That trends come and go in education is a maxim that needs no explanation. Under the guise of innovation, faddish pedagogical strategies and well-funded reform movements are as sure as the sun rises. The best of these innovations serve to enhance teaching and learning. The worst, and by far the majority, are often presented as […]
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Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing symposium on white fragility and its related concepts. To view all of the essays in this series, click here. Craig Frisby usefully points us to the way moral innovators and “virtue-signaling” corporate imitators have stretched the meaning of racism beyond where objective social science and common […]
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Most people and institutions are held accountable, however imperfectly. We all know of a charlatan who has yet to be exposed, or a shady institution that is coasting on its reputation, but eventually, the truth wins out. With any luck, that moment has arrived for higher education. Last fall’s publication of the most comprehensive college […]
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The 2019 college admissions scandal made it clear that, in American colleges and universities, students have three options for entry: the back door, the side door, and the front door. You enter through the back door when your parents donate huge sums of money to the institution. This procedure is not illegal, although many people […]
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Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing symposium on white fragility and its related concepts. To view all of the essays in this series, click here. Part II of this series illustrated how the concept of “racism” has come to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean—which, over time, has diminished in its […]
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The Loudoun County Public Schools are planning to impose illegal racial preferences in student discipline, and have already made changes to school admission policies that are being challenged in court. They also plan to restrict teachers’ out-of-school speech, by punishing them for speech that disagrees with school policies, and by punishing teachers who fail to […]
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The federal Education Department is investigating the University of Pittsburgh for free-speech violations and false statements, after the University took action against Professor Norman Wang for publishing an academic paper critical of race-based affirmative action. The University removed Wang as Program Director at its medical center solely due to his paper. The Education Department is […]
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Cancel culture is quickly moving toward its logical end as an unabashed, even celebrated, tool of cultural Marxists, who are keen to repress views outside the accepted orthodoxy of the day. Those who initially promoted campus shout-downs and dis-invitations have escalated their assault on academic freedom. They now employ threats of violence, intimidation tactics, and […]
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On July 18th, 2020, the New York Times Sunday Review published an opinion piece by Ms. Rebecca Martinson, a public school teacher from northwestern Washington, on how afraid she was that she might be asked to return to the classroom this fall as the COVID pandemic continued to ravage the country. She started her piece with […]
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For the last decade higher education has been in steep decline, even before students were abandoned to fend for themselves and their futures while our so-called elites dithered over what to do about COVID-19. But higher ed was in trouble long before the coronavirus pandemic. According to Forbes, enrollment is down “more than two million […]
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This essay is a succinct and pointed explanation of Critical Race Theory (CRT). It is intended for those who have heard about CRT in the news and wonder how it is connected to the hyper-racialization of the last six months. But it is also for those knee-deep in personal research about Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity […]
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Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing symposium on white fragility and its related concepts. To view all of the essays in this series, click here. In Part I of this series, an attempt was made to break down the meaning of the word “racism” using basic rules of word morphology. Unfortunately, commentaries […]
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Everyone is familiar with fake news. Now the University of California (UC) has presented us with what can only be described as fake research: an unpublished policy paper by a UC employee, Zachary Bleemer, criticizing Proposition 209 and defending affirmative action. The paper was also shared and distributed by the UC Office of the President. […]
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Higher education has begun a transformation similar to the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” of 1966. This claim may sound extreme, but look at the similarities for yourself. Like the Cultural Revolution, the energized identity-politics movement presents itself as a cleansing force. Pure Maoism was being corrupted by covert capitalist sympathizers—they had to be rooted out. In […]
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A faculty coalition at Cornell University is calling for race-based hiring and promotions. What it is demanding violates two laws against racial discrimination, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and 42 U.S.C. 1981. That’s because Cornell has no justifiable rationale for using race in employment decisions at all, much less to the extent that […]
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We’re now more than one month into the implementation of the new Title IX regulations—improvements which the nation’s higher-education establishment uniformly opposed. The amended regulations require two major changes: they narrow the definition of sexual harassment (but not sexual assault) to the definition offered by the Supreme Court in Davis. And they confine a university’s […]
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Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing symposium on white fragility and its related concepts. To view all of the essays in this series, click here. A writer for a popular online entertainment publication once remarked that a James Bond movie is often only as good as its villain. This applies to the “Black […]
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UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank’s new 2020 Diversity Plan, described in her July 8, 2020 blog entry, is more disturbing than suggested by the bland front-page headline: “Blank targets racial climate” (since retitled “National unrest sparks new efforts by UW-Madison to improve campus climate”). The chancellor’s array of proposed new “commitments” to diversity reflects her response to recent […]
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This week, the Virginia Board of Education will meet to discuss a report that may promote destructive racial ideologies — the August 2020 “Report from the Governor’s African American History Education Commission.” James Sherlock laments “the fiercely negative approach to the teaching of African American history offered by the Governor’s Commission.” He says says its […]
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The statement “black lives matter” must be affirmed in light of the recent killing of George Floyd. The police officer did not act as if Mr. Floyd’s life mattered, and by extension, as if black lives matter. His actions, and those of many other policemen, have failed to recognize the equal worth and dignity of […]
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