As a new academic year begins, one hero’s journey has ended. Recently as I checked my email, I was stunned and saddened to see that one of my longtime work colleagues had died in a tragic auto accident. I had worked with this person for the past twenty-three years, and while other colleagues and friends […]
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The modern West is unique in being grounded not in a specific land or property, but in a theory of property. A couple, actually. What used to be well-known as the Classical Liberal theory of property—stretching back to Locke and Hobbes—holds that property is the first line of defense of the individual against a potentially […]
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The L.A. Times’ Attack on a Volunteer County Board of Education A few weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times editorial board published a scathing editorial criticizing the Orange County Board of Education (OCBE), two weeks after its special board meeting on ethnic studies and critical race theory (CRT). The editorial accused the OCBE and its […]
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Editor’s Note: The following is a public comment sent by Professor David Richardson to the leadership of his community college system, the State Center Community College District in central California. It has been lightly edited for readability. Board of Trustees, College Presidents & Chancellor, Thank you for allowing me to offer a public comment on the […]
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A scorched-earth campaign by Woke “anti-racists” is laying waste to America’s education and future. Part I offers an overview of the philosophic underpinnings of a calamity in the making. America’s education system is at the edge of the abyss. Warning signs are flashing red. The sustained focus of Woke elites on purportedly “rooting out systemic […]
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The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights was sued on Monday by the Bader Family Foundation, for illegally refusing to comply with the Freedom of Information Act. The Commission claimed that a FOIA request for the outgoing emails of two Commission officials over a six-month period was too non-specific to qualify as a FOIA request, because […]
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The way we teach history matters. If nothing else, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us that. Natural rights, it turns out, don’t always come naturally; when given the free choice, people will not always choose the same universal truths that we, as Americans, hold to be “self-evident.” Universal reason isn’t as universal […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Pipeline on August 17, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. A cosmic storm is roiling the Astrophysics community. Focused on the name of a NASA space telescope, the controversy is one more in a decade-long whirlwind of accusation that has made clear to straight white […]
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The Taliban has now captured Kabul, a huge setback for women in Afghanistan. For many reasons, one may criticize the U.S. mission in that country, but some facts are undeniable: during the occupation, life expectancy improved by six years, and women’s time in school increased by at least four years. The Taliban is assuring girls […]
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When the Woke Left destroys the dignity and futures of blacks, Latinos, and other marginalized minorities, they call it equity. But racism by any other name just plain stinks. In a year of Woke racist government actions targeting whites and Asians, one of the most unsettling acts of government bigotry instead targets the dignity and […]
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Like the seasons, friendships come, and friendships go. It is a melancholy fact of life that around the world at any given moment, thousands of new friendships are born, and thousands of old friendships are dying. Bitterness may remain in the carcass of some expired relationships. For most of us, there is little that we […]
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The progressive state of Oregon is getting rid of reading, writing, and math requirements for high-school graduation, in the name of helping “Latinx” and minority students. As Jazz Shaw notes, it’s doing this “based on allegations of racism.” The “governor’s deputy communications director said that dropping the requirements ‘will benefit Oregon’s Black, Latino, Latina, Latinx, […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearPublicAffairs and is crossposted here with permission. America’s Founders understood that political change is inevitable. They thought it must come about through constitutional mechanisms, with the consent of the governed, and must never infringe on the natural rights of citizens. Progressives – rejecting the idea that any […]
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On July 13, the Governing Board of California Community Colleges (CCC) voted to approve two new requirements—one adding ethnic studies as a graduation requirement for students seeking an associate’s degree and another mandating the incorporation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and anti-racism in the schools’ employment procedures. Given that all existing collegiate-level ethnic studies […]
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Nicholas Lemann, former dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, currently a professor there, and author of The Big Test: The Secret History of American Meritocracy (2000), has a long new article in the New Yorker, “Can Affirmative Action Survive?,” warning ominously—or hopefully, depending on your point of view—that “The Court may signal that it […]
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Georgetown study shows that racial preferences deny admission to more than one in five qualified Asian American applicants to selective colleges. You didn’t hear that from Georgetown. A substantial number of Asian Americans oppose racial preferences in college admissions (otherwise known by the euphemism “affirmative action”). In a transparent effort to dissuade them and courts […]
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In February 1988, as the world watched the Calgary Winter Olympics, the youngest child of a middle-class American family, whose father was a law enforcement officer and whose mother was a nurse, headed north to compete for the United States. Dan Jansen had taken up speed skating as a child, inspired by his older sister, […]
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A well-known podcaster has the custom of going “off the grid” for a month each summer, to gain some perspective. I can beat that: I have been retired from academic teaching and research for nearly 14 years and have rarely visited my campus during that time. But last year, I finally encountered the university first-hand, […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was written by a professor who wishes to remain anonymous. I am a Latin American professor teaching at a university in the Gulf region. Many universities in Gulf countries are affiliated with institutions in the United States, and even those of us who teach in non-affiliated institutions strive hard to reproduce […]
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by RealClearEducation on July 21, 2021 and is crossposted here with permission. According to entrepreneur and philanthropist Robert L. Luddy, many students today not only lack a basic knowledge of the “American system, including the lives and deeds of the Founders and the brilliance of the Constitution,” but also […]
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