As revisionist histories go, The Forgotten Man went—straight to the NY Times bestsellers list in 2009. The book stayed there for months, even though it differed from the received wisdom of academia, and the lockstep opinion of the mainstream media. Indeed, Amity Shlaes’s pellucid chronicle of the Great Depression became successful because it rejected the […]
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Last Monday, Bowdoin College made page one of the New York Times with its decision to de-recognize an evangelical student group for refusing to sign an anti-discrimination pledge. This meant the group could not use the chapel, the multicultural center, any room at Bowdoin, or even campus bulletin boards. The pledge said all campus groups […]
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There he goes again, bypassing the Constitution’s pesky requirement that laws must be passed by Congress, not promulgated by executive decree. The Washington Post has just reported that President Obama will soon sign an executive order implementing all or most (the text is not yet available) of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), prohibiting discrimination by federal contractors based on […]
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Will working as a barista reduce your college tuition? Starbucks thinks it should. Yesterday, Starbucks CEO and chairman Howard Schultz announced that his company will pay for a portion of its employees’ college educations at the online arm of Arizona State University, provided they work up to 20 hours a week for the company. It […]
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Our friends at FIRE has just released a video explaining why the 2006 Duke lacrosse case is still relevant. It features frequent Minding the Campus contributor KC Johnson, who wrote the definitive history of the case. Check it out here:
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Last month, the Vassar chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine posted a Nazi propaganda poster on its Tumblr site. The poster depicted, among other things, a big nosed man carrying a moneybag. The SJP had previously posted material from an anti-Semitic magazine, using the classic “fifth columnist” trope to describe Israel’s American defenders. At that time, […]
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One striking element of the debate over sexual assault on campus is the almost complete lack of credibility for those whose predictions or observations have failed to stand the test of time. Two examples: The first came in a piece from anthropologist Barbara King, a blogger for NPR. King delivered a pretty standard “rape culture” posting, […]
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Posted by A Voice For Male Students 1. John Doe at Occidental College 2. Andre L. Henry at Delaware State University 3. Benjamin King at Depauw University 4. Edwin Bleiler at College of the Holy Cross 5. John Doe at Williams College 6. Drew Sterrett at University of Michigan-Ann Arbor 7. Kevin Parisi at Drew University […]
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In late April, the media were abuzz with the tale of yet another horrific injustice inflicted by a university on a female student who had been a victim of sexual assault on campus. “Brown University lets rapist who choked his victim reenroll after a semester-long suspension,” thunderedthe headline on Salon.com. The reports were based on the account of Brown […]
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The Center for Individual Rights has filed a lawsuit in Connecticut on behalf of Pamela Swanigan, a graduate student in English at the University of Connecticut. The suit alleges that Ms. Swanigan was not allowed to compete for a highly prestigious, merit-based scholarship despite being the top applicant the year she applied to UConn. Instead she was […]
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Liberalism and the left have become virtually indistinguishable (as Fred Siegel’s impressive Revolt Against The Masses persuasively documents), becoming more intolerant and hence more intolerable. An exemplary recent example is the recent attack orchestrated by GetEqual, a Berkeley-based militant gay rights group, against University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock. Laycock, ubiquitously described, as here, as “husband of UVA President Teresa Sullivan [and] […]
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Last month, the Modern Language Association (MLA) issued the report of its Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature. The crucial word in the report is “unsustainable.” The authors recognize that the old model of luring students into doctoral programs, keeping them at work on degrees for up to a decade, and then […]
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In the Brown University rape-charge scandal, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has declared that the complaining student was “nearly choked to death.” The male involved says the “choking” was minor and meant to be affectionate: “Both (the female and male students, Lena Sclove and Daniel Kopin) acknowledge that Sclove had an intensely negative reaction when Kopin put his hand on her […]
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English departments have pretty much given up on their mission of preserving a literary canon or teaching poetic form and rhetorical strategies. Decades ago, politics of race, class, and gender overtook any concern for preserving and perpetuating poetic art. In fact, to claim that there is such a thing as Literature was to align oneself […]
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Columnist Mike Adams reports that at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, where he is an embattled conservative professor, graduating students can get commencement cords in three colors: gold for good grades, purple for being a homosexual and lavender for being supportive of homosexuals. We had no idea that they gave out tassels for orientation and orientational support, […]
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Is it reasonable for a university to insist that campus Christian groups accept non-Christian or anti-Christian students as group leaders? Ask a hundred ordinary Americans and you would very likely get 99 or 100 noes. Ask the same question at our most politically correct colleges and universities, though, and you’d get a different answer. Because of campus anti-discrimination codes, all […]
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Suppose you’re a wealthy investor, and an enterprising businessman comes to you requesting a billion dollar investment in his company. He promises an incredible ROI. Your interest is piqued, so you ask him for some data to justify such a large investment. “No can do,” he says. “That information is private.” Of course, you’d laugh […]
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Slate‘s Emily Bazelon recently took a look at the tensions in campus sexual assault matters by looking into a the case of Leah Francis, a Stanford student who said that she was brutally raped on campus. Though Bazelon conceded due process problems, her column suggested that issues regarding campus due process are likely to get worse before […]
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President Obama announced today an executive order that will make the student loan program a worse deal for taxpayers. Though the federal government already allows some students to cap their loan repayments at 10 percent of their monthly incomes, the President hopes to expand the program. Students who borrowed before October 2007 or who haven’t borrowed since […]
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The thesis of my 2008 book, The Dumbest Generation, was that digital tools and media have become so prominent in teens’ and 20-somethings’ thoughts and acts that their intellectual and civic capacities are bound to deteriorate. While devices and social networks allow the possibility of intellectual and civic engagement, I argued, they mean something else entirely […]
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