In 1970, I was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Organization for Women in New York City. This quickly triggered invitations to speaking on campuses throughout the U.S.—from Yale to Harvard to Stanford. Each engagement led to an average of three more. However, after starting hundreds of men’s and women’s groups — […]
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Charlottesville is still recovering — or trying to recover — from the chaos of last August when the city and its centerpiece, the University of Virginia, were “invaded,” as people here say, by extreme right-wing demonstrators, who were attacked by extreme left-wing Antifa counter-demonstrators. Evidence of the continuing fallout from the August clashes abound. Here […]
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We notice that Harvard University is now offering a “social justice certificate,” based on 16-course credits over 18 to 36 months at a cost of $10,800. “Explore theoretical and practical questions of economic, political, and social rights through a variety of lenses,” says the pitch on the Harvard site. “Through this liberal arts graduate certificate, […]
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Really, you must admit that student protestors are becoming ever more adorable, kind of like naughty children who first act rambunctiously and then go running back for comfort to the elders they’ve just annoyed. The latest case in point is laid bare in a series of articles in Duke University’s campus paper The Chronicle. It […]
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“The anarchic left” may be adopting a new tactic to stifle free speech on campus: rather than direct shout-downs of speakers they oppose, thus risking arrest and punishment, they may be turning to persistent heckling, says Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars. On April 18, the conservative activist group Turning Point USA […]
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QUICK READ… Every year, American schools get their annual report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress(NAEP), and like all depressing report cards, it is whisked out of sight as quickly as possible. The nation’s public schools are a mess. Only 37 percent of 12th graders tested proficient in reading and only 25 percent in […]
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Several years ago, I did a study on the costs and impact of literary research. The point was to show how much research was published and how often it was consulted. The answer to the first part was this: piles and piles of it, fully 70,000 items of scholarship each year in all the fields […]
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Dear Reader: We’ve chosen a cleaner and more modern design and made a number of small changes that we think make the site more readable and easier to navigate. –We’ve eliminated the distinction between essays and short takes. –We’ve added a feature in the right rail called ‘Notable’—short items we think you should see. –‘Commentary,’ […]
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It has become familiar among conservatives, on and off campus, to cast up the warnings about “moral relativism” as they gnash their teeth about the state of the culture. And yet we often find conservatives with a libertarian bent backing into a soft version of relativism. That tendency has been especially pronounced among conservatives who […]
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Does it make sense for Starbucks to put its workforce through “implicit bias training”? Maybe as a public relations gesture to apologize for the arrest of two peaceful black men who were there for a meeting without buying anything at a Philadelphia Starbucks and then asking to use the restroom. But if the company’s goal […]
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I’m standing in line outside the Beacon Theatre. As the sun goes down, I find myself wondering why I made the drive from Philly to attend a Jordan Peterson (JP) presentation in Manhattan. As a junior in college, I sit through lectures every day. Do I really need another one? Yes, apparently, because I feel […]
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California voters made racial preferences illegal by passing Proposition 209 in 1996, but many university officials have ignored the law, especially at the state’s top law schools. Among such officials, it is a deeply ingrained belief that social justice demands measures to close statistical gaps between “underrepresented” groups (particularly blacks and Hispanics) and “overrepresented” groups […]
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As totalitarian modes of rule continue to decline throughout the world, readers of Minding the Campus will recognize the insidious strain of totalitarianism that has emerged on many college campuses—one that is characterized by the bullying, and sometimes silencing of faculty and students who deviate even slightly from the prescribed progressive campus politics. Most recently, […]
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Many years ago, in the late ‘90s, three professors and I met with the undergraduate dean at Emory University to discuss a Great Books proposal. Steven Kautz, a political scientist, led the effort, and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Harvey Klehr, and I backed him up. The idea was to build a Great Books track within the undergraduate […]
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Nearly 10 years ago, Penn law professor Amy Wax wrote an excellent book, Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century. Last summer she co-authored a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed arguing that all cultures are not equal. It provoked a virtual implosion at Penn and beyond. Now she’s done it again, becoming a larger […]
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Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the course W.H. Auden launched at the University of Michigan in 1941. It’s 6,000 pages of the most powerful literature in the canon: The Divine Comedy in full, four works of Shakespeare, Pascal’s Pensées, Horace’s odes, Volpone, Racine, Kierkegaard’s […]
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In National Review this week, George Weigel writes a pointed commentary on another example of humanities professors undermining their own field. It’s a curious phenomenon, but one you often see. A scholar-teacher steps forward to condemn or distort the materials of his own field, or to rebuke past and present practitioners of it, not realizing […]
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Last year, Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto, made news when he refused to use the invented pronouns of the transgender movement as prescribed by Canadian law (see chart). Pronouns these days are a new battleground, as recommendations admonish us all that the standard English pronouns, which traditionally distinguish she from he, […]
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Bowing to pressure from MoveOn.org, Monsignor Franklyn M. Casale, the President of St. Thomas University in Miami, issued an ultimatum on March 13 to Anita Britt, his Chief Financial and Administrative Officer: choose between your work for this university or membership on the Board of American Outdoor Brands, the former Smith & Wesson Holding Company […]
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“The diversity imperative demands dissimulation and evasion,” Heather Mac Donald writes in City Journal about the public shaming by Penn Law School of Professor Amy Wax for pointing out hard truths about racial preferences. Many of us would put that assertion less politely and simply say that sustaining such preferences and cloaking their true costs […]
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