It is getting awfully hard to be a humanities professor. Or rather, it’s getting hard to be a humanities professor and still maintain the heady confidence in the fields that the faculty had 20 years ago. The daily grind of teaching, research, and service haven’t much changed, especially for tenured professors who aren’t touched by […]
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Title IX, passed in 1972, seems like a simple enough federal civil rights law. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in higher education at colleges and universities that accept federal financial assistance—which almost all schools do to some extent. Yet its initial vagueness, combined with the inevitable mission creep, has caused it to create […]
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The Supreme Court has described cross-examination as the “greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.” Until recently, that lesson had failed to permeate the nation’s Title IX tribunals. Obama-era guidance “strongly” discouraged direct cross-examination between students accused of sexual assault and those making the accusations. Nearly all colleges and universities went further […]
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A large majority of Americans—73 percent—say that neither race nor ethnicity should be factors in deciding which students are granted admission to colleges and universities. Only 7 percent think race and ethnicity should be major factors, and 19 percent favor allowing them to be light factors. The survey was conducted by Pew Research Center in […]
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A recent article in Real Clear Investigations reported on a decision by the University of California, Los Angeles to require all professors applying for a tenure-track position — as well as any seeking promotion — to submit an “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” statement as part of their portfolio. Guidance from UCLA’s Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion is […]
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The college accreditation system is supposed to uphold academic quality and integrity. Many Americans assume that if a college or university is accredited, that is equivalent to the Underwriter’s Laboratories (UL) seal on appliances – that it has been tested and found to be of good quality. Accreditation is a reliable stamp of approval, isn’t […]
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The hearing last week in the case of Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, presumably the last until the judge offers her opinion, witnessed the unfortunate prominence of both a red herring and a red flag. The Boston Globe captured both the red herring and a red flag in its lede: “US District Judge […]
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DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is on everyone’s short list as a primary building block of any possible compromise between President Trump and the Democrats on immigration. Thus, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the striking similarities between the debate over that issue and the equally contentious debate over affirmative […]
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Stanley Kurtz has laid out an interesting proposal for stopping once and for all the shutdowns and hecklers and mobs that have increasingly plagued higher education in recent years. It’s called the Intellectual Diversity Act, and it has a simple provision. The law, as passed by state legislatures, will direct public colleges and universities to […]
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A college male meets a college female, they get along well, and the male attempts to kiss the female. She pushes him away, saying it is too soon. This followed role expectations: boys took the initiative in sexual contact; girls complied or resisted, as they wished. A few days later they have sex, but his […]
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A huge number of comments has greeted Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s proposed rewrite of the unfair Title IX Obama-era regulations often used in hearings against men on campus. Four comments are unusually important. Cross-Examination The first, prepared by Patricia Hamill (who has handled many lawsuits from accused students, including the cases that yielded the powerful […]
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Last year, a former student of mine won a job interview at the satellite campus of a state university system. One of the first questions she had to answer was this: “Tell us how you will contribute to diversity on our campus.” My ex-student was Shiite, female, heterosexual, and 50 years old. As far as she […]
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We may be about to find out whether a university can be found liable for giving accurate advice to an applicant. Inside Higher Ed reported yesterday that Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia is being sued by a rejected applicant to its medical school for, among other things, providing advice in an interview that in all […]
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Well, it’s official: the worst aspects of feminism are winning: not the let’s all play nice kind that actually wanted equal, not special, rights and opportunities for everyone, but the crazed we’ve-got-to-destroy-men kind; the kind that saw feminism as a zero-sum game and composed fantasies of worlds without men, or with only enough men to […]
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“After a University of Nebraska at Lincoln student was sexually assaulted in her dormitory last month,” Inside Higher Ed reports, the university came under intense fire “by students who thought police should not have mentioned in a campus-wide bulletin that two men accused of sexual assault were black, believing that it reinforced harmful stereotypes.” The […]
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Stealing from Shakespeare: “Let’s kill all the accreditors.” In this kinder and gentler age, most of us would be content if college accreditors simply resigned their positions and did something useful, such as selling cars. When you buy a car, you pay about the same as a year’s tuition fee at a good university. Yet […]
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The controversial Gillette razor ad unleashed a barrage of comments supporting and rejecting the meme of “toxic masculinity.” The American Psychological Association, which recently presented new guidelines for identifying the aberrant condition is at the center of the debate. In reality, some “toxic” men are heroes (John McCain, Navy Seals, 9/11 Firefighters) or qualify as […]
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Heather Mac Donald’s book The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, was published more than four months ago, but I just checked Amazon, and it still stands impressively among all book sales at #798. It ranks #1 in two sub-categories of education. She appeared on Tucker Carlson’s […]
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The radical feminist war against men, once contained on college campuses, has leached into corporate America. One of America’s longstanding, iconic companies, Gillette, released a new ad campaign portraying men as violent, sexual predators by virtue of their “toxic manhood” training. The public reaction to the ad has been swift and unequivocal. Below is a […]
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Contemporary Western culture is now dominated by feminist ideology. One of its favorite tropes is “toxic masculinity.” This is part of the feminist strategy to lift females by lowering males. Most Western governments are on the feminists’ side, protected under the banner of “diversity.” Canada and Sweden have made feminization their highest priority, neglecting prosperity […]
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The question of whether, or to what degree, applicants are admitted or hired because they are black or Hispanic (or American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (NHPI)) is a central and indeed indispensable component of the ongoing debate over affirmative action. Now, if a recent Classics meeting in San Diego is any indication, […]
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After I gave a public lecture on ‘Socialization and Fear’ at a university in England, a young professor came up to me and said, “You forgot to mention the biggest fear we face as teachers – the fear that many students have of opening their mouths.” Since this encounter, I have met numerous academics who […]
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North American universities have been taken over by women. Men are decreasingly university students, professors, and administrators. “Gender equality,” a feminist war chant, apparently does not apply when females dominate. In the United States, women outnumber men in colleges and universities — by 2026, the Department of Education estimates, 57 percent of college students will be […]
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There they go again. Inside Higher Ed reports on a new handwringing study lamenting the “underrepresentation” of members of various “Underrepresented Racial and Ethnic Groups” (URGs) among engineering students. The study by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, funded by the National Science Foundation, found, as all such studies always find, that “Hispanic and […]
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Jason Riley, one of my favorite writers, is black and opposes racial preferences (for all groups) on the grounds that they don’t solve underlying problems, sow discord, and become a source of political chicanery. A few years back, he wrote a very illuminating book entitled, Please Stop Helping Us in which he explained why the […]
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Fire, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, has published a report showing that the overwhelming majority of top colleges in America fail to guarantee fair hearings for students accused of sexual misconduct. Their findings include: 3 in 4 top universities do not guarantee presumption of innocence in campus proceedings. 9 in 10 top universities […]
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Harvard is perhaps the only institution in the country with multiple sets of Title IX procedures, depending on which branch of the university the student attends. At Harvard Law School, the parties are allowed to have full legal representation, the tribunal is basically independent, and there’s meaningful discovery. Harvard undergraduates, on the other hand, experience […]
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Two of our nation’s premier credit rating agencies, Moody’s and Fitch, have issued reports recently giving a negative outlook on the finances of American higher education. Of course, the financial condition of schools varies considerably: there are affluent ones with large cash reserves, billions in investments in their endowment, and robust demand for their services, […]
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By now, it is clear to all observers that the most damaging material that Harvard has been forced to release in the lawsuit filed by Students For Fair Admissions is powerful evidence that Asian applicants, who score higher than applicants from other racial and ethnic groups on grades, test scores, and extracurricular activities, are graded […]
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What if the Supreme Court rules decisively against Harvard in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College? Will racial preferences fade into history as has Prohibition? Or will universities employ legally safe proxies such as social class to admit less qualified minorities? Let me suggest one resistance tactic not yet on the agenda but, rest […]
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