The Pulitzer Committee has awarded Nikole Hannah-Jones a prize for her lead essay in The New York Times’ “The 1619 Project.” The news doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. It was widely rumored that Hannah-Jones was under consideration, which raised the tantalizing question of how the Pulitzer Committee might find its way the past […]
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As I write this, I am surrounded by silence: not only the silence of a small university town on lockdown but, also, the silence of the feminists and postmodernists as the COVID-19 pandemic has taken over. Where are the usual attacks on white male-dominated science? Where’s the “standpoint epistemology” to tell us how different is […]
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Half a century ago, our colleges and universities were liberal in their orientations and policies. Generally, they treated students and staff as individuals who were judged by their academic achievements and potentials. (Where they existed, the exceptions were numerically minor: children of alumni and athletes.) Students and staff were free to associate with one another […]
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The latest racket in higher education, evident at my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, is the disturbing proliferation of “social justice” as a degree program, a course topic, an academic emphasis, and even as a prerequisite in campus job descriptions. “Social justice” is a seemingly innocuous term with no established definition. Many […]
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Yale is ending the teaching of one of its most storied courses—a survey of Western Art history from the Renaissance to the present. The Yale Daily News called the action a result of the latest student uneasiness over an idealized Western “canon” a product of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists.” […]
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Social-justice ideology is turning higher education into an engine of progressive political advocacy, according to a new report by the National Association of Scholars. Left-wing activists, masquerading as professors, are infiltrating traditional academic departments or creating new ones—departments such as “Solidarity and Social Justice”—to advance their cause. They are entering the highest rung of college administration, […]
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Inside Higher Ed reports that “It’s OK to Be White” posters have appeared on more campuses: The posters, which also appeared a year ago at this time, are put up without permission [from college officials]. Posters have been seen this year at Christopher Newport University, East Tennessee State University, Oklahoma City University’s law school, Susquehanna University, and Western Connecticut State University. […]
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The readers, writers, and editors of Minding the Campus have it all wrong. If they were to hear the words “Williams College English Department,” a vision of politically correct, exquisitely liberal professors would instantly spring to mind. If they went to the department web site, to be sure, they could find support for their judgment, […]
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Are Oberlin College officials serious when they say they were defending students’ free speech? That remains the college’s defense even after a jury found the college guilty of libel and interference with business in its dealings with Gibson’s Food Mart and Bakery. Gibson’s Bakery felt defamed by Oberlin College’s involvement in a campaign accusing the […]
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As the humanities continue their steady slide toward the margins of the campus, the faculty still can’t look in the mirror and face the sources of the problem. Last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education, four assistant professors of English responded to a previous essay about the state of the field and unintentionally revealed […]
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Anti-white hate is now mainstream American culture. Not just by racial extremists such as Black Lives Matter, for whom statements such as “all lives matter” or “blue lives matter” are racist. Our highest leaders sing the same song. Presidential candidate Barack Obama said of working class, white voters in 2008, “They get bitter, they cling […]
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At Columbia University, the famous core curriculum, founded exactly one hundred years ago and centered on a rich, rigorous two-semester freshman course covering Western civilization from Plato to the present, remains in place and is largely the same as in 1919. But it’s a rare exception. One day in January 1987, hundreds of Stanford students, […]
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DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is on everyone’s short list as a primary building block of any possible compromise between President Trump and the Democrats on immigration. Thus, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the striking similarities between the debate over that issue and the equally contentious debate over affirmative […]
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We may be about to find out whether a university can be found liable for giving accurate advice to an applicant. Inside Higher Ed reported yesterday that Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia is being sued by a rejected applicant to its medical school for, among other things, providing advice in an interview that in all […]
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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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}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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Most professors and students in the social sciences, humanities, education, social work, and law, and most university officials at Canadian and American universities today have adopted a political ideology labelled “social justice,” which requires redress for categories of people deemed “oppressed” for reasons of race, gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and/or religion. For the many who […]
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Universities in the 20th century were dedicated to the advancement of knowledge. Scholarship and research were pursued, and diverse opinions were exchanged and argued in the “marketplace of ideas.” This is no longer the case. Particularly in the social sciences, humanities, education, social work, and law, a single political ideology has replaced scholarship and research, […]
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It is a truth universally acknowledged by “progressives” that all cultures are equally good and equally valuable. Common sense says that this is nonsense. I lived for eighteen months with a nomadic tribe in southeastern Iran in order to study their way of life. These people were ethnically Baluch and religiously Sunni Muslim. They lived […]
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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 […]
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If you’re white, you’re a blight. This past winter Yale University became the latest of dozens of colleges across the country to roll out a course aiming to teach undergraduates how to understand and counteract “whiteness”—a sinister force that, according to its official description, is “a culturally constructed and economically incorporated entity, which touches upon […]
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California voters made racial preferences illegal by passing Proposition 209 in 1996, but many university officials have ignored the law, especially at the state’s top law schools. Among such officials, it is a deeply ingrained belief that social justice demands measures to close statistical gaps between “underrepresented” groups (particularly blacks and Hispanics) and “overrepresented” groups […]
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In National Review this week, George Weigel writes a pointed commentary on another example of humanities professors undermining their own field. It’s a curious phenomenon, but one you often see. A scholar-teacher steps forward to condemn or distort the materials of his own field, or to rebuke past and present practitioners of it, not realizing […]
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In November 2017, a Yale sophomore, Sohum Pal, wrote an op-ed for the student newspaper, the Yale Daily News, titled “White Students, Step Back.” It criticized Yale’s much-promoted “diversity” policies as “focused on a brand of assimilationist politics — the deeply misguided notion that students of color want to be wealthy, that we want to […]
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Conservative rationalist Karl Popper wrote in The Open Society and Its Enemies that “unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.” In a society that tolerates intolerant forces, these forces will eventually take advantage of the situation and bring about the downfall of the entire society. The philosophical foundation of this belief can trace its roots to Plato’s ideas […]
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Already suffering from white privilege and white fragility, some of America’s 260 million white people picked up The Wall St. Journal yesterday and discovered they were suffering from yet another unsuspected ailment—civility. As explained in a Journal op-ed by journalism professor Steve Salerno, “whiteness informed civility” gives whites the impression that they can conduct conversations […]
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“It’s OK to Be White” signs have been popping up on campuses apparently to show that any similar slogan ending in a reference to any other racial, ethnic or gender group would be welcomed by college students, but not one ending in “White.” Sure enough, the “White” signs have been pulled down rapidly, apparently by […]
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In the persistent demands for submission to the current campus orthodoxy of verbal policing, there is evidently not a shadow of concern for the creation of ethical individuals capable of thinking for themselves. Instead, a distinctly authoritarian streak is proudly proclaimed in the assaults and threats angry students launch at others. Ironically, the less there […]
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Colleges are now increasingly busy herding faculty members into racial equity training seminars where they are urged to examine and eliminate their white privilege, implicit bias, and role in maintaining institutional racism. It’s as though Mao’s Cultural Revolution has come to campuses everywhere. One such effort recently erupted into bitter dissension at Duke Divinity School […]
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It is awfully tempting to laugh at the case of Yale dean June Chu, for writing Yelp reviews of restaurants and food stores that referred to customers as “low class folks” and included statements like, “If you are white trash, this is the perfect night out for you!” Watching the sensitivity monitors go after one of their own […]
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