On Sunday night, CNN will air The Hunting Ground—a work of activist propaganda disguised as a documentary about sexual assault on American college campuses. Among its numerous faults, the film blames the campus rape problem on a plague of serial rapists; expert opinion on this matter comes courtesy of psychologist David Lisak, whose misleading interpretation […]
Some politicians and media outlets seem to believe that college and university campuses are beset by a culture that is indifferent to rape and that the procedures for investigating and adjudicating claims of sexual assault are so one-sided as to constitute gender discrimination against female accusers. In reality, schools for decades have denied meaningful due […]
By KC Johnson The Chronicle of Higher Education has received a good deal of attention for putting together a website cataloguing all the Title IX complaints currently pending with the Obama administration’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). But the site should mostly be seen as a concrete demonstration of how little we know about these […]
The long-awaited Columbia Journalism Review report of Rolling Stone’s UVA article, which ostensibly takes the magazine to task for falsely reporting a rape that never happened, sparked a new outcry from both the media and students on America’s college campuses. They’re horrified that the report could have a chilling effect on students reporting sexual assaults. No […]
This is the edited transcript of Manhattan Institute’s March 10 panel discussion of “The Truth About Campus Sexual Assault” featuring Heather Mac Donald (City Journal), KC Johnson (Brooklyn College, Minding the Campus) Amy Wax (U. of Pennsylvania Law) and moderator Howard Husock, (Manhattan Institute). *** HOWARD HUSOCK: We have been told that a crisis of […]
The knock against anthropologists used to be that they were all relativists. Not anymore. Many anthropologists today are hardcore moral absolutists. The members of the American Anthropological Association are busy voting (until May 31) on a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The proposed resolution jumps off in its first sentence in universalist language, claiming that […]
One major and negative narrative about the justice system is that wealthy and well-connected people get to live by different rules than the rest of us. One can find examples both reinforcing and undermining this, but the prevailing narrative remains. If one wanted to find a blatant example of wealthy, privileged people getting their own […]
Janet Napolitano left her post as Secretary of Homeland Security in July to become the president of the University of California. The decision of the UC Regents to appoint her surprised me. As I wrote at the time, she had “no discernible qualification” for the position–other than a politician’s ability to raise money and a […]
Cross-posted from Concurring Opinions Books have lined the shelves of the offices of all my colleagues at every school where I have worked. In my early days of teaching, or when spending a term as a visitor, I’d wander into a learned neighbor’s office to get acquainted. The titles and content of those books announced […]
The 1997 film Good Will Hunting features Matt Damon’s character in a conversation with Harvard students, touting Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States as a way to better understand the American past. The scene was cringe-worthy for at least two reasons. First, there was something more than a little off-putting about a movie whose lead character demonstrated […]
If African American students are disciplined in schools at a higher rate than are white students, the obvious reason is that African American students commit a disproportionate number of infractions. Not according to “disparate impact” (or “disparate outcomes”) thinking, however. Any time one sees significant gaps in black and white treatments or results–suspensions, test scores, […]
Not surprisingly, the University of Wisconsin at Madison has been deeply affected by the important labor dispute that has consumed the state, its capitol, and the nation the last two weeks. Passions are high, especially over the part of Governor Scott Walker’s budget proposal that will drastically limit collective bargaining by state employees covered by […]
The Arizona Civil Rights Amendment, also known as Proposition 107 or HCR 2019, will be on the November, 2, 2010, ballot. Virtually identical to similar measures launched by Ward Connerly and passed by substantial margins in California, Washington, Michigan, and Nebraska, Prop. 107 would amend the Arizona constitution to prohibit the state from “discriminat[ing] against […]
The hysterical reaction of some professors at Texas’s public universities to a new state law requiring them to post their resumes and course syllabi online says more about the paranoia and elitism of the professoriate than about the supposed witch-hunting mentality behind the new law. The law, Texas House Bill 2504, passed in May 2009, […]
This is the slightly edited introduction to the author’s new collection of essays, Decline and Revival in Higher Education ( Transaction Publishers ). Dr. London is president of the Hudson Institute, one of the founders of the National Association of Scholars, and the former John M. Olin Professor of the Humanities at New York University. […]
[This is an excerpt from a paper delivered by Roger Kimball at the Manhattan Institute’s Closing Of The American Mind conference. It will appear in complete form in The New Criterion.] ..It is a rich and promiscuous stew that Allan Bloom served up, part polemic, part exhortation, part exercise in cultural-intellectual history. It sometimes grabs […]