Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars and author of “1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project.”
History News Network In 2012, the College Board released a new set of standards for the Advanced Placement United States History (APUSH) course. APUSH vanishes some figures who would seem indispensable to any basic history of the United States. This is American history seemingly without Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. “Seemingly” is a key word. If you […]
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The Republican National Committee adopted a resolution on August 8 criticizing the College Board’s new Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) course and exam. The RNC called for the College Board to “delay the implementation” of APUSH for one year and convene a committee to draft a new framework “consistent with” the traditional mission of the […]
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This article is third in a series on “the year that was” in higher education. The first two articles are here and here. Campus activism is, by and large, the world of make-believe. Whenever students occupy a president’s office, Tinkerbell is not far away. Whenever faculty demand a boycott, Professor Dumbledore winks at Professor Snape.
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The College Board recently released its new AP U.S. History (APUSH) Curriculum Framework. It is, in many respects, a dispiriting document. A great deal of important U.S. history is given cursory treatment and some ideological themes are sounded rather loudly.
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At the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009, leaders from more than a hundred nations gathered to consider an agenda that included a massive transfer of money from developed countries to the Third World. The developed states were tagged to provide $130 billion by 2020 to help developing nations deal with the consequences of […]
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National Association of Scholars How frequent are sexual assaults on campus? President Obama recently cited the estimate that one in five women enrolled in college suffer sexual assault by the time they graduate. The Bureau of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, based on reported crimes, put the rate at 1 in 40. Reported crimes inevitably fall short […]
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Stanford University’s board of trustees has voted to divest from the university’s $18.7 billion endowment all of its holdings in coal-based energy companies. The university, which is private, has not disclosed what holdings these are, their market value, or the likely cost to the institution in foregone growth of its portfolio. The significance of the […]
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When I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s at an elite liberal arts college, my anthropology professor assigned me as a paper topic, “Why do nearly all the students in the college wear blue jeans?” It was a surprisingly tough question. Looking around, virtually every student at the all-male college was wearing Levis or […]
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How do the fine arts fit with the liberal arts? Not as well as one might think. Painting, music, photography, and other arts are often part of today’s jumbled curriculum, but they seldom have the academic status of disciplines such as English and art history. The situation is reversed when it comes to public status, where having a prize-winning […]
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As a child I relished picking through rocks to find fossils of the lush tropical swamp that once covered my corner of southwest Pennsylvania. On trips to Ohio I collected specimens of the briny brachiopods that littered the floor of an inland ocean. Climate changes. I knew that by age seven. Whether it is changing […]
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My friend Sol Stern has published a rejoinder here to two essays I recently published about the Common Core K-12 State Standards. Sol had quite a bit to say and I have replied point by point in an essay on the National Association of Scholars website. What follows is an abbreviated account. Sol makes, by […]
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Changes in the SAT, announced on March 5 by the College Board, adjust the test to the ongoing decline in the nation’s public schools. The new test lightens vocabulary and math and eliminates the penalty for bad guessing. The new SAT grows out of and accommodates the Common Core State Standards, the controversial set of […]
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The College Board is reformulating the SAT. Again. The new changes, like others that have been instituted since the mid 1990s, are driven by politics. David Coleman, head of the College Board, is also the chief architect of the Common Core K-12 State Standards, which are now mired in controversy across the country. Coleman’s initiative in revising the […]
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By now, Ms. Sandra Y. L. Korn must be wondering whether she picked her words wisely. On Monday, February 17, Ms. Korn, a Harvard senior, published an essay in The Harvard Crimson, titled “The Doctrine of Academic Freedom,” with the explosive sub-head, “Let’s give up on academic freedom in favor of justice.” The Crimson has […]
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The academic left has created a great deal of mischief by appropriating wholesome words for unwholesome ends. This game has been perfected with diversity, inclusion, social justice, and sustainability–all words that mean roughly the opposite of what they sound like. Diversity on college campuses denotes both lockstep conformity on identity group politics and radical stereotyping of people by race. Inclusion means excluding […]
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On February 6 the Maine Heritage Policy Center sponsored a small conference in Brunswick, Maine. The idea was to present a follow-up to the National Association of Scholars’ lengthy study, What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students, by following one of its many threads. KC Johnson, one of the speakers, published […]
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Heather Mac Donald may be the Ida Tarbell of our age: a writer who combines a meticulous eye for facts, intellectual brilliance, a sure sense of the historical moment, and deep moral seriousness. Tarbell is famous for her History of the Standard Oil Company, serialized in McClure’s Magazine between 1902 and 1904, and is celebrated today by the Left for […]
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The membership of the American Studies Association (ASA) on December 15 voted by a two-thirds majority to endorse a boycott of Israeli universities. Minding the Campus has provided good coverage of both the events leading up to this vote and its immediate aftermath. David Bernstein at George Mason and Jonathan Marks at Ursinus College have kept a close watch on the […]
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The wolf at the door of American higher education is online instruction. Traditional residential colleges hear it snuffling at the threshold. They know they are vulnerable. They cannot compete on price. Online is intrinsically cheaper. They compete awkwardly on utility. Online instruction is a more efficient way to convey knowledge and skills in a lot […]
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Michelle Obama would like more students to attend college. In a speech on November 12, which was immediately recognized by the media as a major shift in policy emphasis, Mrs. Obama told students at a Washington, D.C. high school that the administration would work hard to increase the number of low-income students who pursue college […]
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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 […]
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The heavily publicized campaign by gay activists against University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus is back in the news, this time with more ominous implications for peer review and academic freedom. A Florida court has ordered that records of confidential peer reviews of scholarly articles be turned over to a self-styled “investigative journalist.” It is […]
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New York City is bracing for the arrival of its new mayor, Bill de Blasio, whose policy preferences are rooted in the left-wing thinking prevalent in our universities. In his successful mayoral campaign, de Blasio, who collected 73 percent of the vote, had much to say about K-12 education and pre-K education. De Blasio expressed […]
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Hadley Arkes is the Edward N. Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions at Amherst College. He is something of an institution himself. He is a brilliant scholar but perhaps known as much for his irascible temper and aggressive style of argument as he is for the substance of his positions. The combination of intellectual […]
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I first heard of Trayvon Martin via a posted comment on an article I had written for the Chronicle of Higher Education in early March 2012. In retrospect that seems significant. The comment from some anonymous academic came a few days after the shooting and a month before President Obama observed in a Rose Garden […]
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Janet Napolitano’s appointment as president of the University of California is among the oddest choices ever for chief executive of a major university. Napolitano has no discernible qualification to serve as president of the nation’s premier public university. This is not to say that she lacks attainments. Before she was appointed Secretary of Homeland Security […]
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The Sunday New York Times this week included one of those impressive (and expensive) full-page ads that appear when an interest group wants to make a Big Statement. The new ad, sponsored by the Washington Higher Education Secretariat (WHES), is addressed to all of us. It declares in all-caps, “DIVERSITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION REMAINS AN […]
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The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has just issued the Heart of the Matter, a 61-page report (plus appendices) aimed at persuading Congress to spend more money on the humanities. This is one of the report’s immediate goals, phrased of course in the financial imperative, “Increase investment in research and discovery.” The report as […]
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In a letter dated May 9, the federal government dramatically expanded the definition of sexual harassment on campus. In the 31-page letter, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S. Department of Education, informed the president of the University of Montana, Royce […]
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“F*** Your Constructive Dialogue” reads the headline of an article by Kate Aronoff that’s posted on a website that “seeks to facilitate the discussion of political, cultural, and social issues that are often left out of mainstream discourse.” (The asterisks, as Stanley Kurtz nicely put it, are not in the original.) Ms. Aronoff is a […]
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