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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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}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 […]
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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. […]
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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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With the possibility of new Title IX regulations looming, defenders of the now-rescinded Obama-era guidance have aggressively sought to defend their years-long crusade against campus due process. But in several remarks last week, ex-Obama officials and their supporters provided unintentional insight on why the administration’s Title IX policy was so unfair In an interview with […]
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When a recent Canadian study of about 30,000 students between 7th and 12th grade found that more boys than girls were victims of physical dating violence, the reaction was one of disbelief. Accusations of male sexual harassment were exploding from the university campuses to the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies, begetting the #MeToo movement. The […]
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As extensively documented, our universities have been swept up into a new cultural movement, the so-called “social justice” movement. “Social justice” ideology is based on the Marxist vision that the world is divided into oppressor classes and oppressed classes. Unlike classical Marxism that divides the world into a bourgeois oppressor class and a proletarian oppressed […]
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