Minding The Campus - Page 2 of 115 -

Heather Mac Donald: In the Crosshairs of a Progressive Campaign

January 16, 2019
By Mark Bauerlein

Heather Mac Donald’s book The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, was published more than four months ago, but I just checked Amazon, and it still stands impressively among all book sales at #798. It ranks #1 in two sub-categories of education. She appeared on Tucker Carlson’s […]

Gillette on the Razor’s Edge After Airing Toxic Ad Against Men

January 16, 2019
By editor

The radical feminist war against men, once contained on college campuses, has leached into corporate America. One of America’s longstanding, iconic companies, Gillette, released a new ad campaign portraying men as violent, sexual predators by virtue of their “toxic manhood” training. The public reaction to the ad has been swift and unequivocal. Below is a […]

The Toxic Mission to Reengineer Men

January 15, 2019
By Philip Carl Salzman

Contemporary Western culture is now dominated by feminist ideology. One of its favorite tropes is “toxic masculinity.” This is part of the feminist strategy to lift females by lowering males. Most Western governments are on the feminists’ side, protected under the banner of “diversity.” Canada and Sweden have made feminization their highest priority, neglecting prosperity […]

Is Being Black a Badge of Merit?

January 9, 2019
By John S. Rosenberg

The question of whether, or to what degree, applicants are admitted or hired because they are black or Hispanic (or American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (NHPI)) is a central and indeed indispensable component of the ongoing debate over affirmative action. Now, if a recent Classics meeting in San Diego is any indication, […]

Why More and More Students Won’t Speak Up in Class

January 8, 2019
By Frank Furedi

After I gave a public lecture on ‘Socialization and Fear’ at a university in England, a young professor came up to me and said, “You forgot to mention the biggest fear we face as teachers – the fear that many students have of opening their mouths.” Since this encounter, I have met numerous academics who […]

Why Men Are Falling Behind in Schools

January 3, 2019
By Philip Carl Salzman

North American universities have been taken over by women. Men are decreasingly university students, professors, and administrators. “Gender equality,” a feminist war chant, apparently does not apply when females dominate. In the United States, women outnumber men in colleges and universities — by 2026, the Department of Education estimates, 57 percent of college students will be […]

The Push for Unconstitutional College Programs

January 1, 2019
By John S. Rosenberg

There they go again. Inside Higher Ed reports on a new handwringing study lamenting the “underrepresentation” of members of various “Underrepresented Racial and Ethnic Groups” (URGs) among engineering students. The study by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, funded by the National Science Foundation, found, as all such studies always find, that “Hispanic and […]

Reminding Us Why Racial Preferences are a Bad Idea

December 20, 2018
By George Leef

Jason Riley, one of my favorite writers, is black and opposes racial preferences (for all groups) on the grounds that they don’t solve underlying problems, sow discord, and become a source of political chicanery. A few years back, he wrote a very illuminating book entitled, Please Stop Helping Us in which he explained why the […]

Report: 74% of All Colleges Don’t Uphold Due Process for Accused Students

December 18, 2018
By editor

Fire, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, has published a report showing that the overwhelming majority of top colleges in America fail to guarantee fair hearings for students accused of sexual misconduct. Their findings include: 3 in 4 top universities do not guarantee presumption of innocence in campus proceedings. 9 in 10 top universities […]

Harvard Zealots Abuse Title IX to Nail the Accused

December 17, 2018
By KC Johnson

Harvard is perhaps the only institution in the country with multiple sets of Title IX procedures, depending on which branch of the university the student attends. At Harvard Law School, the parties are allowed to have full legal representation, the tribunal is basically independent, and there’s meaningful discovery. Harvard undergraduates, on the other hand, experience […]

How Many Colleges Will Go Under? Will Yours Be One?

December 11, 2018
By Richard Vedder

Two of our nation’s premier credit rating agencies, Moody’s and Fitch, have issued reports recently giving a negative outlook on the finances of American higher education. Of course, the financial condition of schools varies considerably: there are affluent ones with large cash reserves, billions in investments in their endowment, and robust demand for their services, […]

Why Harvard Needs Better Defense Lawyers

December 10, 2018
By John S. Rosenberg

By now, it is clear to all observers that the most damaging material that Harvard has been forced to release in the lawsuit filed by Students For Fair Admissions is powerful evidence that Asian applicants, who score higher than applicants from other racial and ethnic groups on grades, test scores, and extracurricular activities, are graded […]

Get Ready for the Coming War Against Merit

December 6, 2018
By Robert Weissberg

What if the Supreme Court rules decisively against Harvard in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College? Will racial preferences fade into history as has Prohibition? Or will universities employ legally safe proxies such as social class to admit less qualified minorities? Let me suggest one resistance tactic not yet on the agenda but, rest […]

Today’s Social Science Courses—More Feelings, Fewer Facts

December 3, 2018
By Philip Carl Salzman

The social sciences are a “broad church” or “big tent,” containing many perspectives, some in complete contradiction with the others. At the moment, there are two dominant “schools,” or heuristic theories, and one minor “school” of social science. One major school is postmodernism, which rejects the scientific approach, arguing that there is no such thing […]

“Diversity” Rests on Racialist Assumptions

November 29, 2018
By John S. Rosenberg

Sometimes the utter intellectual hollowness of a program is most clearly revealed by its unctuous but unwitting advocates. A perfect example is “Fostering Diversity on Campus to Strengthen Maine’s Healthcare System,” which the University of New England actually paid to have published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The advertorial begins with a profile of Samuel Acha, […]

Bow Down to Diversity or Risk Your Academic Career

November 25, 2018
By Mark Bauerlein

When jobs are scarce, and when you’ve spent your 20s living spartanly, reading books, books, books, writing a dissertation, and you’re sick of being a nobody whose only recognition comes from students in your freshman comp course who thank you for spending time correcting their grammar and punctuation, you’ll say anything the people who control […]

Finally, Due Process Near for College Males

November 23, 2018
By KC Johnson

The proposed Title IX regulations released by Betsy DeVos would ensure a much fairer campus adjudication system—they’d ensure cross-examination (through a lawyer or advocate) of witnesses; access to all evidence and training material for both parties; and the presumption of innocence for the accused. It’s little wonder that groups committed to one-sided campus procedures have […]

How Equality Became the Enemy of Justice

November 15, 2018
By Philip Carl Salzman

}In the U.S., coastal progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans from “fly-over country,” are at each other’s throats. At least half of Americans despise their politically incorrect President. The results of elections are no longer accepted; “resistance” is proclaimed, and the aim is to overthrow those who have been elected, along with the Constitution and the […]

Loyalty Oaths, Diversity Mandates, Faculty ‘Training’ at San Diego State

November 13, 2018
By John S. Rosenberg

Higher education has become obsessed with intense devotion to the all-encompassing cult of “diversity,” and as usual, California is leading the way. New loyalty oaths have become so demanding that, as Heather Mac Donald has written in the Los Angeles Times, even Einstein probably could not be hired on a public California university campus today. […]

Can Public Universities Compete With the Ivies?

November 12, 2018
By Richard Vedder

An executive search firm in the not-for-profit sector, Kittleman, has recently looked at two groups of highly successful heads of organizations: the chief executive officers of the Fortune 500 corporations and their counterparts at the 100 largest non-profit organizations listed on Forbes. It is not surprising that the captains of industry and philanthropy mostly went […]

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No Free Speech: Heckler Cancels Another Student Meeting

Last week, a group of at least 4 Portland State University police officers stood by and declined to intervene as a heckler with a cowbell single-handedly canceled a College Republicans meeting. This is the second time in 2019 that PSU allowed hecklers or would-be hecklers to shut down campus expression — and the second time the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has demanded the university adhere to its First Amendment obligations. FIRE first wrote to the university Feb. 18 after PSU’s law enforcement unilaterally canceled a meeting of a socialist student group after the founder of the group Patriot Prayer said he would show up.

Be Careful What You Wish For on Social Programs

Nathan Glazer, the last of a group of famous neocon social scientists, died at the age of 95 on January 19 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. (He resisted the label “neocon.”) Glazer consistently warned that vast government plans to improve the lives of the poor often come to grief or create new problems of their own. “The evaluations of the specifics of the first ten years after the launching of (the War on Poverty) confirm that nothing worked and in particular, nothing in education worked.” He concluded that the family was the key institution to positive social change and that rights are inherent in individuals, not groups. The article here by Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute ran in 2011 when President Obama planned an extension of the War on Poverty.

You, Too, Can Turn in Your Classmate

The campus police of the University of Illinois have issued calls for students to report “acts of intolerance” to the schools Bias Assessment and Response Team. It said, “acts of intolerance create an unsafe and unwelcoming environment for campus community members. Please let us know if you feel unsafe.” According to BART, bias is defined as “actions or expressions that are motivated at least in part by prejudice against or hostility toward a person or group because of that person or group’s perceived age, disability, status, ethnicity, gender, identity-expression, national origin, race, religion/ spirituality, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, etc.” Those reported to BART may be required to participate in mediation or other educational conservations.

More Evidence of Professorial Political Bias

University of North Carolina business professor Michael Jacobs polled 40 Republican students at his school and found that all but two believed they would be penalized for not expressing the professor's politics in a test answer. The professor claimed that faculty should pledge to respect ideological diversity and that chancellors who are too afraid to promote tolerance for ideological diversity should be fired. “One of my top MBA students, who I would categorize as moderate, recently told me that she will no longer participate in class discussions that involve social or political issues for fear of being branded by the ‘progressive police,’” the professor said. Read the story at Campus Reform.

More Risible News From Yale

As you recall, the campus exploded in outrage in 2015 when Prof. Erika Christakis challenged a Yale diktat warning students not to wear offensive costumes for Halloween. (“If you don’t like a costume someone is wearing, look away,” she wrote in a campus-wide email. Her husband Prof. Nicholas Christakis, threatened by a group of offended students, quit as master of Silliman House after getting zero backing from Yale. In a review of The Coddling of the American Mind in the American Interest, writer Aaron Sibarium says Christakis' successor at Silliman, psychology professor Laurie Santos, has a program for happiness that includes this advice:

Avoid binding attachments and obligations; these will stress you out and make you sad.
Focus on cultivating your own mind and mental habits so that you can be happy regardless of your external conditions, a self-reliant ray of sunshine.
Prioritize instrumental knowledge that helps to achieve your goals; in particular, learn how to manipulate others to your advantage.

In response to "How Diversity Hijacked History 101 and All the Humanities"

The humanities have been committing suicide for some time, but in the early 1990s, it was called “multiculturalism,” not diversity–different name, same game. That’s when our annual faculty reports began to ask for details about our “contributions to multiculturalism” in the three areas of teaching, research, and service. I was on a faculty senate committee discussing this change way back then, and many people on it wondered what they were expected to say to this. One asked: am I supposed to list how many Black students I have in each class? By now, of course, new PhDs are indeed required to pledge fealty to “diversity” and list their contributions to it in “diversity statements” that many universities insist on as part of a job application.

So, their diversity statements read, e.g., “As a gay, biracial, child of a single mother…” etc. One student (very talented, incidentally) with whom I discussed this, responded that there was no choice but to comply, however demeaning it is to have to stress and itemize personal identities and in effect brag about one’s “intersectionality.”

In English rhetoric programs, there are the (required) writing courses, which place curricular emphasis on social justice and identity issues, not on intellectual development, and certainly not on independent thinking. As for the faculty, I could never figure out why professors who have contributed to the decline and numbing repetition of their new pedagogy thought students would want to study second-hand politics in literature courses instead of going straight to the source in, say, poli-sci and related programs.

I think my generation is responsible for most this: professors have by and large not defended the integrity of their own fields, apparently because they do not feel such integrity exists. Identity issues have driven out most everything else. Course descriptions and job ads provide undisguised portraits of this depressing scene. It’s a terrible loss of intellectual vitality and in fact shameful — and faculty bear enormous, rarely acknowledged, responsibility.

Daphne Patai, Amherst MA

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