Antioch College, of fame for strident sexual interaction policies, and Abu-Jamal commencement speeches, has ceased to be. American colleges are not in the habit of disappearing, but then, there are few colleges anything quite like Antioch, as Peter Wood today notes in What Happened To Antioch? on the site today. In a universe of left-inclined […]
Read More
Antioch is no more. The venerable college is closing its doors this fall. Antioch University – which has other operations – will continue, but its flagship college is finished. Its namesake, the ancient city in Turkey, had its ups and downs too, after it was founded by one of Alexander the Great’s generals. Earthquakes, invasions, […]
Read More
Commencement weekend is hard to plan at the University of California, Los Angeles. The university now has so many separate identity-group graduations that scheduling them not to conflict with one another is a challenge. The women’s studies graduation and the Chicana/Chicano studies graduation are both set for 10 a.m. Saturday. The broader Hispanic graduation, La […]
Read More
We’re featuring Brad Wilson’s excellent piece on Constitution Day from Academic Questions. He notes that colleges seemed taken aback, or positively dyspeptic, when faced with a 2005 federal requirement to make some sort of observation or commemoration for “Constitution Day” – September 17. Universities were widely alarmed at such an “intrusion” – even in very […]
Read More
According to a 2007 poll, 95% of Sweden’s young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty know what Auschwitz was, yet 90% don’t know what the word ‘Gulag’ refers to, despite the Russians having dispatched to these infamous labor camps thousands of innocent people. This lack of knowledge is not the fault of the […]
Read More
Robert George and Cornel West have teamed up in an unlikely enterprise – co-teaching a Freshmen Seminar, “Great Books and Arguments” at Princeton. You can find the full story in the June issue of the Princeton Alumni magazine. George and West seem to radiate enthusiasm about the collaboration, and, particularly, about the challenges to their […]
Read More
Among the many lovely qualities that define today’s student radicals – their smugness, their historical ignorance, their blithe contempt for the rights of others – perhaps the most galling of all is their sense of total invincibility. They know full well they can go about the business of mayhem and general anti-intellectual thuggery with the […]
Read More
Stop the presses. The president of a well-known college has actually come out for diversity of ideas, rather than just the narrow form of diversity prized on campus (skin color, gender, sexual orientation). In a baccalaureate address at Middlebury College’s graduation, President Ronald D. Liebowitz talked about the “value of discomfort” in listening to and […]
Read More
I’d advise all to speed to John Ellis’ essay, available above, (or here) from the marvelous Academic Questions. These items are generally unavailable without a subscription, but we’ve arranged to provide you some occasional glimpses. The piece is a bit long, but worth every page. Defenders of the modern academy often assert that reform-minded critiques […]
Read More
Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash are two of the leading critics of Ayan Hirsi Ali whom they deride as an “enlightenment fundamentalist” for her defense of free speech in the face of violent Islamic intimidation. They are also two of the leading apologists for the sophisticated Islamism of Tariq Ramadan, the grandson and intellectual […]
Read More
John Rosenberg has an excellent post at Discriminations on, among other things, Lee Bollinger’s latest slippery utterances in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Rosenberg offers a superb paragraph’s description of the filigreed nature of diversity goals: Since preferentialists speak in platitudes and not principles, their defense of racial preferences provides no guides to policy makers […]
Read More
Martin Kramer, Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, spoke about the failure of Middle Eastern Studies at our colleges at a Center for the American University luncheon here in New York recently. He touched on the radical sympathies of many professors, flimsy research credentials, and prevalent anti-Americanism. Those unable to attend the […]
Read More
Henry Lewis Gates, renowned Harvard professor of African-American Studies – which is to say, someone about as deep as can be gotten in the belly of the diversity-obsessed academic beast – said something quite remarkable the other day. Invited to address the graduates of Kentucky’s Berea College, founded in 1855 as the first integrated college […]
Read More
It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which a left-wing ideology has captivated university life. I sometimes get the impression that the ghost of Antonio Gramsci is parading among academic faculties spreading his soteriology to “useful dupes.” I recently participated in a discussion on Iran at Columbia University sponsored by the college Democrats, Republicans, […]
Read More
The Chronicle of Higher Education in this week’s issue points to a problem confronted by colleges: “the poor grades earned by many minority students.” Vacuous assertions that “diversity and excellence go hand in hand” tend to collapse when confronting figures like those found in the Chronicle piece: Data for 2003-4 U.S. colleges contrasted the percentages […]
Read More
Last week, a faculty committee at the University of Colorado released its recommendation as to the fate of Ward Churchill, and it’s a disgraceful outcome. Despite the earlier finding that Churchill had committed research fraud – “multiple acts of plagiarism, fabrication and falsification”- the committee advised only a one-year suspension, not termination, for he engaged […]
Read More
Vijay Prashad employs an especially nimble means of comparison in The Boston Globe today. It seems that the University of Massachusetts is about to grant Andrew Card an honorary degree. Prashad objects to this, on a variety of grounds. That’s not surprising. University honors bestowed on any political figures (especially those rightward) tend to inspire […]
Read More
[Robert “K.C.” Johnson is the indefatigable chronicler of the Duke non-rape case, turning out a thousand words of brilliant reportage and analysis a day for more than a year on his Durham-in-Wonderland site. On the Volokh Conspiracy, Jim Lindgren writes” “If bloggers were eligible for Pulitizer Prize… I would nominate Brooklyn Professor K.C. Johnson… No […]
Read More
Faculty at American colleges and universities are more religious than many of us believe-65 percent say they believe in God and 46 percent claim a personal relationship with God. Still, they are far less religious than the general population, some 93 percent of which believes in God, with 66 percent reporting a personal relationship. While […]
Read More
Joanne Creighton, President of Mt. Holyoke College, makes several worthy points on the behalf of women’s colleges in The Boston Globe today, but her case for the knowledge they convey is rather bizarrely ordered. Consider the admirable facts that she could cite first: 1. Mt. Holyoke has produced, in the last forty years, more graduates […]
Read More
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2007/05/sign_this_petition_please_joe.html#more
Read More
Press Release: Dartmouth College Office of Public Affairs Dartmouth Board of Trustees Elects Stephen Smith HANOVER, N.H. – The Dartmouth College Board of Trustees has elected Stephen F. Smith as a trustee following a nomination vote by Dartmouth’s alumni from a slate of four candidates. Smith, a 1988 graduate of Dartmouth, will join the board […]
Read More
There may be jobs requiring greater mendacity than a college affirmative action officer – college president comes to mind – but there can’t be many. The ideal college affirmative action officer lies about his mission not only without regret but also without awareness, so brainwashed has he become in the foolish ideology of “diversity.” The […]
Read More
The yield of the University of California’s “holistic” admissions process is now becoming apparent with the release of enrollment figures. Admissions were conducted under a novel system for the current year, a “holistic process” which was promoted as a means to improve the relative chances of disadvantaged students who lacked AP courses and other academic […]
Read More
In mid-January, a brief item appeared on an inside page of The New York Times, headlined “Student Lender Investigated.” The five sentence article noted that the New York Attorney General’s office was looking into “student loan marketing” by Sallie Mae, “the nation’s largest lender to students.” Attorney General Cuomo had requested information about “preferred lender […]
Read More
The Boston Globe reports: A judicial panel at Tufts University on Thursday ruled that a conservative campus journal “harassed” blacks by publishing a Christmas carol parody called “O Come All Ye Black Folk” that many found racist. The Primary Source, which published the carol, removed the lyrics from their site months ago, and replaced them […]
Read More