The never-resting Office for Civil Rights (OCR) U.S. Department of Education and the equally insomnolent Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department have just issued their latest “Dear Colleague” letter advising the stewards of the nation’s schools of their newest responsibility. The “Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students” consists of five pages of text, […]
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Today in the Wall Street Journal, an op-ed by Michael Bloomberg and Charles Koch explains “Why Free Speech Matters on Campus.” Many conservatives might jump to endorse this article as a welcome indictment of liberal censorship and bias by two powerful campus donors. But that would be a mistake. Look more closely at what Bloomberg […]
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Harvey Silverglate delivered these remarks upon receiving the Manhattan Institute’s Alexander Hamilton award Monday, May 9th at a dinner in New York City. Silverglate is a Cambridge attorney, a veteran defender of civil rights and civil liberties, and co-founder, along with University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors, of the Foundation for Individual Rights in […]
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Richard A. Epstein, Defining Ideas, the Hoover Institution These final clubs enjoy widespread acceptance among their members because some young people prefer to organize their social lives around single-sex organizations. To a classical liberal like myself, these revealed preferences count a great deal…. But in the eyes of progressives like Faust, these preferences should be […]
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By Blair Ericson In the name of “gender inclusion,” Harvard has decided to punish members of all-female sororities, all-male fraternities, and single-sex final clubs of either sex. The final clubs, targeted by the administration for years, are independent groups beyond the direct reach of the university, so Harvard will blacklist their individual members by not […]
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Yesterday The New York Times ran a column by Nicholas Kristof saying that American colleges and universities seem to have very few conservative teachers and display a conspicuous aversion to acquiring more. Readers of this site already know this, but the news must have come as a surprises to Times readers. “A Confession of LIberal […]
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After years of decline, the number of PhDs is rising again—despite obvious signs that the job prospects for the holders of all these new doctorates are far from good. In 2009, the number of doctorates awarded in the humanities dropped significantly. In 2005, the fields in total produced 5,210 of them, but four years later […]
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Harvey Mansfield is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1962. He has written or translated works on Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Alexis de Tocqueville and Edmund Burke as well as a book on Manliness. His notable former students include: Andrew Sullivan, Alan Keyes, William Kristol. Clifford Orwin, Paul Cantor, Delba Winthrop, Mark Lilla, Francis Fukuyama, and Shen Tong. […]
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Obviously, we’re in a time now where parenting is in crisis, I would think. The reason we have all these whiny, super-sensitive girls on campus that’ll run shrieking at the slightest thing that offends their ears or drag mattresses onto the stage at commencement exercises, the reason we have that is because the parents have […]
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The knock against anthropologists used to be that they were all relativists. Not anymore. Many anthropologists today are hardcore moral absolutists. The members of the American Anthropological Association are busy voting (until May 31) on a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The proposed resolution jumps off in its first sentence in universalist language, claiming that […]
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Calls for additional or new “campus climate surveys” have been a regular feature the post-2011 war on campus due process. The White House has produced a template that colleges can copy. The Gillibrand/McCaskill Campus Safety and Accountability Act (co-sponsored by such Republicans as Marco Rubio, Charles Grassley, and Kelly Ayotte) contains a provision seeking to […]
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Last fall, Peter Salovey, president of Yale, badly botched the student protests that broke out over the insignificant issue of proper campus Halloween costume. Now he has made a few decisions in hopes of avoiding another round of protests. First, he announced that the “masters” of Yale’s twelve residential colleges will now be known as […]
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The prospect of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) being sued has been much in the news lately. Talk began with an announcement from FIRE—on the fifth anniversary of the issuance of the “Dear Colleague” letter—that it was soliciting an accused student to sue OCR. Attorney Andrew Miltenberg then filed two such suits, on behalf […]
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Earlier this month, The Washington Free Beacon, the conservative online newspaper, reported that the National Science Foundation was spending over half a million federal dollars “to videotape male engineering students while they work in labs” to see if they are committing “microaggressions” against women. The Daily Caller was more openly sarcastic, with a headline that […]
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Decades ago, American professors largely stuck to teaching their subjects and kept their political passions separate from their academic work. Read, for example, Alan Kors’ account of a graduate school experience of his, where a decidedly leftist professor rebuked the class for just writing what they thought he wanted to hear and assigned the students […]
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The annual White Privilege Conference, not open to the public, concluded yesterday at an undisclosed site in Philadelphia. Caucasians mustn’t worry though — the sponsors say they aren’t anti-white. It’s just that having white skin is an oppressive virus or disease that must be repented in the name of mutual respect. The teachers and lecturers […]
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The University of Missouri has eliminated Respect and Excellence. I have to write this in a hurry because it won’t be long before others will seize on this gift. Respect and Excellence are the names for two residence halls at the University. They are being closed because the University suddenly finds that its enrollments are […]
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Connecticut is going through the motions of trying to tax Yale’s $25.6 billion endowment to help relieve the state’s $266 million shortfall. That effort will fail, but public opinion is starting to question the appropriateness of government-conferred tax benefits for university endowment funds. At Harvard, alumni as politically diverse as conservative Ron Unz and progressive […]
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In my research as a labor economist, I discovered that the Lawton program, offering aid exclusively to minority and disadvantaged students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is operating illegally—Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits Federal aid going to members of certain racial and ethnic groups, and not others, as Lawton does. That […]
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Back in 1987, in a paroxysm of self-contradiction, Jesse Jackson engaged in what would have gotten him tossed in the clink had he done anything comparable in Djakarta or Chungking. He led a crowd of banner-waving students at Stanford, taking advantage of a western nation’s heritage of free assembly and free speech, even when the […]
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