Five students drinking Gatorade and water for a week are apparently all it takes to bring a major university to its knees. Columbia has had more than its share of lunatic events this year – the noose, the cancellation of the Minuteman speakers for the second time, inviting and then abusing the Iranian madman, and […]
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Here are links for the majority of papers from the American Enterprise Institute’s “Reforming The Politically Correct University” conference on November 14. Do take a look; there’s much of worth here: – “The American University: Yesterday, Today – and Tomorrow” James Piereson – “By the Numbers: The Ideological Profile of Professors” Daniel Klein & Charlotta […]
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Good friends of the Manhattan Institute were among the winners of the 2007 National Arts and Humanities Medals bestowed today at the White House by President Bush. Among them were Roger Hertog, chairman emeritus of the Institute’s board of trustees, Stephen H. Balch, founder and longtime president of the National Association of Scholars, and author […]
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A lot has been written about the details of the residential life program at the University of Delaware, and the ways in which it has bullied students and residential assistants to accept regnant orthodoxy. The nation’s collective hat should go off to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for exposing this program, and for […]
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The following is a call for papers to be delivered at the Society for Cultural Anthropology meeting next May aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. Frankly, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to us, so as we struggle to understand, we ask you readers for help. This passage, we can all […]
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Yesterday I attended a fine conference at the American Enterprise Institute, “Reforming The Politically Correct University.” AEI commissioned papers on various aspects of the PC university from Peter Wood, Steve Balch, Greg Lukianoff, John Agresto, John McWhorter, and many others. They’re to appear in book form next summer, but many are available now at the […]
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Stuart Taylor’s brilliant rant in this week’s National Journal (“Academia’s Pervasive PC Rot”) says “the cancerous spread of ideologically eccentric, intellectually shoddy, phony-diversity-obsessed fanaticism among university faculties and administrators is far, far worse and more inexorable than most alumni, parents, and trustees suspect.” There’s an obvious explanation of why so many university watchers don’t seem […]
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At a conference on November 14, the American Enterprise Institute released two important new studies by Daniel Klein of George Mason University and Charlotta Stern of Stockholm University. Their research, part of a forthcoming book titled Reforming the Politically Correct University, verifies even further that liberals and progressives outnumber conservatives and libertarians on campuses, overwhelmingly […]
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Alas, one of the intrepid Columbia hunger strikers has given in. How will they ever force Columbia to stop expanding, increase resources for minority centers, require more ethnic study courses, and make January sunnier with such lazy tactics. Especially now that a gourmand opposition group has mobilized – “Why We Act, Why We Eat,” whose […]
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KC Johnson’s remarkable blog, Durham-in-Wonderland, has generated 90,000 reader comments since it emerged as the most reliable source of information and analysis on the Duke/Nifong non-rape scandal. The following is an excerpt from a November 6 reader comment on Duke’s president Richard Brodhead and the book, “Until Proven Innocent” by Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr. […]
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When I wrote about the ludicrous Columbia Spectator op-ed linking a “Euro-Centric curriculum” to the noose incidents, I suggested that the author was clearly not alone in her sentiments. Today we have confirmation; there are plenty of fools at Columbia. The Spectator reports: Beginning today, five Columbia students will go on a hunger strike to […]
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More on indoctrination at the University Of Delaware. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) sent Patrick Harker, the president of the University, a voluminous set of papers on how their residence life program was run. “Hundreds of pages, without exception, are about how to indoctrinate students,” school of education professor Jan Blits told […]
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California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed legislation (SB 190), authored by State Senator Leland Yee, which would require the governing boards of California’s two university systems – the University of California and the California State University – to determine future pay increases of university executives in meetings that would be open to the public. “This […]
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Here’s another bit of wisdom from the Columbia Spectator, this time on the repulsive noose incidents. Here’s the first sentence of the op-ed. See if anything strikes you as odd. In the past weeks’ furor about nooses and graffiti, which dramatize age-old concerns about our Eurocentric curriculum, paternalistic gentrification efforts, and feelings of marginalization from […]
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Sharad Karkhanis, professor emeritus at Kingsborough Community College, is a vitriolic critic of the faculty union at the City University of New York. He’s accused Susan O’Malley, another professor at Kingsborough, of seeking to “recruit terrorists” to teach at CUNY. O’Malley has responded with a two million dollar libel suit, reports the New York Post: […]
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C-SPAN Book TV will broadcast three panels from the Manhattan Institute Center for the American University’s Closing of the American Mind Conference on Saturday and Sunday. Take a look at the schedule for details. Robert George, Roger Kimball, Jim Piereson, Heather MacDonald, and other luminaries are not to be missed.
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William and Mary’s new and anonymous bias reporting system is so wrong-headed that it’s hard to know where to begin protesting it. Some anonymous reports are legitimate, as Eugene Volokh argues at the Volokh Conspiracy, but calling for a college’s entire student body to watch out for bias, and then turn in their fellow students […]
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You’ll no doubt be encouraged to find out, on this fine date, that the academic study of horror cinema is alive and well. The University of Pennsylvania offers “Horror Cinema”, Bowdoin “The Horror Film In Context”, Xavier “The Horror Film”, and the University of South Carolina “Horror Films.” Australia’s not far behind, with horror offerings […]
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Many universities try to indoctrinate students, but the all-time champion in this category is surely the University of Delaware. With no guile at all the university has laid out a brutally specific program for “treatment” of incorrect attitudes of the 7,000 students in its residence halls. The program is close enough to North Korean brainwashing […]
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Brown University has been described as providing “the worst education in America.” Brown’s New Curriculum, far from requiring that students read a list of Great Books, has no core of any kind. Brown students are free to “shop” their courses and take only the ones they like. Brown’s libertarian attitude toward curricular structure no doubt […]
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Beware the words “social justice” and “dispositions” when used by schools of education and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). These apparently harmless terms lay the groundwork for politicizing the training of teachers and giving the ed schools an excuse to eliminate conservatives from their programs. The news this week is that […]
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The New York Times reports that “College Costs Outpace Inflation Rate.” Of course they have. The Chronicle offers a more telling headline: “Student Aid Has Gained, but College Costs Have Risen Faster.” The Times reports “in recent years, consumer prices have risen less than 3 percent a year, while net tuition at public colleges has […]
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Troy Scheffler, a graduate student at Hamline University in Minnesota, thinks that the Virginia Tech massacre might have been avoided if students had been allowed to carry concealed weapons. After e-mailing this opinion to the university president, he was suspended and ordered to undergo “mental health evaluation” before being allowed to return to school. Punishment […]
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Troy Scheffler, a graduate student at Hamline University in Minnesota, thinks that the Virginia Tech massacre might have been avoided if students had been allowed to carry concealed weapons. After e-mailing this opinion to the university president, he was suspended and ordered to undergo “mental health evaluation” before being allowed to return to school. Punishment […]
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Courtesy of the Harvard Crimson, the worst justification for a class I’ve ever seen: I understand that there are a number of students on this campus who think that FemSex is unnecessary, but what class or organization isn’t? Extracurriculars aren’t built out of necessity; they are created out of desires – to do what we […]
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The Naples News reports that Stephen Safranek, Edward Lyons and Phil Pucillo, all Ave Maria professors, have filled suit against Ave Maria University, contending that they were discharged in violation of their contracts. The lawsuit was not an unexpected development given the recent controversy at the school. The move to Florida and its handling by […]
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The University of Chicago hosted a conference last weekend on academic freedom. Participants ranged from John Mearshimer to Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali. Don’t laugh yet. The event’s cause celebre, the Chicago Maroon reports, was Norman Finkelstein. The partipants lamented DePaul University’s denial of tenure to Finkelstein, and lectured, predictably, on the evils of right-wing […]
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Color and Money: How Rich White Kids are Winning the War Over College Affirmative Action by Peter Schmidt Reviewed by George C. Leef Exactly how important is a college degree from a prestige school? Many believe that having such a degree is extremely important – a virtual guarantee of success in life. The higher education […]
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Do minority law students drop out or fail to pass the bar because of affirmative action? That’s exactly the direction recent research by UCLA law professor Richard Sander is pointing. His work, published in the Stanford Law Review, concluded that the admission of underqualified students due to affirmative action leads to higher drop-out rates and […]
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The study of professors’ views by Neil Gross of Harvard and Solon Simmons confirms much of what we already knew: there are more liberals than conservatives working in academia, and the ratio increases in the humanities and social sciences, as well as at more elite universities. However, the survey does show an important fact, that […]
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