I recently began a series of articles assessing the various ways out of our current academic quagmire. In the first piece—or perhaps more accurately, the zeroth piece—I urged conservative commentators to stop spending all of their time pointing out the rather obvious double standards, contradictions, and hypocrisy within the higher education establishment, and to instead […]
Read More
Virginia is for history lovers. George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and James Madison’s Montpelier – a triad of epicenters of our nation’s past – are all within driving distance. Those who own and operate these historic houses have a significant say over how the American Founding is taught. Unfortunately, as described in a […]
Read More
Zig Ziglar, the late motivational speaker, wrote, “Check the records. All great failures in life are character failures, and all complete successes are character based. The need for character education is irrefutable.” Should Ziglar be dismissed out of hand because he was white? Character is a part of everything we say and do in life, and […]
Read More
If you’re not familiar with higher education accreditation, you may want to get up to speed. Accreditation is rapidly shaping up to be one of the most important front lines in the never-ending battle between reformers and the establishment. The latest confrontation concerns the Biden administration’s effort to subvert recent reforms in Florida. But first, […]
Read More
Once a field of serious academic research and study, anthropology has devolved into a virtue-signaling celebration of identity politics. The original goal of evidence-based understanding of mankind, its evolution, society, language, and culture, has long since been jettisoned in favor of advocacy for preferred populations and their particular sectoral interests. This devolution was launched at […]
Read More
As part of an ambitious, five-year strategic plan to reinvigorate a civic education grounded in American founding principles and history, the Jack Miller Center has named Hans Zeiger as its next president. Zeiger will begin his new role on August 1. Founded in 2004, the Jack Miller Center is a nonprofit civic education organization based […]
Read More
In one of the laboratory classes I teach, students learn techniques to separate heterogenous mixtures of solids. One procedure involves the separation of sodium chloride from beach sand by mixing the solid mixture in water, filtering the resulting slurry to remove the sand and evaporating the water to recover the sodium chloride. In a second […]
Read More
Today’s assault on intellectual excellence in the academy will eventually end. Hopefully, an investigation will then commence on its causes, and all the usual suspects will be rounded up. This tribunal will, however, likely ignore one key culprit: ordinary faculty—people like me—who complained about the assault, all while enthusiastically aiding it. Yes, some criticized the […]
Read More
“Jupiter, I should like to understand what it is you are talking about. You say your master is sick. Hasn’t he told you what ails him?” —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Gold-Bug” Baptists and bootleggers don’t see eye to eye. Neither joins the other in their activities, yet they benefit from each other’s existence. A cynical […]
Read More
The Civics Secures Democracy Act (CSDA), a bill that was reintroduced in the U.S. Senate last month under the auspices of bipartisanship, represents a federal legislative push to expand and upgrade K-12 civic and history education through a sum of $6 billion in competitive grants over a six-year period. The proposed federal funding bonanza includes: […]
Read More
For a number of years, many Canadian universities have embarked on a process known as “indigenization” (to be followed shortly after with the addition of “decolonization”). This has been embraced especially intensely by my former employer, Mount Royal University (MRU), which posted the following Tweet on Canada Day from its official account: This Canada Day […]
Read More
Statesmanship has fallen on hard times. Modern social science cannot make sense of this once-popular category of classical political philosophy, and the virtues commonly associated with the statesman today are equated with toxic masculinity or worse. Fortunately, in his new book, “The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation,” (Encounter Books) professor emeritus […]
Read More
Just a few years ago, I was beginning to believe that I had reached a point in my life where I might be ready to slow down. After almost six decades on the planet, I had overcome the obstacles of my youth and after more than three decades, I had achieved a level of education, […]
Read More
Student activism has long been part of campus life. Recall the Berkeley Free Speech movement that began in 1964 over the school’s ban of on-campus political activities. The mid-1960s saw countless demonstrations protesting the war in Vietnam, which were followed by widespread agitation over racial issues. Nevertheless, current demonstrations differ fundamentally from past activism. The […]
Read More
As student loan debt has grown (currently more than $1.6 trillion in federal loans), it has gotten more attention from the public and Washington. Progressives are pushing for free college and loan forgiveness. While conservatives have rightly criticized the Biden administration’s proposals, they haven’t put forward many alternatives. Unfortunately, one of the few ideas that […]
Read More
The “woke” haven’t only adopted the ideology of “social justice” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) and assertions such as “diversity is our strength” (Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau), but they adhere to these ideas not so much as preferred guidelines or scientific hypotheses, but as religious truths that aren’t to be questioned. Any misguided […]
Read More
The onerous new guidelines are sure to victimize the innocent and deny students and faculty free speech In June, the Biden administration’s Department of Education rolled out new Title IX guidelines detailing how schools must address sexual discrimination and widening the areas of personal interaction and the “identities” protected under the rule. In fact, the […]
Read More
“Science must overcome its racist legacy” is the headline, followed by a commitment from four guest editors of color to “help decolonize research and forge a path towards restorative justice and reconciliation,” a reparations-tinged evocation of post-apartheid South Africa. It is both embarrassing and disgraceful that Nature, the preeminent British scientific journal, should surrender science […]
Read More
There are two absolutely minimal essential resources for universities to exist: faculty, who provide the most important services educational institutions provide, and students, who are the customers that universities traditionally serve as part, and sometimes nearly all, of their mission. Yet at many schools, the faculty constitutes only a modest minority (perhaps one-fourth or so) […]
Read More
I’m a professor, retiring at 62 because the Woke takeover of higher education has ruined academic life. “Another one?” you ask. “What does this guy have to say that hasn’t already been said by Jordan Peterson, Peter Boghossian, Joshua Katz, or Bo Winegard1? There’s only one way to find out. Defenestration of a Colleague I’ve […]
Read More