It took a global pandemic to force me to teach online. Before, I occasionally lectured online for various schools and conferences, but had never taught a course online, either synchronously or asynchronously. (I use words like that now, given my unexpected but necessary immersion into online teaching.) My school agilely adapted to the coronavirus crisis […]
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Today [article originally published on March 28, 2021] is the 15th anniversary of Duke University’s suspension of its Lacrosse team in response to false allegations that members of the team committed a racist gang-rape of a black stripper. The gang rape turned out to be a hoax. But long after DNA evidence and cell phone […]
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School systems and colleges now routinely subject students and staff to racist scapegoating under the guise of promoting “diversity” or “anti-racism.” Radio broadcaster Rob Schilling reports on one example in Virginia: the Albermarle County Public Schools’ hiring of diversity-trainer Glenn Singleton. Singleton’s firm got paid a whopping $15,000 just to give a one-hour seminar. Singleton […]
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The specter of Madame Defarge, the blood-thirsty chronicler of severed heads in the French Revolution, hangs heavy over American universities. She just made an appearance at Georgetown Law School. Nowadays, heads don’t fall into baskets, but heads do roll, and careers, reputations, and personal lives are torn asunder by marauding woke progressives. Where can the […]
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Editor’s Note: A shorter version of this essay was originally published by The Epoch Times on March 16, 2021. The purpose of the woke “antiracism” movement launched by some members of the educational, media, and political elite, together with race activists, has always been to elevate its proclaimers above other members of the elite. In other […]
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In early October 2020, a visual arts professor at the University of Ottawa spoke to her students about the phenomenon of subversive resignification. She mentioned as an example the word “nigger.” (She also mentioned “queer.”) One of her students complained to the university. In response, the university put the class on hiatus for a couple […]
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At the University of San Diego, conservative law professor Tom Smith is being investigated for criticizing “Chinese” propaganda, based on the false premise that this constituted racial harassment of Asian-American students. If Professor Smith can be disciplined for criticizing China’s government, then I could have been disciplined as a student for criticizing Russia’s communist government […]
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For many years now, I have attempted an open and thoughtful dialogue about equity and inclusion with members of my college community and with colleagues in my field of Learning Assistance. This occurred in the recent past when I worked at a large urban community college, where I served as a founding member of the […]
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By now, plenty of people have learned of the removal by their publisher, Penguin Random House, of a half-dozen books by the legendary children’s author Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), including such beloved classics as If I Ran the Zoo (the one I most enjoyed reading to my daughters several decades ago, and more recently to my […]
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Cancel culture is seemingly rampant and omnipresent in our nation’s colleges and universities. These days, examples surface so often that they don’t even make the news as they once did at places like Yale, Sarah Lawrence, and Middlebury. Nonetheless, students of all ideological backgrounds report that they regularly self-censor and limit what they say due […]
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On the evening of April 26, 1777, John Adams sat down at his desk to write one of his innumerable letters to his wife, Abigail. By the time he wrote this letter, the initial euphoria of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence and the evacuation of the British troops from Boston the year prior […]
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During my fifty years teaching anthropology at McGill University, my impression of undergraduate students was of reasonable young people, many of whom were seriously engaged in learning about the world and its peoples. Graduate students were fiercely focused on gaining professional status, were more ideologically militant than undergraduates, and were consistently on the wrong side […]
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A law professor at Georgetown University has been fired for pointing out that black students got lower grades in her classes. This was not due to racism. Black students get lower grades at selective colleges because they are admitted with lower grades and test scores than their non-black classmates, due to racial preferences in admissions […]
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It is hardly a surprise that Sa’ed Atshan would be given tenure at Swarthmore College. What is noteworthy is how this came about, something well beyond the normal tenure process in academe. It points to the special place Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) supporters have in academia. To start, Atshan is a well-known BDS activist, […]
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Three professors have been wrongly suspended over Halloween costumes they wore over six years ago. One of them is being investigated for having dressed as a Confederate general. As the College Fix notes: Three University of South Alabama professors have been placed on administrative leave over Halloween costumes they wore and posed with at an […]
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Based on informal observation of Virginia’s public colleges and universities over many years, I have oft lamented “mission creep” as a factor pushing the cost of college attendance ever higher. But I never explored the idea systematically. Fortunately, a new study has done that job for me. In “Priced Out: What College Costs America,” Neetu […]
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Radio giant Rush Limbaugh’s death on February 17th after a battle with lung cancer has occasioned a moment of bittersweet reflection for free speech advocates and for those who share Limbaugh’s reverence for the values embedded in the American creed. Limbaugh’s wildly successful run touched off the ascendance of post-Reagan conservative political power, but its […]
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Editor’s Note: This article is the last in a symposium on white fragility and its related concepts. To view all of the prior essays in this series, click here. On Race, the Best of Times and the Worst of Times For inter-ethnic relations in America, it is the best and worst of times. It is […]
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George Mason University in Virginia plans to illegally give minorities a racial preference, until its mostly white faculty has the same racial balance as its more heavily non-white student body, which is more ethnically diverse than the average college. Under GMU’s draft “ARIE Task Force Recommendations,” GMU will “recruit, hire, and retain faculty” and “staff […]
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Why are progressives so angry at the police, to the point where a significant minority of them want to abolish the police? Because they vastly overstate the number of police shootings of unarmed black people, often by a factor of 40 or more—exaggerating police killings by around 4,000 percent. That leads some of them to […]
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I spent my early years believing in a euphonious lie that modern China was beautifully multicultural, with all its 56 ethnic groups living as one family in utter adoration of the motherland. This patriotic belief, consolidated through years of Marxist and Maoist training, was slightly shaken when I met my college best friend—a Yao minority who talks […]
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Introduction Recent statistical research (such as Krymkowski’s The Color of Culture) as well as the lived experience of Black and Brown people demonstrate that the “outdoors” are among the most racially exclusive spaces in Eurocentric nations. It is obvious, as Krymkowski notes, that the exclusion of BIPOCs from the outdoors is the result of systemic […]
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Former President Donald J. Trump has been acquitted in his second impeachment trial. This time, Mr. Trump was charged with inciting the mob that assaulted the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. on January 6th. Mr. Trump’s lawyers relied on the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which protects free speech. But Mr. Trump’s critics allege that his […]
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In Part I of this essay, we discussed the origins of the term “equity,” its original meaning of fairness, its degeneration into forced equality of outcome, and its eventual inversion into unfair repression of some groups as a necessary means to bring about successful outcomes for others. In this second part, we describe how equity—equality […]
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In my last essay here, “‘Equity?’,” I noted that President Biden’s recent executive orders and appointments dealing with race have been almost universally mischaracterized as “aimed at reversing as many of President Trump’s policies as possible.” In fact, I argued, they reverse “the civil rights policy not just of Trump but of every American president […]
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Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing symposium on white fragility and its related concepts. To view all of the essays in this series, click here. In this piece, I argue for a new way of conceiving national identity and ethnic relations. This entails a porous ‘melting-pot’ ethnic majority, which is informal and […]
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I have decided to prohibit my undergraduate business students from using Google when they write their semester papers. In my teaching, I emphasize interpersonal communication and critical thinking. Future business executives will, as they always have, need to work with others, negotiate, resolve conflict, write clearly, integrate information, and have good judgment. Google attenuates such […]
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On the one hand, universities should seek talent wherever it exists and without concern for credentials or professional values. On the other hand, the academic milieu is strange and difficult, and those brought into universities who have had little experience of it might well dislike it, and that could harm it. These two hands matter […]
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I. A Good Term Gone Bad The modern term “equity” originally comes to us from the Old French term, equite, which in turn came from the original Latin, aequitatem, a word that could mean a number of different things, including equality, fairness, uniformity, or even symmetry. At the end of the 16th century, Western Europeans began […]
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Our current monomaniacal obsession with identity was midwifed by postmodern theory. In the past, students of society and culture emulated science in theory and methodology, striving to offer objective, disinterested, and impartial knowledge about human life. Postmodernism attacked science and rejected the goal of objective knowledge about people, arguing that objectivity was impossible and that […]
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