When a 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson defined America as a land that promises “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as inalienable rights, he laid out the vision for the American Dream. But as time went on, and as the tiny, fragile nation exploded into a world powerhouse, these grandiose promises were frequently blunted by tyrannical […]
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Would it not be wonderful to be a Greek god? Imagine being Poseidon, god of the sea, who was able to create storms, earthquakes, and even horses. Or Ares, god of war, who possessed superhuman powers of speed and strength, allowing him to destroy his enemies, even entire armies, at will. This is pure mythology, […]
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I recently read in the Wall Street Journal that Stanford University had more administrative staff and faculty than it did students. Specifically, there were 15,750 administrators, 2,288 faculty members, and 16,937 students. The paid help of 18,038 (administrators plus faculty) outnumbered the customers (students) by 1,101. That gave me an idea for a stunning administrative […]
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In December 2008, Denis Rancourt was suspended from his tenured professorship in physics at the University of Ottawa—an action that resulted in his termination a few months later. This occurred after a five-year battle with university administrators. It was, according to “workplace mobbing” researcher Kenneth Westhues, a case in which the administration “coalesced in the […]
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If you haven’t heard, “the college essay is dead.” The cause? ChatGPT, a large language model trained on a massive dataset of human text that can generate human-like writing in response to prompts or questions. Since its release, ChatGPT has produced a lot of educational handwringing because it puts at students’ fingertips a machine that […]
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Neapolitan Overtime What is a constitution? In the very broadest sense, whether we refer to Moses’s ten commandments (1450 BC), the Magna Carta (1215), or the Articles of Confederation (1777–89), a constitution is a document that defines and reflects the existence of a people or a nation. A constitution doesn’t have to be a specific […]
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When 2022’s Congressional Fads Mirror Nazi Germany Everything is not ok in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Recent laws, such as the legalization of recreational marijuana, a drug that negatively affects cognitive functioning, and the legalization of gay “marriage,” a precariously codified bill, were evil and well received by […]
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While we may have to wait until 2024 to see a Biden vs. DeSantis battle royale, we might have a preview in the skirmish over accreditation in Florida. To recap developments to date (see here for more), accreditors are private entities that have been entrusted with determining which colleges and universities are eligible for federal […]
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There are professors, and then there are professors. Donald Leslie Shaw (1930–2017) was a titan in the field of Hispanic literature. He wrote two definitive books on the principal literary movements of modern Spain and Latin America: The Generation of 1898 in Spain (1975) and Nueva narrativa Hispanoamericana (1981). He also wrote what remains the best […]
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How ‘Identity Science’ Canceled an Editor The U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1978 Bakke decision, shoehorned racial preferences into legality by identifying (racial and ethnic) diversity as an intrinsic good, a non-merit factor that may be legally used to tilt hiring and college admissions. Now, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have become part of the […]
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In my sixth year as a professor—the same year that Barack Obama’s Department of Justice reshaped Title IX into a tool to police political speech on campus—a student filed a Title IX complaint about me. He claimed that the B+ he had received in my class was a result of my “homophobia.” His evidence for […]
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The battle over racial preferences in college admissions usually focuses on universities and the courts, but no less important is what occurs among the applicants themselves. Gaining admission, particularly to elite schools, can be likened to a game, and it is hardly surprising that families lacking “diversity” often hire expensive consultants to give junior an […]
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White Coats for Black Lives is Bringing Racialized Medicine to a Doctor’s Office Near You The medical student activist group White Coats for Black Lives (WC4BL) is not only radical—it is also mainstreaming radicalism in medical education. WC4BL connects the profession of medicine to a larger woke zeitgeist. The group emerged in 2014 following a […]
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In the last part of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the main character, Winston Smith, is arrested by the Thought Police and subjected to a long interrogation process by O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party. “There are three stages in your reintegration,” O’Brien tells Winston, “There is learning, there is understanding, and there […]
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Stanford University has just apologized for its past discrimination … against Jews. As summarized in Stanford Magazine, a presidential task force made up of faculty, students, staff (including a rabbi), an alumnus, and a university trustee released a 75-page report in September, “A Matter Requiring the Utmost Discretion”, whose research was thorough and conclusion unsparing. […]
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A Review of Gloria Greenfield’s Documentary Film “Civilization in the Danger Zone” If you are married with kids, during the COVID lockdown you may have, like many other millions of American parents, discovered that your local school boards are teaching your children an ideology that is at odds with your most cherished beliefs and practices. […]
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What went wrong with American education? Why are preschoolers and kindergarteners being taught that they were born to combat racism and embrace transgender rights? How come concerned parents who oppose blatant indoctrination are now the bad guys? Any keen observer of contemporary education policy would point out the role played by schools of education in […]
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In 2001, Harvard President Larry Summers rebuked University Professor Cornel West for scholarship that did not meet Harvard’s standards. According to the Globe, Summers “rebuked West for recording a rap CD, for leading a political committee for the Rev. Al Sharpton’s possible presidential campaign, and for writing books more likely to be reviewed in The […]
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Judge Douglas Ginsburg, senior judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, has been contributing to civics education. Already distinguished as a judge and a scholar, Judge Ginsburg has now created Civics Fundamentals, in partnership with izzit.org, as a free, standards-aligned course based upon the naturalization test for would-be […]
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The common first-year reading for new students at my university this year was a comic book—or a ‘graphic novel,’ in the Newspeak of our contemporary culture. In it, George Takei (Mr. Sulu of Star Trek fame), through a team of ghostwriters, tells a monolithically woke version of the story of Japanese internment during WWII. First point: This is […]
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