Peter H. Schuck is an emeritus professor at Yale Law School. His most recent book is, “One Nation Undecided: Clear Thinking About Five Hard Issues That Divide Us" (Princeton University Press).
Anthony Kronman, my long-time Yale Law School colleague and perhaps the most eloquent individual I know personally, has written a brave, high-minded, argumentative, and largely persuasive book about the values and choices that should animate our greatest colleges and universities but no longer do. His book, The Assault on American Excellence, is also quixotic in […]
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We can all agree that students, like all other people in this country, have a right to protest the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. Most of us can also agree that Dr. Blasey Ford’s allegations against him, now joined by Deborah Ramirez’s disturbing story, warrant further inquiry before the votes […]
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Federal efforts to alleviate the high and rising cost of attending college through student loans have morphed from a policy challenge to a fiscal time bomb threatening to blow up the financial future of tens of millions of Americans and the government’s own solvency. Dressed up as a progressive achievement, it is actually a failure […]
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Chattering classes throughout the world are talking about identity politics and with good reason. It is propelling the so-called populist movements, and the response to those movements, which are shaking the foundations of almost every society today. Whether a polity is democratic, authoritarian, or anarchic, it is awash with clamorous appeals to relatively narrow allegiances […]
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We professors should transmit to our students three simple but ancient truths: (1) in many important matters in our fields, the ignorance of experts vastly exceeds our knowledge. (2) Much of what we think we know is hard to verify and may well be wrong. (3) We, and the materials that we will assign and […]
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Almost two years have passed since the Halloween imbroglio at Yale in 2015, which launched the current era of student mobilizations against speech that some students don’t want to hear. Whatever their ideological stance, these protests aim to intimidate controversial speakers and those who would invite them to campus, to prevent others from hearing them, […]
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A New book by Peter H. Schuck, One Nation Undecided: Clear Thinking about Five Hard Issues That Divide Us, focuses on five issues: poverty, immigration, campaign finances, affirmative action, and religious objections to gay marriage and the transgender movement. This excerpt deals with affirmative action. Institutions argue that a “critical mass” of favored minorities assembled […]
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On November 10, following the campus thousand-member “March for Resilience” over racial insensitivity, Yale president, Peter Salovey and Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway emailed those of us in the Yale community. affirming “the importance we put on our community’s diversity, and the need to increase it, support it, and respect it.” The email embraced “the […]
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