Editor’s Note: This piece is part of an ongoing series of articles by Professor Bruce Gilley. To read the other articles in the series, click here. Just when serious scholars started to worry about the pandemic of junk citations, others were positively promoting them. The “citation justice” movement I discussed in the last installment is […]
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The purpose of ruthless objectivity and extreme expertise “Those who are looking ahead to a new movement in education, should think in terms of Education itself. Any movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism’ becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms’ that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is a speech delivered by Professor Elizabeth Weiss of San Jose State University at a meeting of the California Association of Scholars on March 16, 2023. It has been edited prior to publication. Recent reports from Texas Tech University, Stanford University, and the University of North Carolina show promising signs that […]
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“So justice is driven back, and righteousness stands at a distance; truth has stumbled in the streets, honesty cannot enter.” – Isaiah 59:14, NIV I am a sixty-six-year-old philosophy professor. If you are still reading, consider an approach to teaching and writing that I have practiced ever since I went to college and, especially, since […]
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The last 30 years have seen a substantial change in the composition of college and university faculties, including a significant increase in the share of instruction delivered by non-tenure-track, contingent faculty, both full time and part time. Based on data from the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, the U.S Government […]
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The higher education accountability movement has seen very little progress over the years. The main success was the establishment of Cohort Default Rates, which revoked financial aid eligibility for colleges where too many students defaulted on their student loans. But this was both obscenely forgiving (a college could only lose eligibility if 30% or more […]
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Why the heckler’s veto is wrong, and why universities must stop it Something disturbing is taking place with increasing regularity at elite law schools. For the third time this year, a guest speaker has been rudely confronted by a mob of tendentious scolds intent on suppressing views with which they disagree. Not content to merely […]
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Western civilization depends on science, but science, especially social science, is now under threat. Until WWII, science was mostly a vocation. Scientists were motivated by curiosity and the search for verifiable truth. Since the growth of centralized, largely governmental funding, science has become not so much a vocation as a profession. Career incentives now increasingly […]
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“Each side is coming face to face with its own conception of the devil!” – Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night Arthur Rackham’s 1935 illustration of Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelstrom” At some point while reading The Peloponnesian War (late fifth century BC) you begin to realize that Thucydides is up […]
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Portland State University (PSU) closed its Confucius Institute (CI) in January 2021, citing “a range of financial, staffing and operational reasons.” Thus it shuttered its China-backed language program of 13 years. In its announcement of the closure, PSU noted that it intended to “expand direct academic ties” with China. PSU has made good on its […]
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Editor’s Note: This piece is part of an ongoing series of articles by Professor Bruce Gilley. To read the other articles in the series, click here. If you plan to present a paper at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Spokane next year, please be advised: your submission needs to be chock full […]
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The higher education reform movement, as pursued by Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature, has run into a heavy barrage of criticism from both the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and Keith Whittington, who, though writing in his individual capacity, is chairman of the governing committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA). Normally, […]
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Imagine if a single law could simultaneously force colleges to drastically lower their costs and decimate the diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE) bureaucracy. Happily, this is possible, and the solution can be summarized in a single word: unbundling. Almost overnight, the cost of college would fall precipitously, students would mature as they learned to manage […]
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With China on track to produce nearly double the number of STEM doctoral graduates as the US by 2025, it is worthwhile to reflect on the national importance of these fields. A nation’s security and economic prosperity rely largely on STEM capability. Indeed, much of the historical success of the industrialized West was owed to […]
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Since the University of Chicago pioneered the test-optional movement in 2018 by dropping the SAT and the ACT from its undergraduate admissions requirements—ostensibly to “level the playing field”—1,843 accredited four-year colleges in the U.S. have made standardized tests optional, and 84 have gone completely “test-blind.” Diminishing or eliminating the role of admissions tests seems to […]
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In “How To Fix Student Loans—Permanently,” Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity Senior Fellow Preston Cooper proposes an alternative solution to the Biden administration’s expensive student loan jubilee: financial penalties for colleges and universities whose graduates struggle to make repayments. His solution holds institutions accountable for a portion of unpaid loan repayments. He expects the […]
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The atmosphere was akin to Hotel Rwanda—a beleaguered assemblage of innocents shivering behind thin walls, surrounded by a tempestuous sea where the dark forces of the anti-science movement lurked, ready to snuff out enlightenment at the first opportunity. Such was the recent annual meeting of America’s preeminent scientific body, the American Association for the Advancement […]
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Why do countless students willingly pay upwards of $50,000 a year for a degree in black studies, when the skills they learn are seldom sought in the marketplace? In fact, the opposite may be true: few employers want to hire angry activists who’ve spent years marinating in grievances while learning to write impenetrable, jargon-filled prose […]
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Leftists specialize in pejorative labeling of anyone who disagrees with them, calling them racist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe, Islamophobe, deplorable, etc. But they save their ultimate insults for their most important targets; they are labeled “fascists,” “Nazis,” and “literally Hitler.” These childish insults take the place of serious debate, of presenting arguments substantiated by evidence, and […]
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Editor’s Note: This piece is part of an ongoing series of articles by Professor Bruce Gilley. To read the other articles in the series, click here. In 1980, two doctors from the Boston University Medical Center published a five-sentence letter in the New England Journal of Medicine noting that only four of their 11,882 patients […]
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The ability to express diverse viewpoints without reputational and professional consequences has been under threat at colleges and universities for many years now. Numerous surveys and reports reveal that students on both the Left and the Right consistently self-censor for fear of being canceled. Yet, these issues have a geographic component—they appear to be most […]
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Not all segregationists are created equal. Some lose their jobs—others get six-figure salaries. Last week cartoonist Scott Adams became the first type of segregationist, losing his award-winning comic strip for advocating that his fellow whites separate themselves from blacks to avoid racial harm (apparently the Dilbert creator is afraid of black people). Ironically, just days […]
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Last week the student chapter of Turning Point USA at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) attempted to show on campus a film, “The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM,” produced by The Daily Wire and narrated by Candace Owens. Fifteen minutes into the film, before an audience of approximately fifty […]
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For almost five years, I have been sounding the alarm about problematic higher education administrators. Not only are these staffers omnipresent and growing in number, but they try to set the terms of discourse on campuses nationwide and actively promote progressivism among the student body. This tragic state of affairs was on vivid display last […]
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In October, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was finalized, and he quickly made changes to the social media service. Musk built his reputation as an innovator, first in online commerce and later with SpaceX and Tesla. His reforms at Twitter follow a historic pattern of diagnosing problems and quickly working to implement a vision that […]
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“I think that you appreciate that there are extraordinary men and women and extraordinary moments when history leaps forward on the backs of these individuals, that what can be imagined can be achieved, that you must dare to dream, but that there’s no substitute for perseverance and hard work …” – FBI Special Agent Dana […]
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Over the last forty years, public approval and political support for non-profit higher education have eroded significantly. While a resurgence of anti-elitist populism in American culture contributed, the erosion resulted fundamentally from the historical competition among colleges and universities to acquire revenue and wealth and to increase spending on non-instructional programs and amenities, as we […]
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Editor’s Note: This piece is part of an ongoing series of articles by Professor Bruce Gilley. To read the other articles in the series, click here. In a grant request I was recently asked to review, the applicant cited a 2022 academic article by the grandly titled Boeing Distinguished Assistant Professor in Environmental Sociology at […]
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Literature Is Critical Precisely Because Nobody Thinks So As he sailed into the horizon, Odysseus might have wondered what really happens when you become nobody. That was Dante’s take on him, at least (see Inferno 26). The Ithacan overreached and his individualism erased him from the world. The Pillars of Hercules, which marked the edge […]
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Ohio State University’s (OSU) College of Engineering heavily emphasizes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). For faculty, contributing to DEI is now simply a part of the job—in 2020, the college added questions about DEI to its annual reviews. That move is no surprise, as the college already asked for diversity statements from many of its […]
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