This is the the keynote address delivered by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on October 23rd in New York at the fifteenth anniversary dinner of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). *** A few years ago I wrote a chapter on taboo language which began, “It’s no coincidence that freedom of speech is enshrined […]
Read More
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Student Loan Ombudsman has just released his annual report on private student loans. The data in the report suggests that an epidemic of non-repayment is happening in the private student loan sector. Some 5300 borrowers lodged complaints with the CFPB from October 2013-September 2014, an increase of 38% from the […]
Read More
These remarks by the noted First Amendment expert were delivered in New York last night (Oct. 23) at the 15th anniversary dinner of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the foremost protector of free speech in higher education. *** This is an extraordinarily perilous moment with respect to free speech on campuses around […]
Read More
Whatever their ostensible subjects, Stanley Fish’s books tend to be about Stanley Fish. His new one, Versions of Academic Freedom, extends the conceit. Which is not to say that the book is only a “Version of Stanley Fish.” It is also a succinct, well-informed, and often elegant essay. Fish’s great talent is compression. In this […]
Read MoreMove over Captain Renault. Like the Claude Rains character in Casablanca who was “shocked, shocked” to learn that there was gambling at Ricks, Carol Folt seems terribly surprised that athletes at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she is chancellor, were attending (or not attending) bogus classes and getting high bogus marks. How […]
Read More
When Congress passed the Title IX section of the Education Amendments of 1972, it aimed simply to offer women more opportunities to participate in on-campus athletics. Over the years, however, Title IX has become the legal foundation for the Education Department to insinuate itself into sexual assault cases. The key passage of Title IX reads, “No […]
Read More
Just a few short weeks ago, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa once again rocked the world of American higher education with the publication of their new book, Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates. Their study found that many of today’s college graduates were not provided with the tools and skills to transition smoothly […]
Read More
In its response to my column on my relationship with the Federalist Society’s speakers bureau, the Federalist Society claims that it continues to host events on the same topic that got me dropped from their list—challenging hardline feminist doctrines on “rape culture” and rape legislation—and speakers who share the same “basic perspective” as mine. The […]
Read More
The Federalist Society aims to host programs on law school campuses and elsewhere on important and controversial legal topics by offering top libertarian and conservative thinkers a small speaking fee and defraying their travel expenses. Cathy Young recently posted a piece objecting to our decision no longer to include her on the list of speakers we […]
Read More
The latest due process lawsuit—albeit one with quite unsympathetic defendants—has been filed, this one against the University of Houston. You can read the complaint here, and the motion for a preliminary injunction here. The specifics of this case are tawdry. A male Houston student named Ryan McConnell, after a night of drinking heavily, hooked up […]
Read More
Last year, when the American Studies Association announced its boycott of Israeli institutions of higher learning, the development was seen as a great step forward for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Now: not so much. As often occurs when extremist academics encounter the real world, the ASA has been forced to effectively neuter […]
Read More
George Will’s scheduled October 22 appearance at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio has drawn protests from those angered by his June column questioning the campus culture of victimhood and the anti-rape crusade. Anita Manur, director of the school’s Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program, argued that Will’s commentary could “re-victimize and re-traumatize some of our […]
Read More
In an attempt to defend the indefensible, Ezra Klein penned a meandering column responding to the many critics of his “yes-means-yes” defense. Or, I should say, responding to some critics: he ignored perhaps the most troubling response to his piece, Cathy Young’s observation that he had blatantly misrepresented a column by her—which suggested that false […]
Read More
This week has featured a potential tipping point in the debate about due process and campus sexual assault. The first event came in publication of an extraordinary column by Ezra Klein, defending California’s “affirmative consent” law. In one respect, it wasn’t surprising to see Klein defend the proposal; too many liberal commentators (not to mention, […]
Read More
This week has featured a potential tipping point in the debate about due process and campus sexual assault. The first event came in publication of an extraordinary column by Ezra Klein, defending California’s “affirmative consent” law. In one respect, it wasn’t surprising to see Klein defend the proposal; too many liberal commentators (not to mention, […]
Read More
In my freshman year at Duke in the mid-1960s, C’s were still the most common grade in my courses, about equal to the total number of A’s and B’s combined. In my first-semester freshman composition course, there were no A’s given, only two B’s, one or two D’s — and all the rest C’s. The […]
Read More
Over at PJ Media, Ron Radosh reveals that a banner on UCLA’s campus promotes Angela Davis, the radical activist and former UCLA professor from 1969-1970. The banner includes an old image of Davis—presumably taken during her time at UCLA—with the words “WE QUESTION” underneath. As Radosh notes, the ad, which is supposed to boost UCLA […]
Read More
“We are never sending our boys to college.” That line came not from some far-right crank, but instead from Robin Steinberg, a public defender. For an article in the New Republic, author Judith Shulevitz had asked Steinberg to review Columbia’s new sexual assault policy. (I had profiled the policy previously for Minding the Campus.) Shulevitz […]
Read More
A particular nostalgia is at work in academic discussion. We still talk about of liberal education, the liberal arts, and the humanities as if they remain viable activities in higher education, threatened, yes, and losing ground, but open to revival. Universities have grown ever more “corporate,” students flock to business and vocational programs, the sciences […]
Read More
Coal miners used to bring a canary down into the mine to warn them when the air was becoming too dangerous. If the canary went limp, it was time to get out. For the last several years, conditions for American law schools have been getting progressively more dangerous, as students respond to the realities of […]
Read More