It’s impossible not to notice a contradiction on the pages of Minding the Campus. My friend Bill Voegeli seems to be saying that tenure makes teaching in our colleges and universities worse (“Tenure, Kipnis and the PC University,” June 22). The shameful goings on at Northwestern over Kipnis show that tenure doesn’t really protect the […]
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In the fall of 1980, towards the end of my first semester of college teaching, I received a memo saying that on the last day of class I was to hand out the course evaluation forms for students to complete and return. A few weeks later, the packet of forms they had filled out was […]
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Earlier this spring, a student filed a due process lawsuit against Brandeis, charging that he was disciplined under a procedure different from the one that existed when he arrived on campus. In one respect, the facts of this case are atypical. After a nearly two-year relationship (between two male students) ended, the accuser appears to […]
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Some coincidences are less coincidental than others are. Northwestern University recently investigated professor Laura Kipnis, regarding complaints that an essay of hers had violated students’ legal rights. Meanwhile, a committee of the Wisconsin state legislature voted to let the University of Wisconsin choose, as a matter of policy, whether its professors would enjoy the protections […]
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“Incoming freshmen at Duke University are expected to read a graphic novel with cartoon drawings of a woman masturbating and multiple females engaging in oral sex—as well as participate in group discussions during orientation.”— from Campus Reform
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Culture wars over “social justice” have been wreaking havoc in many communities, including universities and science fiction fandom. The ordeal of Northwestern University film professor Laura Kipnis, hauled before a campus gender equity tribunal for publishing a critique of academia’s current obsession with sexual misconduct, has brought the backlash against “political correctness” to reliably left-of-center venues such as Vox. But this is […]
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Reason has released a March, 2015 Nick Gillespie interview with cultural critic Camille Paglia, who as usual has many lively opinions. Here are a few: journalism today (bad), Hillary (a disaster), the ideal first female president (Dianne Feinstein), what kids learn in high school (don’t bully), college now (summer camp, Club Med), what campus leftists should […]
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Stuart Taylor and I have a jointly authored piece debunking the Washington Post series on campus sexual assault. The collection of articles, accompanied by a misleading poll, has also received searing, effective criticism from Ashe Schow in the Washington Examiner, Robby Soave in Reason, and David French in NRO. I recommend each piece. The series […]
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Rape is a serious matter. That is why it is unfortunate that a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll, using a small student sample that does not distinguish between unwanted touching and rape, has concluded that 25 percent of college women are sexually assaulted every year. On Sunday the Washington Post devoted half its front page and three […]
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In the New York Observer, Cathy Young laments the rise of “social justice warriors,” primarily on campus and online, arguing that “this version of ‘social justice’ is not about social justice at all. It is a cultish, essentially totalitarian ideology deeply inimical—as liberals such as Jonathan Chait wam in New York Magazine—to the traditional values […]
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Without rehashing the fine points made by AEI’s Andrew Kelly and Slate’s Jordan Weissmann about the irresponsible advice dispensed in Lee Siegel’s op-ed in the New York Times it’s worth noting a few points on the purported virtues of defaulting on student loans. First, Siegel seems to give the impression he was already under a […]
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Writing in The New York Times, Lee Siegel encourages students to follow his example and default on their student loans. The four biggest problems with his piece are: Siegel is the wrong case study Even if you are of the opinion that college should be free and student debt is immoral, Siegel is the wrong […]
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The AAUP—the American Association of University Professors—held its annual Conference on the State of Higher Education at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. June 10-14. A few subway stops away, the Heartland Institute held its tenth International Conference on Climate Change at the Washington Court Hotel, June 11-12. I suspect that I am the only […]
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Lynne Cheney had a high-profile piece in the April 1 Wall Street Journal critiquing the draft exam associated with the new Advanced Placement U.S. history standards (APUSH). (I’ve written on these standards previously.) The standards have aroused considerable controversy in the scholarly community—the National Association of Scholars deserves the most credit for highlighting the issue. […]
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Kafka was born too early to write about Amherst College. At campus hearings on claims of sexual assault, procedures are relentlessly stacked again males and evidence of innocence doesn’t count. Amherst expelled a student for committing rape—despite text messages from the accuser, sent immediately after the alleged assault, (1) telling one student that she had […]
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Hungry for love and it’s feeding time, Alice Cooper wrote in his 1991 classic song, “Feed My Frankenstein.” Academia has created its own Frankenstein with its speech codes, groupthink enforcement, and discouraging of dissent. This Frankenstein isn’t hungry for love – it’s hungry for power. And academics themselves have belatedly discovered that they’re on the […]
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On June 2 a group of 55 scholars released an Open Letter criticizing the College Board’s newly revised “Course and Exam Description, Including the Curriculum Framework” for Advanced Placement in United States History. On June 3 Daniel Henninger began his Wall Street Journalcolumn by asking, “Would a second Clinton presidency continue and expand Barack Obama’s […]
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At least for now, Columbia’s mattress saga is over. Emma Sulkowicz, the student who spent her final year on campus toting a mattress to protest the school’s failure to punish her alleged rapist, graduated at the end of May; so did Paul Nungesser, the accused man who says he’s the real victim. There was more […]
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A group of 55 historians and other scholars has issued a grave warning about the “dramatically changed” plans for the teaching of American history in our schools. The framework for the Advanced Placement (AP) exam in U.S. History, they say, imposes on students “an arid, fragmentary, and misleading account of American history… The new framework […]
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Classical economics went wrong at its first turn, say Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. Man is not homo economicus, the rationally calculating actor that the dismal scientists from Adam Smith down through Milton Friedman supposed our species to be. No, we are emotionally driven, contextually influenced, socially conditioned: Humans, not Econs. Sunstein and Thaler famously […]
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In a polarized country, it probably should come as little surprise that campus due process also is becoming polarized over alleged sexual violations. While the Office for Civil Rights seeks to eviscerate the rights of accused students nationwide, accused students increasingly have more rights in red states than in blue states—largely because blue state governments […]
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Like many commentators and candidates, Fareed Zakaria, the eloquent host of CNN’s GPS, has turned out a new book on higher education. In Defense of a Liberal Education laments that today’s students are pressured into thinking of college as a time to prepare for the global marketplace, discouraged from dreaming big, and told to acquire […]
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A group of 400 faculty at New York University has issued a devastating 14.000-word attack on the university as greedy, predatory and unprincipled. The group, Faculty Against the Sexton Plan (FASP), referring to John Sexton, who has just stepped down as NYU president, says the University uses a mind-numbing range of tricks and traps to […]
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Excerpts from Ian McEwan’s commencement speech at Dickinson College, May 17, 2015 I would like to share a few thoughts with you about free speech. Let’s begin on a positive note: there is likely more free speech, free thought, free enquiry on earth now than at any previous moment in recorded history (even taking into […]
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Several years ago a Korean student in one of my precept classes at Princeton told me of the shock and anger among Asian students at his expensive California private high school when college acceptance letters arrived in late spring. What really stoked the anger of many of his Asian classmates, he said, was the fact […]
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By Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Jared Meyer This month, as 1.8 million newly minted bachelor’s degrees are handed out, most graduates will be coming off the stage with much more than a fancy piece of paper. Seventy percent will take an average of $27,000 in student loan debt with them as they try to build their careers after college. This […]
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When I published my first book, Unlearning Liberty, in 2012, I felt a bit optimistic that the situation for free speech on campus was improving. Not that the state of free speech on campus was good by any means, but it seemed as though there had been improvement since the blizzard of weird cases that […]
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Fresh off completing her doctorate at the University of Michigan, Saida Grundy has landed a job on Boston University’s faculty – Assistant Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies. What can B.U. students anticipate from her? Editors at the site SoCawledge dug into Grundy’s thinking and found a lot of tweets that resemble those of Steven […]
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Kevin Carey is convinced that online learning has created a watershed moment in the history of higher education. Not since Johannes Gutenberg assembled an ensemble of movable type, meltable alloy, oil-based ink, and a screw press in 1439 has there been such a moment—or so says Carey in his new book, The End of College: […]
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”On today’s campuses, left-leaning administrators, professors, and students are working overtime in their campaign of silencing dissent, and their unofficial tactics of ostracizing, smearing, and humiliation are highly effective. But what is even more chilling—and more far reaching—is the official power they abuse to ensure the silencing of views they don’t like. They’ve invented a labyrinth of anti-free speech […]
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