is that groups defending the First Amendment are multiplying. The most recent are the Alumni Free Speech Alliance and the faculty-based Academic Freedom Alliance, whose members span the political spectrum. Also of recent vintage is Heterodoxy Academy, a group of 5000+ educators committed to […]
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