Academe these days is full of code words. Diversity is one of the most popular, and has increasingly become an article of faith at American colleges. Its usefulness depends on ambiguity. While the public and media may believe it means openness to previously excluded students and studies, the reality is that “diversity” is a brazen […]
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The Professor Watchlist, a site just two just two weeks old, has already touched off heated debate in and out of academe. It is the brainchild of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, a politically conservative youth movement founded in 2012, and has the declared mission “to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students, promote […]
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A number of prominent liberal intellectuals, such as Leon Wieseltier, acknowledge that the humanities are in trouble. There “really is a cultural crisis,” he said at a recent Aspen Ideas Festival. This is an improvement over the mass denial of a few years ago, when the standard retort to conservatives went something like this: “You […]
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These days, administrators at public universities must be very jealous of their counterparts at private institutions. As non-governmental actors, private college administrators can suppress any speech they don’t like – or, probably more to the point, that displeases their dissent-intolerant student constituents. There is no better illustration of the extremes to which a university will […]
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Harvard’s men’s cross-country team has been put on probation because members of the 2014 team made strong judgments on the sexual attractiveness of members of the women’s cross-country team. What? We wonder if male college students anywhere else have ever engaged in this kind of behavior—noticing that females often differ in their degree of attractiveness, […]
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At a Virginia college, inspirational slogans were recently posted in a residence hall to buoy the spirits of students cramming for exams. Resisting the inspiration, some students posted satirical responses. “You are what you think you are, aim high!” drew the reply “You appear to be suffering from delusions of adequacy.” Another encouraging slogan, “You […]
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Democratic pundits are calling on their party to court working-class and non-coastal whites in the wake of November’s electoral rout. But the Democratic Party is now dominated by identity politics, which defines whites, particularly heterosexual males, as oppressors of every other population in the U.S. Why should the targets of such thinking embrace an ideology […]
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I’ve worked at CUNY under four governors—George Pataki, Elliot Spitzer, David Paterson, and Andrew Cuomo. Pataki (and state Senate Republicans) didn’t allocate to the institution sufficient funding. But he was by far the best governor of the four for CUNY. Pataki appointed a superbly-qualified chairman of the Board of Trustees, Benno Schmidt. He named other […]
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Politically-correct college administrators in Madison, Wisconsin asked the police to investigate speech mocking campus Clinton supporters. The police reportedly did so, even though that could lead to a violation of the First Amendment. This occurred at Edgewood College. Reason Magazine reports that an investigation at Edgewood has begun over a “Suck it up, pussies” Post-it note […]
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Many of my colleagues and students are responding to the results of the 2016 presidential election with fear, disappointment, and disbelief. For some, Trump’s victory and the social unrest that followed dramatically changed their perceptions of Americans, democracy, and human nature. They are mourning the loss of a progressive dream. Although I share my colleagues’ […]
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Peter Salovey, president of Yale, posted this in the Yale Daily News Since last week’s presidential election, many in our community have expressed concern about the new administration’s proposals to move toward much more aggressive enforcement of immigration laws. Students and others at Yale and around the country have called for the creation of sanctuary […]
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University heads are very concerned with their students’ feelings and fears about the presidential election. A Chronicle of Higher Education article collected 45 university president statements on the election. The statements reveal how many presidents advocated acceptance of the election results and/or congratulations of the winner—approximately zero–as opposed to offering comfort and therapy of sorts […]
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Within our privileged, cosseted circles we have gotten used to not only thinking that we are right, but that we are obviously so. By putting down “straight white men” with gleeful impunity, we gave poor white voters everything to apologize for, and nothing to believe in…. Nowhere has this benevolent but ultimately self-defeating myopia been more pronounced […]
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“Diversity is all the rage on college campuses. And for good reason. It is important for the diversity of our nation to be reflected in higher education and beyond. However, the people who champion gender, racial, and cultural diversity often shun viewpoint diversity. Universities have become increasingly ideologically homogeneous. This is especially the case in […]
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Since 2011, the federal government has made successful and devastating efforts to undermine civil liberties on campuses. The surprise outcome of the presidential election raises at least the possibility that this illicit campaign, based on a vast extension of Title IX, will be reversed. Thousands of students accused of sexual misconduct but denied due process […]
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On our campuses, the election of Donald Trump is being treated as an emotional and personal disaster. It’s all about feelings. Classes have been canceled, therapeutic intervention offered and safe spaces filled. Here are three administrations in action, as reported on the Power Line blog: There Will Be a Self-Care Session with Cookies and Mindfulness […]
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A cry-in marked Cornell University’s reaction to the election of Donald Trump as president. Zoe Maisel, ’18 co-president of Planned Parenthood Generation Action at Cornell, said she and co-president Cassidy Clark ’17 began organizing the cry-in Tuesday night for “those of us who have been fighting.” “We need to just take a break and just cry […]
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NYU has been in tumult over far-right tweeting by a self-declared “deplorable” professor who revealed himself last week as Michael Rectenwald, assistant clinical professor of liberal studies. Yesterday he made another revelation in a Washington Post op-ed: his alt-right burst of opinions was a pose, a “thought experiment” intended to provoke an authoritarian reaction at […]
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By Rod Dreher Many readers will have heard of Anthony Esolen, the robustly orthodox Catholic literature professor at Providence College, the Dominican-run college in Rhode Island. Prof. Esolen is the author of a number of books, including an exquisite translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is one of the three translations I recommend to anyone who asks me […]
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The Obama administration, acting through the Office of Civil Rights, has made a terrible mess out of sexual misconduct hearings on our campuses, but it did one good thing without thinking much about it: it targeted one university—Yale—for regular reports on how it dealt in sexual assault hearings. The reports, released by Deputy Provost Stephanie […]
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Yale remains deeply unwelcoming to students with conservative political beliefs, according to a new but massively unsurprising Yale Daily News survey distributed in October and reported last week. Of the 2,054 respondents who completed the survey —about 38 % of all Yale undergrads— nearly 75 percent said they believe Yale does not provide a welcoming […]
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On campus, the holiday is at least as much fun as a 4-hour trip to the dentist. Students involved in fraternities and sororities at Tufts University, where the First Amendment is apparently not widely known, were told to not wear anything that could offend or annoy others during Halloween celebrations – or risk getting investigated […]
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The Obama administration has repeatedly violated civil liberties on campus. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has been the chief culprit, but the Department of Justice has played a role too. They have attacked free speech, demanding that school officials censor politically-incorrect speech. They have also pressured colleges to stack the deck against […]
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A paper recently published in Econ Journal Watch, “Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology,” shows what almost everyone believes to be true – that college faculties in the social sciences are predominantly left of center. More than that, it shows that this is truer in some fields and geographic regions than […]
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The most controversial man in Canada these days is probably mild-mannered Jordan Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Peterson has run afoul of the gender/transgender lobby by refusing to use the personal pronouns favored by students, faculty and others with non-binary gender identities. Those with such identities want to be referred to […]
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A poll by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that millennials, particularly younger ones, showed either an abysmal ignorance of communism, abysmal support for it or both. Almost half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 20 “said they would vote for a socialist, while 21% would go so far as to back a […]
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In the suit against Rolling Stone by University of Virginia dean Nicole Eramo over the magazine’s false rape story, the trial rolls along, with the two sides offering a narrow band of arguments: according to Rolling Stone and former reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely, our nation’s campuses are teeming with sexual assaults, beset by a “rape […]
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Pro-life students at Marquette, a Catholic, Jesuit college in Milwaukee, applied for and got permission to mount an anti-abortion display on campus for 48 hours. Three times during that period the display, consisting mostly of small pink and blue flags representing unborn females and males, was vandalized by campus feminists and their allies. Pro-life messages […]
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When Reason Goes on Holiday is a new book with a distressingly familiar theme: intellectuals who preached reason and research while glorifying romantic ideals of revolution and the ideas of Lenin, Mao and Castro. The author, Neven Sesardic, deals with some big names in modern philosophy and shows that the wooly-headed politics associated with the […]
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A lengthy article by Jonathan Haidt dealing with the growing conflict over the proper goal or end of the academy ran here in full on October 23. It was neither an original article of ours nor a reprint published with permission. It should have run–and appears now–as an excerpt referring readers back to its original site, […]
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