Minding The Campus - Page 2 of 113 -

A New University Manifesto

July 19, 2018
By editor

“Higher education is in a lot of trouble, barely kept on track by massive price increases, grade inflation that keeps the mostly inattentive customers sedated, and a class of academic serfs, called adjuncts, who work for meager wages…. And what does the money buy?” Not much, according to Warren Treadgold, author of a new book, The […]

The Liberal-Conservative Dance on Campus Free Speech

July 18, 2018
By Benjamin R. Cohen

Courtney Lawton became the central figure of an hour-long episode of This American Life by making a few derogatory comments on an activist from Turning Point USA, a campus conservative group. Last August, UNL undergraduate Kaitlyn Mullen set up a table with literature and fliers, in the middle of the University of Nebraska campus at […]

A Tide Flowing Toward Free Speech on Campus

July 16, 2018
By Peter Wood

Freedom of expression is making a comeback. That might not be immediately obvious in the age of disinvitations, shout downs, trigger warnings, speech codes, “bias response teams,” and the other components of leftist suppression of ideas and speech on campus. Nor if we look beyond campus to the assaults on public officials, the doxing of […]

Harvard, Not Trump, Could Kill Affirmative Action

July 11, 2018
By John S. Rosenberg

Editor’s note: Even though the Trump administration has reversed Obama era affirmative action policies as they apply to schools, and even though Trump will likely appoint another conservative Supreme Court Justice before the end of the year, academia will continue to write its own rules and institute its own policies on racial preferences. More important […]

Professor John McAdams ‘1’. . . Marquette University ‘0’

July 9, 2018
By Anne Hendershott

Marquette University has been trying to get rid of John McAdams, a conservative gadfly, for nearly four years. In October 2014, they came close to making that happen. When Cheryl Abbate, a grad student in philosophy, was teaching a course about John Rawls and asked students for examples of current events to which Rawlsian philosophy […]

Why the Unfair Sex Tribunals of Title IX Are Losing Ground

July 8, 2018
By KC Johnson

In a reproof to Obama-era guidance on campus sex hearings, Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos issued interim Title IX guidance fair to the accused as well as the accusers. This brought a storm of abuse from the founders of the kangaroo court system, favored by the Obama team. The lawsuits against the interim guidance issued by […]

After the protests at the University of Missouri, enrollment dropped by 13 percent.

The Coming Implosion After Diversity’s Victory

July 2, 2018
By Mark Bauerlein

Conservatives, libertarians, traditionalists, and classical liberals need to get clear on something: the ideological contests are fading. What Irving Kristol famously said in his 2001 Bradley Lecture, “We in America fought a culture war, and we [conservatives] lost,” applies well to higher education. Conservatives fought wars over multiculturalism, Western Civilization, affirmative action, the Academic Bill […]

How to Tongue-Lash Mindless SJW’s

June 28, 2018
By Robert Weissberg

In today’s campus battles, the forces of political correctness enjoy an immense advantage, and to compound this edge, conservatives scarcely notices they’re losing. This is the power to silence critics, indeed remove entire topics from discussion by adroit name calling. Woe to the professors who casually acknowledges that black students rank toward the bottom in […]

Harvard Says Asians Lack Courage, Kindness, Likability

June 23, 2018
By John S. Rosenberg

As a freshman applicant to Washington & Lee University just after the middle of the last century, I had an interview with Frank Gilliam, its legendary, long-time dean of admissions (he could recognize and call by name any student or former student who attended during his 30+ year tenure). Naively — from a small town […]

Princeton Takes a Stand for Free Speech on Campus

June 20, 2018
By Russell K. Nieli

Much of the news regarding free speech on campus is enough to make anyone despair. Year after year more people and ideas are muzzled. But some very heartening news of late comes from Princeton. Due largely to a new book promoting free speech by Princeton University political scientist Keith Whittington and the unusual support and […]

The $1.5 Trillion Student Loan Debacle Hits a Tipping Point

June 18, 2018
By Peter Wood

What’s to be done about the large and growing number of Americans who cannot repay their student loans? There are two new developments. The New York Times reports, “Senators Marco Rubio and Elizabeth Warren introduced a bill on Thursday that would prevent states from suspending residents’ driver’s licenses and professional licenses over unpaid federal student […]

FIRE Survey: Students Want Due Process for Accused

June 15, 2018
By KC Johnson

A major survey sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and conducted by YouGov shows that college students—2225 were surveyed in late January or early February, from two- and four-year institutions— strongly support due process for accused students facing Title IX tribunals. Indeed, the gap between the policies that would flow from […]

How Campus Bullies Pulled Off the Anti-Israel BDS Movement

June 14, 2018
By Jonathan Marks

Today, thanks to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, launched in 2005, campuses around the world are treated every year to Israeli Apartheid Week. The plan, orchestrated by an array of student and non-student organizations, and aided by academic departments that host breathtakingly dishonest anti-Israel speakers, is to depict Israel as just like apartheid-era […]

Are Alumni Pulling the Policy Strings in Academia?

June 11, 2018
By Anne Hendershott

In an attempt to pressure and embarrass Duke University’s President Vincent Price, an undergraduate student group, known as the “People’s State of the University,” interrupted the President’s speech during an alumni weekend event and delivered 12 demands for institutional change. The protestors’ demands ranged from a $15 an hour minimum salary for all hourly Duke employees; […]

It’s Time to Fight for Western Civilization

June 6, 2018
By Philip Carl Salzman

Soon after arriving at McGill University in 1968 from a year of ethnographic field research in Iran, I met an intelligent and sincere young man, an anthropology student, who told me that North American culture was the most corrupt culture in the world. I asked him where else he had been in the world, where […]

Defending a Debased Version of the Liberal Arts

June 5, 2018
By Peter Wood

Two college associations are purporting to defend the liberal arts, the areas of study that undergird higher education in Western history and educate society about universal principles essential for a free person to know to participate in civic life. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) […]

Male and female gender symbols in fire of love

The Gross Unfairness of Title IX Goes National

June 4, 2018
By KC Johnson

Two national publications—the New York Times and the Atlantic—have recently reported on procedural abuses in the Title IX system. Both pieces are must-reads, and reminders of how the one-sided nature of campus Title IX tribunals, analyzed for years mostly by smaller media outlets like this one, has at last decisively permeated mainstream media. Michael Powell’s […]

How ‘They’ Hijacked Anthropology

June 1, 2018
By Philip Carl Salzman

Perhaps the greatest shift in any academic field in the past 30 or 40 years has been in anthropology. Call it an epistemological paradigm shift away from science. Three main influences led to this shift: One was the morphing of symbolic anthropology into interpretive anthropology under the influence of Clifford Geertz, who distanced himself from […]

Diversity Policies Are Corrupting the Sciences

May 30, 2018
By Mark Bauerlein

Anyone who believes that the hard sciences could never capitulate to identity politics in the way the humanities and softer sciences have should not read Heather MacDonald’s report just posted at City Journal. It’s too infuriating, and the impacts could be devastating. MacDonald surveys the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and accrediting organizations […]

College for Everyone? Even the Left Has Doubts

May 29, 2018
By Peter Wood

“College May Not Be Worth It Anymore” warns a headline in The New York Times. It has been a sacred dogma to the American left since the 1960s that “Everyone should go to college.” But the NYT headline is no fluke. Many on the left are now wondering out loud whether mass higher education is […]

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Surprise! College Faculties Are Mostly Democratic

Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor of business at Brooklyn College, published a study of the political affiliations of faculty members at 51 of the 66 liberal-arts colleges ranked highest by U.S. News in 2017. Commenting at Bloomberg this week, Democratic stalwart Cass Sunstein called the findings “eye-popping (even if they do not come as a great surprise to many people in academia).”

Democrats dominate most fields. In religion, Langbert’s survey found that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 70 to 1. In music, it is 33 to 1. In biology, it is 21 to 1. In philosophy, history and psychology, it is 17 to 1. In political science, it is 8 to 1.

The gap is narrower in science and engineering. In physics, economics and mathematics, the ratio is about 6 to 1. In chemistry, it is 5 to 1, and in engineering, it is just 1.6 to 1. Still, Lambert found no field in which Republicans are more numerous than Democrats.

The faculties of Wellesley, Williams and Swarthmore are overwhelmingly Democratic, with ratios at or above 120 to 1. At Harvey Mudd and Lafayette, the ratios are 6 to 1. At the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, it is 2.3 to 1; it is just 1.3 to 1 at West Point.

For two reasons, these numbers are genuinely disturbing, Sunstein wrote.

“The first involves potential discrimination on the part of educational institutions. Some departments might be disinclined to hire potential faculty members based on their political convictions. Such discrimination might take the form of unconscious devaluation of people whose views do not fit with the dominant perspective.

“The second reason is that students are less likely to get a good education, and faculty members are likely to learn less from one another if there is a prevailing political orthodoxy.”

It is far too simple, of course, to say that professors of history, political science, philosophy and the like should “look like America” in political terms. What matters is that they are experts in their fields, able to convey what they know. In faculty hiring, affirmative action for those with conservative political positions is not likely to serve anyone well.

Nonetheless, the current numbers make two points unmistakably clear.

First, those who teach in departments lacking ideological diversity have an obligation to offer competing views and to present them fairly and with respect. A political philosopher who leans left should be willing and able to ask students to think about the force of the argument for free markets, even if they produce a lot of inequality.

The Men's Rights Movement at Yale

It was bound to happen. Last May, a 30-year-old Ph.D. student has accused the University of Southern California and Yale of creating a toxic environment for male students. Kursat Christoff Pekgoz, a member of the National Coalition for Men, is partly basing his claim on data that shows 56% of all college students are women, and 42% are men. He filed a “Dear Colleague” letter, a Guide to Abolishing Affirmative Action for Women explaining how to file a Title IX complaint. Now, some of those complaints are being investigated. According to The Wall Street Journal, “The government dismissed parts of Mr. Pekgoz’s complaints, including concerns about Yale Women in Business and USC’s Gender Studies Program and its Center for Feminist Research, after finding that they don’t exclude or discriminate against men. But it will investigate Yale’s Women Faculty Forum, Yale Women Innovators and five other groups or programs at that school. It is also looking into USC scholarships and fellowships that are advertised as being open only to females, and a Women in Science and Engineering group that excludes males.”

‘Slap a Zionist’ at Vassar

Some 400 students at Vassar received email copies of “The Vassar College Disorientation Guide” to offset the impact of the annual Orientation Guide. Much of the text was either anti-Israel or anti-Semitic, including the advice to “Slap a Zionist.”

The Student Right to Counsel

The authors, Mike S. Adams and KC Johnson, argue in this article that in quasi-judicial campus tribunals, the student right to counsel is good for students and universities. Many colleges deny the right to counsel by prohibiting students’ lawyers, and sometimes the students themselves, from exercising the fundamental functions of an attorney, such as presenting evidence, cross-examining witnesses, or speaking to anyone but the client during a hearing. Such restrictions, moreover, exist at a time of unprecedented pressure—from the federal government, the media, and social activists—on colleges to adjudicate quasi-criminal behavior, especially sexual misconduct, outside the due process protections of the criminal justice system.

The Growing Threat of Repressive Social Justice

DeVos Urges Campuses to Promote Free Speech

Five Reasons Why Student Loans Are a Looming Disaster