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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My first office was my best, and it’s been downhill since. I was a junior in college, 20 years old. I worked a few hours each week as a special assistant to the special assistant to my university’s president. About as low on the totem-pole as one could get, yet I had a corner office, […]
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From Greta Thunberg to Black Lives Matter, activists are fond of pointing out society’s imperfections, but are completely clueless when it comes to proposing alternatives. Meritocracy—and related concepts, such as IQ—is a case in point. When Michael Young coined the term in his famous 1958 book The Rise of Meritocracy, many people shunned the idea […]
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The federal indictments against former University of Southern California Dean Marilyn Flynn and Los Angeles City Councilmember Mark Ridley-Thomas so closely parallel those generated by the Varsity Blues case that it is easy to overlook important differences. In the Varsity Blues case, parents paid Rick Singer to bribe senior athletics officials at several leading universities […]
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In the past decade, schools ranging from Yale University, to Middlebury College, to my own Sarah Lawrence College, have made national news over how they have handled issues of free speech and cancel culture. In reaction, many studies and reports have examined institutional initiatives and the free speech environments surrounding protests and viewpoint diversity. But […]
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Over 6,000 non-tenured University of California (UC) lecturers are threatening to go on strike again. This follows an October 12th collective bargaining offer from UC, which the lecturers criticize as insufficient to satisfy their demands for better pay and job security. Adjunct faculty from UC San Diego and UC Santa Cruz claim that the 4.3% […]
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