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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Criticism, including mine, greeted the University of Connecticut’s plan to build a new dorm to house its 40 black student males. That pressure caused the “black dorm” to be revised: it would be “open” to non-blacks who identify with the “African-American male experience”. Stubbornly college officials held fast to the idea that blacks would be assigned […]
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Have you noticed how many of the campus accusations of rape/sexual misconduct are reported after the 3rd, 4th, or 5th sexual encounter? It’s possible, of course that rape-minded males on campus like to let a relationship proceed a while before forcing themselves on a woman. Or it could be that something happens in the midst of a […]
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I was thinking about the issue of time this past week, while doing what I call cross-reading: reading items online and pausing every few minutes to look something up on a web browser and then returning to the original reading. This is a high-stimulation way of reading, producing an ultrathin layer of information about many […]
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“Academe is Overrun by Liberals. So What?” UCLA historian Russell Jacoby both declares and asks in a long Chronicle of Higher Education essay. Although published on April 1, it is presumably not an April Fool’s joke. For a number or reasons — not all of which coexist easily —Jacoby dismisses out of hand the notion […]
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Twenty-two Senators have asked the Appropriations Committee to increase the budget of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) by almost 30%. All of those Senators are Democrats except for Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada. OCR has pressured colleges and high schools to adopt unconstitutional speech codes. It also has pressured school districts to […]
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The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has just dipped its oar in the dank water of Title IX. The AAUP’s draft of its new document, The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX, leaves much to be desired. But welcome to the fight, AAUP. We’ve been wondering when you would show up. From 1972 […]
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Since the dawn of time, humankind has sought an explanation for our being on this planet, and some have looked for an answer in “liberal arts” education. But now – at Harvard at least – this profound search for meaning has apparently been transferred from the liberal arts department, where definitive answers have been rare, […]
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At first glance, this looks like a victory for free speech: University of Kansas assistant professor, Andrea Quenette, was allowed to keep her job after quoting the word “nigger” instead of referencing it by initial during a discussion of racism. But her victory was qualified–Quenette did not escape punishment. As The Washington Post reports, for […]
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Max Stern, the lawyer for the expelled Yale basketball captain Jack Montague, has spoken out, announcing that he will sue Yale on behalf of Montague in April, and clarifying some details in the case, including a very surprising one: that the aggrieved female did not file the sexual misconduct complaint. In his telling, Montague had […]
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Claude Steele, the social psychologist best known for developing the influential concept of “stereotype threat,” is in hot water. He is Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost of the University of California at Berkeley and holds appointments in the Psychology Department and the Graduate School of Education, ” He has come under fire for the way […]
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The thought police are at it again. The latest confrontation is at Virginia Tech University at Blacksburg where the usual suspects — a coalition of black activists and white leftists — have called upon the university president to withdraw an invitation to Charles Murray, where he is scheduled to speak on March 25 at Tech’s […]
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Mitchell Langbert, a professor at Brooklyn College, wrote last week about the grandly titled and resolutely leftist faculty union that he and all teachers at CUNY are stuck with, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC). Langbert mentioned, briefly, that PSC had made no effort to defend our excellent writer, KC Johnson when KC was under attack […]
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“Forget what the right says,” the title of a recent Washington Post OpEd proclaims, “Academia isn’t so bad for conservative professors.” The sub-title, “Right-leaning professors do face challenges on campus, but we can still thrive,” both reveals that the authors — Jon A. Shields, associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, and Joshua M. […]
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Passing on the right is dangerous and generally illegal driving. But a fair number of people do it anyway. The title Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn’s new book, Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University, combines the image of the careless driver with the other transgressive meaning of “passing.” Conservative professors can […]
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The anti-Semitic Boycott-Divest-Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel keeps reaching for—and finding—new depths of indecency. Among the deepest descenders into this abyss is Jasbir Puar, an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers. Professor Puar recently garnered national attention for her address at Vassar, February 3, “Inhumanist Biopolitics: How Palestine Matters.” The talk has […]
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Last September, the English Department at Colby College in Maine posted a job opening for Associate or Full Professor of American Literature. It’s a plum position, one that hundreds of professors would love to have. As with all academic job listings, the ad files a diversity statement at the bottom, assuring applicants that some identities […]
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Southern Connecticut State University, where I teach, has gone to great lengths to accommodate Muslims — and reject the slightest manifestations of Islamophobia — while acting complacently toward egregious anti-Semitism and hate crimes. Concurrently, widely publicized events at Vassar and Oberlin Colleges reveal that displays of anti-Semitism typically cause uproar within the Jewish community but […]
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Jane Mayer is a writer for The New Yorker who knows her audience. It consists mostly of elitist progressives who like reading that their enlightened transformation of America is imperiled by greedy conservative villains. She has written many articles and most recently, a book entitled Dark Money on that theme. The February 26, 2016 issue […]
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Jack Montague, captain of Yale’s basketball team, has been expelled from the university on some sort of sex charge and the story continues to get uglier. Since his family has basically declined to comment (for understandable reasons) and because Yale chooses (for incomprehensible reasons) to employ “a more expansive definition of sexual assault” than state […]
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