Month: April 2022

Is Violence the Secret Sauce?

When future historians examine the Left’s capture of the academy, a key question will be “Why was it so easy?” And why so quickly, from top to bottom, even at the most prestigious schools, where, most oddly, resistance was almost non-existent? No military historian could find a parallel in which an invading army prevailed similarly […]

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In Rebuttal: Yes, Socioeconomic Status Should Matter in Admission to Selective Colleges

Last week, George Leef of the James G. Martin Center took issue with Kenin M. Spivak’s article in Minding the Campus that advocated normalizing college admissions data for socioeconomic status. Leef’s thesis was that students denied admission to selective colleges have not been harmed. Last year, I wrote “Socioeconomic Status—The Good Kind of Affirmative Action?” […]

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Reflections on the Tyranny of Campus COVID Restrictions

The COVID-19 pandemic appears to be reaching its natural end, but the careers of those educators who helped to incite panic and hysteria are not. Before we close this chapter in history, it is worthwhile to reflect on what has occurred these past two years at schools and universities. George Mason University was the center […]

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Academia and the Big, Bad Fascist

In Review: Jeffrey M. Bale and Tamir Bar-On’s Fighting the Last War: Confusion, Partisanship and Alarmism in the Literature on the Radical Right Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried “Wolf!” may have been originally addressed to children, but of course, adults are the ones who are in most desperate need of its lesson. This […]

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Winged Words

On April 9-11 the Center for Political and Economic Thought (CPET) at St. Vincent College held a conference on “Panic, Policy, and Politics.” I was an invited speaker. When I first read the proposed schedule, I saw that nearly half the presentations focused on the panicked response to COVID. That made sense, and was a […]

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Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin College: The Warning to Wokesters

Late last month, an Ohio appellate court affirmed the $31.2 million judgment in favor of Gibson’s Bakery and members of the Gibson family against Oberlin College and its former Dean of Students, Meredith Raimondo. While Oberlin and Raimondo can (and probably will) ask the Ohio Supreme Court to review the decision, that Court grants only […]

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Bulldozing Debate about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Princeton radicals promote a toxic referendum to divest from Caterpillar Last week, as Palestinian extremists murdered three more innocent Israeli civilians in Tel Aviv in an escalating campaign of terror, activist students at two American universities voted on repulsive resolutions to urge their respective universities to divest from companies doing business with Israel. On April […]

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Further Evidence That Higher Education Accreditation Is a Cartel

Accreditors serve as key gatekeepers in higher education. Without accreditation, a college’s students are not eligible to receive federal financial aid such as Pell grants and federal student loans. This gives accreditors a fairly unique role in allocating federal spending—these private entities decide whether taxpayer dollars will flow to a college. Given that the public […]

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Student Loan Suspension Robs the Poor and Enriches the Privileged

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Liberty Unyielding on April 10, 2022, and is republished here with permission. Joe Biden has provided billions of dollars in handouts to high-income people. The most recent example is his administration’s decision last week to suspend student loan repayments yet again, through August 31. It did that even though people with big student loans tend […]

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The Moral Panic at MIT

If you’re looking for proof that America’s panic-stricken institutions of higher education are still in the throes of punitive overreach from the MeToo movement, look no further than the announcement last week that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is parting ways with its most preeminent medical researcher, Dr. David Sabatini. In the healthcare community, […]

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What’s the Basis for Diversity Hiring?

In February 2021, Ohio State University President Kristina Johnson announced a new initiative called RAISE (for race, inclusion, and social equity) to hire 150 new faculty. At least 50 of the RAISE faculty were to be scientists, artists, and scholars whose work addresses social equity and racial disparities, and 100 were to be “underrepresented and […]

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Recent Articles Show Stunning Lack of Self-Awareness among Higher Education Establishment

Set forth below are three articles that appeared in the last few weeks in the higher education trade press: A ‘Stunning’ Level of Student Disconnection How a President Decided It Was Time to Close His College The Enrollment Crisis for Men Continues to Worsen The first two appeared in the bible of the higher education […]

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How to Fix Borrower Defense

Mass student debt forgiveness is unpopular with Republicans and even some Democrats. As such, it’s unlikely that the Biden administration will forgive all $1.45 trillion in student loan debt prior to the midterm elections. But that hasn’t stopped unelected bureaucrats in the administration from working behind closed doors to forgive massive amounts of student loans […]

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Suppressing Pro-Israel Views at the University of Chicago

Student newspaper retracts an op-ed challenging the tactics of anti-Israel radicals The suppression of pro-Israel views on college campuses has been a troubling development in the ongoing cognitive war against Israel. Now, the silencing of pro-Israel voices even appears in student newspapers. The McGill Daily, as one troubling example, has a long-standing, publicly announced policy […]

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Normalizing Illiberalism

What does it take for a fringe dogma that preys on frail human divisions and obsesses with power struggles to be promoted en masse and generally accepted in a country where political liberalism had been the norm? The radical reshaping of contemporary American minds towards an unnatural preoccupation with cultural relativism and identity tribalism began […]

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Debunking the Debunker

The racist, determinist, and anti-individualist mythology behind Robin DiAngelo’s “most common myths white people believe about race” Robin DiAngelo has suddenly gotten very well-known and much wealthier because of her tapping by cultural and educational elites as one of the “experts” on white racism and concomitant non-white suffering. The university at which I am employed […]

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Town vs. Gown: A Personal Memoir

America is awash in culture wars, but one of the least noticed yet most consequential is the hostility between the academy and business. More is involved than a gaggle of Marxist professors condemning capitalism. Academics, especially those in the social sciences and humanities, not only support the increasingly anti-business Democratic Party; their loathing is often […]

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